Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable
Review: "The Coming" is an enjoyable book if simplistic. The book is set in the near future with the Earth recieving a call from outer space 'they' are coming. The reader finds the Earth falling apart from overcrowding and the usual political wars, but not the usual players. The story jumps between various characters with higher or lower interest in the coming.
To me, this book feels like a seventies movie about post apolyptic earth without all of the destruction yet. It is on the brink. Think of a combination of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' and 'Soylent Green' and you have the feel of this book. It is not a bad book by any means. It is rather enjoyable and a nice easy read. It misses because the reader doesn't have to think about the Earth's situation. Some of his characters also miss. Haldeman places a medical student in the book who also has to perform in porn videos to pay for school. She adds nothing to the story except that the world is not right. He also has the proverbial crazy lady who's character is left hanging in the story. If either one was not added, the story would not have suffered at all. Nice easy read that is enjoyable, but nothing special here.
Rating: 
Summary: The reader as Candide
Review: What is Joe Haldeman's preferred mode? Consider the fate of Otto McGavin, the assassin who ultimately causes the genocide of a race of immortals in "All My Sins Remembered"; William Mandella, a soldier in "The Forever War" and retired veteran in "Forever Free"; the socio-political context of the "Worlds" series; and all the characters in "The Coming." The pretext of "The Coming" is the approach of an "alien" spaceship that has given three months' advance notice of its arrival. The important thing, though, is the context. The Florida wetlands have been paved over. Ozone depletion forces people to slather themselves with heavy-duty sunblock and has made tattoos the fashion for covering skin-cancer scars. Global warming and the sweltering heat drive everyone into the shade... in late autumn. Sexual nonconformists are outlaws and live in fear of their lives. The city is ruled by organized crime, the state is governed by a religious fanatic, and the country is threatened with extinction at the hands of presidents who are, simply... idiots. Devout partisans of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush I & II would see Haldeman's novels, if they read them, as pleasant though occasionally annoying stories with incomprehensible protagonists and quaint utopian endings. Others will read them as trenchant and bitter satires where mankind can be saved not by itself but only by alien intervention and, usually, a profound change in human nature.
Rating: 
Summary: Unexpected twists and turns of plot
Review: An alien being is headed toward earth - one massive enough to destroy or change the world forever - and one scientist is convinced the transmission may be a hoax with deeper meaning. Haldeman's story of invasion and a struggling planet provides unexpected twists and turns of plot.
Rating:
Summary: Strong novel let down by rushed conclusion
Review: First off, the writing in this novel is superb. Haldeman changes the point of view among a dozen characters without ever skipping a beat. Furthermore, he does so without shorting the development of any one character; they are all well drawn, in part because we see them through the eyes of so many other people. That said, this novel gets off to a great start, and really does well until the last twenty pages or so. At that point, much like Haldeman's "Forever Free", it begins to feel rushed. The book ends on a note that is more confusing than anything else. You really lose the feel for the character's motivations, and there is a lot of activity that is barely explained. All in all, this is an enjoyable, well written novel, that is somewhat let down by its ending.
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: Haldeman's "The Coming" is going to be a huge disappointment to those in the mood for a science fiction novel. It isn't science fiction. It's a mafia/suspense novel, and a laughably bad one at that. Haldeman rushes through the SF aspects of the story right away. Something's coming from outer space. That out of the way, we get half a dozen or so unconnected plot lines that have nothing to do with "the Coming." Most of the characters are unnecessary and have no bearing on the plot. Was Gabrielle really necessary? Suzy Q? Did these characters have anything to do with the plot? No. Nor, unfortunatly, did most of the main characters. There's a big chunk of the book devoted to one of the character's efforts to divert mafia blackmail, but the solution is far too easy and it's nothing but a side story, again, having nothing to do with the plot. The Coming is a short book, which is good, because it's a total waste of time. It's not a science fiction book, and as a suspense/mafia book, it's laughably weak. This reads like a book an amateur would write, not an author of Haldeman's status.
