The Last Colony (Old Man's War)

The Last Colony This book is the latest in John Scalzi's series of super humans, and while many have considered him the next Heinlein, that bit gets bandied around way too much. He is not the next Heinlein but he is an phenomenal writer. The Old Man's war series (This is book 3 of the series) is some of the best writing to come out of the "brat pack" of authors (Sagan, Scalzi, and Doctorow) that are setting down some of the newer riffs in modern science fiction writing. The last colony is a book about love, hope, betrayal, and stubbornness, and how all of that will overcome the best laid machinations of government and military. When you promote someone and give them freedom of action to do something, never be surprised that they will work on their own agenda rather than yours. The story starts off with the Hero John Perry and his wife Sagan are talked into leading a colony after the events in Old Mans War and Sagan's story in the Ghost Brigades. We also learn how Zoe (adopted daughter) has become the icon of an alien race without emotions, and how the starting to be teenage daughter deals with that, along with colonizing a new planet. Of course everything also goes wrong, the combined space races have declared a moratorium on new colonies without approval of the interstellar alliance. If you do they wipe out your colony from orbit, which is not the way that you want to end your day. The interesting part about this is the colonial defense group does not want to be part of the alliance, but along comes Perry and Sagan. And things do not end up the way that anyone expected them to be. While there is no planned follow up and Zoe's Tale is not yet available, this is one universe that is worth exploring, and hopefully Scalzi will continue the story because it is compelling, interesting, and just plain fun to read science fiction. Rated this book 5 stars, this is a must purchase, but get the whole series, this is the 3rd in the series, and you will really want the background information.

I'm more of a fantasy buff than a sci-fi fan, but I can and do cross over from time to time ... and a number of months ago, with nothing on my shelf to read, a friend recommended Old Man's War to me. It took me about three chapters to become a fan of Scalzi's style. A reviewer above compared Scalzi's books to Frank Herbert's Dune. I couldn't disagree more. While both are great, Dune was the ultimate in inaccesible Sci-Fi. It required effort to the point of being painful to understand and enjoy, and even the most hardcore reader probably found themselves wearing a path to the back of the book, to remind themselves what the heck was going on. Scalzi is the polar opposite. His work is eminently accessible. Not simplistic, by any stretch of the imagination, but technology and science becomes part of the story, and not the point of the story. He understands, as do most of the great writers, that sci-fi or fantasy is simply a new way to tell an old story, and that the key is interesting, logical characters, and flowing dialogue. Reading OMW, Ghost Brigades and now this was like reading an Elmore Leonard book in space. There's really no point in writing reviews for this book ... if you've enjoyed OMW or Ghost Brigades, you'll love this one as well - so quit reading revies and order the book.

This is a sequel to OLD MAN"S WAR and THE GHOST BRIGADES. Unfortunately, the author claims that it is the end of this story line and I, for one, am disappointed. John Perry has been a soldier and an officer of the human army tasked with defending humanity's colonies from a very nasty universe. Now he is retired and living with the wife and child he loves, He is surprised when he is selected to go with his wife to manage a new colony but packs up the family and takes the job. No sooner does he arrive when he and all the other colonists learn that they have been hoodwinked by the bureaucracy. They are pawns in an ongoing stellar war and in the attempts of the bureaucracy to maintain power over all humans. John manages to hack off just about everyone when he manages to keep his colony from being wiped out. He saves his people and then embarks upon a grand scheme to see that such things cannot happen again. It is very surprising. It is entertaining and very quick to read. I wish there would be more.

An advance copy of John Scalzi's The Last Colony arrived today. I sat down after class, telling myself I'd just read a few pages, and lost the rest of the work day. (More than once, a new John Scalzi book has done terrible things to my productivity. Thank God for tenure.) It brings to an immensely satisfying conclusion the trilogy that began with Old Man's War (which I reviewed here). Scalzi returns to John Perry as the POV character, this time in a story that's more political mystery than military sci fi. What the Colonial Union is up to and why becomes the critical question for Perry. Until he figures it out, after which stewing on a response becomes even more critical. Scalzi has written passionately about the need for science fiction to become less insular: "... if you look at the significant SF books of the last several years, there aren't very many you could give to the uninitiated reader; they all pretty much implicitly or explicitly assume you've been keeping up with the genre, because the writers themselves have. The SF literary community is like a boarding school; we're all up to our armpits in each other's business, literary and otherwise (and then there's the sodomy. But let's not go there)." "... Fantasy literature has numerous open doors for the casual reader. How many does SF literature have? More importantly, how many is SF perceived to have? Any honest follower of the genre has to admit the answers are "few" and "even fewer than that," respectively. The most accessible SF we have today is stuff that was written decades ago by people who are now dead." "Thanks to numerous horrifying lunchroom experiences growing up, SF geeks are probably perfectly happy to be let alone with their genre and to let the mundanes read whatever appalling chick lit and/or Da Vinci Code clone they're slobbering over this week (Now, there would be a literary mashup for the ages: The Templars Wore Prada! It'd sell millions!)." But not Scalzi. Instead, he's been writing immensely accessible novels (except maybe The Android's Dream, which tellingly is my least favorite of his novels to date). Despite its SF trappings, for example, TLC reminds me more of Allen Drury's novels of political suspense, with a little Robert Ludlum-style wheels within wheels conspiracy theory story thrown in too, than it does most SF. Indeed, to continue the analogy to political thrillers, there's even a subplot that's a variant on the good old sleeping killer story. All of which means that, if Tor can manage the marketing trick, the OMW to TLC trilogy ought to reach readers who ordinarily would never be caught dead in the sci fi section of their bookstore. Perry's solution to his political problems has considerable elegance, as does Scalzi's plotting and writing. (No hack writer he.) The pace is quick, and the plot is taut. There aren't a lot of subplots and most of them end up being essential. (There's one subplot involving spears whose purpose I haven't quite figured out