Old Man's War

Um, uh, and so I, I, I have read that one, and I also read...

But the one though, anyway, the one that really sits with me is The Old Man's War series.

Yes.

Um, I absolutely love that as a concept.

That's the one, Old Man's War, um, The Last Colony, um, The Ghost Brigades, uh, well, The Shattering Peace, all those things.

Um, anyway If you haven't read sci-fi in a while, gang, I cannot recommend enough The Old Man's War.

It is a great, great concept.

Yeah.

The books that you might have heard of are Stranger in a Strange Land, very important, I think nineteen sixty-two But also the novel Starship Troopers which was infamously turned into a movie that right-wingers love to misunderstand by Paul Verhoeven in the 1990s and then, you know, he wrote until the late '80s and died, I think, in 1988, I wanna say.

The reason Scalzi, I think, cares about this attack on his lack of fealty to Robert Heinlein is that Scalzi sort of made his name with Old Man's War, which is also military and science fiction, but very much not the military science fiction of Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers is a fairly sort of derring-do youth adventure novel about space marines, which, you know, the Verhoeven film points out is more than a little fascist.

Official politics lean more towards the libertarian.

Yeah.

It's this existential horror story really.

And Scalzi's Old Man's War is basically in that vein.

It's military science fiction that largely sort of is like, "This fucking sucks.

what about other authors like you mentioned Asimov did you do you have any other favorite ones have you ever read Ben Bova oh

Scalzi John Scalzi uh Old Man War I love all his books but especially that series but I've read all of his books to I also really like Jim Butcher, he's not a sci-fi author, he writes urban fantasy, but the recent five series are awesome.

And there is this other guy, Joe something, he has a really long name, I keep forgetting.

He wrote The Devils, The Blade itself, really good author.

Max Gladstone was in there for the Craft Wars, but the winner was a cornerstone of modern science fiction.

John Scalzi took home the trophy for Old Man's War.

Which feels like a legacy achievement.

It really does.

Old Man's War is a foundational text that essentially redefined the military space opera for the 21st century.

It took the classic tropes of Heinlein and completely recontextualized them for a modern audience.

Yeah, he really updated that whole vibe.

We'll get there, though.

[laughs] Oh, if you, if anyone cares, Sergeant Graham is reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi in this episode, and apparently John Scalzi was a creative consultant for the show, so a little nod there.

Yeah.

Daniel's wearing the same jacket he wore in Memento Mori, so I guess they kept some stuff.

Yeah, sci-fi writer, very active in sci-fi fandom.

I mean, people might r- be familiar with The Interdependency, they might be familiar with Old Man's War.

Writes sort of, you know, hard sci-fi, um, and is just a very outspoken guy on, I think no longer Twitter, but on Blue Sky, and just a good poster, uh, one should say, too.

The other person that you need to know is Vox J, real name Theodore Beale-

Best short story, In My Country by Thomas Ha.

And best series, Old Man's War by John Scalzi.

And I actually read the first two books in that series a little earlier this year.

So I can count that towards my reading resolution.

A commodity.

In John Scalzi's 2005 novel Old Man's War, it's the perfect entry point for this.

Let me set the stage for you.

The protagonist is John Perry.

Heinlein's style was often deeply ideological, almost sermonizing about citizenship, duty, and the morality of violence.

Scalzi takes the snappy pacing and the competent man trope of Heinlein, but he completely drops the sermon.

Right, because the first half of Old Man's War is almost breezy.

It's this incredibly brisk, weightless recruitment and training story.