The back half of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series contained decidedly experimental volumes — the alternate-POV Zoe’s Tale, and the serial-format books discussed in this review, The Human Division and The End of All Things. They progress essentially chronologically, but through the viewpoint of several humans and non-humans. Dealing with the fallout from the events at the end of the third book The Last Colony, the human-governed Colonial Union (CU) and its military arm, the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) must contend with the recently enlightened […]

In my micro review for The Last Colony, the third and previous book in this series, I noted that the third book was the last in the series, considered in a traditional fashion. That’s because Zoe’s Tale is an alternate POV re-telling of The Last Colony, and the books that follow are also a little different in their structure, but I’ll get to that in those reviews. Alternate POV novelizations aren’t unheard of, but they’re tricky to pull off and are often viewed by more […]

The progression of the Old Man’s War series has been pretty clever. On its face, the series is a story about humans in space fighting against the aliens who want to kill us. From the beginning, we suspected it couldn’t possibly be so simple, but while the first two books were tasked with introducing readers to the expanded universe, including the political and military branches that oversee and enforce human space activity, they only included speculation on the other races’ intentions toward humanity. Finally, in […]