Short Book Review: Old Man’s War
If you were looking for the high concept of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, you could probably do worse than to call it Ender’s Game for the geriatric set. In the future, you can enlist in the offworld military when you hit 75, which many do as there’s a sort of legend that they’ll make you young again, and many of those who join have no reason left to stay on Earth (to which you can never return). It’s an interesting perspective for a war novel told through the perspective of the elderly, though I sometimes feel that some of the uniqueness of that voice is lost as the story progresses. Scalzi’s novel is neither an all out glamorization or condemnation of the military and war (though the author does acknowledge a particular debt to Robert Heinlein), portraying it as a necessary evil in a dangerous universe. There are apparently a pair of followups, which I look forward to checking out.
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