• Read any of these titles? Tell people what you thought!

• Recommend another military science fiction novel.

For some reason, I find it somewhat embarrassing to admit to really enjoying reading good military science fiction, but it’s true. Someone suggested that liking military sf is similar to liking to eat red meat (which I don’t eat, or at any rate not a lot of). Yet many of my all time favorite sf novels, including Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, are prime examples of this sub-genre.


As I’m always on the lookout for a new author, I was pleased to discover John Scalzi, whose first novel, Old Man’s War, is clearly influenced by, but not derivative of, my three favs. At 75, John Perry joins the Colonial Defense Force, gets a vastly improved-over-the-original body of a 25 year-old, and reports for active duty, where he and his platoon fight throughout the universe against a variety of aliens bent on the destruction of humanity. Everybody’s favorite line in the book has to be: “Conquering the world was beginning to get to me.” One of the pleasures of military science fiction is to see what aliens the author has been able to dream up; I was quite taken with Scalzi’s description of the Covandu, who are described as being “bipedal, mammalian, extraordinarily gifted in artistic matters, particularly poetry and drama, fast breeding and unusually aggressive when it came to the universe and their place in it.” They’re also no more than one inch tall, so the best way to kill them is to simply step on them. Yikes.