Old Man's War
Posted 14 Feb, 2005 at 15:18 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
I've tried writing this review several times in the past few days, and it just hasn't been gelling. Let's see if this time goes any better.
The first thing you should know about OMW: John Scalzi has clearly done his homework in Heinlein 101. And 102. Probably all the way up to the graduate-level. This novel -- his first to be picked up by a publisher -- has been compared to Starship Troopers by numerous reviewers, for a number of obvious reasons. There's a similar setting, for instance: Earth has colonized space, found that it's not all friendly out there, and so there's a kind of space-marine force. If you (as an Earth-born) want the stars, then you have to join up to fight for some period of time.
Which brings us to the first point of bifurcation: as the title suggests, the Colonial Defence Forces are only interested in the elderly: people who've lived life, survived to a ripe old age, and thus might have some store of wits and wisdom. They can -- and will -- rebuild you.
OMW also touches on some of the same themes as Starship Troopers: the value of a strong military (as well as its drawbacks) and its relations with civilian life, war as a transformative force, comradeship. I've seen some refer to this as an anti-war book, which I don't think is entirely accurate, though I certainly wouldn't characterize it as hawkish.
The writing itself is a joy. The narrative is first-person, matter-of-fact about wonders and absurdities alike. (I can remember laughing out loud at least twice while reading the book.) While the main character isn't a stand-in for the author, certain aspects of the perspective will seem familiar to any readers of Scalzi's blog.
Even the drawbacks of the book are Heinleinesque. One of my principal complaints about Heinlein is that his characterizations tend to be sketchy at best; given a block of dialogue with attributions removed from any of his books, I would probably be unable to tell you which character was saying what. (F'rinstance, can anyone tell Jubal's women apart in Stranger in a Strange Land by their speeches alone?) Scalzi's got some of the same sorts of problems here, I feel; his principal characters have quirks that stand in for personality traits. (By contrast, the "bad guy" characters, the ones that we're not supposed to sympathise with, all stand out in my mind very distinctly. This could be because it's easier to describe what you don't like about a person than it is to describe what you like.)
Still, highly recommended. There's one major head-scratcher in the plot (which, admittedly, I only picked up on after reflection) that'll probably be explained in the sequel, The Ghost Brigades; I, for one, eagerly await.