Scalzi strikes again.

I love this series! This one wasn’t my favorite, but it does a great job finishing off the arc started way back in The Last Colony and escalated in The Human Division. Whenever Scalzi comes back to this series, he’ll have a brand new universe to play around in. Also, it’s chock full of Scalzi’s smart, irreverent voice.

So this is the sixth book in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. The first three books are a trilogy, #4 is a weird re-telling of #3, and then Human Division and this one. The last two are in the more experimental vein, both being told in “episodes” instead of one long story. The episodes in Human Division were smaller (there were thirteen of them), and here there are only four, longer novella-length ones. They all serve their purpose in the larger story, but can also be read on their own individually (why you would want to do that escapes me).

The main arc in this book (really, carried over from the last two proper books) is the predicament the galaxy has found itself in now that Earth is clued in to the fuckery the Colonial Union has been getting up to over the years, subjugating and killing alien races to colonize planets, using Earth as a soldier farm without letting anyone on the planet know what’s actually going on in the galaxy, and just generally being shitty galactic neighbors. In response, most other aliens in the galaxy formed a union of their own–The Conclave–to protect themselves against the CU. So now the CU has to live with the consequences of its actions, and not only find a way to get a long with everyone, but to repair the damages their past actions have caused.

And as if that wasn’t hard enough of a task, there’s an invisible third party out there stealing ships and committing acts of terror against both sides to escalate the tension between the two groups.

But that’s just background. The meat of this book is in its four novellas, each of which tell a complete story in a different way, featuring different main characters, but which all fit into the universe he’s created and move the over-arching plot along. My favorite was probably the very first one, because the narrator was super sassy and clever, and was also a dude with his brain in a box. We also get one from the POV of the assistant to the leader of the Conclave, one about CU soldiers who are seeing firsthand as the CU’s power erodes, and the last one brings it all to a head, ending with events that effectively change the universe Scalzi is writing in forever. I really love the first three Old Man’s War books and their focus on one story with one or two POV characters, but I’m also super digging this episode format and what it does to Scalzi’s storytelling. It’s such a neat way to bring across this super large and massive changes, and it’s such a pleasingly economic way to approach storytelling.

I will look forward to the next book in the series being out within a couple of years, but I wouldn’t mind re-visiting all six of these in a row, just so I can see how the whole thing fits together, either.

(As a note, I read this on audiobook, the first of the OMW books I’ve done that with. I liked the experience and the dual narrators Tavia Gilbert and William Dufris, although I did miss Scalzi’s usual Wheatoney narrator. He just does Scalzi’s narrative voice so well.)

[4.5 stars]