Le vieil homme et la guerre

Part Ender's Game (without the hero worship) part Starship Troppers (without the fascism) and quite a lot of fun. A few plot errors (one pertaining to the whereabouts of the crew of the Sparrowhawk spring to mind) and a couple of "just so"-moments took a little bit away from it.

Very readable, good characters, a strong sense of humor. I'm totally not a fan of military space opera, but this was worth reading.

Since I read Redshirts earlier this year, John Scalzi has been becoming one of my favorite sci-fi authors. Old Man's War is an extremely well crafted story. It borrows heavily from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers for the aesthetic. You've got a well-trained army going against a thousand things that would eat them for breakfast without hesitation. Then you get into a bunch of nature versus nurture questions about behavior and what it means to be human. Old Man's War is an exquisite piece of contemplative fiction.

I see why people rate this one so highly. I burned it down in about 2 days, which is both due to it's relatively short length, and it's easy but engaging style.

I won't go into specifics, since I think I'm the last one around here to read it, so just the 10,000 foot view.

Some books are really dense and hard to get through, and at the end, leave you wondering if any of the characters progressed at all. Some books move so fast that might swear that the book read itself while you slept, for all the continuity you experienced. Right in the middle are those books that move quickly, but are written in a way that leaves you feeling like you aren't missing anything you need, or are weighted down with anything you don't. This book is an example of the last type.

Someone else mentioned that it felt like a great homage to "Starship Troopers", and I totally see that. As a battlelogue of one soldier's exciting-turned-regretful-turned-accepting journey through war with a veritable nature's field journal of unashamedly bizarre xenobiology, there was no obtuse technobabble, and conversely, no technology that I felt was "practically magic" by anthropological definition. It just worked. Actually, it worked a bit too well: near the end, I was envisioning how this could be turned into a movie. I have no idea if it's on that track, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least (I checked; it is).

I would have given this another 1/2 star (leaving room for the "perfect five star book") if not for the occasional bouts of 'Crichtonosis', when one character is used strictly to set up another as a mouthpiece for showing off the author's cool theory/grasp of science/need to educate in the middle of an otherwise enjoyable read. Honestly, though, in some cases, this really irritates me. Here, though, it fit because the...two?...times it happened, it wasn't very drawn out, and was positioned at a turning point for the story, making it one part necessary, one part "look at me".

This generation's worthy successor to Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" and Haldeman's "The Forever War."

I picked up this book as part of the Humble E-Book Bundle, or otherwise I'd probably haven't bought it. And with what I know now I would have regretted it.

Some SciFi books feature a lengthy introduction, telling you how this setting came to be. Others jump right in and leave you wanting for more explanations. And a very few skip the introduction but manage describe the setting in words that have you understand everything right away. Scalzi manages the last way, by having his characters guess about how stuff works. Combine with that characters that are relatable, a marvelous fluid writing style, a nice backstory, mix well, and you've got a book that lends to re-reading and has you wanting for more (eg. [b:The Ghost Brigades|239399|The Ghost Brigades (Old Man's War, #2)|John Scalzi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316729668s/239399.jpg|18279845])

My reading of this book is probably due to a series of coincidences. Another book from Scalzi, Redshirts, has been on my radar for a few weeks/months - so I knew the name. And then, the EBook Humble Bundle appeared, and I bought it, and there was this book in it. And that day, I thought that I had forgotten my (dead tree) book (I hadn't, it just wasn't in the bag in which I thought it was), so I browsed my Kindle app content, found that, told myself "oh well" (I was not convinced by the title), and was hooked within a paragraph or so. Or possibly within the first three sentences: " I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army."

The whole book is very similar to Starship Troopers, by Heinlein - Earth is reasonably healthy, but war is everywhere in the galaxy, and aliens are not the most peaceful creatures ever. And to fight a war, well you need soldiers. In Starship Troopers, soldiers are mostly young adults/kids, and military service is a way to attain "citizenship" (the right to vote, essentially). The premise of Old Man's War is pretty different: people enrol at their 75th birthday, in the hope of accessing a better health - even if noone knows what happens in reality (because it's all managed by the Colonial Defense Force, whose interactions with Earth are minimal), the general consensus is that you cannot wage a war with 75 years old people, so probably they must do something for that. In the book, we follow the narrator, John Perry, during his enrolment and subsequent career. And it's a very, very enjoyable read. Again, the reference to Starship Troopers are obvious - but it's a "revamped" version of Starship Troopers - and much more funny (there are some great dialogs in there - I laughed out a few times in the train yesterday - sorry for that, neighbors).

