Review 73: Old Man's War

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Somewhere in the unspecified future, humanity has reached out beyond the solar system, settling colonies wherever they can find a habitable planet. It's the inevitable expansion of the Human Race, finally freed from its precarious position on Earth. With the new skip drive, capable of taking people vast distances in only a moment, a whole range of new and interesting worlds are open to hardy settlers willing to make new lives for themselves.

Unfortunately, there are many alien races out there with the same idea, who need worlds with similar climates and resources. And very few of them are keen on sharing with us. So, in order to protect the human race against its competitors, the Colonial Defense Force was set up - a space military whose basic mission is to deal with the alien menace by whatever means necessary.

No one on Earth has ever seen a CDF soldier. Nobody knows anything about them - how they fight, where they fight, or even whom they fight. People do know one thing, however - there's always an opportunity to join. Protect and serve.

If you're seventy-five years old, that is.

The CDF isn't interested in hotheaded youths with no experience. While they have traditionally been the main component of the soldiering class, they are erratic at best, cannon fodder at worst. The CDF is looking for an entirely new type of cannon fodder, hopefully one with a better head on its shoulders. Therefore, the CDF recruits from the elderly. The theory is that once you get to be seventy-five years old, you've seen a bit of the world, you know how much you don't know, and you're less likely to be infected with the special brand of insanity that comes along with being in your late teens and early twenties.

So, on your sixty-fifth birthday, you go to the recruitment office for a routine physical and a basic description of what you're in for. Ten years later, if you're still around, you join up for real. There's no turning back, though. Join the CDF and your life on Earth is over. You will be declared legally dead, and there will be no coming back to your home planet, ever.

For many people, this might be a somewhat intimidating proposition. After all, the Earth is the only home we have. But once you're seventy-five and looking your mortality straight in the eyes, it might be a reasonable price to pay.

As for the myriad physical problems that come with being 75, well, there are ways of getting around that.

The book follows John Perry, a widower-turned-soldier as he fights for the safety of people he doesn't know, in a universe he's only beginning to understand. Once he begins his new career as a soldier, he discovers that, to paraphrase Sir Arthur Eddington, the universe is stranger than he can imagine. He is taken to new and interesting worlds to meet new and interesting species of intelligent life and, more often than not, to kill them. Along the way, he has to deal with new takes on the old questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries - what is identity, what is duty, and what is the function of war? Even the nature of reality itself pokes its head in to cause a little trouble. All through this, John Perry is just trying to keep his head down and get through his tour of duty - but you know it can never be that simple.

This was Scalzi's first novel, and as first novels go it was just the kind you want to have. Exciting, funny, nominated for a Hugo and immensely popular. To say nothing of being reminiscent of Heinlein (if Heinlein had had more of a sense of humor). Not only do we have a cracking good military space adventure, but we're introduced to a far wider universe that Scalzi will later expand upon. The "Old Man's War Universe" is vast and exciting, and as of this writing, there have been three more books that take place in it.

With that in mind, this book is mostly exposition. While the adventure parts are adventurous, the vast majority of this book is laying down the important concepts that are necessary to understand the book and those that follow. And so we get a lot of explanation about what the CDF is and how it operates, why it needs its soldiers and how they're prepared for battle. We're introduced to the BrainPal (tm) and SmartBlood (tm) and the MP-35 Rifle, truly one of the most useful weapons ever made by man. We meet a variety of alien species - some disturbingly ugly but gentle, others utterly adorable baby-eaters, and still more who believe that murdering other life forms is an act of religious grace for which the murdered should be thankful.

Lucky for us, Scalzi chooses the most logical way to do all of this exposition - the main character is as clueless as we are. He also needs everything explained, sometimes in vivid and gruesome detail, in order to make sense of the universe in which he now works. By following John Perry through basic training and his first year in the CDF, we start to understand the basics. The rest will come in later books, and our learning curve will be somewhat accelerated.

The book manages to hit all the right notes - it's exciting, it's poignant and it's funny. John Perry has been given a quick and sarcastic sense of humor, which reminds me of a lot of my friends, so I felt an immediate kinship with him. We like the people he likes, we care about the things he cares about, and we understand what it is that keeps him going, even when he's risking his own humanity in the process. In short, John Perry is a character who is at once singularly interesting and at the same time easy to identify with. This, I must say, is a tough feat to pull off.

If you like funny, exciting, universe-scale science fiction, pick this up. If you're interested in how our eventual coexistence with aliens might one day go, give this a read. And by all means, if you're a fan of Robert Heinlein - and you know who you are - definitely get this book.

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"If the universe is bigger and stranger than I can imagine, it's best to meet it with an empty bladder "
- John Perry, Old Man's War
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John Scalzi on Wikipedia
Old Man's War on Wikipedia
Old Man's War on Amazon.com
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Review 03: The Android's Dream

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

What do you get when you combine aliens, diplomacy, artificial intelligences, religion and sheep together? Well, for most people, the answer would be a horrible mess. For John Scalzi, however, it's a fantastic read. Nothing too complex, no greater statements about the nature of humanity and the necessity of war that holds together the stories in his Old Man's War universe, just a good old-fashioned espionage romp. With sheep. Or at least a sheep. Kind of.

