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Review: Old Man’s War

Posted by Mark | Filed under Books, Reviews

Old Man’s War
My rat­ing: 5 out of 5.

For a while now I’ve been despair­ing of find­ing new sci­ence fic­tion authors I like. I would go through my local book­stores and the only ones that didn’t seem like pure twad­dle were either books I’ve read pre­vi­ously or by authors I was pre­vi­ously famil­iar with. Authors who usu­ally are very old or already dead. Oddly this prob­lem only seemed to be hap­pen­ing with sci­ence fic­tion. Fan­tasy, hor­ror, mys­tery and so on all are fine right now. I just haven’t for the longest time been able to find any decent sci­ence fic­tion by an author who wasn’t all corp­si­fied (or close to being so). This has con­cerned me as I mis­spent much of my youth blast­ing around the uni­verse on the dread rock­et­ship Imag­i­na­tion fueled by the works of many fine authors. I wish to con­tinue to doing so, but the fifth or fifty-fifth time you read a book it does not always gen­er­ate as much juice as the first time.

All that being said, I am pleased to say I have found a new sci­ence fic­tion author who writes some­thing worth read­ing! A while back, I was read­ing Doug Stew­art’s blog and he men­tioned get­ting a par­tic­u­lar book for his birth­day. Inter­est­ingly enough the author of Old Man’s War, John Scalzi, stopped by Doug’s blog and wished him a happy birth­day. I thought that was pretty cool of him. Given that Doug described the book as a gift that should “warm any decent sci-fi fan’s hard­ened heart”; my inter­est in this book was peaked.

I fol­lowed the link from the author’s com­ment to his web­site and noticed he had a free, sam­ple chap­ter of the book online. I read through the sam­ple and quite enjoyed it, so I added the book to my list¹. A few weeks later, the wife and I stopped in a Barnes & Noble to rest our weary feet and grab a cof­fee from their café. Before we went into the café, we looked around the store for some read­ing mate­r­ial. I still remem­bered want­ing a bet­ter look at Old Man’s War, so I hunted around and found a copy of it. I thought the plan was to sim­ply browse through the mate­r­ial while hav­ing our cof­fee but I was over­ruled and she bought the book with the cof­fees. As we sat down, I started to flip through the book but she wanted to look at it. Since she hadn’t found any­thing to look at and I actu­ally had sev­eral books at home I was in the mid­dle of; I let her have it. That turned out to be some­thing of a mis­take on my part, as I didn’t get it back until she fin­ished it the next day. Since I didn’t get it back right away, I stuck it into my stack of books to read. I held off a cou­ple of days before I broke down and yanked it out of the mid­dle of my stack. I read it cover to cover in a sin­gle evening and loved it. I just read it again (since I’ve been home sick for a week) and still loved it. But enough about me, you prob­a­bly want to know some­thing about the book other than I loved it.

Right, Old Man’s War is set in the future. How far in the future is not explic­itly stated but it seems to be the not-too-entirely-distant future. In this future, human­ity is liv­ing and fight­ing amoung the stars. It turns out while there are numer­ous stars & plan­ets out there; only so many of them are of any use to us and to the other races we’ve met. That’s right, there is alien life out there and it ain’t friendly. Human space is pro­tected by the Colo­nial Defense Forces (CDF) which boasts the old­est army ver fielded by man. The CDF’s infantry is entirely made up of the elderly. Peo­ple, like the main char­ac­ter (John Perry), can­not even join the CDF until they turn 75. The elderly are join­ing up in droves because they all know the CDF must have some­way to make them young again. After all at 75 years on Earth, humans are not exactly in the ideal con­di­tion for fight­ing a war.

The book starts with Mr. Perry vis­it­ing his wife’s grave and then join­ing the army. From there it’s a fast sprint through the rest of the story. Mr. Scalzi’s writ­ing is easy to read, in part because he does not bog you down with tons of details about the new tech­nolo­gies used in the future. Also the char­ac­ters are very lik­able and easy to relate to. But the book is not with­out its flaws.

The CDF is an inde­pen­dent entity from Earth and has more power than any gov­er­ment on Earth, but there’s noth­ing in the book telling us how this came about. Mr. Scalzi hints at it say­ing that the CDF iso­lated Earth from the rest of space² and then used tech­nolo­gies it devel­oped or stole from other races to main­tain its mono­ply on humanity’s space­flight. The actual details of how the CDF man­aged the ini­tial iso­la­tion and how they con­tinue to keep Earth from build­ing more skip dri­ves³ and sneak­ing off planet. Also the plot cov­er­ing John Perry’s res­cue by the Spe­cial Forces and sub­se­quent inter­ac­tions with his res­cuers seems.… a bit too deus ex machina. Mind you it was fun to read but it stretches the believ­abil­ity more than just a lit­tle and no I won’t tell you exactly why as that would require me to reveal big spoil­ers of the plot. Hope­fully some of this will be cleared up in the sequel, The Ghost Brigades (due out next week accord­ing to Amazon.com).

¹ The list of books in my head that I need to buy when I have the money and am in a book­shop. It fluc­tu­ates depend­ing on how good my mem­ory is, how empty my wal­let is, how often I’m vis­it­ing any given book­shop and how big an impres­sion a book or an author makes on me.
² Due to an out­break of an alien dis­ease that ste­ri­al­ized all but 1/3 of Earth’s men.
³ The skip drive is the FTL drive in Mr. Scalzi’s universe.