March SF/F Book Study: Old Man's War

So I really liked this book but there were a few things that nagged at me... I don't want to put in a lot of spoilers for people who haven't read the book yet.

For example, right before they get inducted, there's an annoying bit character who conveniently drops dead. The way Scalzi wrote the character I was absolutely convinced this going to turn out later to have been a murder. That the army folks realized this guy was a terrible recruit and had him killed and it would come back later and prove to be a plot point. Turns out it was just an excuse to introduce the Ghost Brigade to us...

And I thought it was silly that everyone had the same reaction to suddenly being young again - "Cool! Let's have an orgy!"

Overall, a great read and a nice homage to Starship Troopers, et al.


Things I liked:

1. Brainpals (TM) and everyone's reaction to them.

2. The widely diverse aliens (both physically and psycologically) they get to meet and kill.

3. The whole Willie the Wheelie story

4. Scalzi's use of 'first person: smartass' in telling the story.


Things that irk me:

1. The backstory of how the Colonial Union was able to seperate itself from whatever country or league of countries started exploring space in the first place. How were they able to completely isolate Earth and everyone just fell in line without some major conflict? Surely earth was the major source of the infrastructure to get into space in the first place. How could thay have given it up/had it stripped away? I'm not saying it couldn't have happened that way, I'm just saying it wasn't explained enough for me to find it plausible.

2. I would have liked a little more variation in the personalities and characterizations of the characters, they all kind of blend together (those who are not plot devices).

For a while I thought I wouldn't be able to find the book at all, but I just spotted a copy. I'll get to it once I finish my current books.

I noticed that about how everyone has the same flippant tone. It really surprised me when they got BrainPals and everyone had almost identical reactions. It highlighted for me how similar everyone's tones were.

I thought the book was really well written and had a ton of fun reading it, don't get me wrong. The characters just weren't very diverse.

Sai said:

...The dialogue itself is full of great lines, the problem is that everyone seems to talk with the same flippant, clever tone, and it makes it hard to tell who's talking (and it doesn't do much to distinguish the characters from each other either).

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KateJJ said:

...I thought the book was really well written and had a ton of fun reading it, don't get me wrong. The characters just weren't very diverse.

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Wait till you get 3/4 of the way through it.

I've finished the first part. I have limited interest in the way this military is being written, so I'm mostly here for the aliens.

Done. I thought this was a solid SF story (it did the main thing of presenting new ideas/aliens/tech) but it left me a little dissatisfied. I'm having trouble pinning down exactly why; maybe this discussion will help with that.

The missing element for me wasn't the characters - while I didn't particularly like anyone, that isn't much of a barrier. Though on this subject I have to say that I didn't really buy everyone being 75. There were some nice nods to age and experience, but it didn't have much of an impact on the story.

The problem might be that I didn't feel the stakes were very high. Pivotal war against evil aliens, sure, but there wasn't anything deeper. No one's beliefs or systemic structures are at stake. Even the book acknowledges that there really isn't much difference between the human army and everyone else - we're watching a petty conflict and supposed to cheer for one side just because they look like us.

I was hoping for more with the Consu, the military hierarchy, or the overall galactic situation. It is a series, I suppose - anyone read any of the others?

Rheinman said:

1. The backstory of how the Colonial Union was able to seperate itself from whatever country or league of countries started exploring space in the first place. How were they able to completely isolate Earth and everyone just fell in line without some major conflict? Surely earth was the major source of the infrastructure to get into space in the first place. How could thay have given it up/had it stripped away? I'm not saying it couldn't have happened that way, I'm just saying it wasn't explained enough for me to find it plausible.

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I agree. I think this could have been a more interesting book if it put some time into a plausible setup for this.

Ian Isaro said:

The missing element for me wasn't the characters - while I didn't particularly like anyone, that isn't much of a barrier. Though on this subject I have to say that I didn't really buy everyone being 75. There were some nice nods to age and experience, but it didn't have much of an impact on the story.

This was my big issue with the book too. I didn't really feel like we were getting a 75 year old man's perspective. He could have been 35 and the same level of deadpan snark. I'd been looking forward to an exploration of what it would be like to have wars fought by old people but I didn't really feel like Scalzi delivered that.

The problem might be that I didn't feel the stakes were very high. Pivotal war against evil aliens, sure, but there wasn't anything deeper. No one's beliefs or systemic structures are at stake. Even the book acknowledges that there really isn't much difference between the human army and everyone else - we're watching a petty conflict and supposed to cheer for one side just because they look like us.

I was hoping for more with the Consu, the military hierarchy, or the overall galactic situation. It is a series, I suppose - anyone read any of the others?

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I read the sequels (Ghost Brigade and Last Colony). There was more explanation of what was going on but again I felt both books were flawed in various ways. I didn't buy the Ghost Brigade setup - like in this book, the age and experience of the characters should have been a major issue and I just didn't think it was. And then there's a kid character in Ghost Brigade who (nitpicky) came off as completely the wrong age.

Last Colony had a couple "WTF" moments for me. I think they were both worth reading and a nice homage to classic science fiction. I can see why Scalzi is so popular and will keep an eye out for his books in the future, but some of his worldbuilding was definitely lacking.

I loved it. Having a new green, healthy, and beautiful body very much appeals to me. I think it would very much become a plaything for me.

I didn't find the story to be about war...war was the setting, but to me the story was about being alive, juxtaposed with the deaths of his circle of friends and made that much more poiniant.

Old Man's War, to me, felt as much a homage to those who'd gone before as a new sci-fi endeavour. What people did with their new bodies was absolutely Heinlein, for instance, while the aliens would have fit in seamlessly in the pulp magazines.

I suspect at least some of the criticism comes from what seemed to me to be the book's own sense of self-awareness; the book itself seemed genre-savvy, well aware that it was a modern evocation of the grand pulp adventure style for a generation with different values and different experiences. Most of us don't have the experiences of WWI and WWII that our sci-fi reading forebears did, whether at war, on the home front or just knowing people who were; on that scale the conflicts we know are shallow and petty, and Old Man's War reminded me of that.

It's been awhile since I've read it. It's solid and fun as were the sequels.

But...

For me, the characters were too much of 2000's middle-class Americans in space. It's more prominent in Zoe's Tale, where Zoe is cast as a perfectly adjusted 2000's American middle class teenager. Which is impossible given her fictional background.

It's like the difference between Forester's Hornblower and O'Brien's Master and Commander, both set in Napoleonic War in the British Navy. But Forester's character felt like 20th Century characters in the wrong century, while O'Brien's felt authentic, as if one of O'Brien's characters could have been Jane Austen's brother.

Had to wait forever to get the book from the library, I started reading it yesterday and am up to page 140. I wasn't sure if I was going to like it based upon the back cover blurb but so far it's been a really quick and somewhat funny read.