Old Man's War

John Scalzi’s novel is premised on a clever inversion of the old saying about how old men’s wars are young men’s fights. In the future, John Perry, a retired advertising copywriter nearing the end of his life, volunteers to fight for the Colonial Union, the organization managing humanity’s interplanetary settlement. He joins thousands of old people who are given new bodies and sent to fight the myriad species battling it out for habitable worlds in a seemingly unending contest. Yet for all of the bloodshed the novel’s tone is surprisingly light, as Scalzi injects a considerable amount of wry humor into the proceedings. It makes for a very entertaining book, one that shows just how smart military science fiction can be in the hands of a good writer.