In English 318 at BYU, every time somebody mentions Scalzi’s name, Brandon Sanderson (who teaches the class) counts to three, raises his fists and shouts out “Scalzi!” in this voice that makes it clear that he’s cursing his name. Why? Because he beat him to some kind of award or something. But Scalzi is definitely a good writer, not only because Sanderson chose Old Man’s War as one of our “textbooks” for his class, but because he wrote a sci fi book that sold better than most fantasy books, in a time when the genre has been experiencing a downturn. And he is a good writer; I thoroughly enjoyed his book…
Old Man’s War tells the story of an elderly man named John Perry. Like most people his age, when he reached 75, he signs up for the Colonial Defense Forces, an army fighting aliens out in space.
Why? The CDF is a secretive organization with technology decades ahead of anything on Earth. In fact, nobody on Earth quite knows what’s going on in space–they just know that the CDF needs recruits for their military operations. Everything else is a carefully guarded mystery.
The thing is, the CDF only wants old people for their armies. This leads a lot of people that they have some kind of rejuvenation technology. Naturally, many elderly people sign up, since they don’t have much else to look forward to except slowly getting old and falling apart.
When he gets out into space, though, John Perry finds out that the situation is a lot different than he’d realized. There are hundreds, even thousands, of sentient alien species out in the universe, and the number of habitable planets and resources is very limited. Consequently, everyone is engaged in an endless war against each other, where only the strong species survive. And mankind is not, by any means, the strongest race out there.
This book reminded me a lot of Haldeman’s The Forever War…except that it was much more of a feel-good sci fi novel. It was well written, had a lot of interesting characters and ideas, the writing was very good, and the setting was really cool–but I never really felt like I was reading about a real war. It was a lot more of an adventure story than gritty, military sf. For a lot of people, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I wouldn’t exactly say that this story is appropriate for children, since there is some sex and quite a bit of language, but it didn’t offend me much as an adult. The quality of the writing is very good, and from the start to the end I was really interested in finding out what was going to happen next.
Some of the ideas were really cool–like the theory behind the FTL technology (had to do with parallel universes and reminded me of the Schroedinger’s cat thought experiment), some of the alien races, the genetic modifications to the soldiers’ bodies, and the idea of having a computer interfaced into your mind. Whether or not these were original ideas, Scalzi did a good job and I enjoyed reading about them.
If I would criticize anything in this novel, it would be that I never really felt that I was being immersed in this world. The setting was well thought out, but the way Scalzi casually described several of the alien species and moved on to other things made me feel more like I was in some kind of a movie than in a futuristic society. Same with the way he dealt with the horrors of war–they didn’t really feel all that horrific.
Haldeman’s Forever War was the polar opposite–I felt so immersed in that world when I read the book that it was actually somewhat depressing–and when the ending finally came, the release of tension was so awesome that I was glad I’d gone through it all. With Old Man’s War, however, it felt more like I was watching some kind of adventure movie–things were cool, but I didn’t really feel like I was really there.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. I really did enjoy this book. The characters were interesting, and a lot of the stuff that happened was really cool. Scalzi did an excellent job and wrote a really good, entertaining story. If I can write books as interesting and fun to read as his, I’ll have come a long way.
