Geriatric soldiers versus child soldiers – A book review

A common theme at Coming Anarchy is the importance of experience in addition to theoretical understanding. Actually visiting a far off locale can lead to insights otherwise unrealized by just reading about it. That is not to disparage book learning, something essential to our overall knowledge. But anyone can read about a topic. Experience plays a differentiating role by giving nuance to understanding. It is like a secret spice that makes the family recipe unique and memorable. This sums up my impression of the science fiction novel Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.

Old Man’s War is a hard scifi novel within the subgenre of military science fiction. In a nutshell, it is about the military adventures of John Perry who joins the Colonial Defense Forces to protect intergalactic human colonialists from a variety of imaginative space monsters. The twist is that all recruits of the CDF enlist when they are 75 years of age.

Other than the age of the soldiers — the ramifications of which are disappointingly not fully explored — there is nothing particularly novel about this book. Better guns, genetically modified soldiers, faster than light drives: it is all pretty derivative of the extant hard scifi canon. To me the only truly interesting part the book was the meeting at the hamburger stand in the third act, of which I will say no more.¹

From a military studies perspective the only thing of interest is the decentralized organizational structure of forces enabled by the ubiquitous network connection via a computer installed in every soldier’s skull. Disappointingly the author skips over the problems of information overload, restricted information access, among others. It is as if he read a Revolution in Military Affairs document from the early 1990s, used that as his premise for the future, and ignored all the well-documented problems brought up about RMA in the past 15 years.

You may think I am being harsh in my expectations for realism. Yet contrast this with another military science fiction book I read almost exactly one year ago: Ender’s Game.² Ostensibly these are similar stories — interstellar travel, battling aliens for the survival of humankind — except the International Fleet recruits children as young as 6 years old. However Ender’s Game gives much insight into military leadership, training and even strategy. While Old Man’s looks to the past for its military inspiration, Ender introduces the “strategic corporal” a full 12 years before Krulak’s famous speech.

The difference between these two books, in my opinion, is experience. Orson Scott Card based much of Ender’s Game on his brother’s experience training for the Viet Nam war. I think this shows in his book, in his characters and in his approach to the topics at hand. John Scalzi seems less informed as to the daily culture of the armed forces. It is almost as if he researched the book simply by watching war movies and reading Wikipedia.³

The point is that experience can make the difference. This is as true in real life as it is in fiction. Old Man’s War is by no means a bad book. But it is no wonder that of these two books only Ender’s Game is on the Marine Corps reading list.
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1. You’ll get no spoilers from me! ↩
2. I mentioned this book earlier this year in a query about preparing your child for the coming anarchy which led to this great discussion about whether ideology matters in art. ↩
3. This review on Amazon reflects my opinion well. Don’t read it if you don’t want spoilers! ↩