Cyde Weys Musings

Frank quickened his stride and took a leaping jump onto the waist-high brick wall separating the sidewalk from the field. Kathy rolled her eyes at him. None of the other students busily hurrying to or from their classes registered a response at all.

“You know, this isn’t the playground at kindergarten,” Kathy teased Frank.

“Yeah, I know,” Frank responded. “If it was, I wouldn’t have made that jump.” He cracked what he hoped was his most winning smile. Arms spread wide, he balanced carefully as he continued walking along the brick wall. Kathy walked along beside him.

Kathy turned away and grunted, trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile. On the other side of the wall, a large group of students – too many on the field at once for a real match – was kicking a soccer ball around on the patchy field. They didn’t look especially coordinated, nor was there even a clear delineation between teams, but at least they looked to be having fun.

The two walked awkwardly in silence for awhile, avoiding each other’s gaze, until Frank grew bored of the novelty of walking along the wall and jumped back onto the sidewalk, nearly tripping in the process. He hoped Kathy hadn’t seen that, but of course, she had.

After several more moments of silence, Frank turned to look at Kathy. “Ready for the exam next Monday?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Kathy said mock-indignantly. “And that was a complete waste,” she continued, gesturing behind her. “How come we’re already learning new material that won’t even be on the exam?”

“He’s trying to teach sadism.” Frank paused for a few instants for effect. “By example.”

Kathy smirked. Then, she quickly side-stepped to the left to avoid an oncoming bicyclist on the sidewalk, bumping into Frank in the process.

“Idiot,” she said angrily, looking over her shoulder at the bicyclist. “The sidewalk is for people.”

A car whizzed by on the road to their right, braking and honking angrily at an absent-minded student who had just started jay-walking across the road.

“So, do you want to study for the exam together?” Frank asked. A slight tremble in his left hand would have betrayed his growing nervousness, had anyone noticed it.

“Oh, come on, you ace all the tests,” Kathy said with a tone of feigned annoyance.

“Well, I could help you.”

“Come on, you have better things to do with your time,” she said, smiling.

“Nope, I really don’t,” he said half-jokingly.

“All right, well I hope you don’t expect you’re getting anything out of this,” she said, her smile widening. Frank felt his heartbeat quickening.

They reached a group of students anxiously waiting on a patchy piece of grass between the sidewalk and street for a break in the steady stream of cars. The real crosswalk was a hundred feet up the road, but it didn’t lead directly to the walkway leading between the Mathematics and Physics buildings back to the dorms.

“So, when do you want to meet up?” Frank asked hopefully. A gap in the cars arrived and the group pushed out into the streeth. Frank stepped off the curb and followed them, Kathy closely behind him.

“How about toni-”

The world turned red in an instant.

Jagged loping arcs of pure white electricity lept between the power lines leading to the Physics building.

The red afterglow faded just as soon as it had come.

Everyone stopped in their tracks. One man fell over himself.

An oncoming car plowed into the students in the road behind Frank at low speed, the panicked driver stomping on the brakes to little effect.

Frank pulled Kathy up onto the opposite sidewalk.

People witnessing the carnage behind them began screaming for help. Others just began screaming.

“What the-” Kathy began saying. A loud boom from elsewhere on campus cut her off. The assembled crowd whipped around and looked in the direction of the presumed explosion, but saw nothing. The screaming ceased as people strained to hear anything further.

More out-of-control cars collided into each other on the roads, followed by bewildered motorists stepping out and staring at their vehicles in exasperation.

“Something happened,” Frank said softly. He was still holding Kathy’s hand, but he was no longer thinking at all about how he could turn a study session into something more. The traffic light up the street was dead.

Frank glanced at his watch. It was blank. “Something big happened.”

Kathy fumbled with her cell phone, but it wouldn’t turn on.

One of the students that had been struck by the car unsteadily got to his feet, clutching his leg. He started yelling at the driver of the car, unaware that larger problems were afoot.

“Nothing works!” Kathy said with increasing exasperation. She threw the cell phone down in disgust. The other students were collecting themselves.

“What happened?” Kathy asked Frank. The silence was deafening, punctuated only by curious and frightened whispers. He didn’t answer her right away. He was staring up in the sky, transfixed. Slowly, Kathy followed his gaze, and was frozen in horror too.

“Remember this moment. The moment that everything changed.”

They stared at the jetliner in the sky several miles out. It continued on its steep downwards trajectory, trailing a contrail of smoke that was too gray to be just water vapor. It developed a list to the left, and then with a chorus of shocked gasps from the attentive crowd, it rolled over entirely, and quickened its meeting with the ground. In the distance, in the direction of the airport, two more jetliners sought a similar fate.

