I first encountered John Scalzi’s writing courtesy of his blog Whatever in late 2008, and found a funny and insightful writer. Naturally, I wanted to sample some of his books, and as it happened, The Last Colony was the only book I could get my hands on at the time.
This is sort-of-important because The Last Colony is the third in a series of books collectively known as Old Man’s War series, or OMW for short. But this is by no means an impediment, as Scalzi makes sure that any new reader is brought up to speed on the important bits even as he gets this story moving.
In the distant future, humanity is ruled by the Colonial Union, who fights with several alien civilizations in a bid to secure worlds to colonize. It gets both colonists and soldiers from Earth, which is blissfully unaware of grim state of things beyond the atmosphere. The colonists can be almost any age, but the soldiers are recruited exclusively from Earth’s elderly, which the Colonial Union can make young again by transferring their minds into genetically enhanced bodies. Young, beautiful, quick, strong – on the face of it, an excellent deal… until you learn that these young, beautiful, quick, strong bodies are rapidly and repeatedly sent out to fight, bleed, and die against nearly every alien race out there. If you survive to the end of your term of service, you can either stay in the army (and be young forever), or you can muster out, be given a normal human body, and settle down on one of the many colony worlds the Colonial Union has taken from those self-same aliens (just to be clear, the CU is not like the United Federation of Planets – it’s nasty). Our hero, John Perry, having had his fill of fighting, has mustered out and settled on the planet of Huckleberry, along with his wife Jane Sagan (another former super-soldier), and his adopted daughter Zoe Boutin.
But, as in the action movies, “just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in.” Perry is offered a job to lead a new colony, named Roanoke, and soon finds himself and his family, along with his assistant Savitri Guntupalli, and Zoe’s two alien bodyguards (it’s complicated), in the middle of a plot to shatter an alien alliance known as the Conclave. You see, the Colonial Union may be nasty, but then so was every other alien race out there – until an ambitious and war-weary alien named Tarsem Gau convinced over four hundred races to work together for a lasting peace. The Conclave was the result of his efforts, and one of the first things it decreed was that any non-affiliated race may no longer colonize. If they do, the Conclave stomps on those illegal colonies – hard.
Since the Colonial Union refused Gau’s invitation for humanity to join the Conclave, we’re on the non-affiliated list… and so Roanoke is an illegal colony. Perry, his family and friends, and nearly 2,500 other colonists are now pawns to be used and thrown away. When the CU’s plot goes sideways, Perry, Jane, and Zoe have to use all their wits and resources to keep their colony alive and safe – for if Roanoke falls, the entire human race faces extinction.
With a description like that, you could almost expect it to be a long, grim, war story, but it’s not. In fact, there’s only one real battle in the tale. The rest is a well written tale brimming with likeable characters, a plot that doesn’t stay still for a moment, a healthy mix of drama and humour. Expanding on the humour angle for a moment, Savitri practically steals the show every time she appears; and I suspect Scalzi had at least as much fun writing her dialogue as I had reading it.
Running through the tale are some interesting thoughts on loyalty; where people place it, who deserves it, and what comes from it. And although there is a sneering bad guy, there’s a credible case that the real villain is the Colonial Union’s government policy. They may be the only ones looking out for humanity, but as Perry states near the end, they’re not doing a good job of it. At the end, Perry does something that upsets the status quo so much, the Colonial Union will have no choice but to change.
As I said at the beginning, The Last Colony is not the first book in the OMW series; all the books are out in both paperback and e-book format, so if you haven’t read any of the OMW books, you might want to start with the very first one, Old Man’s War. But The Last Colony is still a good entry point to the series, and a fun read to boot. It certainly made me a loyal reader.
Next time, we’ll look at something older on my bookshelf; Poul Anderson’s Shield, coming June 19.