MEGA-Review: the Old Man´s War trilogy, by John Scalzi

One of the most recent examples of a narrative that deals with post-human issues is the Old Man´s War series, written by John Scalzi. Composed by Old Man´s War (2005), The Ghost Brigades (2006), and The Last Colony (2007), plus The Sagan Diary and Zöe´s Tale (2008), this so-called New Space Opera series is a tribute to Robert A. Heinlein´s Starship Troopers, although it pays its respects, both in style as in theme (even if it isn´t purposefully so - see interview below) to Joe Haldeman´s The Forever War. And it is so much closer to Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein than its contemporary cyberpunk counterparts.

The story of Old Man´s War begins approximately two hundred years in our future, in a time when humankind reached a kind of stability, without scarcity of resources or food (although the world is not Utopia, because of a number of wars and minor conflagrations all over the globe). There is, however, an additional factor: Earth has already colonized dozens of star systems through the Colonial Union and its Colonial Defense Forces.

One of the reasons why Earth is more "balanced" is because of the exodus of Third World inhabitants to those colonies. To the First World (especially America, although Europe is also involved in the effort), by decision of CU, was assigned the defense of the colonies.

The interesting thing is that the colonists may leave Earth when they wish, but the first-worlders only are allowed to enlist when they are seventy-five years old. An army of old men (and women)? Yes, but they are old just in spirit: they get an extreme rejuvenating therapy, which consists basically in having their minds transferred Moravec-like to a new body cloned from their own cells and grown until 25 years of age, and with green skin - result of chlorophyll laced to their DNA so they can perform better through photosynthesis. The price for it? They can never return to Earth.

That´s what happens to the protagonist, John Perry. A widower with a son and grown-up grandchildren, Perry doesn´t want to wait for death on Earth. So he enlists. When he is off-Earth, he is rejuvenated along with everyone inside the ship which will take them to their missions in worlds being disputed with a plethora of alien races.

Perry will find out that he will not only look younger, but also faster, stronger and more resilient than he ever was in his former life. Aside from the green skin, every soldier is pumped full of SmartBloodTM, which helps the body to heal faster in case of gunshots, bombings and other wounds. And the BrainPal, a brain implant that augments intelligence and connects people. So John Perry, and his CDF mates, becomes a post-human.

Old Man´s War can be read as a meditation (action-like meditation, but meditation still) on war, but not for it (neither against it, mind you, at least not in this first book of the series). In this point he differs a lot from Heinlein, and it is good that he does, because our real world is very different now. Scalzi isn´t afraid of being politically incorrect, but the thing is, he isn´t. He just has balls, and isn´t afraid of using them as well.

He also has lots of humor - sometimes wicked, but sometimes he´s surprisingly fresh and youthful. The scene in which Perry´s self-appointed group names their BrainPals (using a variety of potty-mouthed names such as Asshole, Dickwad, and Fuckhead) is simply funny, and makes us forget the horrors of war to come. But it´s also a very real, human thing, with no heroics.

Not everyone gets in the joyride, though. In the day before the therapy starts, Perry´s bunk companion dies in his sleep, of a heart attack. The medics who take out the body make a comment that Perry understand as being offensive:

"A last-minute volunteer for the Ghost Brigades," the other Colonial said. I shot a hard stare at him. I thought a joke at this moment was in terrible bad taste.

But this comment is far from being a bad taste joke. Even if Perry doesn´t know it yet, the Ghost Brigades really exist - although this name is unofficial and indeed a deprecating one. Special Forces (the true name of the Brigades) are the cream of the crop of the CDF, both well-liked and feared by everyone. Because they are created literally from dead people.

But the procedure is not so macabre as in Frankenstein - although the principle is basically the same: to create life where it is none. Or, at least, where it no longer exists: physically, the soldiers of Special Forces are exactly the same as the rest of the rejuvenated recruits. There is one single (and fundamental) difference: they are entirely created from DNA of dead individuals, laced to the genome of one or more alien races.

This may account for weird, embarrassing situations, such as John Perry being rescued by a person he identifies as being his late wife Kathy in a battle in Coral, the fifth planet colonized by humans. Everybody tells him he was in shock, and therefore he must have hallucinated the whole thing. Later, when he is recovering, he sees her eating in the canteen of his ship - and finds out that she is not Kathy, but an autonomous human being called Jane Sagan, product of Kathy´s DNA (a legally approved procedure when Kathy signed her pre-enlisting documents in her 65th birthday, a regular procedure on Earth). Sagan becomes very angry with Perry for what she regards as an invasion of privacy, but later he will save her in what will become known as the Second Battle of Coral against the alien race of the Rraey.

