Old Man's War

Old Man's War

published	2005 by Tor Books
first published	2007
binding	Paperback
isbn	0765315246 (isbn13: 9780765315243)
pages	320
description	John Perry did two things on his seventy-fifth birthday. First he visited his wifes grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity fin...more [close] John Perry did two things on his seventy-fifth birthday. First he visited his wifes grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce and alien races willing to fight for them are common. Far from Earth, the war has gone on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding. We fight to defend Earth from our new enemies and to stake our claim to planetary real estate. On Earth, the bulk of the resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Only those of retirement age can join the CDF; they want people who carry the skills from decades of living. CDF members are taken off Earth to serve two years at the front. If they survive, theyre given a generous homestead on hard-won colony planets, never to return to Earth. John Perry is taking that deal with only the vaguest idea what to expect.
date added	04-15-07 edit book

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 712)

Brownbetty

Brownbetty rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

05/10/08

Not quite what I expected from the cover. In my experience of oil-paintings-of-planets-and-spacecraft covers, you tend to get pretty hard SF to go with them. This was more extra-firm tofu hard. The cover blurbs compared him to Heinlein, which was fair.

The book has a couple of reveals, the first of which I genuinely did not see coming, and the second of which I saw coming for a while, so I'll separate my review into the bits I can talk about without spoiling and the spoilery bits.

John ...more

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Trin

Trin rated it:

06/04/07

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in February, 2007

The first 100 pages or so of this book are absolutely fantastic. The Colonial Defense Forces recruit citizens of Earth on their 75th birthdays to fight with them against the various alien species threatening the series of colonies Earth needs because of population overflow, war, all the usual ways we’ve fucked up the planet. Senior citizens sign up because the CDF promises to make them young again—if they sign a contract to serve for ten years. And most of them will probably get gruesomely k...more The first 100 pages or so of this book are absolutely fantastic. The Colonial Defense Forces recruit citizens of Earth on their 75th birthdays to fight with them against the various alien species threatening the series of colonies Earth needs because of population overflow, war, all the usual ways we’ve fucked up the planet. Senior citizens sign up because the CDF promises to make them young again—if they sign a contract to serve for ten years. And most of them will probably get gruesomely killed in that time. But at least they won’t die old, right?

All of this stuff is fascinating. I loved the set up, the procedure and world-building involved in John Perry, 75-year-old widower and retired ad writer, joining the army and making friends with his fellow recruits and going through pre-procedure tests and through the actual procedure (which I won’t spoil) and the boot camp stuff that comes after. Scalzi describes the actual battles which follow with no less intensity, but once John starts fighting, the sense of who he is really gets lost. (I was actually waiting for that to be revealed to be part of the point, but it wasn’t.) John just becomes A Soldier, almost instantly. Besides his sense of loyalty and his lingering feelings about his dead wife, there’s very little left to connect him to who he used to be. It’s mentioned several times that John and his wife protested the big war on Earth, but John seems almost entirely unconcerned with the unquestioning massacre of various alien species. I must admit, it started to make me a liiiiiitle uncomfortable. Scalzi has said that his inspiration for this book was Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and this book, I think, faces a lot of the same problems I’ve heard are inherent in that one. (I haven’t actually read it, so if I’m way off base, please tell me.) Both, I believe, walk the line between criticizing war and glorifying it, and so whatever message results is kind of muddled. I got the most enjoyment out of Old Man’s War when I, well, just tried not to think about it too much. Not an attitude I usually endorse, but there you go. Still, the underlying sci-fi concepts in this book—the stuff about identity—are really interesting; I am anxious to get my hands on the sequel, even if it means I’ll have to turn off my brain for a while. Or at least the hard-working liberal guilt section....less

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Sam

Sam rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

04/08/08

bookshelves: science-fiction

Read in April, 2008

Pretty good for a first novel and a real page-turner.

This novel was highly enjoyable and has several things going for it: it's imaginative, the prose is good, the plot works well, and the main character is likable.

It also has some things that bother me: the dialog is "overly clever" - that is that every, and I mean EVERY, exchange between the main character and his friends includes some high degree of verbal irony, witty remark, and satire, all of which loses some amount of rea...more Pretty good for a first novel and a real page-turner.

This novel was highly enjoyable and has several things going for it: it's imaginative, the prose is good, the plot works well, and the main character is likable.

