Published in 2005 by Tor Books. Paperback, 313 pages.

A couple hundred years into the future, Earth is a backwater. Humans have long since mastered interstellar travel, but this technology is kept away from the humans on Earth, whose society don’t really seem much different from that we live in today. Excepting of course that people from overpopulated areas can be allowed by the Colonial Union to move off the planet, and that others are allowed to move off the planet at the age of 75, if they are willing to devote the next ten years of their lives after this point to service in the Colonial Defence Forces. Despite the oddness of this requirement — who’d want a geriatric army? — most humans accept this offer. After all, they’re given the chance to see the bloody Universe!

One of those who accept this offer is John Perry. He and his wife had originally agreed to sign up together, but she died just two years after they at the age of 65 had signed papers confirming their status as potential CDF recruits. So on his seventyfifth birthday he visits the local recruitment office, signs the remaining papers, and within a few days he’s in orbit along with a couple of thousand other geriatrics, on a Colonial Union space station, awaiting shipment to the CDF training camps on a distant planet. Needless to say, the most discussed topic is what the CDF will do to make their bodies young again — this rejuvenation aspect is also one of the commonest reasons to sign up.

Hopefully, if you read this and choose to pick up a copy of this book, you won’t encounter the one I did, where the solution to this problem was given away in one of the cover blurbs, of all things. In the spirit of this hope, I’ll try to avoid spoiling this part.

The book then follows Perry’s military career. It’s all narrated by Perry himself, in the first person, which help to add a lot of intimacy to the tale. Perry is also a very likeable guy, so it didn’t take me long to warm to and begin sympathizing with him. The same goes for the other recurring characters, a gang of recruits Perry first encountered on on the “space elevator” that took them from Earth to the Colonial Union space station.

There isn’t much of a main plot line in the book, really. Or there is, in the sense that it follows Perry through the first couple of years in this his second life, with training, battles, hanging around with other soldiers, and that sort of stuff. Later, the book starts focusing on Perry’s obsession with the Special Forces, which is as close the book comes to having a unifying plot. Most of the time, though, it reads kinda like a travelogue, with Perry describing other alien cultures, the history of the human colonization of space, battles, and travels. Perry also befriends a former high school physics teacher and a theoretical physicist, who teach him a bit of what they know of science. This knowledge is of course far inferior to that of Colonial scientists, but combined with the retrospect narrative form which allows Narrator-Perry to supplement the knowledge of Narrated-Perry and his friends, it provides the reader with a quick introduction to the science of his premise. It also helps that most of the scientists in the beginning are forced to be quite open with their information in order not to freak their patients out more than they already are.

In addition to the travelogue aspect, much of the book reads kinda like a Starship Troopers pastiche — only with less Fascistoid political reflections (as far as I’ve been able to gather, at least, as I only have first-hand knowledge of Heinlein from the Starship Troopers movie, and that’s hardly first-hand, really). Perry and his fellow soldiers are sent off to fight alien races — all of which are brilliantly thought up and portrayed, by the way; really one of the novel’s strongest points, and that’s saying something — who desire the same potential colonies as humans (or, in many cases, the humans themselves; we’re considered quite the delicatesse), and after about a year’s worth of descriptions of military life, Perry has a breakdown. This happens during a battle in the capital of the Covandu — a people uncannily humanoid, but only one inch tall — where he after spending several hours literally stomping out the life of an intelligent species finally allows his feelings to run a little amuck. But, like his commanding officer says, this happens to every soldier at a certain point.

All in all I thought this was a brilliant novel. It doesn’t have the gravitas of “serious” literature, but reflects on a lot of important issues, especially ones related to identity, while aiming for a light, humorous tone. And it works splendidly.

8.0/10.

It’s really great to read some of this kind of science fiction again. Don’t think I’ve done that since I was a kid, and then it wasn’t really this kind.

To conclude: A gazillion thanks and a lot of cred to Amras Elensar! If it hadn’t been for you, I’d probably never read this awesome book.

Also? Great expectations for The Ghost Brigades.