Xi'an's Og

No, this isn’t about the lost battle of John McCain, even though this election day was rightly celebrated as an historic moment! Rather, I just finished a series of three novels from John Scalzi, starting with Old Man’s War, followed by Ghost Brigades and ending up by The Last Colony. This is fairly standard sci-fi’ of the space opera type with aliens and humans battling for planets and the like, but nonetheless quite enjoyable… The first one, Old Man’s War, is certainly the best one with a very very good idea about sending Earth senior citizens to fight colonial wars in the rest of the Universe (no spoiler!) and many clever details. This makes for an easy read and so do both other novels, even though the novelty wears out a little bit. I actually got the first one free from Tor by email and read it on my computer in my hotel room in Cairo last Spring. I then bought the two following ones in the airport when coming back from SAMSI in September and last Sunday, respectively, and I got done with one of them on each trip as I could not let go!

Checking on Amazon, I just saw there are not one but two “sequels”, entitled Sagan’s Diary and Zoe’s Tale, that appear like a remake of Ghost Brigades and of The Last Colony, respectively, seen from another perspective… Can’t get too much of a good thing?! Maybe we can, actually. This really sounds too much like over-stretching the marketing and so I’ll skip the two siblings (unless I end up being stuck in the next airport with really nothing to read…)

This entry was posted on November 5, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Books with tags book review, science fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.