panguitch's Full Review: John Scalzi - Old Man's War
Old Man's War, by John Scalzi, 2005
John Perry visits his wife's grave on his 75th birthday. Then he joins the army.
Enlisting is a mysterious process. Old people are taken by the Colonial Defense Forces and never seen again. But John has no ties to Earth life, so he doesn't mind taking that one-way ride on the space elevator. He soon makes friends among the other elderly recruits. While they suspect the army fills its ranks with old men and women because of their accumulated experience and expertise, they can't imagine how their aged bodies could be of practical use. The answer to that riddle is only the first of many shocks they'll experience as they learn what interstellar war is really like.
Where's the big idea?
It's often said that science fiction is the literature of ideas. But reading the magazines in recent years and the novels that have generated critical buzz, some people have wondered "Where's the big idea?" Literary technique, often pushed to opacity, has replaced the sensawonda that came with ideas that spanned trans-dimensional galactic empires.
In this sense Scalzi is a bit old school. His narrative is straightforward, and serves his story rather than the other way around. His sense of place consists mostly of gee-whiz spaceships, planets and aliens rather than deep textures. His characters are serviceable, more so than some of the old masters could claim. More than anything, Scalzi has a story to tell, and it's built around ideas that have no need to hide behind literary window dressing.
Survival of the Fittest
The idea that strikes me most (other than the idea of sending old men off to war) is one of the oldest, most central themes in science fiction: Darwinism. While human-alien warfare is a genre commonplace, Scalzi renders it an explicit expression of the survival of the fittest maxim.
It's only reasonable. There are precious few inhabitable planets, and any spacefaring species who share similar environmental needs will compete for them. So the Colonial Defense Forces conquer, occupy and defend planets against a variety of aliens both frightening (like the Consu, for whom battle is a purifying sacrament) and absurd (like the little Covandu, against whom the best weapon is a boot heel).
This simple explanation satisfies the question that so often goes unasked in classic science fiction: "Just why did we start fighting with these aliens?" It also gains depth as John and his fellow soldiers must consider why they fight for humanity when they themselves have grown less human.
Micromanaging Evolution
The human body is not as suited for violence as a lion's or chimpanzee's, so the Colonial Defense Forces improve on the standard model, adding strength and durability. Nanotechnology quickens the senses, replaces blood, and furnishes weapons in the form of an assault rifle with ammunition that morphs from bullets to explosive grenades to a flamethrower as the need arises.
I confess this weapon strained credibility for me, falling into the trap where nanotechnology simply sounds like magic. In contrast, the BrainPal that each soldier receives and uses to interface with other soldiers and the information grid, while equally magical, feels much more plausible. Perhaps because the main uses for BrainPals are analogous to surfing the internet or communicating in the field with radio.
Band of Brothers and Sisters
Notwithstanding these advantages, it's the rare soldier who survives his tour and earns the right to become a colonist. The coterie of friends John makes in training, who underwent the initial transformation and orgy of awakening with him, begin dropping off like proverbial flies. It's sad, because this group and their repartee carry the book in the early sections, buoying us through the initial exposition and injecting youth into John's worn out personality.
As this camaraderie becomes a casualty it's replaced by a mystery. John sees someone in the ranks of the secretive Ghost Brigades who looks painfully familiar, though she violently denies ever knowing him.
Intellectual Discourse or Straight-up Fun?
This rejection, added to John's loss of his friends and the question of whether it makes sense to fight for humanity when you're no longer Homo sapiens, echoes a common theme in war literature. This disassociation, this feeling of no longer being part of that for which you're fighting recalls Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, where it's expressed through time dilation, with the protagonist feeling as if he is standing still while the world continues on without him.
But unlike Haldeman's William Mandella, Scalzi's John Perry is an ultimately positive character, his story more an adventure with ups and downs than a prolonged degradation of spirit. In mood it's more like the other book it's often compared to, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
In mood, but not in tone. Old Man's War follows in the tradition of military SF, but lacks the tenor of militarism (even jingoism) that Starship Troopers attains. Nor does it flounder in lengthy political discourses justifying violence or advocating a political system.
So rather than portray a Vietnam-era disillusionment with war, or the self-assured belligerence of the 1950s, Old Man's War opts for an engrossing story. Perhaps it's reflecting its own generation's preoccupation with entertainment, especially where it involves guns. In any case, it's a better novel than the other two books because of this. In a way it out-Golden Ages these classics, while still benefiting from the intellectual groundwork they laid. It always feels smart even though it's mostly just good fun.
Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi s astonishingly proficient first novel ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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