robbbbbb (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} robbbbbb) wrote,@ 2006-05-19 12:21:00 |
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Book Review: Old Man's War
We took a quick tour through a bookstore in Victoria while we were there to grab some reading material. Erica and I were both looking for something new. I'd heard Old Man's War, by John Scalzi, recommended several places in the blogosphere (most notably by the Instapundit), and so I picked it up.
I started it while waiting to catch the Clipper back to Seattle. I was immersed in the book until we had to pick up our car, and then I finished it that night before bed. It's excellent; a real page-turner.
The plot begins on John Perry's seventy-fifth birthday. He enlists for service in the Colonial Defense Force and is carried off Earth. He knows little about what the CDF plans for him, as Earth is isolated from the rest of humanity. The book tells the story of his first two years (of ten) enlisting in the CDF, all of it spent as an infantry grunt.
When describing the book to Erica, I said that military science fiction tends to run to two poles: One dominated by Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and the other dominated by John Haldeman's The Forever War. You can see where Scalzi drew his inspirations from both. Like both, it's told in the first person.
Like Starship Troopers, the protagonist is a volunteer in a fighting force, and earns privileges for enlisting. The book conveys some of the same themes: Sometimes, you just have to fight. Like The Forever War, the protagonist is sometimes unsure of his actions. War is not pretty in Scalzi's universe, which is one of the main complaints against Heinlein's work.
It's also a well-written story. That makes it a fun read. The aliens are much more believable than Heinlein's Bugs or Haldeman's Taurans. Very few pages go by without interesting action. He avoids the long stretches of moralizing or politicking that slow down those books.
It's a good one. Go read it.
We took a quick tour through a bookstore in Victoria while we were there to grab some reading material. Erica and I were both looking for something new. I'd heard Old Man's War, by John Scalzi, recommended several places in the blogosphere (most notably by the Instapundit), and so I picked it up.
I started it while waiting to catch the Clipper back to Seattle. I was immersed in the book until we had to pick up our car, and then I finished it that night before bed. It's excellent; a real page-turner.
The plot begins on John Perry's seventy-fifth birthday. He enlists for service in the Colonial Defense Force and is carried off Earth. He knows little about what the CDF plans for him, as Earth is isolated from the rest of humanity. The book tells the story of his first two years (of ten) enlisting in the CDF, all of it spent as an infantry grunt.
When describing the book to Erica, I said that military science fiction tends to run to two poles: One dominated by Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and the other dominated by John Haldeman's The Forever War. You can see where Scalzi drew his inspirations from both. Like both, it's told in the first person.
Like Starship Troopers, the protagonist is a volunteer in a fighting force, and earns privileges for enlisting. The book conveys some of the same themes: Sometimes, you just have to fight. Like The Forever War, the protagonist is sometimes unsure of his actions. War is not pretty in Scalzi's universe, which is one of the main complaints against Heinlein's work.
It's also a well-written story. That makes it a fun read. The aliens are much more believable than Heinlein's Bugs or Haldeman's Taurans. Very few pages go by without interesting action. He avoids the long stretches of moralizing or politicking that slow down those books.
It's a good one. Go read it.
