Book Review: Old Man's War

I'm rereading Old Man's War, by John Scalzi for probably the fourth or fifth time in the last year.  Ok, I'm a fast reader.  And yeah, I like my favorite books.  Books on my "constant reread" list tend to feel like old friends I'm seeing again.  Sure, I know exactly what's going to happen.  But who cares?  I like my nice, safe, familiar book worlds.

So anyway, I'm rereading Old Man's War, because, even though it's really Heinlein/Starship Troopers-lite, it's a pretty damn funny book.  Like Starship Troopers, humanity is fighting a big war against extraterrestrials, and we see this fight through the eyes of someone who is enlisted as a soldier.  But here's the catch - the soldiers are all old people from Earth, put into new, improved bodies, and set lose on all the alien species wanting to kill off humans.  Lots of action.  Lots of great, funny dialogue.  Really, the best part of the book is the dialogue.  Scalzi makes his characters eminently likable.  And you know - and here's where I'm an undiscerning sap when it comes to books - good things happen to the main character!  You root for him, he succeeds, and I'm happy.  Maybe it's not great literature, on the scale of character agony, pain and deprivation, but for this book, it works.

Plot development-wise, the book is pretty light.  It really reads like a combination of Starship Troopers and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, but instead of children, we have geriatrics.  The plot's been done before - no big surprises here.  But it's a nice, fairly happy sci-fi novel with good dialogue and funny characters.  And sometimes, that's pretty tough to find in the pretty big genre of science fiction, and that's really what makes this book worth reading.