Old man's war

[ndkid]

So my Chemistry teacher started loaning me some scifi books, and one of them was Old Man's War by John Scalzi. I read the whole series and really enjoyed them.
So I was wondering if anyone else had read the books and had any thoughts on them.
I personnally enjoyed the universe that is inside the books, Scalzi makes a deep universe to support his plot much like Starship Troopers.
What do you guys think about the books?

[Izawwlgood]

I enjoyed the first one, and the following books just sucked.

They're very campy, and definitely have moments of good fun, but there's not a whole lot of original material, and a bunch of 'hero enters battlefield and saves the day!' type interactions.

Still, those Spartan Model Warrior Bodies were fucking rad.

[Jahoclave]

I much prefer Scalzi's non-fiction works, especially his experiments in bacon cat technology.

[CogDissident]

I quite enjoyed them as well, and he did have a few moment of originality (beyond just being enjoyable military-sci-fi).

Such as "how do you win a war against hundreds of alien civilizations that are bigger than you?"
The answer being to genetically engineer people into being able to live on asteroid belts and in deep space natively, since nobody wants those anyway. The species in his novels only go to war over resources, not ideologies (usually), so living somewhere that people don't care about means that humanity has a good foothold somewhere nobody else does. This is only touched on in two of the last books in the series, but its still a new concept.

[Izawwlgood]

It's been a while since I read these books, but weren't those genetically engineered humans not actually for colonization, but for military purposes?

[CogDissident]

Quite true, though at the end of the main character's conversation with one, he says that they plan to retire in their current bodies, as they no longer identify with normal human anatomy. And at one point they talk about setting up asteroid-belt-colonies of retired soldiers. So, while the main idea was as weapons, its clear that they also intended them to be secondarily a colonization effort. Probably because almost all technology in the books focuses on military applications first and foremost, and the secondary benefits trickle down from the military use.