Cyborgs of various ages

My writing group selected as its next book club book John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which had been on my TBR list already since I figured I should read more of John Scalzi’s stuff besides Redshirts (which I read last summer but could not brain enough to comment on) and his awesome blog, “Whatever.” At any rate, I think I can now officially say that my book club is cooler than your book club, unless your book club is also reading John Scalzi.

Old Man’s War takes place in a version of the future where humanity’s Colonial Defense Force (CDF) is in a state of constant warfare with various other intelligent species to colonize planets and not get exterminated. The CDF has a very tight monopoly on several forms of advanced technology, including some sort of scientific advance to make old people young again that they refuse to tell Earth people anything about. As a result, the CDF recruits its soldiers from citizens of “developed” Earth countries who have reached seventy-five years of age. The story follows our Ordinary Hero protagonist, a seventy-five-year-old former advertising copywriter named John Perry, as he enlists in the CDF and learns about what is really out there in the universe.

While I was reading this book, I kept thinking about something Professor Huang told us in the “Aliens and Others in Science Fiction” seminar I took my sophomore year in college (and yes, that class was just as awesome as it sounds, because my college English department was cooler than yours, too). She stressed that good science fiction—what separates “speculative fiction” from “stories with frickin’ laser beams on their heads in them”—makes us think about being human. The Aliens and Others seminar focused specifically on stories that use aliens and cyborgs to examine our assumptions about what “human” means (and related concepts like “Who is deserving of what we currently refer to as ‘human rights’?”). Other science fiction stories look at issues like how technological advancements could change human society and how they might affect people psychologically.

Old Man’s War does not dick around trying to be subtle on this front; it places the human question squarely front and center, frequently in the form of characters explicitly discussing how in-touch or out-of-touch they feel with their humanity and debating whether or not they still “count” as human. This doesn’t get preachy or abstruse or boring, because John Scalzi is a very accessible and clear writer with a background in philosophy that somehow has not destroyed his ability to write a natural-sounding sentence. There are two main story elements that raise the bulk of the questions about being human: one is biotechnological advancements (such as cloning and gene splicing), and the other is war. I think this is particularly brilliant, because the biotechnology/cyborg thing is all very new and futuristic and the sort of subject that is squarely within the domain of science fiction, but the brutality of war thing is a very, very old topic, which has been the subject of a great many works of very serious literature (both fiction and non-fiction) for quite a long time. Since most of the biotechnology in this book is being put to the use of creating scary, technologically enhanced, übermenschen-y super-soldiers, the two themes fit together very well.

Despite the amount of time spent kicking around Deep Questions, this book is actually a pretty fun, fast-paced, high-action military “space opera” kind of book. Some bits of it float in that space between “cliché” and “classic” where it depends on how much you like the trope in question to start with, like the scene where our protagonist first goes to basic training, and ends up being the one person the shouty drill sergeant does not immediately dislike, despite a long, weird, and hilariously genre-savvy rant by aforementioned shouty drill sergeant that just because he sounds like a stereotypical shouty drill sergeant doesn’t mean he’s going to stop hating them all and let them earn his grudging respect or anything. So there is definitely a little voice in the back of the reader’s head going “Ahaha of course he does”, but it’s fairly easy to drown that voice out by laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole scene (I don’t want to give it all away but it involves a wacky tattoo). Witty banter features heavily in all portions of the book, including the narration, since it’s first-person POV. One of my absolute favorite parts was the marketing copy for the enyouthified, technologically enhanced soldier bodies, which are full of proprietary genetically modified biological products with stupid corporate names like SmartBlood, which is some sort of extra-fast-clotting bloodlike substance, and BrainPal, which is basically the Internet implanted into your brain.

One recurring character in this drama is Kathy, John Perry’s wife who died of a stroke a few years before the story opens. When I first ran into this, my first thought was along the lines of “Great, the dead wife trope.” However, this is actually handled pretty well. Kathy isn’t put on any sort of weird pedestals; in John’s memories she comes off as a normal, snarky, pretty awesome lady. There isn’t anything fishy or mysterious or refrigerator-y about her death; she dies of a stroke when she’s around seventy years old, which is a thing that happens. It’s sad for us because it’s sad for John—he loved his wife, and he misses her. The bit where this bumps up against wacky science fiction plot stuff is( Spoilers ahoy! )

Overall, this was a very good read, and I fully intend to purchase the sequels quite soon. *eyes large pile of already-purchased, unread books* Okay, I will be good and read at least one other book first, and then I will get the sequels.