discardia

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

What a good book. Zipped me along so fast that I had it done and read in a day. The premise is pretty simple: John Perry is a 75 year old widower that visits the grave of his wife on his birthday and then heads for the military. The Colonial Defense Force takes old people, retrofits their bodies and sends them off to war… for a number of suprising reasons. A war that never ends, never has the same enemy, and is always brutal. Perry bonds with fellow blue haired soldiers and ends up finding a part of himself he thought he had lost.

The plot itself is very plausible (like good sf should be). The tech never runs away with plot and stays close enough to current scientific theory that you only have to suspend your disbelief on only a few small things. Old Man’s War read a lot like The Forever War by Joe Haldeman or even Heinlein’s Starship Troopers… and at times it felt like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. The sense of wonder and amazement is well balanced with gritty and down to earth realism. The best part is the unwavering humor. A passage about Perry recieving some injuries in an almost fatal crash relates his experience of being one of the few humans to ever, quite literally, kick their own uvula. I was chuckling throughout the book at the dry humor of the central character.

I would give it 4.5 out 5 stars. The missing half star is because it should have been longer!