In The Ghost Brigades, the second book, John Perry doesn´t appear: he´s just mentioned briefly, for the goal of this novel is to show upclose how the so-called "Ghost Brigades" work. In the first pages, a conversation between Jane Sagan, and Cainen, a Rraey scientist, serves as a narrative device to explain this point:

"We know there are three kinds of human," Cainen said, and held up his fingers, so much longer and more articulated than human fingers, to count off the variations. "There are the unmodified humans, who are the ones who colonize planets. Those come in varying shapes and sizes and colors - good genetic diversity there. The second group is the largest part of your soldier caste. These also vary in size and shape, but to a far lesser extent, and they´re all in the same color: green. We know that these soldiers aren´t in their original bodies - their consciousness is transferred from bodies of older members of your species to these stronger, healthier bodies. These bodies are extensively genetically altered, so much that they can´t breed, either between themselves or with unmodified humans. But they´re still recognizably human, particularly the brain matter."

But Cainen himself expresses doubts regarding the third group:

"That they are created from the dead", Cainen said. "That the human germ plasm of the dead is mixed and remixed with the genetics of other species to see what will arise. That some of them don´t even resemble humans, as they recognize themselves. That they are born as adults, with skills and ability, but no memory. And not only no memory. No self. No morality. No restraint."

This conversation is a preparation for what will come right after that: after the supposed death of Charles Boutin, a genius human scientist who defected to the side of the Obin, (a race enemy of humankind and who consorts with several other races to wipe humans out of the galaxy), the Special Forces manage to collect his DNA and clone him.

And then they do something it wasn´t ever done before: they upload to the clone´s brain the "soul" of Boutin, that is, the "holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness" of the scientist.

That transfer, of course, doesn´t guarantee in the least that the clone awakes with the memories of Boutin, but Special Forces hope that the procedure makes him to behave and think as Boutin would, and that may help them to capture the traitor and find out what he´s been planning against humankind.

Although the transfer of this holographic representation happen without problems, Boutin´s clone wakes up in tabula rasa mode, with neither conscience nor memory of his "original". Then he gets the same treatment of all the other clone-soldiers of the Ghost Brigades.

For starters, he receives a name, the selection criteria being always the same: random selection from a pool of names, from which the first name is usually a Biblical one and the last name pays homage to a famous scientist of the past. Boutin´s clone gets the name of Jared Dirac: Jared, according the the Bible, was the father of Enoch and grandfather of Methuselah (who entered the lore being the oldest man ever to live on Earth - nine hundred sixty-nine years old, with his grandpa not much behind him: the first Jared would have lived nine hundred sixty-two years old), and the last name was given in a tribute to the mathematician Paul Dirac. Information not relevant to Boutin´s clone, but which he start to cherish, because they confer an identity to him.

In his second day of life - and first of training in the Special Forces - , after a petty fight with a mate, Jared receives from his immediate superior a task: to read Frankenstein. Like Mary Shelley´s monster, the newborn soldier also reads fast, but much more faster than him. He downloads the book with the help of his BrainPal and read it in eight minutes. And he understands why he had to read that book:

He and all the members of the 8th - all of the Special Forces soldiers - were the spiritual descendants of the pathetic creature Victor Frankenstein had assembled from the bodies of the dead and then jolted into life. (...) The allusions between the monster and the Special Forces were all to obvious.

So, in an obvious mirroring of Shelley´s story, Jared reads to better understand who he is - and the speed of the entire process is also a mirror (but an inverted one) of the langue dureé (comparatively) of the learning process of Frankenstein´s monster using the books that he finds in the shack of the old blind man De Lacey, books that shaped his gothic, romantic Weltanschauung.

Still using the symbology of the mirror, Jared, who is a kind of new Frankenstein monster (and representative of a new "species" of clones made from the dead, maybe a fourth kind of human), is not content only with reading Mary Shelley´s book, and downloads every single movie version of Frankenstein, plus every possible narrative that presented robots, androids, replicantes et cetera - and, filled with curiousity, he researches the literary ancestry of Frankenstein and learns of the Golem myth, among many other stories featuring homuncles and mechanical automata.

Driven by this new knowledge of himself by means of the time-honored tradition of science fiction, Jared repudiates the tragic view of Frankenstein´s monster in favor of another, more technical, pragmatic Weltanschauung.

The creation of these "Ghost Brigades" is the science-fictional equivalent to the model analyzed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. In that text, Foucault investigates the appearance of the hospital as a therapeutic instrument, a fact that only starts to happen from the 18th Century onwards.

Foucaultian also states that this transformation of the clinic/hospital into an instrument to cure happened not driven by the search of a positive action from the hospital upon the disease or the patient, but to the annulment of the negative effects of the hospital (for instance, the great amount of deaths by infection). He also observes that this transformation starts in the military hospitals, because:

"(...) economic rules and regulations became more and more hard in the mercantile system, and also because the price of men became higher and higher. It is by then that the formation of the subject, his capability, and his skills start having a price for society". (my translation)

Foucault cites the example of the Army, which, upon the invention of the rifle (fusil, in the French original, hence the fusiliers, infantry soldiers who knew how to shoot with this kind of gun) in the end of the 17th Century, becomes mores technical and expensive:

"In order to learn how to use a fusil it will be necessary exercises, maneuvers, training. That´s how the price of a soldier will surpass the price of a simple workforce and the cost of the Army will become an important budgetary issue in every country. When you form a soldier, you cannot let him die. If he should die, he must die as a soldier, in the battlefield, not of a disease". (my translation)

In the universe created by Scalzi, the price of a soldier is so high that he/she becomes much too invaluable to be wasted, even after death; so, his/her DNA is sort of "recycled" and he/she comes back to life in the body of another - an able-bodied being. Who, in opposition to Frankenstein´s monster, not only are accepted by his/her creators (even though they are feared for their supposed "inhumanity") but they are also trained, encoraged to fight and (if they survive their mandatory ten-year enlistment period) rewarded with the possibility of living for the rest of their lives in a human colony.

