Old Man's War
Hugo Award nominee 2006, Locus Award nominee 2006.
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.
The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce - and aliens willing
to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile
place.
So: we fight. To defend Earth (a target for our new
enemies, should we let them get close enough) and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has gone on for
decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.
Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial
Defense Force, which shields the home planet from too much knowledge of
the situation. What's known to everybody is that when you reach
retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living.
You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve your time at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous
homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.
John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder
than he can imagine - and what he will become is far stranger.
"Gripping and surpassingly original. It's Starship Troopers without the lectures. It's The Forever War with better sex. It's funny, it's sad, and it's true." - Cory Doctorow
"John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective - a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe." - Robert Charles Wilson
John Scalzi
John Michael Scalzi II (born 1969) is an American science fiction author and online writer, and former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is best known for his Old Man's War series, three novels of which have been nominated for the Hugo Award, and for his blog Whatever, at which he has written daily on a number of topics since 1998. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fanwriter in 2008 based predominantly on that blog, which he has also used for several prominent charity drives. His novel Redshirts won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. He has written non-fiction books and columns on diverse topics such as finance, video games, films, astronomy, and writing, and served as a creative consultant for the TV series Stargate Universe.
Old Man's War Universe
Old Man's War Universe consists of six primary books, and includes two additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
