On his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grave \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and then he enlists.<\/p>\n
In John Scalzi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Old Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s War<\/a>, the universe is a nasty place. Intelligent species are common, generally hostile, and good real estate is as common as a cheap oceanfront lot in California. The Colonial Defense Forces must fight tooth and nail (and tentacle, and claw . . .) for every livable planet.<\/p>\n Why sign up a bunch of geezers? Their experiences are invaluable to the colonies, so the logic goes, and they have nothing much to lose. John Perry in particular has nothing to lose. His beloved wife is dead. They had planned to enlist together, but she died from a stroke eight years ago.<\/p>\n And why do the geezers want to join? Blind faith, really: thanks to the CDF\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interactions with alien races, they are technologically advanced relative to Earth. Surely they must be able to turn old farts into killing machines. (Oh boy, can they.) No one down here on Earth knows; one condition of enlistment is that the recruit agrees never to go home again.<\/p>\n Before long, John is a green recruit struggling through basic training. After that, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a cog in the CDF machine, traveling to foreign worlds, meeting unique races, and killing them. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when the fun begins,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d except that Old Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s War is a romp right from the start.<\/p>\n OMW is bound to stir memories of The Forever War and Starship Troopers. It even reminded me (pleasantly) of Harry Harrison\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Bill the Galactic Hero. Like Bill, and like Forever War, OMW is all about entertainment: action, adventure, humor, and even a poignant love story which did not feel the least bit grafted.<\/p>\n Scalzi gives more than a passing nod to Robert Heinlein in his acknowledgments. The novel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s main Heinleinism \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the way the action intermittently grinds to a halt to allow the characters to hold a roundtable discussion \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is my primary quibble. (I have other quibbles, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re petty enough to qualify me as a snark, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll shut up.) Fortunately, this does not happen too often. And, unlike Heinlein, Scalzi does this for the sake of exposition rather than political diatribe.<\/p>\n Perhaps less obvious is the debt Scalzi owes Jack Vance. I see Vance as the consummate author of cultural science fiction (his short story \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Moon Moth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a great example). One of the coolest things about OMW is the Consu, an ultra-advanced race who think they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing us a favor by killing us. As in Vance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stories, the Consu culture is more than just local color \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a key plot element.<\/p>\n Old Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s War is the most fun I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had with a science fiction novel since Snow Crash. This novel doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t try to blow your mind with post-Singularity trans-human gobbledygook, and it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pretend to be cyber-punker than Gibson. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an old-fashioned pulpy joyride: Scalzi has made entertainment paramount.<\/p>\n D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grave \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and then he enlists. In John Scalzi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Old Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s War, the universe is a nasty place. Intelligent species are common, generally hostile, and good real estate is as common as a cheap oceanfront lot in California. The Colonial Defense Forces must fight tooth and… Continue Reading Old Man’s War<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-n-authors","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}