Old Man’s War (review)

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

• Title: Old Man’s War
• Author: John Scalzi
• Genre: Military Science Fiction
• Year: 2005

Old Man’s War is a book with a hook, the sort of easily-conveyed original premise that tells you enough about why you might want to read it in one sentence. Therefore, anyone that has even heard of it knows it’s a book in the vein of Starship Troopers or The Forever War that takes place in a future in which the elderly may enlist to become soldiers. But Old Man’s War stretches beyond its tagline to deliver a fast-paced, military sci-fi adventure that is a great deal of fun.

John Perry, a widower, joins the Colonial Defense Force when he turns seventy-five, turning his back on Earth and everyone and everything he’s ever known. Little information on the Colonial Union and its military arm reaches the inhabitants of Earth, who are kept at arms length by the CU — an organization that has a monopoly on space communications and FTL travel in the form of skip drives. Mankind has a large, and contested, colonial empire for which Earth serves only as the source of colonists and geriatric recruits — and Perry moves from idyllic small town America into a galactic conflict of which he knows nothing.

Naturally, such old recruits need to be made young (which is their reason for enlisting in the first place), and the exact nature of this process is something I will not spoil for the first time reader. Suffice it to say Perry and his fellow septuagenarians are transformed into super soldiers and, as is expected in a book of this sort, around a third of the story is dedicated to this journey from recruit to soldier. The end result of all this training and high-tech modification are a company of kick-ass CDF infantry that fight to protect and expand mankind’s colonial holdings against an array of alien species.

Scalzi’s aliens are an interesting and varied bunch, as are the various technologies on display in Old Man’s War; from nanite-based limb replacements and programmable ammunition, to brain-based computers, consciousness transference, and personal electromagnetic shielding that allows high-orbit insertion onto a planet. Skip drives, Scalzi’s Faster Than Light equivalent, are perhaps the most novel — rather than warping space or shooting through worm holes, skip drives actually move a ship sideways to any point within a parallel universe. According to the theory of branching universes, such nearby parallels should be essentially indistinguishable from one another, but the idea alone should give anyone pause — and I found this a nice touch of immensity in an otherwise intimate story.

But what about the war? A grim tale of human alienation among the stars? A political diatribe? A jingoistic celebration of fascistic assertiveness? Well, none of the above, I’m glad to say. Old Man’s War isn’t intended to score points at the expense of story, and anyone checking it out under the assumption that it is a continuation of the dialog started by Starship Troopers and The Forever War might be let down by the absence of soapboxing. Scalzi neither celebrates or condemns his conflict, on balance presenting it as a necessary evil. But the focus here isn’t a critique or a justification of war, but rather on the human story of John Perry who is presented with a second chance at happiness and clings to it against all odds. If Heinlein’s story was about duty, and Haldeman’s about futility, then I think Scalzi’s is ultimately about hope.

I had a few disappointments with Old Man’s War, though nothing that would keep me from recommending it. Perry, despite narrating the story, never comes across as an especially rich character though he is a sympathetic one — and he certainly never quite seems like a seventy-five year old. I kept expecting these soldiers, recruited for their lifetime’s experience, to put that experience to use somehow — they never do. Whether this was a missed opportunity for additional depth, or a judgment call by Scalzi to keep the action of the story brisk, I can’t say. Old Man’s War is also guilty of something seen in a lot of sci-fi — so much so that I wonder if I should even single it out for mention — namely, the technological possibilities it presents would seem to render the necessity of certain plot points (such as recruiting seventy-five year olds for their experience) moot if carried to their logical conclusions. Between nanos, clones, and various memory retrieval/transference technologies it seems unlikely that the CDF would need to keep recruiting as they do, and could instead just churn out copies of their best soldiers to replace loses.

But these are fairly minor niggles of the sort that are happily cast aside while one greedily turns the page. Old Man’s War is a page turner; and it’s this smooth, compulsively readable aspect that is the real reason it should be compared with Heinlein. Scalzi is writing more books in the same universe, with The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony available now. Bottom line, this is a great action story, full of all the essential servings of gee-whiz and bang-bang, but with a compelling human story at its heart that lifts it above the run-of-the-mill military sci-fi.

• Old Man’s War on Amazon
• John Scalzi’s homepage