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 […]
“My job is to be your loyal opposition.”
The progression of the Old Man’s War series has been pretty clever. On its face, the series is a story about humans in space fighting against the aliens who want to kill us. From the beginning, we suspected it couldn’t possibly be so simple, but while the first two books were tasked with introducing readers to the expanded universe, including the political and military branches that oversee and enforce human space activity, they only included speculation on the other races’ intentions toward humanity. Finally, in […]
John Scalzi is good to me
My reading pace this year has slowed down seemingly tremendously, though in actuality probably not that much. The consequence of this is that my first temptation is, when I do have a spare moment to read, to only read books that I suspect I’ll race through quickly so I can get that quick high off finishing a story. That impulse has led me to put off reading the Old Man’s War series, despite it sitting near the top of my TBR for the last three […]
I’m running out of ways to describe likable characters in an interesting sci-fi world.
This is the fifth book in the Old Man’s War series, which takes place in a Star Trek-like future where humans have colonized space, and are warring with other alien races for territory. It’s generally been a great read, and I highly recommend the series to any fan of science fiction. But…something happened on the way to book 4. Scalzi double dipped into the plot of book 3, and just retold the story from a different perspective. Maybe some don’t mind re-reading a story so […]
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 […]