Dust jacket by Lee Moyer.

Joe Haldeman has been one of the world’s most universally admired and beloved science fiction writers for more than four decades. He has earned the respect of both lifelong science fiction fans and mainstream literary writers, both for the originality of his concepts and for the unsurpassed clarity of his prose, and his characters are among the most memorable in all of science fiction.

This first career retrospective of Haldeman’s finest work ranges from early tales such as “Hero”—which instantly earned his reputation and provided the basis for his classic novel The Forever War—to mid-career masterpieces like “Seasons” and “The Hemingway Hoax,” his major tribute to a favorite literary godfather, to very recent stories such as “Sleeping Dogs” and “Complete Sentence.” Haldeman has provided original story introductions for this new landmark collection.

What emerges from The Best of Joe Haldeman is a stunning portrait of a writer who may be more complex and varied than even his most devoted fans suspect. He can build a touching far-future romance from a Shakespeare sonnet (“For White Hill”), depict with ruthless intensity the horrors of war (“Graves”), and ask classic science fictional “what if” questions worthy of Robert A. Heinlein, to whom Haldeman has often been compared as a worthy successor.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Hero
Anniversary Project
Tricentennial
Blood Sisters
Lindsay and the Red City Blues
Manifest Destiny
More Than the Sum of His Parts
Seasons
The Monster
The Hemingway Hoax
Graves
None So Blind
For White Hill
Civil Disobedience
Four Short Novels
Angel of Light
The Mars Girl
Sleeping Dogs
Complete Sentence

From Publishers Weekly:
“Demonstrating that the hard-to-market novella is perfect for science fiction, this collection of 19 stories by SFWA Grand Master Haldeman (Earthbound) features several tales that bring out his ability to wrap hard science speculation with deep human feeling…”

From Library Journal:
“From the tense, military action of ‘Hero’, the basis for Haldeman’s award-winning classic The Forever War, to the horrific short story detailing the prison of the future, ‘Complete Sentence’, the 19 pieces collected here bear witness to the brilliant and hard-hitting prose of one of today’s most significant sf voices.”

From Locus:
“Another (relatively) Old Master, from the generation just after Le Guin, is Joe Haldeman, who has a big retrospective collection out in early 2013. The best story here may be the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella ‘The Hemingway Hoax’, but there’s plenty of other first-class work here, including ‘Hero’, the seed that grew into his famous novel, The Forever War, ‘For White Hill’, ‘None So Blind’, ‘The Mars Girl’, ‘Sleeping Dogs’, ‘Anniversary Project’, ‘Tricentennial’, and ‘More Than the Sum of His Part’”, as well as stuff a bit removed from his usual science fiction, such as ‘Manifest Destiny’, a Western, and ‘Lindsay and the Red City Blues’, a supernatural horror story.”

From SFCrowsnest:
“The Best of Joe Haldeman is an extremely impressive collection of the author’s finest shorter fiction. If you only know him from The Forever War and would like to see the breadth of his talent you need look no further.”