The exam that would now never happen was the last thing on their minds.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, the past several months on Cyde Weys Musings have been characterized by my extreme inactivity. That wasn’t unintentional. I just had to make enough of a break from the old direction of the site in order to feel comfortable taking it in a new direction. Apparently, a couple of months’ worth of guilt over writing very little for you all was enough to overcome the threshold of taking this site in a more personal direction.

I’ve finally realized that what I enjoy more than anything else is writing fiction, yet so long as I was writing non-fiction on here quite regularly, that wasn’t going to happen. I might’ve been a bit optimistic when I proclaimed that the secret to getting into the mood to write is by writing, because I clearly wasn’t doing it. I’ve finally turned that corner.

So the new personal direction on here will consist of me writing fiction frequently and publishing all of it. I know that doesn’t sound very personal, especially since I won’t be revealing any sort of intimate details about myself like so many other bloggers, but believe me, it is. It’s a frightening thing putting your writing out there for all to see and critique. While I got over that hump with my non-fiction awhile ago, fiction is still a much more sensitive area. But I’ve finally gotten over it, and I’d rather my work be read and possibly disliked than languish in obscurity on my hard drive. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be critical — but please be kind. Saying someone’s opinion piece sucks is one thing, but saying someone’s fiction sucks is another whole world of authorial insult.

So, keep your eyes peeled. I’m going to keep at this for awhile come hell or high water. I’m not really attempting to become a professional writer or anything (though I wouldn’t mind it if that did end up happening). I’m content to write for a small audience here. That what I write is read by a few people is enough.

For completeness’s sake, here’s a list of all of the works of fiction I’ve published on this site so far that I consider at least passable. I hope to at least double this number of works within a month.

• Invasion Day
• A Stay At Motel Z
• One Humble Cloth
• For Want of a Bolt

“So much for Her Majesty’s elite unit,” Lieutenant Nottingham said softly as he sank down into the canvas netting of the wall-mounted fold-up bench. The electric lantern above his head drifted lazily to and fro.

“It was a great idea, only suffering from a complete lack of execution,” I responded, trying to find some humor in the situation. We continued hearing the gentle pitter-patter of enemy fire against the outside of our behemoth. It sounded oh so distant.

“And to think, all for want of a bolt,” Nottingham continued morosely.

“A bolt, indeed,” I responded. I gave up on tinkering with the steam relay junction and sat across from Nottingham.

“What do we do now? Surrender?” Nottingham asked. He was leaving the decision up to me, even though he out-ranked me. The death of our commanding officer had shattered the chain of command. I could still picture the tortured look on his face as he sank down from the exposed cupola above the hatch, the fatal rifle shot having turned half of his insides to scrapple.

“And give them use of the behemoth? Never!” My resolve strengthened. I knew victory was no longer within our reach, but we could still avoid absolute defeat.

“Perhaps they’d find more use for it than we,” Nottingham said.

“No, we know what we must do,” I snapped, not in the mood for his attempt at gallows humor. The rain of lead against the outside of our hull abated slightly, passing into a more stochastic, syncopated murmur of clinks. Perhaps they were finally realizing our impenetrability. Perhaps they lost the pressing need for urgency upon realizing the complete hopelessness of our circumstances.

“We’ll die in the explosion too, you know,” he said. I could see a hint of fear in his eyes, which he hurriedly hid by slouching forward even more and resting his forehead on his palm. He was not ready.

“We only have one other choice then – set it in motion dead ahead, right into the river,” I resolved. “It won’t be recoverable after that.”

“Fine,” Nottingham hastily agreed. It was better than the alternative.

We set about the startup process with automaton-like efficiency. I slammed open all the intake relays leading to the boilers, material stresses be damned. The behemoth would find finally be unleashed to discover its maximum capabilities. Nottingham triggered the ignition and a loud whistling overtook us for a spell as the immense boilers began building up pressure. Evidently our enemies could hear it too, because the rate of ineffectual fire increased back into more steady volleys. I could sense their fear even through the two-foot steel armor surrounding us on all sides.

We waited as the indicator needles on the engineering panel slowly rotated to the right. I looked at Nottingham but he averted my gaze, too intent on attempting to discern some pattern from the now just-barely-audible reports of enemy fire.

When the majority of the needles passed the first marked threshold, I threw the main handle forward, and the behemoth roared to life. The control room creaked all around us as the first two locomotive legs began lifting up. The floor turned several degrees from straight down. I fought against the disorientation that proven to be the biggest hardship in finding a driver for the behemoth.

