(Book #1 of the Old Man's War series)
Rating: 🍁🍁🍁🍁
I generally don't read a whole lot of pure sci-fi, despite the fact that it’s one of my favourite genres. There’s so much potential for imagination and exploration, things you can do and say with sci-fi in a way that’s more powerful than with regular literature. And yet you won’t see much of it on my bookshelf. Why? It largely comes down to the characters who inhabit the story. If the author can’t make me at least sympathize with one or more of the main protagonists (or even the antagonist – I’m not fussy), I cannot enjoy the book no matter how amazing/revolutionary/significant the plot or writing may be. Much of sci-fi is littered with characters that make me want to shoot them out the nearest airlock. I don’t want to get into the reasons why I think this is the case right now (*coughsystemicmisogynyandracismcough*). I bring it up only by way of explanation for why I’m only now getting around to reading John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.
I’m kind of kicking myself for waiting so long. Old Man’s War is thoroughly enjoyable – a fun, fast-paced, thoughtful space adventure. The concept of an army made up of senior citizens, combined with an awareness from Scalzi’s online presence that he is indeed A Good EggTM, was enough to make me put it on my to-read shelf. Scalzi did a great job of navigating the internal world of a 75-year old man (John Perry) whose life was going through some radical changes over a relatively short period of time in a believable, thought-provoking way. There were moments that I laughed out loud, moments that I questioned some of my own understandings of humanity, moments of happiness that made my heart hurt with the pain that comes from recognizing the cost involved in reaching that happiness. John Perry is a fun and interesting guy to spend time with.
The external world created by Scalzi was a lot of fun too. Not one I’d like to live in, but fun to visit. It’s a war out there, with many different species vying for the too-limited planetary resources. I can’t speak to the accuracy or plausibility of all the science-y stuff, but it all made sense on some level for me. If there’s one criticism I have of the book, though, it’s the amount of time spent explaining the science behind some of the different technologies. I tended to skim most of those, but that probably has more to do with my lack of interest than anything else. Still, there was only one instance where I was forced to go back and reach the science-y explanation in order to understand what was happening, so I question whether the rest were really necessary. They felt more like a ‘Hey look at this cool thing I learned while researching for this book’ moment on the part of the author than anything else. I will say that he at least explained the stuff well – my non-scientific mind was able to grasp the concepts he was outlining with relative ease.
On the whole, I’m glad I read Old Man’s War, and will be putting the next books in the series on my to-read list posthaste.
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