Review: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (2005)
Posted on February 22nd, 2008
Free download!
There are only a few military science fiction books I consider significant, but his is one of them. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Drake’s “Hammer’s Slammers” series, and Haldeman’s Forever War are the big ones for me. I would place OMW in the list as being in the same vein as Heinlein, a position I think Scalzi has explicitly stated.
John Perry is seventy-five, his wife has passed away, and he is stepping into the Colonial Defense Force’s recruiting station as the novel opens. The mysterious CDF ships him off-planet, gives him a new augmented body and sends him away to interesting planets to meet interesting aliens and kill them.
There are crises of conscious as he wonders why he is doing what he is doing (think Forever War), and interesting encounters like when he runs across someone wearing his dead wife’s body, and of course, lots of fighting with aliens. I don’t think I need to go into too much depth here because there are reviews all over the web discussing this book. I will simply say it is
Excellent/Very Highly Recommended. I promised you a free download, but you’ll have to work for it a bit. You can get this by signing up with Tor’s mailing list. They are launching a new site and are giving away digital downloads as they countdown towards launch (next is Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin). If you are worried about spam, use a junk email account.
Sign up here. FYI, it took a few days for me to get the email with the link.
Tags: Review
Filed under Free Stuff, Military SF, Review, Scalzi, John, Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) |
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