The World's Trilogy by Joe Haldeman
"The World's Trilogy" is a science fiction series by Joe Haldeman that serves as an extended exploration of societal themes and human experiences set in a future world. The narrative follows Marianne O'Hara, a highly educated young woman from New New York, situated in a group of asteroid colonies called the "Worlds." The trilogy unfolds primarily through O'Hara's perspective, detailing her relationships with two engineers and her subsequent journey to Earth, where she confronts violence and political turmoil. As the conflict between Earth and the Worlds escalates, O'Hara grapples with personal trauma and a backdrop of revolutionary upheaval.
The trilogy consists of three parts, beginning with her struggles against systemic oppression, including her experiences with sexual violence and the realities of war. The second installment shifts between her narrative and that of Jeff Hawkings, her husband, who faces challenges of survival in a transformed Earth. The final part delves into O'Hara's role in a colonization effort on Epsilon Eridani, highlighting the complexities of governance and the consequences of human actions in new territories. Through these narrative arcs, Haldeman reflects on themes of freedom, identity, and the burdens of leadership, ultimately presenting a multifaceted view of humanity's future amidst both collaboration and conflict.
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Subject Terms
The World's Trilogy
First published:Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future (1981), Worlds Apart (1983), and Worlds Enough and Time (1992)
Type of work: Novels
Type of plot: Science fiction—post-holocaust
Time of work: The twenty-first and twenty-second centuries
Locale: Earth and habitats in space
The Plot
This trilogy is Joe Haldeman’s only serial work to date. It is a marvelous extended meditation on the United States and that country’s founding, flaws, and errand. Haldeman’s sense of the protagonist Marianne O’Hara began with a short story titled “If I Had the Wings of an Angel,” published in 1991, as Haldeman finished the trilogy, but written earlier.
Worlds is a biographical, often epistolary text set in 2080. It introduces the young Marianne O’Hara, a citizen of New New York, one of the asteroid “Worlds” near Earth. O’Hara’s story begins with her awakening sexuality and subsequent creation of a clan, or line family. She marries two brilliant engineers, Daniel Anderson and the hunchbacked John Ogelby, both outsiders from Earth. O’Hara, a polymath twenty-two-year-old with two Ph.D.s, travels to Earth for postdoctoral studies in American culture. In old New York she meets poet Benny Aarons and acromegalic Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Jeff Hawkings, whom she eventually marries. Shortly after contact with a violent revolutionary group known as 3R (“third revolution”), O’Hara is stabbed during a rape attempt. She has a nervous breakdown when the violence she experiences personally is mirrored by the growing threat of war between the Worlds and Earth. Earth sees the Worlds as resource colonies; they see themselves as the independent nations suggested by their names, which include Tsiolkovski, Uchüden, Von Braun, and Mazeltov. O’Hara tours Earth’s major countries. She is further traumatized by a second rape attempt and the 3R’s murder of Aarons, who had become her friend and lover. After playing clarinet in a New Orleans jazz band for one night, she is kidnapped by a wealthy power in the now-anarchist nation of Nevada.
War finally breaks out. As bombs fly and the deadly Koralatov 31 virus is released, Hawkings rescues O’Hara and puts her aboard a shuttle for New New York. He is left to fend for himself.
As its title suggests, Worlds Apart is split in two. One narrative line concerns Hawkings, now called “Healer,” who remains alive because of his acromegaly. The Koralatov 31 virus has killed off other humans over the age of eighteen. Hawkings’ sections of the novel, called “Charlie’s Will,” alternate with O’Hara’s story of the Worlds. This device allows Haldeman to make pointed juxtapositions of different ways of surviving. On Earth, a Mansonite cult based on the Bible and Charles Manson’s Charlie’s Will (in which death is a sacrament and old age a curse) sweeps to power. A new generation of murderous, sexual children rules Earth.
Realizing that a nuclear warhead is pointed at them from Zaire, the New New Yorkers send O’Hara and a strike team down to steal Earth’s last operative shuttle. Returning from a bloody but successful mission, the spacers discover two child stowaways. Their presence allows the Worlds scientists to isolate the plague and develop a vaccine. A suicide epidemic prompts the Worlds government to build a starship, Newhome, designed to travel across the galaxy to Epsilon Eridani.
Hawkings fixes a radio link and makes contact with the Worlds. He meets and befriends Tad, the leader of a family of children. Jeff and Tad leave for the Florida Keys, inoculating children as they go. O’Hara promotes an “aptitude inducement” system that lets her record Worlds’ citizens’ rare physical skills, such as carpentry and farming. The first and longest-lived product of this expert system is an artificial intelligence that O’Hara calls “Prime”; it is a computer model of herself. Hawkings and Tad find a tribe of cannibals living in the Keys just as O’Hara returns to New York State to establish a farm. The project ends in disaster when the children are reinfected with a modified plague. The Worlders escape after a brutal shootout. As O’Hara prepares to leave on the ark Newhome, Tad and Jeff take over the Keys, stop cannibalism, and begin a trade-based society.
O’Hara Prime narrates Worlds Enough and Time. Now under way to the water world Epsilon Eridani, the original O’Hara is jolted to discover that the Worlds are run as a benevolent dictatorship, not an open democracy as she had thought. Prime documents shipboard life and the problems of living in a closed environment. The singular, unconnected quality of Newhome is emphasized when sabotage destroys New New York’s link with the starship.
O’Hara has her first child implanted in her womb. She miscarries. Sandra, O’Hara’s second child, is created by parthenogenesis, with the fetus successfully grown in vitro. Rust destroys the ship’s crops, forcing most of the colonists to go into suspended animation. After running the civilian government on Newhome, handling the dangerous Church of the Eternal Now, and witnessing her husband John’s debilitating stroke, O’Hara also goes into the freezers.
Upon arrival at Epsilon Eridani, the colonists establish a planetside community. The floating gasbag creatures that attack the colonists reveal themselves to be the eveloi, an ancient race that has been monitoring and directing human activity. O’Hara is chosen to prove that humanity is worthy of being spared extermination. After a literal test of fire in which O’Hara is twice dropped in a molten river, the humans are left alone. The eveloi prove to be godlike, arbitrary, and brutal. O’Hara lives to the age of 114 Earth years. In the epilogue, Prime writes that it misses O’Hara.