Really a great book; I was kind of afraid of Redshirts because I really loved the premise but I was afraid that the book would not live to my expectations; now I think it will, so I'm happy :) Also, Old Man's War is actually the first of a series of (to this day) 4 books; I think I'll read the rest. 

Scalzi's book is an entertaining read, but if you're expecting a deeper message about the pointlessness of war or the perils of the human condition, you might be better off reading Haldeman's Forever War or Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Character development is not real complicated but the plot development is enjoyable enough. Recommended.

Up to now I hadn't read anything by John Scalzi, which is a bit of a faux pas in SF fan circles these days. So I started, somewhat unoriginally, with the book everyone mentions.

Old Man's War is what I think of in my head when I talk about written science fiction. It's set in the future, it has weird alien races, advanced science and a fair amount of action.

On the surface there's nothing really exceptional going on here. We've had clones before, and scary aliens and battles in space. What makes this work is the execution.

The story here is simple enough. People who reach the ripe old age of 75 get to enlist with the Colonial Defense Forces and go up into space to defend the growing human settlements. When they do so they discover that they had no idea how comfy and safe a life they had been living and how harsh space really is.

I say story rather than plot, because it isn't quite a plot. Along the way we learn more and more about the universe and the races that life in it as well as the CDF and it's methods of defending humanity. But it's more of a man's biography than it is a singular plot.

Scalzi presents us with a cold and dangerous universe. Populated by aliens we really don't understand very well. Many of which are as capable (or more) than us. But he humanizes it with the characters that populate it. Some of those characters really don't get much screen time, but they are distinctive and when some of them die, it does hurt a little.

In the quest to be new and original, sometimes the basics get forgotten. And those basics are far more important than any burst of originality. I'm glad I read this and I'm looking around to see what other books of John Scalzi's I might want to read soon.

This was an easy read, I liked the way the story flowed and the humor.

This is not a serious book about war or soldiers.
Making the aliens man eating monsters and/or religious nut cases you can't reason with doesn't leave much space for questions about why we have to fight and die. And hell, man eating aliens? Really? They are really going to be able to metabolize humans? It's as bad as sex with aliens and vampire aliens.
I was also not at all convinced that the characters were over 75 years old.

There was much talk about the reasons for choosing old soldiers, but it didn't seem to play out in the actual performance of the troops.
If I was not told that these are old soldiers I would never have guessed.

However it is actually just the jesting and youthful socializing that make this book fun to read.

It's a bit weird to read about this Zero Sum universe where war seems inevitable and is very hard to question, with man eating alien enemies to boot.
Right after reading [b:A Deepness in the Sky|226004|A Deepness in the Sky|Vernor Vinge|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316729499s/226004.jpg|1270006] and the Qeng Ho's efforts to use trade in place of 0 sum resource hogging, war and enslavement.

I was on the edge of my seat for the entirety of Old Man's War. Not just because I was invested in the story and the characters (I was) but because after I'd read several excellent chapters, I wanted to see if Scalzi could keep up the momentum all the way to the end.

Lots of books blow their load early and fizzle out. Dean Koontz, for example, writes some wonderful first and second chapters, but he suffers mightily from the sort of mid-book doldrums wherein it feels as though he's just winging it until he can find his way to the conclusion.

Scalzi does not suffer from this problem. After packing the first half of the book with a fast pace, wit, and clever things, he shifts gears and ends it with a fast pace, wit, and more clever things. He never runs out of clever things! He stays witty, get this, all the way through the book! And the pace? It's fast.

Bravo. I've already purchased the next two sequels from the used bookstore and look forward to reading them when I need some serious entertainment.

I enjoyed this book, which actually surprised me a bit. Typically with sci-fi I tend to prefer heavier fare, but Scalzi's light touch with his prose worked for me quite well. Its central idea is spectacular story-fodder, and I'm interested in seeing what he does with it in the later books of the series.

Unfortunately, there is a little bit of a strange disconnect in the story, which might have a lot to do with the fact that the protagonist seems to excel at everything, and never seems to face a real challenges, so the central conflict of the story feels almost superficial. Also, the alien species are painted in very broad strokes, and it gave me the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the universe was not fully realized by the author beyond the limited conflicts that are depicted. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I like to feel a bit more depth to the world, and I might have been able to ignore it had the protagonist faced more challenges.

