…quite a lot of ground-breaking science fiction.   Being of a rather childish sort, I tend to like his more quirky, flashy, more “Haldemanesque” novels.   Mindbridge, and Buying Time come to mind.  His other work, though exemplary, I can take or leave.  Any old writer can crank out plain-jane, dull, boring-looking blocks of prose that look like nothing more than…  well…  boring-looking blocks of prose–indistinguishable, unless read, from any other such blocks.  To write something that looks “really cool,” so to speak… something that, dare I say “knocks your socks off” with its originality, even from a distance, before you read it; yet is not some kind of random junk of the type produced by other “avant-garde” writers attempting simply to confuse–to make the well seem deep, by obscuring its shallow bottom, so to speak… no, to write something such as I describe takes… well, actually… Joe Haldeman.

Anything else about the man, including his less imaginative–and eminently less entertaining–prose, and his strangely (for one so unique) collectivist, and anti-individualist views, holds little interest for me.

I would, of course, prefer that one of the most amazing and interesting such writers, might be a little less crazy; however, I suppose one might say it goes with the territory.  Although not always.  Refreshingly not, I am happy to so state.

Still, if Mr. Haldeman had a blog on wordpress, I’d give him a “follow,” and any number of random “likes” and an occasional comment; because, that’s what we do here.  And in all good faith.   But that…  is about all.   And though at this point he clearly doesn’t need it, he’ll not get another dime from me.

UNLESS…   he writes another of the “awesome, wicked-cool” non-boring works of which he is most capable.   Then I might not be able to help myself.  God forgive me.