Something I didn't really care for in Old Man's War was the protagonist, who I just couldn't jive with, but I really liked the setting. Turns out this book reuses the world laid out in the first book, but with a completely new cast of characters. Win-win for me!

There's some philosophical undercurrents about consciousness and identity lurking under this plot, but I was having too much fun with the over-the-top action scenes and espionage and extraterrestrial blackmail that was going on to focus on it too much. Hell, at one point a supersoldier is fighting an alien and is getting his ass kicked, so he spits up blood into the alien's eyes, then sends a command from the supercomputer inside his head to force the nanomachines in his blood to explode, blinding the alien. That's the kind of shenanigans we're dealing with here; kinda hard to wax poetic about the ~self~ with that stuff happening every other chapter.

If you just wanna turn your brain off and go on a creative military sci-fi romp, you'll enjoy this one. But there's also a little more meat on the bones here if you're looking for something more engaging than that.