Old Man's War

This idea has been touched on before, but Joe ads enough new elements and realism to really bring the concept to life.

We all love second chances, or at least the idea of them, fantasizing about the life we could have lived if we could do it all over again. This book reads like pure wish-fulfillment initially, with senior citizens having their minds transferred to cloned and upgraded young bodies and sent off to fight aliens.

And this book definitely hits me harder as I get older. But a second chance is also no guarantee that you’ll be any wiser (or luckier) this time around. Still, all in all, yeah, I’d be down for a super version of me that gets to… show more.

My mind was blown when John Perry had his transformation. I knew it was coming, but didn’t expect how it happened. I get wrapped up in what the characters are doing, and I care for them even though they have to go off to war. I thought the story was a very creative and intelligent way of theorizing where current day situations could lead us; a sort of thought experiment with a few concepts.

Scalzi’s universe isn’t hard science fiction, but I love how that brings me above the drudgery of this world into the fantastical. My mind was stimulated… show more.

I couldn’t put this book down; I was hooked from the first page. The concept of transferring a person’s identity into a clone to make an advanced soldier fight aliens is not something I had encountered before, and I found it absolutely engrossing.

I found the irreverent and often humorous attitude of the main character amusing, which served as a prompt to keep turning the pages. In war, there is blood and gore, and this book has its fill of it. It is a reflection of what mankind does to preserve itself and expand into hostile space. When the story… show more.

The premise of Old Man’s War is basically every old man’s fantasy (no… not what you think). But if there really was a way to combine the wisdom of age with the virility of youth, I think we’d all be on board.

From a military point of view, it does a great job of bringing a civilian through the recruiting and basic training process without resorting to the trope of a wide-eyed, innocent youth who finds his strength.

In this case, our recruit already comes with a lifetime of experience and his observations of military training and philosophy are pithy,… show more.

I was moved from the opening lines of Old Man’s War. An ordinary man of 75 visits his wife’s grave, then joins the army. What? Oh yeah, now I understand. Mind uploading is integral to this book, first published in 2005, and it will soon be the rage in the real world of our near future. In Old Man’s War we experience mind uploading through the character, John Perry, and other new recruits. Then we fight. Perry becomes a war hero, and he crosses paths with his wife along the way. What? I thought she was dead? Oh… show more.

Very well entailed, to the point where the author could almost be elucidating about nothing but it would still be readable, this story wraps itself around an incredibly novel idea that has been copied all too often in later author's work. Often with deficient results.

The consciousness of age-old men and women is transferred into the body of a much younger and abnormally fit fighting entity that will be used by the earth against alien invaders.

A well-scripted tale that delves both into the evolution of human thought, and the juvenile rigors of military life that are imposed onto a… show more.

While I love the whiz-bang-pew of space battles, I also like to laugh. John Scalzi manages to make me do both. I love the wrinkle in this story—the main character enlists in the colonial military on his 75th birthday, knowing that once he leaves Earth, he will never be allowed to return. Watching an older man—he gets a younger body, but he’s still 75 mentally—who has put up with all the normal crap of life, and experienced a full lifetime, deal with the situation in space is really great, not only because the main character has a great sense… show more.

John Perry has lived a full life as a run-of-the-mill, normal guy. He’s a 75-year-old widower who’s a retired ad writer. This all changes when he enlists in the CDF, is given a new, young body, and ventures through the galaxy to fight hostile alien species. A dream come true, right? Absolutely. As an added bonus, the Old Man’s War sex scenes are neck-and-neck in unabashed, bacchanal hilarity with the ones found in The Broken Earth Trilogy. When we talk about Perry and Essun (above), we’re talking about badasses in the bedroom as well.