These Are Not the Supersoldiers You're Looking for

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Book cover

Before reading Old Man's War, my only experience with John Scalzi's work had been the handful of episodes he wrote for Love Death + Robots, which were a welcome refreshing note in the middle of an otherwise very underwhelming show. After following him on Twitter and its descendants for quite a while, the moment eventually came when I simply had to see for myself what this multi-award winner was like. That moment happened when I stumbled upon Old Man's War in a Spanish translation at the Bogotá Book Fair. It will surely please Mr. Scalzi to hear that his books are selling in Colombia.

To summarize: Old Man's War is about a future where humankind is in a state of perpetual war with dozens of expansionist species, and the brutal conditions of war have led human scientists to design supersoldiers with extra strength, extra endurance, extra resistance to diseases, and extra hotness. So the old people of Earth are invited to join the Colonial Defense Forces. In exchange for legally dying on Earth, their minds are transplanted into magnificent young bodies that exceed every human standard but are the bare minimum for having a fighting chance against what the universe will throw at them.

Why old people? Because the necessary degree of self-sacrifice is harder for the young. This is an exceptionally horrific type of war that soldiers should not expect to survive, so the CDF only seek those with enough maturity to do a very difficult, very scary and very painful thing for potentially no personal benefit.

On one hand, it's brilliant of the author to have found a solution for the obviously suicidal problem of civilizations that throw away their most talented youth by making them cannon fodder. On the other hand, the fact that the CDF maintain an information embargo around Earth has a nasty vibe that isn't much questioned in the first novel, but I was relieved to find was put at the center of the discussion in the sequels. I'm talking about the arrogance of generals who don't bother answering to civilian oversight and at the same time behave condescendingly to those civilians who have no idea of the kind of sacrifices that are required to keep the civilization alive.

From the summaries I've read of the sequels, it appears that that arrogance will be faced with strong counterpoints. Good. But just judging by the first novel, it would be too easy to end up believing that the CDF status quo is presented as a good and desirable thing. Most of the plot of Old Man's War is about training new soldiers, and that is where the author repeatedly falls for a tempting misstep: the “this is not like the movies” defense. To hear CDF drill sergeants, all the space war movies you've watched have gotten it wrong. Dangerously wrong, if you go to space war with the garbage those movies put in your head. No, this is not like the movies! This is real life!! This is serious!!!! We have finally figured out how to fight in space the right way!!!!!!!!

(Whenever this claim appears in a work of fiction, it's inevitable to imagine the author chuckling at the keyboard and thinking, I have finally figured out how to write space war the right way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

The problem with inserting this explicit criticism of all other space war fiction is that it gives Old Man's War an insufferable air of “Verily, verily I say unto you.” For example, there's a chapter where the lesson is “You have heard that it was said, Thou Shalt Give Peace A Chance, but truly I tell you: Thou Dost Not Have Even The Most Basic Intercultural Context To Reliably Interpret The Intentions Of An Alien People.” Several times in the novel, a recruit meets a gruesome death as the predictable consequence of trying to do things his own way. But the mistakes these recruits make are too obvious, too amateurish, and it's hard to suspend disbelief about these scenes when one considers that these characters have the brains of experienced grandparents. This eagerness to demonstrate to the reader that all the movies are wrong and We Finally Got It Right contradicts the whole intention of recruiting old people in the first place.

The problem goes deeper: the reason why the CDF got it right is that humans do live in an extremely hostile universe, where some cultures treat war as a holy cleansing ritual that doesn't proceed according to human tactical thinking, while others (alarmingly too many) have a taste for human flesh. But that's the setting that Scalzi chose to create. If we're meant to read Old Man's War as Scalzi making a point about the prudent and imprudent ways of conducting interstellar relations, we must also keep in mind that it was Scalzi's choice to put Earth in a universe of fanatical mass murderers and cannibals. Scalzi even acknowledges this line of attack: one recruit, who in his youth was a diplomat, criticizes the CDF's readiness to use violence, and his superiors are too annoyed at him to bother explaining that diplomacy has already been extensively tried, that some cultures simply cannot be reasoned with. But again, that is only true in that particular setting, where humankind makes it into space when it's already dominated by a zero-sum squabble of territorial expansion. It isn't as hopelessly grim as Liu Cixin's detestable Dark Forest hypothesis, but the effect in game theory terms is very similar.

(Also, this is the image of the universe that the CDF have chosen to present to their soldiers, an image that the sequels will helpfully question.)

I went into this book hoping to get some insights on old age from the perspective of a young writer (Scalzi was 36 at the time of publication). And I have to admit he does a very good job of putting himself in the mindset of characters twice his age. But sometimes his personal brand of humor gets in the way when important ideas are being explored. I will definitely read more Scalzi, because he does have interesting things to say, but perhaps it won't be in this series. I guess I should have started this post by explaining that I have very little patience for military fiction, and it may take it some years to recover enough for me to try the sequels. What I will definitely need to brace for in future readings is the copious swearing that Scalzi is famous for. As with everything in art, your mileage may vary. In my case, it was exhausting.

—Arturo

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