Geekisms!

Book Description:

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce--and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. To defend Earth, and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force. Everybody knows that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve two years at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.

John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine--and what he will become is far stranger.

Review: 

This was one of the easiest books I've read in a long time. Easy in the sense that once you pick it up, it's hard to put down until you finish it. Mainly because the writing style is so laid back and uncomplicated, the characters are not hard to figure out and even though it's a science fiction story, the futuristic concepts and technology used in the book don't overwhelm you with their complexity. But that doesn't mean that the tech isn't cool! Another thing that I loved about this book is the way it brings up certain questions that are associated with the themes used in the book and attempts to answer it through the points of view of the different characters in the book. For instance, at one point during the story the morality behind certain laws is questioned and you see how each of the characters affected by that law come to terms with it.   One thing I had against it though was that I wasn't able to connect emotionally with the main character. Though he went through periods of joy and pain, it looked like he was just passing through those emotions and not actually experiencing them. All in all, a fascinating read that by the time I had finished it, left me wondering why it had taken me so long to read this books even though it had been in my sights for years now. John Scalzi definitely knows how to tell a captivating story. My next course of action is to find everything else he has written see if the Old Man's War was just a fluke. 

My Rating: 8/10