found drama

Hot off the heels of Blindsight, I decided to stay in the scifi realm for my next read and made John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War the novel of choice.  You might say that I decided to give “harder scifi” a second chance.  In this instance, I’m not entirely certain that was a good idea.

I’ve seen it written in a few places that Scalzi follows in the Heinlein tradition of scifi.  The Heinlein that gave us Stranger in a Strange Land.  The Heinlein that gave us The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  And the Heinlein that gave us Starship Troopers.  In full disclosure mode, I admit that I’m not terribly familiar with Heinlein’s work.  I read a novel or two of his in high school before largely moving on to Gibson, Vonnegut, and other novelists that better resonated with me.  A lesson there?  Perhaps not.

However, I am not in full disclosure mode and that said: usually when I encounter reviews comparing someone to Heinlein, we inevitably arrive somehow at this conclusion of the objectivist/libertarian ¹ superman.  Scalzi gives us one of those — albeit, one thin on the objectivism (his religion disrupts that, I’d say) — a protagonist named John Perry who has few flaws, who is so strong to begin with that we need only put him into a new body to make him stronger.  And then we do.  Not that he is without troubles (e.g., moral dilemmas, nervous breakdowns, etc.) but they’re relatively predictable in light of the environmental conditions and subject matter.  And it isn’t that Perry isn’t without his complexities and nuances.  They’re just all so familiar and comfortable and human.  I mean: Perry and every other green-skinned CDF soldier seems to be Christian for crying out load.

Now, compare this with Blindsight‘s Siri.

Perhaps my mistake here was rushing into Old Man’s War so quickly after Blindsight.  In Watts’ novel, we’re confronted not only with aliens that are completely unknowable but humans that are epistemologically difficult as well.  Again, considering the close proximity of these two reads, these were the two things that I got severely hung up on:

• The aliens.  I could live with Scalzi’s skip drive.  As a scifi reader, you are practically under oath to respect your author’s choice when it comes to moving you around the planets.  On the other hand, I could not get over how Human all of Scalzi’s aliens were.  Their motivations all seem very much the same as ours would be.  They are (nearly all of them) described as “[fill in your favorite terrestrial animal]-like creatures” or else “a cross between a [Earthly animal #1] and a [Earthly animal #2]”.  Their languages are all translated.  They’re all competing for the same habitable conditions as we are.  Meanwhile, my brain is still reflecting on Watts’ conclusion that consciousness is metabolically expensive and maybe we’ll grow out of it.
• The bodies and the sex.  Okay…  Once again, I am perhaps tainted by Watts’ future humanity where “first-person” “old school” sex was considered a disgusting fetish, a kinky perversion.  But that seemed an applicable lesson here.  We’re jamming 75 year olds into the bodies of 20 year olds here; bodies that have been engineered basically from scratch to be fighting machines.  They’re sterile.  And yet they’re not sexless.  It would seem to me that the Colonial Defense Forces (in their infinite, military wisdom) would strip these same bodies of their “naughty bits” and just not deal with the whole sex complication in the first place.  But whatever.

All of that said, I wouldn’t “thumbs down” this novel either.  It was an entertaining read that went quick (about two days, start to finish for me) and had a few interesting moments.

1. For those that have previously acknowledged my own libertarian tendencies, please bear with me here.  When have my relationships with my politics not been (er…) complicated?[↩]

About Rob Friesel