It also has some things that bother me: the dialog is "overly clever" - that is that every, and I mean EVERY, exchange between the main character and his friends includes some high degree of verbal irony, witty remark, and satire, all of which loses some amount of reality for the characters - also the characters are mostly very shallowly developed, which includes the main character who is not as well-developed as one would like in a novel about war, and a final problem - though some might not see it as such - is that this novel doesn't say anything. By that, I mean that it presents sentiments that are both pro-war and against it as absurd, yet it develops neither. This leads to the obvious observation that this novel is primarily just an entertaining story about war.

Some minor things that also could have been better are the differentiation between genders, he seems to have committed the Heinlein error of writing masculine females to a higher degree than Heinlein himself ever did, though this might be expected from the admitted Heinlein influence. Also, the relationships between characters were not as believable as they could have been (an example being that between John and Jane, which seems preposterously simple considering the circumstances). A final comment is upon his kitsch use of introducing technology through obviously staged dialog where one character just so happens to have supreme knowledge of the thing in question and is only too happy to explain it in excruciating detail (this happens several times with the same character even!). I won't presume to attribute these things to anything, but hope to see improvement in future novels by this writer, whom I will undoubtedly read in the future, though without expectation of a thought-provoking read.

Anyways, a summary of the above ramblings might read as such: Scalzi is a very creative writer, having many great ideas that he's able to synthesize for a unique read, but his much lauded style (in my opinion unjustly lauded) leaves many things to be desired....less

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Denise

Denise rated it:

05/10/07

bookshelves: sf

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: Any SF reader

I picked this one up intending to read a few chapters before bed tonight, and now it's two in the morning and I've finished it, which should tell you something about it. I'm valiantly resisting starting the sequel, which I also bought tonight.

The cover quote on this one compares Scalzi to Heinlein, which is both accurate and inaccurate: this is the book Starship Troopers would have been if it had been written fifty years later, with the intervening fifty years' worth of political and ...more

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M.d.

M.d. rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

04/17/08

bookshelves: sf

Old Man's War, by John Scalzi.

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce - and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.

John, of course, does not fight in his seventy-five year old body. He is given a new, much improved one (sort of the Six Mill...more

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Tim

Tim rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

06/22/07

Read in April, 2007

On the cover of John Scalzi’s first novel is a statement by Publisher’s Weekly that reads: “Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi’s astonishingly proficient first novel reads like an original work by the late grand master.” While I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that he’s picked up where Heinlein left off, I will say that the overtones from the aforementioned master are evident and plentiful.

In...more

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Jim

Jim rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

06/10/07

Read in May, 2007

I don't have much reading time these days, thanks to two careers and two young kids. The fact that I neglected the work side of things in order to finish this book in two days is a tribute to John Scalzi's writing ability.

[book:Old Man's War} tells the story of John Perry, a 75-year-old man who enlists in the Colonial Defense Force (CDF). In Scalzi's universe, there's a lot of prime real estate out there for colonization. Unfortunately, th...more

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Keely

Keely rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

12/02/07

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: Ender's Game fans

A real page-turner. The main character is well-developed and likable (even if you have a deep ambivalence for the military). The pacing is pitch-perfect. Usually I tend to get a bit bored reading descriptions of alien technologies and civilizations, but this book never lost my attention.

My only complaint. The book is willfully and unremittingly morally ambiguous about issues of honor in battle and ethics in foreign policy. There are even points in the plot where it addresses these issues a...more

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Chris

Chris rated it:

02/09/08

bookshelves: science-fiction, top-shelf

Read in October, 2006

This book was fantastic. Great sci-fi, well-done characters, creative universe-building, and damn funny in parts, too. All I could think was it is the kind of book Robert Heinlein might have written if he had possessed a functioning sense of humor.

The basic premise: In the unspecified future, humanity has reached out beyond the solar system, settling colonies wherever they can find a habitable planet. Unfortunately, there are many alien...more

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Speedtribes

Speedtribes rated it:

(review of isbn 0765309408)

02/04/08

bookshelves: military, sci-fi

Read in January, 2008

As well written as "Android's Dream". This military space sci-fi was funny at the right times, serious at the others, a bit of a man's romance to both adventure, life and love. The technology is just as complicated, with long character discussions of space engines and theoretical physics. The key thing I enjoyed about it, however, had nothing to do with the tech itself, but Scalzi's approach to it.

