The Book That Made Me Want to Enlist at 75

Seventy-five and shipping out

John Perry buries his wife, turns seventy five, and does the one thing every senior citizen in his world is quietly counting down to: he enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces. Nobody knows exactly what happens when you join. You leave Earth, you never come back, and the recruiters are cagey about the details. That’s the whole premise and it’s a genuinely great one. Old age as the entry requirement for war, not the disqualifier. Scalzi doesn’t dawdle getting you there either, the book moves like it’s being chased.

What happens to John once he ships out I won’t spoil beyond what the marketing already gives away: the CDF has a way of making elderly recruits combat ready again, and it involves technology that reads like body horror dressed up as a miracle. The chapter where John first sees his new body is one of the best “oh no, oh wow” scenes I’ve read in the genre, that specific whiplash of horror and delight. Then it’s off to boot camp, then to war against a rotating cast of aliens who are strange, funny, and sometimes genuinely upsetting, and the book settles into its real shape: a squad of septuagenarians-in-super-bodies trying to survive a universe that wants them dead in increasingly creative ways.

What actually works, and what I side eyed

Here’s the thing about Scalzi’s prose: it is disgustingly readable. I don’t say that as faint praise. I read the first hundred pages of this on a red eye when I was too tired to hold a thought in my head for more than ten seconds, and it never once lost me. Short chapters, clean dialogue, jokes that land because they come from character instead of being bolted on. The banter between John and the other old folks in his recruit class, especially Harry Wilson, does real work. It makes you like these people before the book starts killing them off, and it does kill them off, don’t get comfortable.

The emotional core, John’s marriage to Kathy and the specific ache of getting a second body but not a second version of her, is the best thing in the book and I did not expect to feel it as hard as I did. There’s a scene involving her old reading glasses that undid me more than any of the battle sequences, and I went into this book fully braced for battle sequences to be the main event.

Now the side eye. The politics of this book are, let’s say, comfortable. The CDF is basically always right, the humans are basically the good guys defending their right to colonize space against aliens who mostly want to eat them or take their planets, and the book doesn’t spend much time asking whether humanity deserves what it’s fighting for. It’s very Heinlein, very Starship Troopers, and if you go in wanting a war novel that questions the war, you’ll be frustrated. I was a little frustrated. I don’t think Scalzi is unaware of this, later books in the series lean harder into moral complication, but book one is mostly content to be a blast without much bite. I also think the back third loses some steam once the emotional hook of “old man learns to be young again” gives way to a fairly standard string of missions. It never gets bad. It just gets more ordinary.

Am I rating this a little generous because it made me feel something on a plane at 2am and I’m sentimental about it? Maybe. I’ve reread it since, in daylight, sober, no travel fatigue, and it held up fine, though the seams show more the second time.

One more thing I have to mention: the Ghost Brigades soldiers, glimpsed near the end, are one of the creepiest quiet reveals in the book, and Scalzi wisely doesn’t over-explain them here, he saves that for the sequel that’s literally named after them.

The scariest thing about getting a second life is realizing how much of the first one you’re still not over.

About John Scalzi

Scalzi is the guy who writes the sci-fi novel your non-sci-fi friend will actually finish. He came up through journalism and blogging (his site Whatever has been running since the actual dawn of blogs), which explains why his fiction reads so conversational, like someone talking to you at a bar who happens to know an enormous amount about physics and also happens to be very funny about grief. He’s a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, a Hugo winner, and one of the few working sci-fi writers who can be reliably, deliberately funny without the jokes undercutting the sad parts. He’s also famously online and opinionated, which tracks with how opinionated his narrators are.

If this wrecked your sense of what “old” means in sci-fi, read these next

• The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi, the direct sequel, and where the moral complexity I wanted from book one actually shows up
• Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, the book Scalzi is openly in conversation with, less funny, more lecture-y, but essential to see what he’s riffing on
• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, the anti-war answer to Heinlein, angrier and sadder, read it right after this one for the gut punch contrast
• Redshirts by John Scalzi, if you want more of his voice but in full comedic mode instead of the grief-adjacent register of this one

You can grab a copy here: Old Man’s War on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Would you enlist, knowing you’d get a new body but could never go back to Earth or the people you left there?
2. Does John’s grief for Kathy feel resolved by the end, or does the book use his new body to dodge dealing with it fully?
3. The CDF’s morality is rarely questioned within the book. Does that undercut the story for you, or is it beside the point of what Scalzi’s trying to do?
4. How does the humor in the early boot camp chapters change the way you experience the violence later on?
5. If you’ve read The Forever War or Starship Troopers, how does Scalzi’s take on the “old soldier” premise compare to their takes on soldiering in general?