I was really hoping that I would like John Scalzi’s An Old Man’s War.  Scalzi writes an entertaining blog, he’s well spoken of, is a Hugo notable and a former SFWA President.  I particularly liked the way he went about getting it published.  Legend has it Scalzi serialized the book on his blog in 2002 and, miraculously, got an offer from a slumming editor from Tor.  Three years later it was out in hardcover, and one year after that it was a Hugo Best Novel nominee.  Good Lord, could a good book and quality writing triumph after all?

But really it was the title that intrigued me.  Of late science fiction appears to have been highlighting LGBT characters and themes, female protagonists and authors, protagonists and authors of color, etcetera etcetera.  Well, let a hundred flowers bloom and all that, but where are the elderly amidst this tide of diversity? Forgotten.

This is a pity, particularly for science fiction.  After all, the old are the only true time travelers among us.  The only refugees from parallel worlds as well: for what is the past but a place that resembles the world of today in many respects, but in some respects differs markedly?  The elderly have not only that enriched perspective, but the time to have digested it and reflected on it.  Moreover the old are rarely one of the gang; age isolates, and isolation from others, not to mention the ever closer proximity to death that aging entails, tends to burn away conformity.  Who cares what others think if you won’t be alive to have to deal with them?  Blunt honest statement makes for good prose.  Scalzi’s title suggested an old narrator, which in turn suggested a reflective prose and an ambitious author.  A substantive work.

An Old Man’s War is not that.  It’s not even original.  Not that Scalzi is a plagiarist, merely that he’s writing to a template as rigid as a Petrarchan sonnet:  the military sf stamped out at the neofascist assembly lines at Tor and Baen.  You’ve read it many times before:  the loser-to-superman scenario where embattled outnumbered humanity must kick the ass of deadly inscrutable alien foes; or at least enough such reptilian ass as to hook the reader into buying the next book in the series.  Our badass hero saves the day against superhuman odds and gets the girl in the end, of course; all the while retaining his likable sensitivity even as earns the esteem of the toughest of the toughest of his peers.  Bullshit, in short.

Really, this kind of writing is a sort of porn.  As with porn, the externals of passion are there in cringe-making superabundance, but the faux-emoting couldn’t be more false; people may scream, but they don’t cry.  So with An Old Man’s War:  The character’s life is on the line day after day, his bones are crushed, his jaw and leg are off, he kills a population of humanoids by stepping on them a la Godzilla (!), he is the sole survivor of an assault in which his entire team is exterminated, and after a high-tech band-aid or two, back he bounces for more, wading through global gore to stellar cataclysm anew with not a heartbeat skipped.

An Old Man’s War is a young man’s story.  John Perry, the protagonist, enters as an elderly widower who joins the Colonial Defense Force to defend Earth because Earth holds nothing much for him now that his wife is gone.  Will the feisty old codger direct drones from his wheelchair?  No: the CDF provides superhuman rejuvenation for its codger recruits.  Rejuvenate him it does, making him stronger and faster and more alive than he’s even been.  Are the newly minted oldsters calm and sage as they enter their second lives?  No way:  the first thing the entire division of rejuvenated elderly do is go at each other like rabbits. “We did it because we could, and because it beats being lonely.”  As good a reason as any for a space orgy, I suppose.  Or is it just to sell books?  Hmm… Well, readers hot for Granny will perhaps appreciate it.

I admit, elements like that are part of what makes An Old Man’s War fun.  I would bet money that Scalzi never fought in a war; this is not the prose of a Joe Haldeman.  But Scalzi has a healthy sense of the ridiculous, a medium in which war swims constantly.

Nonetheless, a good deal of An Old Man’s War is less than appealing.   The Colonial Defense Force is blunt about their ultimate goals.  Defense, hell!  The Scalziverse is rich in alien races but limited in turf, so if mankind is to flourish, humanity needs to grab the real estate first and fast.  And if someone is already living there?  Kick them off, and shoot them if they resist:

“Colonization is the key to our race’s survival. It’s as simple as that. We must colonize or be closed off and contained by other races… We cannot hold back our expansion and hope that we can achieve a peaceful solution that allows for colonization by all races. To do so would be to condemn humanity. So we fight to colonize.

“…when we do find planets suitable for colonization, they are often inhabited by intelligent life. When we can, we live with native population and work to achieve harmony. Unfortunately, much of the time, we are not welcome. It is regrettable when this happens, but the needs of humanity are and must be our priority. And so the Civil Defense Forces become an invading force.”

Bad news for Planet Palestine!  But we don’t really see much colonialism in bloody action.  Readers don’t cheer on people armed to the teeth kicking the shit out of the weak and taking their stuff.  This need for Lebensraum, to go with earlier terminology, is merely a excuse to get Perry out there facing titanic odds and winning.  That’s the part makes us feels good.  Who wants to linger on what it’s actually all about?

But as feel-good books go, it does do its job.  Perry is a likable guy with a sense of humor.  He sees the absurdity of what’s going on around him; he doesn’t kid himself that it’s a sane way of life.  His dream, to be back home on a farm with the woman he loves, is a cliche, but a humane and moderate one. Yes, Perry succeeds just a little too easily getting kicked up the military food chain to be even remotely plausible.  But that’s the book’s goal, and even part of its adolescent charm:  it wants you, pimply high school reader, to vicariously go from zero to hero, not to moralize.  And that’s OK, if you want to show dimwitted sf fans a pleasant masturbatory time and not even try to get them to think.  There is a place for things like that.  The best seller list, I regret to say.  But it’s not SF at its best, or even at its only moderately embarrassing.

Most poor sf contains the seeds of the great sf it might have been.  This book might have been an American Solaris:  the story of a bereaved and grief-stricken widower encountering the resurrected variant of his lost love and trying to reassemble the broken pieces of both their relationship and themselves into a new whole.  It could have been a story about the cultural dissonance between superior transhuman Special Forces unable to relate to  the humanity that they fight and die for and yet whom they find slow and stupid and bovine.  A rebellion of supermen in the midst of a galaxy-spanning battle to the species-death?  There’s a certain Wrath of Khan heft to that, don’t you think?  But heavy mettle is not what Scalzi delivers. Instead there’s only an all’s-well-that-ends-well wish fulfillment tale where the reader vicariously follows Perry’s ascent as the old duffer morphs happily into a superbuff alien-killer, the apple of the military’s antidemocratic eye, star-hopping galaxies for fresh solar systems to trash.

Despite all the above, I do not wish to trash Scalzi in like manner.  This isn’t a great book by any means, but that doesn’t mean the author lacks promise.  Late Scalzi may well beat early Scalzi.  I haven’t read any late Scalzi yet; I can’t say.  (I’ve since heard that, incredibly, Scalzi had no less than Saul Bellow for his thesis advisor at the University of Chicago; so perhaps greatness doth indeed sit on his brow.) And I must admit, the narrator is amiable, there are unexpectedly decent lines and moments here and there, and if, poor fool, you like military sf and a quick light read, this book will entirely satisfy your jaded and pathetic taste.  But, reading it, I felt myself in the presence of an author who could do a lot better.  Hopefully he has.