God Damn Literary Masterpiece: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
First things first: The idea of downloading the brain of a 75 year old into a body of a genetic supersoldier in order to preserve a lifetime of experience is a fucking awesome concept that I wish I’d had first. And it gives this novel one a cracker of an opening line.
Googling through a few reviews of this book, I notice that it’s associated with The Forever War a lot, and I can see why. It’s a similar sort of protagonist, fighting a similar kind of war, presented as a series of episodic battles and incidents. Of course, the classic SF publishing system gets a different coat of paint here because it was first published in bits on the internet.
It’s a very mod kind of story, with plenty of biotechnology and body enhancements and BrainPal implants that give the characters an intercranial iPhone (mind to mind text messaging comes over particularly well). As a reading experience it must be similar to contemporaries reading 50s SF, when that era’s extrapolation of technology was advanced and realistic rather than dusty and quaint, which Old Man’s War itself, of course, must inevitably become in turn.
I was fifty pages in before realising it, so the work happily conforms to the Current Rules. I got through it at a pace that usually only happens with authors I’ve been familiar with for years. Then again, in a way I am pretty familiar with Scalzi’s writing, even though this is the first of his books that I’ve read, as I started reading his blog regularly last year after I found it, in the disjointed way we find things online, via his short story Pluto Tells All over at Subterranean Press.
His dialogue is one of the thigns that draws a lot of praise, and is used as a selling point on the cover of the paperback edition. I’m not quite sold on it myself, not because it isn’t fun, but because it makes a lot of the characters, regardless of background, sound pretty similar. Then again, maybe that’s actually a downside of reading someone’s writing almost daily; you find yourself tuning in very quickly to their ‘voice’, maybe in a way that you don’t with work that only gets an airing a couple of times a year at the most.
The action bits are top rate, and it’s very easy to get caught up in a story that runs off so energetically in the way it needs to go. It’s made me interested in getting hold of the Heinlein stuff that inspired it. And if I can make a concluding observation without actually reading Starship Troopers, the connecting thread through these works would appear to be that while The Forever War strips the outer layer off the former’s corpse and walks around in it, like a literary camouflage that’ll encourage us to let the complexities into the compound of our minds, Old Man’s War reanimates it, shoves it full of shiny new equipment, then proudly shuffles it off over the horizon towards Adventure.
