This was probably in February. I still didn't get to it by the end of that school year.
I didn't find the time to read it the next school year, or in 2014, or any year until once day, a few months before I left that job, I decided to read everything that this friend had recommended to me over the years. After all, our lives are very different; without teaching to unite it, I knew our friendship might not survive long.
So finally, June 2017, I started Old Man's War. Within six weeks, I read all of them. (All of them I could find, anyway -- my library doesn't have Zoe's Tale, and frankly, I'm not sure I'm interested in galactic events from the POV of a 13yo anyway. I'm still recovering from my years of dealings with YA lit.)
I must say, I deeply enjoyed them. The universe Scalzi has created here is enormous and clever; like all good syfy, it feels like it could be real. That someday, when I'm 75, the beanstalk could indeed rise out of Nairobi and take me to Earth Station and I could head off into the wide, wide universe green-skinned and ready to fight whatever was trying to kill humanity.
That's pretty neat.
And again, like good syfy, the aliens are complex and clever. They are not just as advanced as humanity, civilization-wise, but they are clearly not just humanoid. That's always the mistake that amateurs make, and to tell the, that's the reason why I feel unqualified to write syfy. I can handle fantasy and realistic fiction, essays and reviews, but I don't feel creative enough, accomplished enough, to write syfy. It's too easy to assume that everything out there would be like us, when in reality, aliens aren't going to be anything like us.
[As a side note, this is one of the things that the movie Independence Day does best -- they explain that the aliens want Earth because its atmosphere and world composition are extremely similar to their homeworld. They could live on Earth, more or less. Amusing to think that of all the complexity of syfy, Independence Day did this one thing perfectly.
This is also notably why the aliens in Arrival look so crazy: They can't live on our world at all. Their evolutionary track is far too different to allow it, and that's also extremely realistic.]
My point is: When Scalzi creates a universe that feels real and possible right down to the extreme alien-ness of his aliens, he is joining a whole host of writers and creators who recognize that part of good syfy universes means acknowledging the vast differences between and them. Aliens are the ultimate Other.
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| I didn't read this book, but the Obin feature heavily in The Last Colony. And they definitely aren't humanoid. |
Part of what I don't love is his writing itself.
Scalzi does a great job building his worlds -- his alien civilizations are complex and deep, each with their own physical, cultural, and faction-oriented details required to make them seem real. And he interconnects his worlds amazingly well -- characters readers meet in the first book come back in the third, ones in the second are main characters in the 4th, and so on.
But the writing itself has some noticeable issues.
Some of this is poor editing -- there are some mixed up names where the first draft put the wrong character's name as the speaker and the editing didn't catch it. Humans and aliens tend to have names that begin with the same letter, which gets confusing fast when they are the only two characters on the page. It's far too easy to misunderstand something.
And first person sounds the same, regardless of the speaker. Some of this is personal preference admittedly, but when Jared Durac (Ghost Brigades) sounds stunningly similar to John Perry (Old Man's War), and when Harry Winston (The Human Division & End of All Things) sounds interchangeable with either of them, it becomes poorer writing. Not everyone is snarky; it's an obvious tell when all your first person male characters ARE.
Then there are issues like using the same words in a sentence, or saying the same words in five sentences in a row. Lots of sentences start the same way. There is no variation to "<character name> said" to change things up. I have a harder time forgiving errors that I taught my high school students to avoid.
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| On more than one occasion, I found typos to indicate a story started in third person and was edited to be in first -- like this one! For the record, the only person with a BrainPal in this scene is the narrator, who previously was using first person. Barf. |
This is not to say Scalzi is a bad writer; he's not. His plots are intricate and carefully executed, he writes a wide variety of characters and motivations, and as I've discussed, his world-building is amazing.
It's just that he's not Shakespeare. He's not Tana French, the Irish author of the Dublin Murder Squad books who, despite the fact that her endings are categorically poor, writes this amazing, beautiful prose that I cannot mimic for the life of me. He's not Stephen King, whose consistently colorful backgrounds of minor characters who have almost nothing to do with the story except create a world are so stunning, that everything I read inevitably gets compared to his ability to make me care about the no ones of his stories.
Admittedly, some of the errors I caught may not be noticeable unless you read all five books in the same month. Scalzi collectively makes up close to 50% of the books I've read this year -- that's a lot of time for an anal-retentive reader like me to catch errors.
And to be honest, none of those errors would stop me from recommending Old Man's War, or from suggesting that someone read the next one, or the next, or the next, if they liked it. It is a worthwhile read, a lovingly crafted universe, and I have enjoyed my time there.
There is no higher endorsement for a syfy world than its readers wanting to be a part of it. If indeed I could, I can say with confidence: I would sign up for the CDF tomorrow.
