K-SCORE: 59
Author: John Scalzi
Spoiler Level: Minor
Old Man’s War (first published in 2005) isn’t bad, but it’s so painfully derivative of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (first published in 1959) and Joe Halderman’s The Forever War (first published in 1974) that it really isn’t worth reading. I would have gained a good deal more insight and entertainment into the possibilities of galactic militaries by rereading either one of those novels than I did reading Old Man’s War. That’s disappointing, and makes this a tough book to recommend. It also doesn’t bode well for my prospects of picking off each of the five sequels in the whole Old Man’s War series, especially considering that it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Yet I loved the books that inspired it and mostly for their premises, so I didn’t dislike my trip through this sci-fi war story. Heinlein’s dead and if that fact bums out John Scalzi so much that he wants to dedicate his life to trying to recreate his writing, I’m not going to stop him. He is the grand master after all.
“putting Grandpa in a young-man suit, strapping a rocket launcher to his back, and seeing if his wizened old ass has the balls to blow the shit out of a six-foot walking lobster”
The one way Old Man’s War distinguishes itself is evident in the title, and it’s the reason that I picked it up. Old people, having lived a full life and are now well-beyond their usefulness, sign up for the galactic military called the Colonial Defense Force, for they alone hold the secret technologies to making men and women young again. The cost is that they must serve in deadly conflicts with alien races scattered throughout the galaxy. I’m not above putting Grandpa in a young-man suit, strapping a rocket launcher to his back, and seeing if his wizened old ass has the balls to blow the shit out of a six-foot walking lobster, so I climbed aboard. And, to Scalzi’s credit, that’s largely what you get.
There are a few problems, several of which were imported straight from the source material I mentioned earlier. One is pacing. By the time protagonist John Perry joins the military, gets into space, gets his new body, and goes through training so that he’s ready for actual combat, the book is half over. The complexity of the premise necessitates those hundred and fifty pages. It’s fine. It’s why I like my SF books to be long though. If you’re going to spend so much of the introduction walking me through the “how” of the future scenario, I really want an extensive conflict that answers the “why” in much greater detail and with much greater emphasis. None of the three novels do this. All three writers liked spending their time setting up future combat scenarios more than they liked crafting intricate plots. So the stories are imbalanced.
Another issue stems from the monotone of war stories. The best war stories can break free from this problem, but many others, Old Man’s War included, can’t. They pick a level of emotional impact and hold to it throughout. Sometimes that’s a deeply depressing note, where everything is tragedy and death all around all the time. Thankfully Old Man’s War goes with darkly humorous, and very matter-of-fact about subjects of incomparable horror, like when alien races raise human babies like veal and eat them. It’s readable, but doesn’t make any one chapter more exciting or less exciting than the previous or next ones. Even when Perry witnesses his friends die or suffers an injury that costs him a leg and his jaw, the only impression you get is shrug-worthy.
Part of the reason for that speaks to the novel’s biggest weakness, and why, regardless of publication date or other entries in the genre, Old Man’s War isn’t that great. Characterization. After having read three-hundred and fifty pages of John Perry’s life, from John Perry’s perspective, I’m still not sure what kind of man he is. As a soldier, I’d count him among the quick-thinking and the extremely lucky. As a man, I don’t know. He likes people, mostly. A little bit. He misses his wife. Some. Maybe. And after seventy-five years, he’s managed to fade into a shade of gray so perfectly medium that it’s exactly as much black as it is white. His friends and squadmates that come into the novel and die along the way, similarly are old people without interesting personalities. Each one has a single background element (school teacher, CEO, scholar of eastern religions, etc.) and if they’re lucky, one single character trait (intellectually curious, nurturing, crass, etc.) and none of them feel like fully-fledged people. That’s definitely not what you want in a novel that’s introducing old, long-living men and women into brand new environments. They might as well be Ender’s Game-esque children. If they had seventy-five years of experiences that made them uniquely suited to specific roles in military service or seventy-five years of bad habits to conquer, then the premise of an actual old man’s war would have been really interesting. Instead the only interesting thing about it is the presentation of a world where old people are capable of doing more than just dying, and because Scalzi thoroughly ostracized his galactic marines from Earth and the rest of human civilization, even that wasn’t really explored.
The science fiction fun of the novel, though, is still there. Green-skinned new bodies with Olympian capabilities. Cool! Tell me more about the old people that abused them. What’s the psychological effects of being suddenly young again? What else does the CDF do with all this genetic modification tech? Ooh Ghost Brigade, I like the sound of that. The Consu both love and hate the humans and make them fight to the death? How did that alien race evolve. Old Man’s War is page after page of that kind of thing, so it’s obvious that that was Scalzi’s focus. He likes contemplating tachyons and the multiverse, of dreaming up new advancements to make soldiers superhuman, of drafting schematics for the perfect multi-use galactic rifle. And it’s enjoyable up to a point. Having read a lot of science fiction, I can tell when he’s getting lazy instead of more creative. He uses nanobots to solve most of his small-scale technological problems and he uses quantum physics to solve his large-scale ones, rarely exploring either with great depth. For his alien species, he picks an Earth animal or two and makes them humanoid somehow. He creates planets by tweaking one aspect of Earth, its rotation rate, its land cover, its weather and pushing it to the limits of human tolerance. All of which is fine, but there’s so much more room for depth that Scalzi doesn’t touch.
In Old Man’s War, John Sclazi never drummed up any emotion that wasn’t mild, and that includes the negative ones like agitation. He did make me laugh a few times, like when all the Old Farts rambled off their names for their BrainPals and how Perry ended up bonding with his drill instructor Ruiz because he happened to be the guy who wrote an ad for a tire company called Willie Wheelie. Yeah, the universe is that strange. There are also a few cool lines. “I didn’t mind getting old either. It’s the being old now that’s getting to me,” (page 17) was particularly poignant. Becoming desensitized to the brutality of war seems to be a common theme among spacemarine stories, and I was quickly desensitized to anything Sclazi threw at me. Any attempts at complex thematics he offered left me quizzical and not in a good way. Thankfully though there’s not many, and so the worst I can fairly say about the book is that I felt like I’d read it before and didn’t need to again.