There was a point when I was going to give up. It was certainly clever enough in that way sci-fi books need to be clever, but the xenophobia and the banding together of humans because of their humanness is not a theme that resonates with me. Full disclosure: I am about to start The Dark Forest which includes the ETO, an organization that wants to see humans wiped out (or at least colonized) -- that's more my speed. Also, you need to appreciate the military in a way that I find difficult--even though the author takes pains to make the hero a former war protester.

What saved it for me is that it turns out to contain a love story. Make love, not war; yes--the slogan of an earlier generation (earlier for YOU, not me, for I am an old man and this was really a young man's war disguised as its opposite. The young shouldn't really be allowed to write about old people in the way whites shouldn't write about blacks (except, if they do it well, and the problem is they mostly don't) There's a sense in which age is marginalized in our current culture and that marginalization is transported into the future in this book despite superficial attempts to value the life experience of 75-year-olds.

One curious theme is how the book starts with 2 characters bonding over bible quotes but the religion of aliens is made to appear comical.

So I checked out the goodreads author's page for John Scalzi and he makes a point of how writing is a job for him. That gibes with the concept of duty & the military and so explained something to me of where this book came from: a world view in which necessity/survival ultimately drives everything else--a kind of economic Darwinism in which art is happy coincidence, or maybe the beautiful plumage that give that extra push to the propagation of one's genes.