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Old Man's War
April 2013 - Old Man's War
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Thoughts - Part 2: Chapters 7-12
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Ryan
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Apr 02, 2013 12:27PM
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John shows that despite living in his previous life as a protester and an advertiser, he has vast potential as a military leader and tactician. He easily fits in to the 'everyman' category, but maybe too easily?
Training only takes up the first couple of chapters of this part. The rest is spent on deployment - battles on strange planets against stranger enemies, and once again John shows his capacity for shrewd snap decision making, tactical analysis of a battlefield, and allround survivability.
In the last part the CDF leadership quoted some dire figures about soldier survivability, and by the end of this part we have already lost half of the Old Farts. The massacre at Coral, the unsuccessful attempt at a surprise attack, and the near death of our protagonist leads me to believe that the final part of this story will be a redemption of sorts for John leading the charge to take back Coral. What I'm not sure about is the price that humanity will pay.
Ok so for the second part, I think it is quite different compared to the first part. There was more or less a build up of the universe in the first part now your thrown after some basic training right smack in the middle of some planetary battle. The first chapters focussed on the training of John Perry and one of the Old Farts Allen. I chuckled in the first part but had a out loud moment during the training, especially with the comments that Drill Sergeant Ruiz made: When he is going for the excuses to send the recruits of training. Let me just give a short excerpt.
"Who's a minority?" Ten recruits stepped forward. Bullshit. Look around you, you assholes. Up here, everybody is green.
Now I do not want this to be offensive but in the context that this was used it was just soo funny to read about. There are some others as well like the old veterans and such. (the everybody green part is due to their new and enhanced bodies, the swapping part)
What I was hoping for after the first part was laser weapon action and aliens. I got both and much more. Forget just the laser rifles. The MP35, the standard issue rifle, is pretty versatile, you got the rocket launcher, grenade launcher, microwave blast, flamer and normal rifle rounds, pretty neat ehh? I woul say so myself!
Then there were the aliens. Beginning in a briefing lesson by Oglethorpe. Again a pretty cool integration of some creativeness there. There are already quite a few alien species listed like the Consu and the Convandu. each alien species is unique but the latter one the Convandu and the godzilla reference again cracked me up. 1inch tall aliens with a full battle fleet :)!
Though there is a lot of action on different planets there is also a nice recap when the recruits are on their ship again. Focussing on some of the events of their past lives. I really like this small intervention just to take away a bit of the heat of the battle and later after this is done continuing with it again full tilt.
The overall pacing of the book is neatly plotted with the first part focussing on building the universe and John, the second part causes the book, in my opinion, to become more and more interesting with all the revealings of the alien races and some of the tech, the multiverse part caused me to have to reread that part though. It only did feel that the second part focussed more on the surroundings that actually the main protagonist John, felt he was a bit pushed in the background with his development overall.
What do I hope to see in the last part? Well the second part did leave a bit of a cliffhanger moment with the Rraery ambush. In the beginning of part two you got to know the extents of the new bodies but what happened to John, he is going to need some recovery... I am expecting some sort of showdown at the (ok) Coral! Get those MP35's ready please!
