Last night I had my first John Scalzi dream, borrowing from Lock In, Redshirts, and Old Man’s War. My consciousness has just been downloaded into a body, and I am standing on a cliff overlooking a harbor. There’s another person sitting in a machine gun nest in front of me telling me that “he” is on the boat just docking (I’ve also been watching Shetland, so we’re all speaking with Scottish accents and the landscape is bleak and beautiful). Because I am a John Scalzi hero, […]
My Dream Blend of Sci-Fi
John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War has everything I want out of science fiction: space battles, politics, religion, cosmologies to make you think about your own preconceptions, and heart. If you aren’t familiar with this modern classic, OMW centers around John Perry, an old man nearing the end of his life. In the OMW world, once you hit a ripe old age you can enlist in the space marines. You are legally dead once you enlist, and you never come back to Earth. You say your goodbyes and head […]
The war’s over (for now)
The back half of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series contained decidedly experimental volumes — the alternate-POV Zoe’s Tale, and the serial-format books discussed in this review, The Human Division and The End of All Things. They progress essentially chronologically, but through the viewpoint of several humans and non-humans. Dealing with the fallout from the events at the end of the third book The Last Colony, the human-governed Colonial Union (CU) and its military arm, the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) must contend with the recently enlightened […]
More Scalzi sarcasm, in teenage girl form
In my micro review for The Last Colony, the third and previous book in this series, I noted that the third book was the last in the series, considered in a traditional fashion. That’s because Zoe’s Tale is an alternate POV re-telling of The Last Colony, and the books that follow are also a little different in their structure, but I’ll get to that in those reviews. Alternate POV novelizations aren’t unheard of, but they’re tricky to pull off and are often viewed by more […]