John Scalzi has quickly become one of my favourite authors with his action-packed sci fi adventures in a faced-paced novel length. I feel he is an easy author to recommend to anyone who wants to check out sci fi as his books simply don’t look very daunting in length and have fun covers, but include well thought out characters and interesting events.
“Old Mans War” is a military sci fi adventure, playing with the concept that, given biomodification, anyone can be a soldier. If this sort of thing and some on the ground battles on different planets with smart strategic moves and bizarre alien creatures sounds good to you too, then this might just be your cup of tea.
Spoilery Thoughts: We follow John Perry, an old man who loses his wife of many years and decides he might as well join the military at seventy-five because he has nothing else left. Luckily, this military exclusively recruits seventy-five-year-olds, and John Perry and some other recruits get rocketed into orbit with a space elevator. On their journey into space, they all get their old people bodies replaced by bioengineered clone bodies that look twenty-five years old with green skin, smart blood, enhanced senses and some other cool features. This leads to the very bizarre reading experience of watching a gang of old seventy-five-year-olds meet each other again in young attractive bodies and bang each other’s brains out… The take-away from this, Scalzi plays with the concepts and ideas of morality and how people would really behave in this futuristic setting. People are not just machines when they become soldiers. They still love and hate and make mistakes.
From there the recruits get trained to use their special new bodies for war, where they learn that they are still vastly outmatched by the alien creatures out there. Different societies and species exist, and most want to kill you. Great. We follow John Perry on a few missions and get exciting battle scenes on different planets mixed with the moral and ethical questions a soldier would have if they left the only planet they knew and went to blow up some stuff for a space government. I liked this part of the book, so it was great for me. But if you don’t like this part because nothing massively plot specific happens, then this will be a draining section of the book. However, I really don’t see how this could not be liked, as Scalzi keeps introducing new alien concepts that make it intriguing. A particular favourite of mine is where John Perry joins a fight on a planet against aliens way smaller than him, and he has a mental breakdown where he questions what he is even doing in this military, and he rage kicks a alien sky scraper no taller than himself and acts as this alien species own personal Godzilla.
I won’t spoil the entire story, but this is a good chunk into the book already. If you like the sound of it, check it out.
My thoughts: “Old Mans War” is a great book filled with a military style plot that I didn’t think I would enjoy but actually really did. John Perry is a decent main character. He is easy to empathise with in the beginning of the story and becomes a great person to experience space through later. Some of the side characters I found less memorable. A few stay with us throughout the story, but due to the nature of joining different attack squads we are sometimes thrown with a whole new platoon that I didn’t really care for. The fighting in this book is fantastic, the alien concepts fun and unique, and generally quite scary. I love the pacing of this book. It is an easy read. I never felt I had to sludge through a chapter to finally get to a certain point. This is something I value more and more as I read more books. I love sci fi and fantasy, but I no longer enjoy a book being 1000 pages long where two hundred are spent explaining an ancient feud that has nothing to do with our story.
Rating: 8/10