The needles continued rising as the automatic loader worked at full bore, delivering fresh lumber to the fireboxes as quickly as space permitted. The movement of the behemoth settled into a regular swaying motion, not unlike being at sea. I counted the movements across ten strides and satisfyingly noted that our speed was increasing at a brisk pace. I no longer heard any bullets pinging off the outside of our vehicle, but I could not discern whether that was because we had outrun our enemies, or simply because our steam engine was so deafeningly loud. As I reached for my earplugs, Nottingham interrupted me.

“One last word for Major Littlepage!” he shouted.

“Fine,” I shouted back, wincing as the mechanical noises around me grew ever louder.

Nottingham attempted to shout out some kind of eulogy or prayer for the late Major, I did not know which. I could not hear him over the roar of our furious machine. Instead, I pondered on his ill-fated mission, and the absurd flaw in the behemoth’s design. If I ever met the idiot that decided to put the spare parts locker on the outside of this rust bucket, I’d have a few choice words for him. Apparently the possibility of there being a need to make minor repairs to the behemoth in combat had escaped the designer’s mind. The courageous Major had died for want of a bolt, shot down as soon as he lifted himself through the hatch. He’d never even made it within twenty feet of the parts locker.

As soon as Nottingham stopped talking, I reached for my earplugs and jammed them in.

I peered through the periscope. The Rhine was still directly ahead of us, exactly as I had remembered. Except that now we were much, much closer to it, and drawing closer with an accelerating pace. Driving the behemoth deep into the river would guarantee its end just as much as detonating it from within, as no machine would ever be able to drag it out again save another behemoth — and after this travesty, there likely wouldn’t be another. Additionally, it would afford us some attempt at escape.

The pitch of the floor changed again as the behemoth entered the downwards sloping flood plain. It wouldn’t be long now. We picked up even more speed, running across the landscape at a rate I hadn’t even thought our behemoth capable of. She saw her fate before her and charged after it with a head full of steam. I glanced down at the boiler indicators, all of which were pegging against their final redlines so hard that the needles were bending. This would be the behemoth’s final blaze of glory.

I motioned to Nottingham, but he already knew what to do. He raced back to the hatch, stepping gingerly over the Major’s body in the process, and prepared to open it. With a tremendous splash, our first leg entered the edge of the river, throwing up a huge plume of spray. The other legs followed suit. Our forward momentum steadily dropped. The indicators sagged. Shortly enough we were in water up to the bottom of the main body. The boilers choked and died as they flooded with water, that infernal whistling giving its last dying gasp. Water began rushing into the cabin from a thousand different spots in the floor. The legs locked up and the behemoth began pitching forward.

“Now!” I yelled at Nottingham at the top of my lungs. He couldn’t hear me over the din, nor was he even looking at me, but he sensed that the time was right nonetheless, and with a giant push, he heaved the hatch upwards and clambered through it. I took one last look at the flooding cabin, sneering in disgust at the discarded steering wheel bobbing in the water, its sheered-off attachment bolt gleaming brightly in the newfound sunlight, and made to follow after him.

One night, on the precipice of sleep, a fragment materialized in my mind that I immediately aroused myself to record. It led to the following account:

Why does this cloth billow so? It has seen the sunshine of many days and the darkness of many nights, the twilights of oh so many yesterdays. Yet with each fresh gust it prances with greater ease in the sky. While all else around it grow old and reach their ends, it grows younger, shedding thread after thread each year, losing its resistance to the wind’s capricious ways. It is growing younger into sheer nothingness, the day when the cloth will be no more. Until then, it waves with ever-increasing vigor, eager at the prospect of its end.

How many a battle has this cloth seen? More than any mere cotton, it has served as a rallying point in countless skirmishes, as a standard in actions, as a focal point in parade. It is made of such humble materials, yet it has seen more history than the greatest person that ever lived. Its tapestry of patchwork, correcting uncountable battle wounds, attests to that. Many a man has died because of and on behalf of this cloth, a sad trifle it is fortunate it cannot be troubled by.

Such bold and regular geometric patterns! (Only spoiled by hasty repairs.)

Such vivid dashes of color! (T’would be better had it not faded with age.)

Such a spritely dance through the sky!

What is it in this cloth that spurns men to action? Why have so many cheerfully lept into warfare beneath it? What poisoning effect does it have on otherwise thinking minds that drags them down into brutality, even while proclaiming that it stands for all that is noble and patriotic? Yet the uncaring merry cloth tangos in the clear blue sky, oblivious to all it has wrought and all that it will wreak.

