The hero of Old Man’s Wa r is 75 years old. But at first glance, the ingredients in this book seem even older. Few sci-fi plots are more over-worked than the space war with aliens—just look at H.G. Wells or Orson Welles, or other storytellers who went to this now almost dry well one time too many. In fact, almost every chapter in this book will remind you of something you've encountered before. Even the writing and character development draw on well-known precedents.
Let me tell it to you straight. Old Man’s War is not one of the new highbrow literary fiction works of the current day that mix speculative concepts with Iowa Writers’ Workshop techniques. Scalzi may have studied briefly with Saul Bellow, but his book bears no resemblance to Herzog or The Adventures of Augie March . The ethos and stylistic conventions at play here come straight out of the pulp fiction tales of a now distant day. Nor will you find any trendy cyberpunk or steampunk angle to seize hold of in these pages.
This is an adventure story, as old school as it gets. But, lordy, what an adventure story!
I don’t know if you can teach storytelling skills of this caliber, whether at the Iowa Workshop or inside Saul Bellow’s office. The goal of this kind of writing is easy enough to describe. The author must construct a novel in which each subplot and interlude is compelling and infused with suspense. Familiar elements drawn from previous books are inevitable, but each incident must come with a new twist or unexpected variation. Readers should be enticed into anticipating certain development and resolutions, but you can’t give them only what they expect—otherwise they lose interest. They should feel that they are treading on familiar ground yet, at every moment, heading into something different and exciting…and perhaps unnerving.
Yes, this is all easy to describe. But pulling it off is another thing entirely. And even rarer is the first-time novelist who can achieve all this in a literary debut. In the realm of popular fiction, only a handful of writers have achieved this—Ian Fleming in Casino Royale (1953) or Frederick Forsyth in The Day of the Jackal (1971) and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) come to mind. Each of these authors worked within the tightest genre formulas, yet made the conventions seem fresh and, well, a little less conventional than they were before this bold new talent arrived on the scene.
The basic plot of Old Man’s War offers the first unexpected twist. Unlike every other war in human history, the military encounter in Scalzi’s novel relies on senior citizen combatants. Savor the opening paragraph:
“I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.”
Nice, no? And why do these oldsters abandon the senior center and handball court for a stint in the military? The answer is simple: they believe that the army possesses technology to make them young again. Why else would the authorities sign up recruits who have so little life in them?
When you spill the beans on your surprising switcheroo plot in the opening paragraph, you better have more surprises in reserve for your readers. And Scalzi does just that. Yes, every step in this story has been told thousands of times before. We get the recruitment office scene, the mean drill sergeant interlude, the first test on the battlefied moment. These could easily collapse into a series of clichés and recycled set pieces. But Scalzi never settles for serving up second-hand goods. Even the love story, usually the weakest part of a sci-fi story, is handled with deftness and imagination. I won’t offer a spoiler here, but I will say that Scalzi comes up with an angle on romance and courtship that I’ve never encountered before, and integrates it into his main plot with great skill.
Scalzi is quick to acknowledge his predecessors. Robert Heinlein offered the basic blueprint for this type of book in his Starship Troopers (1959). And at least one response to Heinlein’s novel has gained renown as a genre classic in its own right, namely Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974). But Scalzi’s novel has earned its place alongside these well-known works, and its achievement may be all the more spectacular—after all, he needed to reinvent this storyline almost a fifty years after Heinlein’s book, and more than a generation after Star Wars.
If you enjoyed any of these works, this book should be on your reading list. Just be forewarned. Old Man’s War , despite the name, is not your grandpa’s sci-fi. Like the characters in this novel, it has been rejuvenated.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).