Old Man's War

Aloha,

The Beamers found themselves with a nice, light book to help while away the lazy summer days, "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi. Of course, our discussion was anything but light as we went after the essentials of science fiction and fantasy, the demands of military fiction, the strengths and weaknesses of first novels, the advantages of sequels, and the believability of 1-inch-tall intelligent aliens. Appropriately for a book about future wars, we battled our best to tease out its secrets and to test our own convictions and preferences. As a special treat, we were joined by a guest, Phil De Parto of the SF Association of Bergen County (www.sfabc.org), who gave us much interesting information about the SFABC's activities as well as staying to join in our debate with glee.

The debate opened with my provocative interpretation of the book as a fantasy novel despite its obvious sf elements, claiming that we had a story in which a young apprentice was granted a magic wand and sent off to different places to slay monsters. This depiction of the book was immediately challenged, and it set us off in quest of defining sf and fantasy and how they differ (as well as how they relate, which is equally important to our discussion and to our affections for the combined genre of speculative fiction). Jon first opined that sf was speculative fiction set in the future, while fantasy was set in the past. As we dissected that option to pieces, he offered a more functional discriminator, positing that sf and fantasy differ in the access to power, saying that sf makes its abilities freely available, where fantasy reserves its significant traits to specially designated individuals. This comparison helps explain why fantasies are frequently set in pre-industrial worlds, where the idea of mass production is absent. Phil opted to challenge my definition of the need for sf to logically and rigorously work out the consequences of the author's speculative change (like the nano-tech super-rifle of Scalzi's work, that seemed more magic wand than infantry weapon to me), pointing out that accepting genre tropes and classic ideas (faster than light travel, for example) was generally accepted by readers to free authors from having to bog down their books with infodumps. Otherwise, much sf would have to be tossed out of the genre, if my rule were to be logically and rigorously applied. In general, the Beamer consensus did grant that "Old Man's War" should be considered as sf, but we did see that Scalzi left himself open to many challenges due to omitting much of his backstory, producing a book that Kevin critiqued as "facile" even as he enjoyed reading it.

In comparison to other military sf, we could see correspondences, such as the stock portrayal of boot camp and the formation of bonds among the new recruits as they become hardened veterans and find their primary allegiance turned toward their unit and their comrades-in-arms. Carol related a story about a friend serving in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo who felt compelled to apologize for a misdeed committed by someone not in his platoon nor company but still in the same battalion in which he served. Scalzi did give a good portrait of how military life reshapes John Perry, his hero, but some of us would like to see it deepened with some of the darker edges that war chisels onto those who serve under arms. In fact, the issues of recruitment itself, which compose a large part of the book, had us arguing over the conceit of inducting 75-year-olds for their experience (alleged to be vital for facing the unexpected alien opponents in unforeseen ways), which is also paired with the idea of creating elite troops from birth (giving us the unsettling contrast of highly dangerous and deadly 6-year-olds). The problem that we had for putting these two opposing recruiting options together into a cohesive military strategy was symptomatic of the lack of context for the military actions themselves. Working on the basis of this book alone, we could not say how the Colonial Defense Forces were organized or why they fought, nor how the Colonial Government operated and could keep Earth as a quarantined backwater. Carol did explain how much of the backstory was available in later books (which she felt were better written), but there was a significant disconnect for those of us who had not continued with the series as the first book lacks the "hooks" that would have pointed us toward, if not the answers, at least the sense that the John and his companions the Old Farts would be finding them out in future volumes.

One major stumbling block for many Beamers was the one major hook to the sequels, John's discover of his dead wife's clone. While it does offer the obvious way for the narrative to continue ("boy regains girl"), it occurs under circumstances that have astronomical odds against them occurring, as John has to be the one survivor of a planetary assault-turned-ambush who is rescued in turn by the one Ghost Brigade (special forces) soldier who is Kathy reborn. I noted that the way in which the injured John is given a brief vision of a female agent come to carry him, the fallen soldier, away from the battlefield to safety, was a clone of the fantasy scene of the Valkyrie come to take the worthy warrior to his reward in Valhalla. In that reading, we need not worry about the staggering coincidence, because Siegfried and Brunhilde are fated to meet, and we would be disappointed if they did not. Similarly, the battle against the 1-inch-tall Covandu was yoked by the author to John's feelings of himself as Gulliver stomping Lilliputs or Godzilla crushing Tokyo, both images from fantasy works. (Oh, a gathering of Philadelphia lawyers has nothing on a Beamer meeting for turns and twists of rhetoric!) Given that most Beamers were not happy with the fantasy reading of the book, the coincidental meeting of John and Jane Sagan (the person "wearing" Kathy's body) was simply a point where the suspenders of disbelief went "Snap, snap" for them.

Overall, though, no one was disappointed with spending time to read Scalzi's first novel, even if we as experienced readers tended to look around more for the background details than a first novelist who is caught up in the enthusiastic telling of his tale may be prepared to deliver. If there was a general fault for the more positive Beamers, it lay in the overly repetitive battle sequences in the middle of the book, and most were willing to forgive Scalzi enough to either continue on to his sequels on their own or had continued or would at least consider continuing based on the enthusiastic recommendations of same by their fellow adventurous Beamer colleagues. Volunteers of the army of Literature that we are, we Beamers do share our own unit bond and do like to uphold the honor of the Regiment of Readers. Just call us the Old Farts of F & SF..

Our September book is the out-of-print sf mystery, "Kiln People" by David Brin. Beamers having trouble locating a copy should contact Marina for her assistance. In October, we celebrate Hallowe'en with the humorous horror of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", a parody of the classic Jane Austen novel with more bone-crunching zombie mayhem than you can shake a brainstem at. For November, we will dip into a new collection of galactic empire stories, "Federation", edited by John Joseph Adams and featuring a wide-ranging cast of classic (Robert Silverberg, Alan Dean Foster, Anne McCaffrey) and current (Alastair Reynolds, Robert J. Sawyer, John C. Wright, Catherynne Valente) authors who command a great deal of respect within the field.

- Eugene, ready to re-enlist for another hitch in the Regiment of Readers ...