This cloth will go on to see the end of the world — the end of the world, caused on its account.

How dare this cloth billow so?

Halloween is just around the corner, which means that it’s almost time for a full month of writing. Of course, I am referring to National Novel Writing Month, a “competition” in which people challenge themselves to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. This will be my fourth time attempting it. I’m pretty confident about my chances, seeing as how I successfully completed it last year. I know a lot of people try to set tougher goals for themselves the second time around, but seeing as how I haven’t written much fiction at all recently, I’ll be content just to finish it again.

The experience last year was pretty intense. I fell below pace during the middle of the month and had to catch up by spending a couple days toward the end of the month pretty much doing nothing but writing. It really challenged my creative energies, but I persevered. This year will probably go much the same way — I’m just a procrastinator by nature. And while I have a general idea of the plot I want to write, I haven’t really fleshed out the characters, nor do I have much of a conclusion. In other words, it’s going to be just like last year again, figuring things out as I go along.

So, are any of you doing NaNoWriMo? It sounds a lot harder than it actually ends up being, once you get into the hang of things, and it really is a neat thing to be able to say you accomplished.

It is one of the conceits of our race that we are quite full of our own intelligence. Hopefully, one day we’ll run across a vastly more intelligent species and be put in our collective place. But until then, we’ll keep on calling our own intelligence the best thing since sliced bread — something, I should point out, that our intelligence invented, and still thinks itself mighty clever for having come up with.

In nearly every fantasy universe, humans are the smartest creatures around. Even elves, the high variety of which are frequently portrayed as wiser than people, are really just humans with pointy ears. If you don’t believe me, just ask a half-elf, or a quarter-elf, or a third-elf. Now compare that against all of the stupid races in fantasy universes: goblins, orcs, trolls, ogres, etc. They’re all so dumb one wonders how they even manage to put their armor on in the morning.

To make up for their incredible stupidity, these creatures are also given incredible strength. The human protagonists in the story must therefore rely on their cunning, their wit, and their intelligence to triumph over the enemies. Even magic is nothing more than a form of intelligence made physically manifest — the art of spellcasting is portrayed as an academic endeavor, in which the most studious become the most powerful. The concept of fantasy magic is the ultimate in human intelligence navel-gazing.

Even in non-fantasy media, the protagonists typically defeat their human rivals by outsmarting them. The movies in which the protagonist defeats his nemesis simply by beating on him more powerfully are few and far between — and of those that do exist, most of them involve sport, an activity so frequently fetishized by commentators that all connections to reality are lost. You simply can’t have a compelling story without a triumph of the mind. It’s understandable, really: while our eyes merely gaze at the movie screen, it’s our own mind that is truly watching it, and minds do harbor sympathies for other minds.

We value human intelligence so greatly because we are the only beings on the planet who possess anything close to it. When we triumph over a lion, a bear, or a hippopotamus in nature, we do so not by brute force, but through our intelligence. In one-on-one hand-to-hand combat, a fight against an elephant isn’t remotely fair. Allow the human use of a simple hand-held weapon such as a spear and the odds tighten considerably. Now give him a modern weapon that represents the apex of human intelligence — say, an F-22 joint strike fighter — and the elephant is easily reduced to a cloud of pink mist that has no chance whatsoever of retaliating against the human roaring away at Mach 2 a couple miles above it.

It is no surprise, then, that our fantasy worlds mimic very much the real world. Even though we make our villain fantasy races anthropomorphic (an orc is frequently portrayed as being a human with prominent boar features, for instance), even though we give them the ability to speak language, they represent nothing more than the animals of our own world, which we are used to accustomed to dominating completely. Are the fantasy creatures more intelligent? Certainly. It’s not a fair fight if the man-sized enemies don’t use weapons. But ultimately all that they really are is animals. No wonder fantasy story lines follow the races of player characters: humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and others — all of which are pretty much the same as humans, sharing the same relative physical weaknesses, but possessing the same mental prowesses.

So it makes sense that human intelligences are most entertained by the dealings of other human intelligences, and that is thus what our fictions focus upon. It makes sense that in our fantasies we conduct battle against either humans or animals, because that is all we really know about fighting against in our own world — except in fantasy even the animals frequently look like humans because we really are that obsessed with ourselves. Yes, we humans really are quite full of ourselves, but seeing the complete lack of alternatives, who can blame us?

Wow, William McCamment hit the nail on the head with this one: The secret to getting into the mood to write is to start writing. In other words, writing creates the mood, it does not wait on it. I can definitely empathize with this maxim. Even when I generally don’t feel like I’m in the mood for writing, if I manage to force myself to start, the words flow out naturally after that. It’s thus pretty much like any other activity: overcoming your inherent laziness and actually starting to do something is the hardest part. A good example of this principle would be exercising. It’s hard to drag yourself to the gym, but once you start exercising, you see it through to the finish — say, an hour long workout.

