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.