During a recent trip to the local Borders Book Store I happened upon a paperback in the science fiction/fantasy section titled, OLD MAN'S WAR. The cover art was reminiscent of the old sci-fi classics that I had read as a teenager so, intrigued, I picked a copy up off the shelf and gave it a good old once over. Down at the bottom of the front cover were the words, "WINNER OF THE JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER", which is always a good sign. Another quote on the front compared the author to Heinlein and I was sold.

The author's name was John Scalzi and this was a tale of military science fiction – right up my alley. So I turned to page one and started reading...what a great move that turned out to be. OLD MAN'S WAR centers around the Colonial Defense Forces and their unique recruiting methods on Earth. You see – there's an interstellar war raging out there among the stars but the people of the Earth can only learn about it on the news. In order to be a part of the action, you have to sign over your Earthly life – literally – and be declared dead on Earth. You have to sign over several years to military service in the Colonial Defense Forces and acknowledge that you will see quite a bit of combat, so much in fact that you most likely will not live through your first term of service. You have to sign over all of your Earthly possessions to your family and loved ones, you have to give up everything you've ever known and you have to leave the planet forever, never to see your friends and family again. Oh, yeah, and there's one more catch – you have to be over the age of 75 to join up. The Colonial Defense Forces don't want men and women with no life experience. They want fully developed, fully educated, fully matured men and women to join the fight against any one of a dozen or so alien races – all seemingly determined to wipe we humans from the face of the universe.

So, you might ask, how do a bunch of senior citizens go out and fight a war against several vicious races of alien beings? Easy – once their minds have been transferred to new younger bodies that were grown from their own DNA several years earlier during the initial recruiting process. Bodies that are vastly superior in every way to normal human bodies. Bodies that make the ugly process of fighting a war out among the stars just a bit more feasible. Bodies with quicker reflexes, greater strength, more stamina and a thick coating of green skin. Bodies with enhanced eyesight, stronger hearing and advanced healing abilities. Perfect bodies for soldiering.

Enter John Perry – an old man who is mourning the loss of his wife and decides to join up and leave it all behind. As it turns out, the war is nothing like he had envisioned it. Earth bound humans had no real idea of what was going on out there in the heavens each and every day. They were not aware of the horrors, the brutality and the violence of life in space. Had no idea of just what it was that the recruits did to defend their very freedom on a daily basis. The Colonial Defense Forces existed for a reason – and they trained their recruits to be the very best soldiers they could be. Unfortunately, for most of these recruits, that training would not be enough to see them through.

But John Perry was one of the lucky ones – although not a military man in his former life, he was good at the art of war. He was a survivor. With some skill and a lot of luck, John Perry lived while many of the friends he made among the recruits died. He earned honors and promotions for quick thinking on the battlefield and he earned the respect of many veterans in the CDF – including his wife...who had died quite a few years earlier. But that's a part of the story better left for the reader to discover.

John Scalzi has indeed woven a tale of science fiction worthy of the awards that have been bestowed upon it. I greatly enjoyed OLD MAN'S WAR and find myself eagerly awaiting the paperback release of the second novel in this trilogy: THE GHOST BRIGADES. Scalzi shows more than promise as a new author on the science fiction scene. If he keeps writing novels like this one, he'll be a recognizable name in the genre for many years to come.

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army. The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce - and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.

John, of course, does not fight in his seventy-five year old body. He is given a new, much improved one (sort of the Six Million Dollar Man on steroids) that transforms him into a mean fighting machine. He'll need all of his resources. It's a scary, violent, deadly universe out there; soldiers are lucky to last a few months. We follow John and his "family", a group of elderly who joined at the same time he did, from boot camp to the interstellar fighting fields. Not all of them survive.

Scalzi retains his smoothly flowing style in Old Man's War, and there are traces of humour reminiscent of his first novel, Agent to the Stars, but the story is deeper, richer, more inquisitive than Agent. It could be qualified as a space opera but, just as Robert Charles Wilson's Spin, it goes beyond the genre. Scalzi questions what makes us human, in a very different way. John Perry doesn't have his own battered body, but retains his mind and his experiences. So the question appears: what makes us "us"? How is our humanity defined? Our personality? How much of it would we retain if we were to be reborn, or brought back from death?

He also asks the question: if there are aliens out there (and who says there aren't), would violence, born of an inability to understand each other, be the only solution?

Scalzi's Old Man's War is deceptive. Sure, it can read as a simple war story. But if you're willing to become absorbed in the story, you will ask yourself the same questions he poses.

Old Man's War was nominated for a Hugo Award. It's well deserved.