Another wonderful debut novel is John Scalzi's Old Man's War. In this tale of intergalactic warfare, Mr. Scalzi goes beyond the normal Heinlein-esque cliches of most recent Sci-fi novels. Not that I have anything aginst Robert Heinlein, because I love the great majority of his works (although The Cat Who Walks Through Walls leaves much to be desired), but apparently many sci-fi writers subscribe to the "if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing" mantra. While Scalzi obviously got a great deal of inspiration from Heinlein, he goes above and beyond with the depth of his characters. As beloved as Juan Rico is to me, John Perry has taken his throne. While Rico was a great character who made the struggles of his life easily understandable, he was somewhat two-dimensional and unchanging, a trait not shared by Scalzi's protagonist.
The premise of Old Man's War is that, instead of recruiting armies from the young and inexperienced due to their physical prowess, a breakthrough technology that allows the transferring of one's consciousness into another body makes it possible to recruit the extremely old: just put them in new bodies. These new bodies are cloned using their DNA, but are heavily modified to make them better warriors, such as increased strength and agility, more efficient blood (SmartBlood), etc. The most important aspect is the BrainPal, a computer that is integrated directly into each recruit's brain, allowing them all sorts of abilities: storing information, communicating instantly among other BrainPal users, etc. Basically, if you had an automated, intelligent Google in your head that actually answered your questions instead of giving you thinly-veiled porn links.
These new recruits go through boot camp and travel throughout the universe defending Earth's colonies from alien attack, as well as attacking hostile aliens and trying to take their colonies. However, as the novel progresses, Perry's worldview (or universeview, I guess) begins to change as he confronts the reality they live in: everyone is constantly fighting everyone else, killing instead of finding diplomatic solutions.
I won't give away any more than I already have. This is another book I highly recommend. There are a few sequels that are also very good, especially The Last Colony.
9.5/10 - wonderful
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