Starship Troopers, again.

Perhaps Cory Doctorow described it best when he wrote, “Old Man’s War is Starship Troopers without the lectures and Forever War with better sex.” That just about says it all, though it speaks more to the juvenile nature of the sex in Forever War than to any sex which may be present in Old Man’s War, which is pretty negligible.

An elderly widower, with little else to live for, joins the army. At the time, many elderly humans join the Colonial Defense Force because of the promise of a return to their youth. The Colonials are apparently technologically superior, owning the secret for interstellar travel (the skip drive) as well as the secret for eternal youth.

While the science in this novel is outstanding and the premise is good, much of the dialogue is contrived and trite. This is the first in a series of three novels and well worth proceeding to the second, The Ghost Brigades. ( )

I was very impressed by this book. A space war book with a whole new twist & look. The writing was excellent, the plot tight & the characterization was wonderful. I could really identify with the main character & understood the motivations of even the oddest aliens, as much as the character could anyway. There was plenty of action, but that wasn't the main thrust of the book. It carried along a lot pretty neat ideas on what our future might be like & took a sideways look at what constitutes a 'man'. Definitely worth reading & I'm looking forward to other books by the author. ( )

I would give this book a 3 for story and 4s for cool science and characters. I just felt like more should have happened in the book, but overall I found it to be very enjoyable and had a great sci fi concept. ( )

Vivid characters. Very funny, especially the first half of the book, where Perry joins the army as an "old fart" and gets acclimatized to his new body. Fast-paced scenes of combat, with an end that leaves you wanting more. ( )

Loved every single word of it. Fantastic story, start to finish, and brilliantly told. ( )

Ever since masses of bloggers received Zoe’s Tale for review last year, I have wanted to read something by John Scalzi. It seemed to appeal to even those who don’t read science fiction, and I’m not a fan of science fiction. Saying that, I was really swayed by all the positive opinions floating around, especially given that his books had great characters. That’s my problem with science fiction, lack of great characters. So, where else to start with the first book in that series?

(As an aside, look, I bought books because of bloggers, it does work!)

I was not at all disappointed with Old Man’s War. The characters are fabulous. John, the narrator, is capable of eliciting such emotion from me, especially about his deceased wife Kathy. He’s so real I could almost touch him. His bonds with the other characters are strong, believable, and interesting. This book brings up questions about war, kind of like Ender’s Game, and does it extremely well.

The technology in this book, while present, was not scary or hard to understand. It didn’t make me want to rip my brain out, like some science fiction books have with their explanations. It’s explained, and some of it is not explained and taken on faith; one of the characters says to another, “You don’t have the math”. To be honest, I like taking things in books on faith better as long as they follow their own rules, kind of like in fantasy. And we can pretty much guarantee that I will never have the math to figure even modern technology out, so I was quite happy with that!

I really enjoyed this book. I closed and immediately thought that I wanted the next. It was the Read-a-Thon, so I’m only adding it to my Amazon cart now, a few hours later. I’ll be continuing with this series. It’s awesome.

http://chikune.com/blog/?p=840 ( )

Really interesting premise (I'll exclude it to not have a spoiler). Worth reading for the thoughts/novelty of the premise and the first 50-100 pages explaining the premise. The rest of the novel is a bit formulaic (more airplane time filler than truly engaging or thought provoking. The author is supposed to have been inspired by Heinlein, and the writing is definitely along those lines...if you like Heinlein, you'll probably like this book. ( )

I picked up Zoe's Tale when it showed up on the new books shelf, and D informed me that it was loosely a sequel to the Old Man's War stuff, so we went back to the library to check it out to read first. Like his Android's Dream, he writes in a plain spoken, clear-as-a-bell style, just straightforward enough to plausibly make his protagonist, John Perry, seem like a real, normal human. Perry is a man looking back on his first couple of years of service in the Colonial Defense Forces, and he spins out his story simply, embellishing with the details of everyday life rather than with exaggeration or high rhetoric.

The retrospective timeline also serves to make the story work. Prospectively, the average story should end in a quick and gruesome death, but in this case history is written by those who are both clever and lucky: the winners, or at least the survivors.

The book also has a nice amount of friendship and romance. I have to wonder about the romance part, because the protagonist is a writer, and I wonder if Scalzi is nodding towards how happy he is to have "gotten the girl" in real life. (8 ( )

Gritty, but good sci fi. Scalzi's battles are graphics, his tactics are interesting and unpredictable.

