Review of Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Or...
Space Guns Go Boom Boom: A spaghetti space western starring forgettable characters and lazy contrivance.
Old Man's War starts off strong with sincere, amusing characterisation. It deploys humour without the exclamation points and sincerity that's quiet and real. I believe John loved his wife profoundly, and misses her terribly, but that eight years have passed and the feelings are deep but no longer raw. That he has quiet scars on his soul.
The author doesn't ever try and say "My heart ached at the loss, every day, like an earthquake levelling Japan" but instead makes simple, real observations: "I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive."
That's beautiful. It's showing, not telling, and what endears me immediately to the main character.
I also believe in John's age. It's a first-person view of a 75-year-old and I believe it. He's measured and unrushed, perceptive, and has the air of someone that's lived a full life. You get the feeling his personality has always been similar. I think having the age feel right is really important, especially in the context of a book starring elderly people. It's also impressive writing.
I like that the author doesn't contrive remarkable and unrealistic character meetings.* We get to meet others going on the same adventure, and they have the kind of relationships and dialogue you'd expect from those people - refreshing and honest dialogue, if a little slow.
*This praise did not age well
And here, onboard the spaceship as we head to our first alien planet - and skipping past the weird fantasy-indulging sex stuff - is where the book ends for me. Specifically:
- All character development
- The believable relationships
- The pleasant lack of contrivance
- Any interest in the characters, civilisation and wars
Because from here on out, it's those bullet points running the show. I knew we were in trouble when the self-aware drill sergeant couldn't, for the first time ever, find something to dislike about our John. And instantly breaking character, asks about John's work on Earth, whose response happens to be some product character that saved the drill sergeant's life and put him on the right track and gets him an instant promotion, minutes after landing on the planet.
Um, what?
The army
John's instant promotion was bizarre and literally unbelievable. He could have made that work so much more authentically. The author obviously wanted a reason to raise John in the drill Sergeant's estimations and get him in the chain of command (for...reasons?) but this fell way short. It never surfaces or has any relevance again in the book. I guess it's because they needed him to show leadership abilities?
This is the first entry in a series of events I'm calling Contrived Nonsenses.
He's later made captain for making a handful of sensible decisions. Now in the right setting it could work - even explaining that ranks are depleted because of the calamitous wars - but in this extremely efficient, organised, hierarchical machine, where it's explained <1 year earlier that recruits understand nothing about this new universe, it just smacks of getting the character where the author wants them to be for the next book. Because it sure as shit doesn't add anything to this one.
Anyway, we're on an alien planet now with inhuman bodies and a rigorous military schedule - what a shock to the system, right?
Wrong.
No one bats an eyelid. They just get on with stuff and John issues commands like he's some veteran captain, not a 75-year-old advertising writer. There is no introspection or psychological impact. There are no substantial or deep relationships. I wouldn't care if any of the known characters died, except maybe John.
And most of them did die. And I didn't care.
I know the book's a series, so hopefully those core relationships do build at some point. But man, will I even remember them by then?
Initially I thought the book's slow pace gave it a sense of realism and authenticity. But we're talking about an army of absolutely untrained humans going to fight unspeakable terrors...and there's no actual training or psychological elements at all. It feels more like Ender's Game than actual war. They get super-jacked bodies, but still don't learn to push themselves, to find the edge of their limits and ignore it, to understand the profundity of killing others for your own gain. (For which there's no real justification so far, just...'colonisation')
There's no challenge transitioning from elderly earthling to green superhuman. There's no personal struggle of any kind throughout the book and its insane implications. That's the crux of where this book disappoints. Somewhere between arriving at planet and the second battle, the book becomes a video game on easy mode and incredibly boring.
I think a book about 'brutal, bloody and unyielding war' could have do so much more to make us feel it.
The 'battles'
Life-or-death battles are about the worst situations imaginable. They're bloody and violent and haunting and messy and nuanced and traumatic.
Not here.
These wars are a video game. The first battle they're killing loads of enemies - ostensibly humans, that's how we're told to think about them. Intelligent creatures just like us - and it's just jovial, consequences-free mucking around. Sure one human gets killed...but he's set up for it by being a bit of an arsehole and no one cares that he's been killed. John Perry, our trusty 75-year-old writer, just carries around the corpse like it's nothing and chats to his friends, utterly unaffected.
Note: this isn't because he's a cold, cynical and sociopathic bastard... No, that would have been interesting. It's because the author is lazy and only cares about big spaces guns go boom boom. The character development from the first chapters? Forget it.
Imagine this same easy slaughter happened on Earth. I think this character, from how he's portrayed so far, would be profoundly affected and disturbed. Probably violently sick and haunted. Disappointing how the author gives up on characterisation.
Every war seems to result in the total slaughter of the incumbent or invading people. They're not wars, but easy massacres. Is no one actually protecting their people? How can any of these civilisations successful colonise if they're leaving behind people to be slaughtered? There's no struggle, just rapid victory or defeat. There's no point. But again, not in an interesting existential way - just in a the author didn't think about this way.
When the attack from the Rraey happens and they're planning the response, it's all exactly like an Earth war would go: surveillance, destroy commercial and industrial works, sabotage, shoot guns... They talk about 'being outnumbered two to one" but not about the different characteristics of the species that make the numbers relevant - if humans were superior, a 1 to 10 deficit might still be a huge advantage. Like the tiny people they attacked for seemingly no reason and without remorse.