Here, with all the 'experts' running about, no one is really all that clear on how th...more

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Andy

Andy rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

03/21/08

Read in February, 2008

Any thing you get for free is automatically suspected of being less than average in quality. Having never read any work by John Scalzi, and it being the first download I received from Tor's free Sci-Fi book download at Watch the Skies - Tor.com hopefully you can understand my original misgivings about reading Old Man's War. Thankfully, I...more

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Minh

Minh rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

09/18/07

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in September, 2007

I resisted the urge to read this series for so long, simply because I wasn't really interested in Sci-Fi, and it still isn't one of my favourite genres. However every now and then you'll stumble across a gem that is just really worthy of the hype.

One of the positives of not being overly hyped up for something is the anticipation and fun of really having no idea what is going on. I had no idea what the novel was about, having never even read the blurb for the novel. John Perry struck me as a...more

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Ascexis

Ascexis rated it:

08/05/07

bookshelves: alienworlds, reviewed, sci-fi

Read in June, 2007

This is an odd sort of book. Scalzi has a really neat central premise -- but the story gets lost up against it. The story is told in an oddly clinical fashion that leaves a sort of feeling that you're being given a report on story instead of the story itself. The story moves along briskly enough, but I'm left oddly unmoved by the protagonist's experience.

It doesn't help that while the premise requires that the protagonist excel at warfare etc., he surpasses all expectations -- stuns hi...more

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Puddle

Puddle rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

12/23/07

bookshelves: science-fiction

Read in December, 2007

Poor man's Starship Troopers. Scalzi mentions Heinlein in the acknowledgements. Note, I gave Starship Troopers five stars, so this is definitely a positive, not a negative.

The philosophical ideas discussed are interesting and thought-provoking. However, all of Scalzi's characters have a smart-ass comment for every situation, and as a result the dialogue doesn't seem quite realistic, and having round characters definitely takes a back seat to Scalzi slamming you in t...more

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Cee

Cee rated it:

12/09/07

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in December, 2007

I'm a fan of John Scalzi's blog, and when the library eventually bought some copies of his book Old Man's War, I snaffled up a copy.

I quite enjoyed this tale of the elderly being shipped off Earth to be made young again, and used as soldiers in a seemingly never-ending galactic war. It's an interesting premise, certainly. I wasn't completely caught up in it though - and it's hard to be attached to characters who keep dying (they are in a war, after all). And a seemingly never-endin...more

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Thomas

Thomas rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

03/03/08

bookshelves: fiction

Read in March, 2008

Admittedly, I only finally read this book because it was released as a free ebook by Tor (you can sign up here to receive others -- sorry for the advertisement, but it's a good deal). That said, I was already familiar with Scalzi and had put him on the short list of SF readers to check out.

I finally "cracked" open the book on Saturday and finished it on Monday. Granted, I only read it in burst since it was on the computer and even ...more

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Mark

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

08/21/07

This one kept showing up on the lists of recommendations from book store employees. Plus, John Scalzi won the Campbell award for best new writer and I have to say, this book did not disappoint.

It tells the story of an Earth, isolated from its colonies "for its own protection" by a military struggling to carve out new habitats in a galaxy teeming with sentient species. The catch here is that the military only recruits Terrans 75 ...more

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Cutterid

Cutterid rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

03/21/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2007

A Hugo Award finalist, Scalzi's novel of the future shows us an Earth which is segregated from the rest of the human-colonized galaxy. In this future, the colonies have their own defensive forces, and as Earth humans reach retirement age (75) they can enlist in the Colonial Defense Force--a mystery organization that doesn't want young people to fight its wars with aliens. Instead, it wants people with a lifetime of experience and skills that will make them better soldiers; the CDF will provide...more

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Andrea

Andrea rated it:

(review of isbn 0765348276)

07/03/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: fans of military space fiction

When the book starts out, it's really fun being immersed in all the technology and anticipating the unexpected along with the main character. But once that is resolved, the rest of the book has a lot of a military diary quality to it, which, while fun to read, isn't quite as fun to think about. I kept expecting there to be Some Big Thing that all the foreshadowing and events of the book had been leading up to -- a conspiracy, or an enemy behind the scenes, or a sense of purpose for the main ch...more

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Laura

Laura rated it:

06/07/07

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: people who like war based sci-fi

This is a compelling and well written first novel by John Scalzi.

The premise follows the universe contains main intelligient races but few habitable planets so the galaxy is at war. After some initial failure but gaining some useful technology the Colonial defense force decideds recruiting the elderly and upgrading them is a better method to fight and win than recruiting teenagers.

The story follows on such man, John Perry, as he joins the CDF and find out quite what they mean by signing ...more

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avg rating (all editions): 4.12 (587 ratings)
avg rating (this edition): 3.85 (74 ratings)
number of reviews: 122

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