John Perry had no idea what he was getting involved in when he joined the Colonial Defense Force. But he becomes a surprisingly good soldier at the age of 75. He is a good character and you can't stand to put the book down because you want to see what he is going to do next. ( )

Came highly recommended. Hot-stuff space opera. But, for me....not so much. ( )

This was an excellent book. Anyone who enjoys military Sci-fi will like it. But to really enjoy it you have to have read another favorite of mine; Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. If you have seen the movie please try to not think about it while I am talking about the original. In fact, try to wipe it from your memory entirely and then read these two books to replace the void.
Starship Troopers is a coming of age novel. A young man joins the intergalactic army (can't remember the name) and we see how he matures and you get some cool tech stuff and fighting aliens. Bad description, but a good book, especially if you remember that it was written as YA and also don't mind a bit of politics with your novels.
Old Man's War tells the same story, but from the other end. The premise is that to join the intergalactic army you have to be 75. You will never some back but you promise to be a soldier for no less than 2 years, maximum of 10. This immediately throws the entire soldier novel tropes out the window because most of them deal with some sort of coming of age theme. What if the soldier thrust into new and difficult situations is an old man? Set in his ways, wiser and less apt to just accept everything he is told?
The amazing thing about this story is how well it works when you already basically know the plot. The general outline is very similar to Starship Troopers, but the details are so very different. Scalzi is a very talented writer to have pulled this off. He manages to pay tribute to Heinlein without feeling like a copy or a repudiation of the original. ( )

I found this book to be a bit thin - the characters weren't as complex as I'd prefer, though the plot moved quickly (some readers prefer plot over characters and others, vice-versa) and it was reasonably enjoyable. Because of the lack of detail, however, it's not something I'd read again. ( )

Link to a review on my personal website. ( )

I read this book with a sense of Deja View - I read Ghost Brigades a few years back, and I think the plots started to mix :)
First off, the premise is interesting - in a universe populated by aliens, there is no big galactic united nations keeping peace- each species is out for themselves. Who do you get to defend the human universe? the young folk just starting out in their life, or the old folk, who with a bit of technology, come with a whole lifetime of experience, and need a new purpose in life anyway.
I enjoyed the book immensely. I think John Scalzi, found the essence of growing old, becoming young, and the pointlessness of war. The book was an easy read, and in some spots seemed a bit slow. ( )

John Perry joins the Colonial Defense Force, at the age of 75. The CDF takes the elderly Perry and turns him into a killing machine that any Starship Trooper would be proud to see. While amazed with his new body, he struggles with being less than human. Perry goes off to war fighting the enemies of humanity and deals with the horrors of war.

Fans of Heinlein should find Scalzi's style and story highly entertaining. He manages give Old Man's War the air of a hard sci-fi story without the technical jargon so many others use. There is no need of a degree in rocket science to understand this book. However, the explaination of the science involved does not seem to have been dumbed down or overly handwavist (if such a word exists).

Old Man's War is with out a doubt the best sci-fi novel I have read in well over a decade. There is plenty of action and the character developement gets you invested in the story.Scalzi's crystal clear and easy to read style makes Old Man's War a great new entery into the sci-fi genre. ( )

http://tpi-reads.blogspot.com/2009/03... ( )

At 75, John Perry is finally ready to join the CDF (Colonial Defense Force). No, he was not merely putting it off, the CDF only takes recruits aged 75; although everyone assumes that CDF must have the power to make older people young again, nobody knows for sure as nobody has ever seen a CDF soldier after they left Earth.

“Old Man’s War” was John Scalzi’s first novel. Although I’m not generally a fan of science fiction, Scalzi entranced me with his newest book, “Zoe’s Tale” (my review), which is the latest in the Old Man’s War series. I can tell that Scalzi has been honing his craft because I definitely think “Zoe’s Tale” was a smoother novel than “Old Man’s War,” but I still found Old Man’s War very intriguing and well-written. John Perry is an immensely likeable character, even when he’s being a smartass (which is often), and the world Scalzi creates definitely took me away. ( )

We follow here the adventures of senior citizen John Perry as he decides to gamble his life on the promise of... extended life - he quits Earth and join the Colonial Defence Forces for a term of no less than two years, with a high probability of serving the full ten the contract stipulates.

I haven't read any Heinlein in ages, yet he was the first reference that came to my mind while reading Old Man's War; a kind of flashback to my teens, when I devoured anything with Heinlein as an author. I don't research books too closely before so I had no idea Scalzi himself recognises this debt, but it makes sense.

