The Last Colony by John Scalzi.

Tor Science Fiction, 2007.
320 pages.

“Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”

— Commissioner Pravin Lal of the Peacekeepers,
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

The Last Colony, the concluding volume of John Scalzi’s science fiction series consisting Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades (which I’ve curiously enough not reviewed), sees the return of mental octogenarian John Perry and his teenaged commando wife Jane Sagan. About a handful of years have passed since the events described in OMW and TGB, and Perry and Sagan are living on the planet of Huckleberry, close to the city of New Goa, with their adopted teenage daughter, Zoë. Perry is working as a village ombudsman, solving the problems of the villagers, while Sagan is the local law enforcer, when an old acquaintance from the Colonial Defense Forces seeks them out. The Colonial Union, he tells them, has decided to establish a new colony on the planet Roanoke, and Perry and Sagan have been chosen to lead the first wave of colonists, consisting of 2500 people from ten different planets. They are skeptical at first, but finally accept, although they both sense that something is slightly amiss with the whole project. And since every novel needs a conflict, it does not take long before they discover that few is what it seems, and that a menace connected to the past of both Jane and Zoë is threatening not only them and their colony, but the entire human race.

The Last Colony is a fun little book, which continues where OMW and TGB left off. In the series’ first installment we learned that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of hostile races in space and that none of them like humans very much. TGB expanded on this, primarily by introducing the idea of a kind of intergalactic Berlin Conference, and it is this strand that is followed in TLC. It continues the exploration of Scalzi’s paranoia-inducing Hobbesian universe, brings in other ideas any student of international relations ought to be familiar with (I was left thinking about the Neo-Neo synthesis, for those of you in the know), and gives the world additional complexity and depth. Mind you, this isn’t complexity and depth of the kind found in, say, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Steven Erikson’s Tales from the Malazan book of the Fallen (I’m sorry that I don’t know of any science fiction novels to use as examples here, but I have an extremely superficial relationship to the genre). It isn’t mind-boggling, overwhelming or approaching realistic dimensions. However, for such a short, entertaining series, I still think it’s quite good. The racial part of the world building is great, Scalzi’s presentation of the difficult political relationships between these races is exemplary, as are the various internal political situations in the different power blocks (especially that of the Colonial Union), and the technological side of the shebang manages to flabbergast a poor humanist, if nothing else. In all these respects, Scalzi masterfully hints at a greater depth than he really presents, thus preventing his world from feeling superficial.

The same goes for the characters. John Perry and Jane Sagan in particular and a couple of other main characters as well all have enough distinct personality traits to make them seem believable, while the light and effective prose and fast pace of Scalzi’s narrative doesn’t allow for much more. Some are of course more rounded than others, and a few come off as little more than foils to the main characters, but that’s the way most novels of this kind end up. And Scalzi’s little trilogy sure as Hell (if we for a minute overlook the fact that I, for one, reject the existence of any Hell or hells) isn’t among the worst in this respect.

When it comes to plot, TLC manages to slip through with an “approved” stamp here, too. Twists and more or less unexpected revelations are portioned out throughout the novel, with suspenseful intervals in between where John Perry, Jane Sagan and their colonists do their best to survive under difficult conditions on a hostile planet, while Perry, Sagan and a few accomplices do their best to excavate the truth about their mission from the isolated outpost they’re stranded on. I found something interesting about all these plot strands, which is kinda rare; every novel usually has at least one subplot that bores me just about to death. I have two diminutive issues with the plot, though. The first is that Scalzi has to insult us by resort to a deus ex machina in the novel’s climatic fight scene; the other is that the closing chapter could have been a bit longer. The second point is the least important, though, as I’m ambiguous about whether Scalzi’s aforementioned effective prose (there’s few if any superfluous scenes in any of his novels that I have read) improves or ruins the ending.

To sum things up, The Last Colony brought a good and entertaining end to the first and this far only chapter in the Old Man’s war universe. It is a quick read, easily finished in two or four evenings (I think I spent perhaps six or seven hours on it), with lots of things that’ll make you laugh out loud (Scalzi still writes very witty characters, and his narrator isn’t exactly dimwitted either), a few that might make you cringe, and maybe even some that will make you tense up for a few minutes as you read them. It does, however, not challenge the reader to any noticeable extent, but seeing as I can’t really imagine people coming to a novel such as this expecting to be challenged, I don’t consider it to be much of a problem.

7.0/10.

(Also, I want to draw attention to John Harris’ awesome impressionist cover illustrations. They’ve all been both tasteful and dramatic, and are among my favourites.)