Rating:
Summary: Execrable and Unworthy of the Younger Haldeman's Work
Review: Haldeman's latest work entitled The Coming is wrongly billed as SF. It is in actuality a meandering hodgepodge of decidely NON-science fictional stories that do not satisfactorily cohere at the novel's end. Ostensibly about a message from deep space signaling the arrival of--what?---, the text looks at the lives of several academics, bar owners and pornographers in southern Florida. These people are all uninteresting. The "Coming" itself is the thinest of convenient plot devices used to give forward locomotion to a plot that would otherwise stagnate. When we finally learn what the Coming is all about, we are grossly let down. I got the feeling Haldeman played a deliberate trick----"HA! You read through all this execrable text, and look how it was all for nothing!" The ending is hard to worsen deliberatly; it is plain lousy. The characters are badly drawn and the overall air of the novel contains a certain degenerate pruriency, or even decedence, that can not be wholly attributable to the given values of mid-21st century---Florida. My impression is Haldeman has accociated too long with academics and his thinking, creativity and writing have suffered accordingly.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I bought this after reading the three "Forever" novels that Haldeman wrote, because I liked his writing style and thought his characters usually were very believable and interesting. From the beginning of the new book, I had a hard time falling into the story. The multiple-perspective structure of the narrative, although interesting, makes it hard to maintain enthusiasm for any of the characters. The rapid shift from one third-person perspective to another is jarring, not because the "voices" are so different, but because they're so similar. Characters and subplots are included without any apparent connection to the plot, either. A porn actress, street bum, disfigured bartender, and several other characters are obviously provided solely to give the author a chance to provide background on his vision of an American near-future. That's okay, but why have them show up over and over? The book isn't long enough to justify this kind of filler material. Subplots are introduced and forgotten, as well -- the university chancellor's plot to get blackmail leverage on one of the main characters is completely ignored in the last half of the book, for one thing, and what was with the homosexuality obsession? If Haldeman had wanted to show a future which included hypocrisy and cultural intolerance, couldn't he have done it without throwing the plot out the window for the sake of the message? Mostly I just didn't think there was enough material for a novel, here. It was a collection of pretty prosaic ideas on the near-future, with too many characters who play too small a role to justify their time on the page. And the characters themselves are incredibly two-dimensional, for Haldeman -- the villains are crazed, irrational fools, the heroes are harried, underappreciated idealists. When there is complexity, it's inexplicable, such as when the chancellor and dean are perfectly willing to set up (and indirectly kill) a co-worker who is helping them get blackmail information on a colleague. These are career academics, but this is a sensible or psychologically believable decision? (There isn't even any point to the blackmail scheme. It's just a mechanism to introduce some other characters and themes, and make the whole thing seem like a giant, hypocritical circus. Maybe if the book were 400 pages longer, this would have been the effect. Or maybe it just (....) The book reads as if it were written very quickly, and the multiple-perspective gimmick seems intended just to keep Haldeman interested enough to finish the story. Why was this book published? Why wasn't the initial editor driven insane? Why didn't the printing presses burst into flame while producing the first run? Okay, that's silly, it's not that bad. The writing's good enough to keep you reading, anyway. Actually, I have a theory here. I think Haldeman started working on this book, then threw it in the drawer and forgot it. Then he was pressed by his publisher for another novel, and he couldn't think of anything. ("Forever Earnestness?" "Forever Tacos?") So he hauled the manuscript out, re-read it a few times, drank a bit, threw it in the garbage, drank a bit more, pulled it out of the garbage, and then finished the thing in one hazy four-hour stretch at the computer, Bordeaux sloshing all over the keyboard. And finally (just blowing off steam here, now), how about a little humor, Joe? Must every hero be troubled, desperate and earnest? Aren't there worthwhile themes other than mankind's predisposition to hypocrisy and self-destruction?
Rating: 
Summary: Does Not Live Up To It's Billing!
Review: I finished this book tonight, finally. I would have quit days ago, but I hate to leave a book unfinished. The promotional reviews on the book's jacket led me, new to Joe Haldeman's books, to believe that this book ranked alongside Sagan's "Contact," or Tilley's "Fade Out," but it proved most disappointing. The book spends most of its time describing characters, and while I liked Rory, the Astronomer, her husband was a shallow, sexually-frustrated muscician, who yearned for his gay lover...but what is this kind of thing doing in a "First Contact" Sci-Fi novel? Another character, a Mafia-type baddie gained prominence early in the book, then died a fiery death, with little apparent relevance to the "First Contact" theme, and the book simply moves on to other characters. If you're looking for entertaining science fiction, you won't find it here, no matter what the jacket says. Let the Buyer Beware!
Rating:
Summary: Where's the SF part?
Review: I found this book to be more of a cheap mystery novel than the SF book I was expecting. The characters were uninteresting. The plot had potential, but Haldeman never delivers. The ending left me very disappointed. Not worth the time it took to read.
Rating:
Summary: nice original format, but very short on science
Review: I gave the book a couple of stars because the presentation is very original -- we get to hop around between various persons and their points of view as the alien visitation is approaching. It creates a dynamic flow that keeps you with the story. However, the story itself is lacking. It's bigger on sex and blackmail than it is on science. I was hoping for something that discussed more of the characters feelings towards the alien arrival, but what you get is just a bunch of uninteresting personal side-stories about who's had affairs with who. The book also loses a star for having the characters speak a dialog that is a mixture of spanish and english. The author probably has a point here -- English will continue to absorb spanish words, but the effect is distracting and just didn't work for me. Lastly, the ending seemed rushed and poorly thought out.
| 
