Alright, Obscurists, aging sucks, but there’s no way around it. But what if you could get a second start in your seventies? Sounds good, like in “Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi—oh, and you need to also join the army, and your second life will probably end tragically soon and violently. But! Other than that. It’s all peaches.
***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***
What I love about this book:
I’ve read a few of Scalzi’s books before picking up “Old Man’s War,” the first of which was “Redshirts.” Liking those books—a lot—but never actually loving them, I was surprised at how much this book struck me. Like the rest of his work, I’m familiar with, it oscillates between being profoundly funny and tragic science fiction. That said, there is something about the pathos of John Perry, the protagonist, that pushes this novel to another level for me than the other Scalzi books I’ve read.
I think I love John Perry as a character so much first because he’s a soldier but not your traditional soldier. Perry doesn’t join the army until he’s in his seventies—and if you can’t wrap your mind around why he’s so effective as a soldier, clearly it’s for science fiction reasons, though I’m not going to spoil the “how” as of yet. Novel as that all is, the real reason I’m enamored with this character is that you can feel the weight of Perry’s lived experience carried with him from his long life at all points of the story. A lot of the time, I don’t believe highly functional “old” characters because many writers don’t know how to write them, in my opinion. They just feel and act like young characters, and their age is really just an artifice of the story.
Perry’s relatable-ness as a grandfatherly type extends to the rest of the cast of supporting characters too. This means that once sci-fi-style super-advanced warfare starts happening, it’s terribly sad when characters start dying.
What I don’t love about this book:
So this book is famously—as famous as things go with these things—inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers,” a science fiction classic that, for all its merits, I ideologically speaking just don’t like. This book and that book exist in a pessimistic vision of the future. They inhabit the polar opposite of where I first entered into my love of the genre as a boy, which is with “Star Trek.” I can still like them, even love them, but ultimately not to the same degree as I love the more optimistic stories in the genre.
Clearly, this book is about a war, hence the title, and I feel it’s only a small spoiler to reveal that it’s a war against aliens. Not just one group of aliens, but several different and not necessarily affiliated groups of aliens. Building off my unease about the inherent pessimism of future space war, it’s especially bleak for me that all other spacefaring species humanity encounters are hostile, and conflict is just inevitable. It goes a step further to even suggest that not only is conflict unavoidable with alien life but that anyone who doesn’t think so is either naïve or trying to self-aggrandize—or both. There is lip service that peace should be possible, but it isn’t really explored, at least not in this story.
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***The Spoiler part of this review***
***Ye be warned to turn back now***
The quick and dirty synopsis:
John Perry is an old man—seventy-five to be exact. So it’s odd after saying goodbye to his wife, at her grave, that he’s about to leave Earth forever and join the army. At first, not much is known about the Colonial Defense Forces other than they’re an army that exclusively recruits old people.
