"old man's war" by john scalzi
this isn't my typical sort of book at all. i saw it sitting on eric's shelf and the book i was currently reading was in the other room and i decided to read a few pages to see what i thought. i thought enough of it to ask to borrow it.
on the face of it, it's space opera, but there's so much more to it than that. john perry joins the colonial defense forces on his 75th birthday. they will shoot him into space, renovate his body in ways he can't begin to imagine, and instead of dying of old age, he will most likely die fighting aliens to defend human colonies in space. but if he can survive, he gets to live longer and in a much younger body. and his beloved wife is dead, so what the hell, right?
i thought i knew what some of the plot twists might be and i was wrong about all of them. scalzi is economical in a way that i love--small details from early on in the book turn out to be important. but the thing that surprised me the most was the depth of the book. i really enjoyed it. i think it would be a bit of a tough read if you just lost someone you loved a lot, though.
on the face of it, it's space opera, but there's so much more to it than that. john perry joins the colonial defense forces on his 75th birthday. they will shoot him into space, renovate his body in ways he can't begin to imagine, and instead of dying of old age, he will most likely die fighting aliens to defend human colonies in space. but if he can survive, he gets to live longer and in a much younger body. and his beloved wife is dead, so what the hell, right?
i thought i knew what some of the plot twists might be and i was wrong about all of them. scalzi is economical in a way that i love--small details from early on in the book turn out to be important. but the thing that surprised me the most was the depth of the book. i really enjoyed it. i think it would be a bit of a tough read if you just lost someone you loved a lot, though.