It's probably deliberate, to show that universe-scale warfare is no different to other types of war. But it should be different. All these different species seem to wage war in the exact same way as humans: spaceships, projectile weapons, infantry etc. Again, probably deliberate, but it really plays down the complexity of universal life, which is disappointing. Every battle we've seen so far, unusual biologies not withstanding, could have taken place on Earth. Big space guns go boom boom.
Particularly disappointing after the effort the author goes to with his little cinema show on the first planet, showing off how complex and dangerous all the lifeforms are. How impossibly difficult it would all be.
As for John's mini existential crisis about the Covandu and what it all means, and how he doesn't feel anything about the war and killing...it falls completely flat. It comes out of nowhere and smacks of the author briefly remembering about characterisation.
He's seemingly enjoyed the total lack of consequences so far, and everything in the war has felt like a video game. It's jarring because everything about the war has been totally frivolous and meaningless. It's also inconsistent - he goes back to video game mode straight away. Like much of the book, the characters and their actions are not believable. It's impossible to care about them.
And then 100,000 people are lost in the ambush...and we don't care. The news falls completely flat because there have been no consequences so far at all. And none of the enemy massacres mattered, either. We don't care because we haven't been conditioned to care or given anyone to care about. The only character we really know is John, and he's just fine the whole time. Even when he's 'mortally injured' he just gets magically fixed and back on his feet. And even that experience doesn't affect him at all, even going back to the same planet later on.
Instead of 5 'wars' without any consequence, the author could've have really zeroed in on one or two, and introduced real human emotions - which they all still have, by the way - and conflict and depth. Oh well.
Character development
Halfway through the book, nuanced and interesting John has disappeared. The story has become entirely about the fun space stuff and not the more interesting struggles, characters, relationships and utter calamity (and unique camaraderie) of war.
I don't like how John seems is increasingly portrayed as a serious military strategist and thinker. He's shown a grasp of the very basics of strategy and tactics, but there are literal Navy SEALS in these platoons. They're dismissed because "war here isn't like in Earth" but everything John's done has been plain, simple, entirely Earth-relevant thinking.
When the shuttle gets blown up in the Rraey attack, he's hailed as essentially a military hero and brilliant thinker. Where has this come from? Where is the struggle or uncertainty or imposter syndrome? Or if he is super competent, when did the change happen? How did it happen? This is so jarring it pulls you out of the story.
John's baseless military pedigree, from using basic human judgement, forms Contrived Nonsense #2.
Not to mention becoming "the first human in special ops" because...he asked to? And because he luckily didn't die, due to his deus ex machina superbody and magical healing technology? And he's a 'veteran soldier' after playing shoot-the-bad-guys for one year? Then happened to end up in the room where the future technology was mysteriously stored and happened to find a 'memory' body part or something, that he happened to be able to navigate and realise it had everything they needed to recreate the futuristic technology...
The book should be called Deus Ex Make It Up As You Go Along. And this is barely scratching the surface of the nonsense coincidences the author uses to drive - plod - the plot forward.
Man and...wife?
The genuine, heartfelt love John feels for his wife - the thing that really gripped me in act one - is rent to pieces by his desire to 'live again' with his wife's new alien clone. And her not-believable-at-all desire to do the same. To farm together. This is basically an alien programmed for war that has no business wanting anything like this. Based on...some random human?
Contrived. Nonsense.
There's just no substance or rationale to any of this. It's just like the author said "Okay here's the thing I want to happen. Now...it's happened. Move on. I have five more books to write."
The gutting thing is that this 'wife comes back' thing is a really interesting premise, and the whole dichotomy between loving his wife and learning to love this new version of her could be fascinating and profoundly complex and interesting, But it's just beige and basic and uninteresting. Worse, it's not believable. In fact even worse, I just don't care whether they get together or not.
Being generous, I'd say the author maybe tried to do too much in a single book? Establish a strong character and backstory, create worlds, a space army, lots of technology and species, futuristic de-ageing, complex missions and chains of command, the former-lover-sentient-clone thing, the ghost brigades and their missions...
It's not actually that much, but because it was all such surface-level stuff, maybe that's the problem. He didn't take the time to get into anything. He just explained that things were happening and...that's it, really. He could've gone so much deeper and created so much more impact with the reader.
Look this isn't a terrible book. It reminds of Brandon Sanderson: big ideas and all the right components, but the depth and execution is just not there. The kind of book that has a cracking blurb but loses you in the details.
Maybe I just missed it at the start, but the rate of 'things happening just because the author wants them to' increased significantly as the book went on.
And what about all that time introducing new characters and making the effort establish the BrainPal group chat, to then open a few chapters with random accounts of their death - void of any emotion - and have all major interactions happen in person anyway?
Above all, the book's biggest weakness is a total lack of meaning or consequence. There's just no reason to care - about John, about the war, about the humans or aliens that die constantly. None of it matters. But not because the scale of horror is so massive that they pale into insignificance...but because the author didn't bother to make these things interesting. He just wanted to play Star Wars.
Speaking of the blurb - which, if we're honest, paints a much more interesting novel than the one actually delivered - I think this line summarises where it all went wrong:
"They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living."
These older men and women, and their superior knowledge and wisdom, are neither apparent nor valued anywhere in this book. In fact, the CDF's most potent warriors are, by design, superhumans with no history at all, made entirely in the laboratory. So...why do we need old humans, again? The entire premise of the book, by the way.
The blurb goes on to say that 'the fight is far, far harder than he can imagine-and what he will become is far stranger.'
That part's true, at least. Not the intense fighting - which, we've established, was virtually absent - but the bit about becoming far stranger.
He goes from a compelling, emotional man and to a vapid, unthinking, boring space ranger. Shame.
5/10.
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