Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First of all, I strongly recommend reading this right after The Last Colony. It’s been as long time since I read it and so it took some effort for me to remember the original story beats this was supposed to be referencing.

Second, Scalzi does a great job retelling the story and adding lots of depth to it. It brought a new perspective to events from the last book. The contrast between the way adults and teens handled things seemed spot on.

Old Man’s War Boxed Set 1 by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have rapidly become a Scalzi fanboy. I’m proof of the sentiment behind Scalzi’s new $3 million deal - when someone reads one Scalzi book, they read them all. I don’t believe it discounts what I’m going to say, but it’s worth noting up front. Starting with The God Engines and going through Red Shirts, I’ve built up a huge enjoyment for Scalzi’s style. What style is that? I’ve had a hard time articulating it to friends and family. Here’s my best shot - Old Man’s War is not a comedy, but it’s funny. It’s an like action movie, but it’s not dumb. The humor mostly comes from witty or sarcastic responses by the main characters. Even though it’s framed as a military action book, it’s mostly a series of character studies. I also enjoy that both within a book and within the series, Scalzi only doles out information as needed. This has two good effects. First, there are no info dumps - or if there’s more than one paragraph of explanation, it’s the only way Scalzi has of conveying it Second, as we learn more of the universe - either through our POV characters learning more or by going from regular army to special forces, it forces us to re-evaluate what we learned before in a new light. Most apt in that comparison is the scientist telling our main character early in the first book about how the space elevator is designed in such a way as to be a symbol of how much more advanced the Colonial Union is than Earth without revealing just how advanced. With all that’s learned (mostly in the second two books), the scale of that deception is truly realized.

The God Engines by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very short book. Well, technically it’s a novella - it even says so on the jacket flap. The MSRP is $25 and I think it’s not worth all that for how short it is. However, it’s $9 for hardcover or $5 on Kindle right now and I think that’s a fair price. Because it is so short, I finished it in one day over about two hours, but that’s actually an indication of how good I found it. Last night, just before bed I planned to read 2 more pages to finish the chapter I was on. But I was very intrigued by what had just happened in the book. I didn’t want to stop reading. I look at at how many pages I had left and spent the next half hour finishing the book. Had it been a longer book I would have put it aside and gone to bed.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(warning: This whole review is full of spoilers!) When I first heard about this book I thought about it in the same way that I thought of the Battleship movie. The Red Shirt joke is a fun joke that’s been parodied endlessly. But is it enough to sustain a book? Yes, and it works because of the way that Scalzi does it. He essentially turns it into a space version of Stranger than Fiction. The characters learn quite quickly that things are a little off and that some of the individuals on their ship appear to be impervious to death. They act with a realistic amount of skepticism until too much evidence mounts for them to be able to ignore the idea that something screwy is going on.