Print Old Man's War by John Scalzi - I don't understand the hype?
Just finished this book last night and felt very underwhelmed by it. I love military scifi, I've read Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Armor, lots of Warhammer 40k books etc... and saw people recommending this book as a great follow-up to books like that, but after finishing it I was a bit confused as to why people mention it alongside those.
To be clear, I didn't hate the book, there were parts that were good, especially some of the funny bits. And I liked the idea of transferring people's consciousness into new bodies specifically engineered for combat after their natural lives have come to a close on Earth. John Perry's love of his wife was also very sweet and was a good connection to The Forever War.
But overall, I found the book rather bland, unoriginal, lacking in detail, and bafflingly American-centric. The prose was just sub-standard, very straightforward which sometimes helped with the comedy bits but detracted from any feeling of scale or awe. The ships and planets were poorly described so that they just ended up looking very generic in my head. The armor the soldiers wear was also uninteresting. There were no cool vehicles and the space battles were weak.
There weren't really any epic battles in general, and the battles that were there felt contrived. Some of the tactics used were really lame (like the two-shot firing solution he uses to fight the Consu, that seems like something their onboard AI could have come up with on its own). The aliens were also not interesting, they have none of the richness or unique aspects that make aliens so cool, they were just enemies to kill, with the exception of the Consu, though even they were underwritten.
Look, I've never been in the military, so I can't really act like I know what combat actually feels like, but I felt like the combat scenes were clearly written by someone who not only had never been in the military, but hadn't spent much time studying conflict at all. I learned afterwards that he wanted to write a comedic scifi book and tacked on the military aspect because he thought it would sell better, and in retrospect that really makes sense.
I definitely tend to lean more into hard sci-fi, or at least sci-fi that feels believable and tries make either a convincing alternate universe or a convincing vision of the future, and this was neither. My favorite scifi author of all time is Iain M. Banks, and comparing this to that was like comparing a loaf of white bread to a delicious fully loaded sandwich.
I recently read The Mote in Gods Eye (which I also had some big problems with, especially that it is such a fascist and conservative vision of the future), but the aliens in that book are so unique and well-thought out, and the space battleships are wonderfully described and operate in a believable way that makes you feel that the authors either had personal experience in the military or really did their research. In this book, the spaceships are barely even described. All they do is fire off a few missiles or simply get blown up by enemy missiles.
Speaking of believable visions of the future, one big pet peeve I have of certain scifi, especially newer books where the author should know better, is when a vision of hundreds of years in the future is still heavily American-centric (and by the way, The Mote in Gods Eye is also an example of this, but not quite as bad). As far as I recall there was exactly one obviously non-American character, a Peruvian who is killed almost immediately after being introduced. Every other character just feels like a stereotype of a late 20th century American. There is no explanation as to why the CDF is so dominated by Americans when we are and will almost certainly continue to be a minority of people in the world. I don't think there is a single Asian character even though Asians constitute the majority of humankind, except for the odd bit about how for all the colonists are South Asian after we nuked them for some unexplained reason? And then we don't even get to meet any of these colonists, which makes the stakes of protecting them feel a lot lower. You need a scene where he defends colonists directly and they question his humanity or something like that. It would have been really easy to just mention that this section happened to be an American group, and they keep nationalities together for bonding reasons or something like that, but we get nothing. Even the Ghost Brigades all have American names and are named after Western scientists.
The closest comparison you can make with this book is The Forever War, except The Forever War is vastly more interesting. The bits in The Forever War about how human society has evolved in the time the main character has spent fighting make it a fascinating vision of the future, whereas Old Man's War seems to have Earth society practically unchanged from now, or if is different, we hear almost nothing about how it has changed. The aliens in The Forever War are unique and weird. The Forever War also ends with an interesting resolution to the conflict, with humanity changed forever by it, whereas Old Man's War just kind of ends.
Does the rest of the series get better than this?