The story begins with, as so many stories do, a murder. Not an intentional murder, really, but one that was born of shame and revenge, as so many murders are. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't rate much, except that the death of an alien trade ambassador is never a convenient thing. When said diplomat may just possibly have been killed by his human counterpart, that's even more difficult to deal with. Instead of a nice, tidy trade agreement cementing the relations between the United Nations of Earth and the Nidu, an alien race with an extraordinary sense of smell and hair-trigger tempers, we have what the State Department might just call "a challenge."

The only thing that can heal this little rift between the two planets is a sheep. But not just any sheep - a special breed, created just for the Nidu called the Android's Dream. Without this sheep, the ruling family cannot hold on to power, and the Nidu will be plunged into a catastrophic civil war that will, in all likelihood, take Earth with it. In order to find the sheep, avert catastrophe and, most importantly, avoid calling shame down upon the government, State Department employee - and veteran of the Earth's greatest military failure - Harry Creek will have to use every skill at his disposal. And then some.

It's a great read, this book. Telling any more about the plot would ruin it, so I'll just exhort you to pick up the book and get reading. In all honesty, you could probably finish it pretty quickly. But I can't just stop here, so let me tell you more about why I liked it as much as I did.

What made it so good, what always makes good sci-fi good, is the reality of the world the author creates. It's great to come up with high-concept scientific ideas, or intricately-planned space battles, but for the reader to really immerse him-or-herself in the book, it has to have a world in which the reader can easily imagine her-or-himself existing.

I thought of this during one scene early in the book. A character was riding the Washington, D.C. Metro and the narrator was describing the various aliens who were riding with him. There was an explanation of how various species had integrated themselves into the city, overcoming prejudice and discrimination, but what really got me was the description of a young woman reading the paper, the only other human in the car. Amidst all the different bodies, tongues, smells, and appearances, she didn't even notice.

"If her great-great-grandmother were on the train," Scalzi writes, "she would have thought she was on commuter train heading toward the fifth circle of Hell. This woman didn't even look up. The human capacity for being jaded was a remarkable thing."

It was at that point that I really accepted the reality of the book. It wasn't a perfect world, it wasn't one that had been ripped apart or perfected by alien contact. What had happened was what happens here any time cultures interact - after a brief period of unpleasantness, cultures start to mingle until it gets to a point where no one can remember when things were at all different. This book has all those little details that help sell the world, things that blend our world with theirs. Bored mall employees, amoral hit men, political jockeying, all of those things are familiar. Actual ghosts in machines, planet-cracking bombs, aliens that are almost entirely mouth and digestive systems, those are not. But they're believable, because Scalzi is one hell of a writer.

I do have one little nit to pick, however. It's not a big nit, but a nit nonetheless.

The book is an adventure, plain and simple. It's a plot-driven story that pulls you along from one event to the other with nary a chance to catch your breath, and I never complain about that. It has some great characters... who remain almost entirely static throughout the story. I can't say there's no character development in the book, because the big hairy guy who eats people does have a change of heart about it, but other than that.... Harry Creek begins the book as a reluctant hero who is hiding his super-hacker, ass-kicker light under a bushel, and he's happy to continue to be that at the close of the book. Robin Baker is a sassy, independent young woman who holds up under pressure - though not necessarily happy about it - throughout the book, and the Nidu ambassador Narf-win-Getag is untrustable the moment he walks on the page, and he remains so up through his sudden and inevitable betrayal near the end.

Like I said, this isn't a huge complaint, because the book that Scalzi has written isn't a character book. It's an adventure, and adventure books usually don't require a whole lot of character development. That doesn't mean the characters aren't believable - they certainly are - and it doesn't mean they're not interesting - they absolutely are. They just don't grow. Fortunately I know from having read Old Man's War and its related books that Scalzi has no problem with character development, and so I can assume that keeping his characters reasonably static in this book was a deliberate choice.

As a tangential comment on characters in the book, there was one character that drove me nuts. This character is not central to the story, and only appears a few times. What makes this person interesting are the following two things: first that the character is named Sam, and second that Sam's gender is never established. Maybe it's me and I missed something, but I have no idea if Sam was a man or a woman.

I caught it mainly because Tad Williams used the same name to pull a similar trick in his Otherland series, but in that story he was hiding Sam's gender from another character, not the reader, so we eventually found out what was what. In this story, Sam's gender remains a mystery for no other reason than I figure it amused Scalzi. It has no bearing on the story, and it doesn't make the fate of Sam's lover any less tragic, but I found it fascinating.

In any case, it's a great read and - as a bonus - very funny. The opening line alone lets you know that, no matter what you think you've read before, you haven't read anything quite like this. But I'm not telling you what that line is - I can't give away everything....

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"If there's one thing that distinguishes the human species, it is a pathological need to stay connected."
-John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
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John Scalzi's homepage
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