Don't ge me wrong, I enjoyed the book, and will try out the next book in the series, but the disconnection I felt means I can only give it three stars.

Not quite what I expected from the cover. In my experience of oil-paintings-of-planets-and-spacecraft covers, you tend to get pretty hard SF to go with them. This was more extra-firm tofu hard. The cover blurbs compared him to Heinlein, which was fair.

The book has a couple of reveals, the first of which I genuinely did not see coming, and the second of which I saw coming for a while, so I'll separate my review into the bits I can talk about without spoiling and the spoilery bits.

John Perry, the protagonist, is seventy-five when he joins the Colonial Defence Forces. Those recruited by the CDF never return to Earth, and are never heard from again. No one knows why the CF recruits senior citizens, and in fact, doesn't permit you to join younger than seventy-five, but the assumption is that they must have some kind of rejuvenation technology, because a seventy-five year-old isn't otherwise the ideal soldier.

Although many things in this book are Heinlein-esque, Perry is much older than the average Heinlein protagonist, and noticeably wiser, (although perhaps not as smart) which was a bit of a relief. It's nice not to have to watch a protagonist make mistakes the reader can see coming. Yet, Perry is still enough of a risk-taker to step out into the unknown.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

This book has two different kinds of fridge problems. The first is what TV-Tropes calls fridge logic: those logical inconsistencies which don't particularly bother you until you're finished the book, and, in a moment of boredom, suddenly realize part of it makes no sense.

It turns out that the CDF's plan for the elderly that it recruits is this: ten years before they reach the age necessary to join, they're signed, and given a rudimentary physical. Using materials culled from this physical, individual clone-bodies are prepared for them, and given significant upgrades. If, ten years later, these people still want to join (and are still alive), their consciousness is uploaded into their clone-bodies, and they become soldiers in war against any and every alien species that challenges or threatens the colonies.

However, given the population they work with, some of the people who originally were recruited don't make it to seventy-five. In these cases, the bodies prepared for them are given a basic personality template, soaked in military learning, and become "ghost forces," an elite company which have never known anything but war, and who are so well adapted to their specialized soldier-bodies that they use them more efficiently than anyone else ever could.

In the case of the book, the Ghost Forces exist so that Perry can encounter a body grown from the DNA of his dead wife, Kathy. It was actually done much better than I expected-- as I said before, Perry is old enough not to be stupid. He doesn't harass Jane, the woman living in Kathy's body, or expect her to be Kathy, although he is fascinated by her. He quickly grasps that she's her own person, and treats her that way.

However, the fridge-logic is this: if bodies without a personality upload are more effective soldiers, why bother with the personality upload? In fact, why bother with the DNA collection? Surely one could make a thousand, or a million soldiers with the same DNA, just as efficiently, if not more so? Why train soldiers who already have bad habits from a lifetime of living, and who have adapted themselves to Earth, when you can start fresh with someone who will only ever know war in space? I think the answer is "it would be a different story."

The other fridge problem is who goes in it: The soldiers are told when they go through basic, that the odds are against their survival, and indeed, most of the people Perry trains with die, including the explicitly homosexual Alan. Scalzi sort of seems to write about straight, white men, although there are generally enough others thrown in for representation's sake.

It's mentioned that those from the Indian subcontinent are permitted to join the CDF earlier than seventy-five, presumably because their life expectancy is shorter. However, the only time that continent comes up is when a racist ass pontificates for the sole purpose of allowing Perry and another (white) recruit to bond over slapping him down. After they're popped into their new bodies, they're told racial divides have been abolished since there is no longer any skin colour but green. (The new bodies are chlorophyll enhanced, among other changes.) I am somewhat sceptical of this. One of Scalzi's commanding officers is mentioned to be from South America: she dies.

The Ghost Forces are named by a simple convention: a common first name, and the last name of significant philosopher or scientist. However, they seem to be given common English first names. I didn't notice any of them named Samir, or Jamila. The only non-English last names I noted were those of ancient Greeks. (I admit, I think a soldier named Gandhi would be hilarious, but probably somewhat offencive, so, perhaps just as well.)

(Although I should note that the person who makes this claim identifies himself as Latino, and doesn't, so far as I can recall, die.)