I’m no expert at colonizing newly discovered worlds, but I gotta think that naming your new planet ‘Roanoke’ and your settlement town ‘Croatoan’ is just asking to be pimp slapped by fate. Why not just christen a ship ‘Titantic’ or call that new nuclear plant ’Chernobyl’? What’s the worst that could happen?

The third installment of this series finds John Perry and his wife Jane retired from the Colonial Defense Force and living quietly on a colonized planet with their daughter. The CDF approaches them to head up a new colony, Roanoke. All the other colonies have been started using people from Earth, but Roanoke will be the first to be made up of a hodge podge of people from different colonized worlds, and this makes it a political hot potato. John and Jane agree to head up the new colony, but they quickly learn that the CDF hasn’t told them everything and that the Roanoke colony is a pawn in the conflict between the CDF and other alien races.

Like Old Man’s War or The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony is a fun and fast mix of space combat and politics. Scalzi creates characters you like and then throws them into plots that race from one huge event to the next, and he also injects a welcome sense of humor into the books. My only complaint is that the pace is so fast that Scalzi skimps on descriptions of settings, people and alien creatures in favor of dialogue and action so that I sometimes had a problem getting a clear picture in my mind of what was going on.

This is space war action several notches above what you usually get in this genre, and any sci-fi fan should check out this series.