In the first half of the book he manages this heritage very well, but the second half don't live up to expectations - at least not mine. The last chapter felt contrived, and should rightly had been labelled 'epilogue'.

Despite this reading this book was an enjoyable experience. ( )

Short, Sweet and ...Funny. It's been quite a while since I've read a science fiction book that's also humorous, probably since Douglas Adams or Grant Naylor. I actually laughed out loud a couple times. Enjoyable.I don't remember what the Rraey were supposed to look like... Did Scalzi describe their appearance? If so, I guess I was too tired for it to make an impression the way the other aliens' descriptions did. ( )

Scalzi has done an amazing job of stealing tropes characters, scenes, futuristic concepts, you name it, from a dozen or so of the best sci-fi novels (most obviously Starship Troopers by Heinlein, but Heinlein's Time Enough for Love and Friday are in there, too), gutting them, turning them inside out and handing them back to you, saying, yeah, you didn't know it could turn out like this, huh? Which is not to say that this book slaps you upside the head, but its an action book and it moves fast and its making me write in run on sentences. I love it when a book does that.

http://archthinking.blogspot.com/2009... ( )

Mankind has started to spread out in the galaxy, and so have a lot of other races. The available real estate is scarce, which leads to near-constant war for land.

The only way for Americans to get into space is to join the Colonial Defense Force (CDF). They guard human colonies, and go to war over disputed planets. The CDF only takes people who have reached their 75th birthday. A vague promise of being made young again is a pretty strong incentive to sign up. The catch is that joining the CDF is a one-way trip. If you survive your tour of duty, hardly a sure thing, you will spend the rest of your life on some colony planet; returning to Earth is not an option.

John Perry signs up. He just turned 75, his wife, Kathy, died several years previously, and his one adult son lives on his own. On the spaceship taking him, and several hundred others, to basic training on another planet, he learns just what the becoming young part is all about. His consciousness is transferred into a cloned body, in its mid-twenties, made from his own DNA, which was extracted from him several years previously. It's very much of a new and improved body with a green skin color. He also has a computer implanted in his brain, which can talk to him and communicate with anyone else.

After basic training, Perry and his squad travel from planet to planet. Friends die, and new friends are made. During one disastrous operation, Perry crash lands on a planet, and is rescued by. . . his wife. She too is green, but the resemblance is way too close to be a coincidence. She (her name is Jane) is part of the Ghost Brigades, actually clones of dead people. Having no conception of what life is like as a realborn, they are kept far away from the rest of the CDF. Perry is made part of a Ghost Brigades squad, and begins to tell his squadmates what it's like to be married, and to love another person.

Here is an excellent novel. It has space travel, it has weirdness, it has heart and it has a lot of great writing. This is highly recommended. ( )

http://yet.org/2009/02/le_vieil_homme... ( )

http://tinyurl.com/b9nrdy

My friend Jane gave me the first two books in this trilogy, promising good space opera without the complacent misogyny of a dyed-in-the-wool 1950s sci-fi writer.

It is precisely so: a ripping good yarn with a "hey, we're mere mortals but we CAN save the world" theme that you would expect from a Heinlein book. But without the female characters consistently in the rearview mirror, and called "sweetie" and "honey" and "where are my slippers?" to boot.

In fact, this didn't hit home to me until John Perry, our protagonist, learns about the death of one of his space-army buddies. She dies a gruesome Army death, and does her best to the last to kill as many nasty aliens on her way out. That she's female? Not even a factor. It's like a gust of fresh air when you realize that fact.

The basic plot: Perry joins the military at 75 thinking the Colonial Defense Forces have a good thing going if they want the old brain and the old body as well. How will they modify him? How long will he need to serve? What will the aliens look like, and how will they fight?

Read and find out. I'm on the next one already, "The Ghost Brigades," and will be sad when I finish the final one, "The Last Colony." ( )

"The main thing that makes Old Man's War such a success...is Mr. Scalzi's imaginative powers. This book is a short, quick read; yet Mr. Scalzi has packed more innovative technology, more original alien species, and more interesting cultural notions than other books twice its size. I don't want to spoil anything, but suffice it to say that the alien races one encounters in this book come in all different sizes and appearances. And some of the rituals and rules they abide by are truly bizarre and fascinating. I found myself wanting to know more about almost every race encountered, about their society, history, and ideas. In the final analysis it was this that really made this book a page turner. It didn't hurt, however, that Scalzi is an excellent writer with a fantastic since of humor!"

Read the rest of this review at Speculative Fiction Junkie ( )