In the end of this novel, another mirror: the final showdown between Dirac and Boutin, almost identical twins, but different at the same time: forget the commonsensical duality of the ill-famed "evil twin"; both are human, and they know it. The confrontation bears more resemblance to the Deleuzian paradigm of "difference and repetition": even when things are very much the same, they are never exactly identical. But not the opposite of each other - it´s never that simple.

Jared Dirac is fully aware of who he is and what he must do in the end to secure the existence of humankind - and, in this point, The Ghost Brigades is truly a Heinleinian heir as good as they come; full of sturm und drang fighting (but still keeping its measure of humor), and drama, and, maybe the most important thing, love and caring, constant reminders of our humanity.

While Dirac and Boutin fight each other, Jane Sagan (who also played an important role in the story, appearing now and then during the education of Dirac) rescues Zöe, Boutin´s daughter

When the third volume of the series, The Last Colony, opens, we see John Perry again, living as Administrator of the colonial planet Huckleberry, along with his wife, former Lieutenant Jane Sagan, and their adopted child, Zöe Boutin-Perry. Things are going very well, thank you very much, until they get conscripted to run a new colony, named Roanoke, of all things.

It couldn´t end well - in fact, it doesn´t even begin well: when the colonists are dropped onto a different planet than the one they expected, Perry and Sagan discovers they were trapped by CU itself, which is using them as bait to attract the Conclave, an alien confederation that has as its main goal destroy the human colonies... and probably Earth as well.

The Last Colony also features the most radical example of this post-humanity when presents fully to the reader an explicit example of what Cainen says to Jane Sagan in The Ghost Brigades: a human being that doesn´t have anything to do with humankind as we know it. Seen only in a cameo appearance in The Ghost Brigades, the Lieutenant Stross (a good-humored tribute to writer Charles Stross, friend of Scalzi´s) plays a fundamental role in The Last Colony.

Stross belongs to a kind of humans who were genetically modified to live in space. They are dubbed the Gamerans (the name being a reference to a Japanese Godzilla-like monster):

Gamerans were humans - or at least, their DNA originated from human stock and had other things added in - radically sculpted and designed to live and thrive in airless space. To that end they had shelled bodies to protect them from vacuum and cosmic rays, symbiotic genetically altered algae stored in a special organ to provide them with oxygen, photosynthetic stripes to harness solar energy and hands at the ends of all their limbs.

As the synopis on Amazon.com goes, Scalzi avoids political allegory, promoting individual compassion and honesty and downplaying patriotic loyalty. Maybe this is why only nine votes separated Scalzi from this year´s Hugo: the sheer quality of the work and the human factor. (Michael Chabon is a very tough opponent, and to choose between both must have been like to choose between a rock and a hard place; I didn´t envy the voters.)

When all is said and done, or at least we thought it was, Scalzi published two more stories in this universe: in The Sagan Diary, we see a surprisingly poetic approach to the mind of Jane Sagan, through excerpts of her BrainPal, taken and edited when she left her former body to take another, standard-issue human body to live in Huckleberry with Perry and Zöe. The edition looks more like a poetry book than a movie, and it´s good for a change: we find out that Sagan is much more than the no-nonsense, action-oriented soldier, and she is a caring, considerate, loving person. She is human, and, I guess, that´s the whole point of The Sagan Diary: revealing the humanity of Sagan. It worked perfectly, even though I didn´t need it when I first read the trilogy - but it made me like Sagan better. She´s one of the most interesting characters in the SF literature of this decade.

And things come to a end (for now) with Zöe´s Tale. Scalzi does his magic turning a story that had everything to be stale and repetitive into an entirely different novel , even though it apparently just recounts the events of The Last Colony through the eyes of Zöe Boutin-Perry. Zöe´s Tale is a moving story that manages to convey all the tension and emotion of the other narrative and make us wait for something new to happen, even though we already know the end. If you didn´t read it yet, just think of POV-oriented movies like Akira Kurosawa´s Rashomon or even the brand-new Hollywood blockbuster Vantage Point.

Reading an entire series at once, one book after the other, is a kind of experience which I find very refreshing, but that not always make me ask for more. Sometimes I have a need for "decompression", for taking a break in the middle of the series just to read something else, be it a comic book or a Jamie Oliver cookbook (Yes, I like to cook!). Not with Scalzi, however, and that surprised even myself. I´m not a great fan of military SF, but clearly the Old Man War series doesn´t belong to this very limiting niche - at least not entirely, as it doesn´t belong entirely to the New Space Opera label. It is New Science Fiction, and it is Good Science Fiction. That should be (and it is) enough.