Old Man's War by John Scalzi
316 pages
Published 2005
Read from August 2 to August 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Somewhere on the internet, someone voiced the opinion "John Scalzi writes good Robert Heinlein novels." I assume the commenter had Heinlein's earlier work in mind, as Old Man's War was totally lacking in the incest and old-men-sleeping-with-pubescent-girls that defines the latter half of the Grand Master's career. Instead, War is merely a fun space shoot-'em-up that opens with an excellent conceptual stroke -- everyone on Earth has the opportunity to join the space military at age 75, in exchange for a young new body of their very own -- but follows predictable paths to a ho-hum ending. The space military is awfully white and American, a situation weakly handwaved away with one or two lines about citizens of "overpopulated" nations having the opportunity to settle new planets without a stint in the bug-zappers. The narrator's plain-spoken Ohio sensibility runs laps around two centuries of space soldier experience, culminating (of course) in his getting tapped for a mission with the special forces alongside with the clone body of his wife, who died before she could enlist. It's a fun book that only falls apart if you stop to think about it at all.
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