Old Man’s War was published by Tor Books in January 2005, after appearing in a serialized version on Scalzi’s blog “Whatever.” It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel and established Scalzi as one of the major voices in contemporary military science fiction. The premise is irresistible: in this future, you can only join the Colonial Defense Forces on your seventy-fifth birthday. The elderly of Earth trade their dying bodies for new, enhanced, youthful ones — but in return they must fight humanity’s wars against hostile alien species in a galaxy far more crowded and dangerous than anyone on Earth knows.
John Perry, a retired advertising writer from Ohio, enlists on the day of his seventy-fifth birthday — the same day he visits the grave of his wife Kathy, who died eight years earlier. He is transferred to a new body: green-skinned, superhumanly strong and fast, equipped with a neural computer interface called a BrainPal. He finds himself fighting a succession of alien species in conflicts whose strategic logic he can barely comprehend, as the Colonial Defense Forces fight to secure habitable planets for an expanding humanity.
Scalzi is transparently working in the tradition of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers — the military SF novel as adventure story combined with philosophical speculation about duty, identity, and the ethics of violence. But where Heinlein’s politics are authoritarian, Scalzi’s are liberal: his protagonist is intelligent enough to question orders, compassionate enough to mourn alien dead, and mature enough (being, after all, mentally seventy-five) to understand that the universe offers no simple moral frameworks.
Collecting Old Man’s War
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2005): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $75–$150
- Signed firsts: $250–$600
- Trade paperback first (2005): $15–$40