Book Review: Old Man’s War

Old Man's War

When you get old and reach the winter of your life, you don’t generally think about joining the military to go off and defend humanity against horrible alien threats. Well, you don’t, but the characters in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War do. This is mostly because they get to be young again, but that deal in exchange for never getting to return to Earth and braving pretty bad odds on survival. Space is a pretty brutal place, what with all the different alien races competing for a relatively small number of inhabital planets and trying to crowd each other out.

This is the hook upon which Scalzi hangs his space opera, and it’s not a bad one. The main character, John Perry, is an 75-year old retiree when he enlists with the Colonial Defence Force at the beginning of the novel. Readers get to learn more about what he’s gotten himself into at about the same pace he does, since the CDF keeps everything pretty close to the vest. The author does a pretty good job of keeping things at a brisk pace, revealing just enough at a time about this world and the terms of Perry’s deal to keep us interested and turning the pages.

I don’t read a lot of science fiction so maybe I’m just not jaded enough, but I also found Scalzi to be pretty creative. I liked how humanity’s brand of technology used nanobots and genetic engineering to counter alien dangers and how their electronic BrainPals(tm) essentially made them telepaths and able to get e-mail in their head. That seems like a plausible course for future military tech to take, and indeed the implications for all this on space and terrestrial warfare is explored and played with in a pretty entertaining way. John Perry is sort of a bland character in and of himself, but like a lot of sci-fi, the world is the real main attraction and the protagonist is just there to give us someone to see it through.

So, I think it’s safe to say I liked it, so much so that I’ve already started on the sequel, The Ghost Brigades.

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One thought on “Book Review: Old Man’s War

  1. I loved this book, it actually got me back int sci-fi after I’d stopped reading for years, then I devoured everything Scalzi wrote. His stuff has great characters and he just has a style that I enjoy.

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