Finally! A return to a well loved by one of my favorite authors that doesn’t disappoint! I’m a big fan of Mr. Scalzi’s work since I found Redshirts on the new books shelf at my local library years ago, and I’ve been reading his website regularly for a long time. After Redshirts, I went through his back catalog. I remember enjoying Old Man’s War but bouncing off the sequel, the Ghost Brigades, the first time I tried to read it. I went back to it and enjoyed it eventually, but found the series to be a bit uneven. I didn’t particularly care for the Zoe character and didn’t love The Last Colony or Zoe’s Tale, but I enjoyed The Human Division and The End of All Things a great deal more. I realized that what I enjoyed most about this series was the world building much more than I enjoyed the Perry family. This was a space opera set in a world where humans were often the villains and where human civilization was not a monolithic political entity, both ideas that I find interesting and that I thought were executed well.
Mr. Scalzi’s novels in the past few years have been more misses than hits for me. Many of them were weaker than some of his earlier work, and I personally think it was due to his habit of rushing through writing them to make his deadlines (as he has eloquently described on his blog). However, his last novel, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, I loved (well, except maybe the ending) and he seemed to have his mojo back.
So I was I got the new John Scalzi book from NetGalley and Tor in exchange for an honest review I was really looking forward to a return to the Old Man’s War universe.
The main character of this book was Gretchen, a minor character in previous books who was the teenaged friend of Zoe. When she was a kid, I found her fairly one dimensional and annoying, but now she’s all grown up into an interesting character in her own right. This book tells into two of the interesting and previously unexplored aspects of this universe - the enigmatic aliens the Consu, and the skip drive. When the skip drive was introduced in the first book, it was explained that ships equipped with it didn’t travel through space so much as they skipped into a parallel universe that was so close as to be indistinguishable from the original universe, and that people shouldn’t bother thinking about it. Multiverse stories have all the rage recently, but what the author does with it here did not feel trite or overdone to me. Without spoiling the mysteries, I will say that this story move the overall political plot forward and satisfying ways, while giving us interesting characters that, unlike in a number of previous books by this author, actually felt like different people.
It was a real page turner and a return to form by an author I really like and like to enjoy.