The advice applies to all sorts of other activities, of course. Not feeling in the mood to get off your butt and do something productive? Just do it anyway. Once you start at it, you build enough momentum to see you through to the end. It’s just a problem of getting over that initial hump.

Man, I wish I had listened to this advice, say, ten years ago.

I have some advice of my own to add to this: if you have trouble doing anything regularly, commit to doing it on a strict schedule, and then keep to it. Once you get used to doing something regularly, it becomes much easier to keep doing it, through sheer force of inertia. For instance, I wasn’t able to really commit to working out regularly until I forced myself to do it every Monday through Thursday after work. And more to the point of the original advice, I wasn’t able to start blogging regularly until I committed myself to blogging every day. Now I haven’t quite kept that strict schedule (in particular, I’m apt to lapse a bit on weekends), but it works for the most part. I write nearly every day for this blog.

If you’re a budding writer, or even an established writer who still needs a bit of help, you should definitely check out the list of Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do). I’m intellectually aware of the existence of all of these mistakes, but my ability to put them into practice varies wildly. I’ll go over the list of all ten and briefly discuss each one.

1. Repeats. I will admit to suffering from this problem, not so much the phrasing variety but definitely the word variety. I rely on certain useless words with far too much frequency. I’m especially thinking of the words “really” and “very”, which I use with such depressing regularity in first write-throughs of my sentences and then have to go back and excise. At least I’m aware of the problem though, and have been working to rectify it.

The biggest example of this problem in professional fiction I can think of was in a book by either Arthur C. Clarke or Robert A. Heinlein (sorry, I can’t remember which author or what book, but if you’ve ever read it you know exactly what I’m talking about). The word “presently” was overused to such a degree that it became immensely distracting. Pick any random sentence in that book and the odds are good it started with “Presently”. By contrast, you can go through entire novels by other people and never once run across that word. It’s not a good word. It doesn’t convey much information, and there are much better conjunctive phrases to be bandied about. I’m thinking whoever the editor of that book is was derelict in their duty.

2. Flat writing. I’m thankful that I don’t have this problem (or at least I don’t think I do). If anything, I have the opposite problem: language that is unnecessarily flowery. Regardless, I have a good eye for spotting flat prose, and as soon as I realize I’m producing some in my own work, I’m very quick to spice it up. Believe me, I hate writing sentences like “He parked in the lot, entered the grocery store, picked up some milk, eggs, and bread, and brought it to the register” just as much as you hate reading them.

3. Empty adverbs (such as actually, completely, totally, and literally). I like to think I’m decent at this one, and when I’m not it’s more for a lack of editing than an inability to spot them. I believe I acquired my eye for these guys during my time as an opinion columnist for The Diamondback. When you’re limited to 600–650 words and you have a lot you want to say, you get good at making every word count.

4. Phony dialogue. Yeouch, this one gets me all the time. It’s almost a given that the first draft of any dialogue I write is usually stilted. It’s like I’m making a framework for what I want the characters to be able to say, then I have to go back and actually make it sound like those characters are saying it. Otherwise, the dialogue is likely to come out sounding omniscient and in author’s voice.

A great example of phony dialogue that I saw recently was in the pilot episode of the television show The Secret Life of the American Teenager (don’t ask why I watched that). The show is about high schoolers, but the dialogue is way out of the league of anything teenagers actually say. One kid has a long string of witty repartees with his guidance counselor which actually has the guidance counselor looking like a bit of a fool. Two other students have a minutes long conversation on religion, abstinence before marriage, and sex that sounds like a back and forth one might hear in a debate. None of the students have their own voices; they all share the intellectual, grown-up voices of the script-writers, and it’s a major failing of the show. You’d think a show all about the supposed “secret lives” of teenagers would need to get the teenagers’ voices right, but alas, they didn’t manage.

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Having recently read Old Man’s War, it’s not surprising that I’ve just finished reading its sequel The Ghost Brigades. I liked Old Man’s War, but I found some significant flaws in it that hampered my enjoyment. Thankfully, most of those flaws were fixed in the sequel. The alien races aren’t nearly as implausible, not every character has the same dark cynical sense of humor (which is totally a projection of John Scalzi’s sense of humor, I should add), the writing style isn’t quite so absurd, and the cast of minor characters no longer consists solely of cliché cardboard cut-outs. In other words, John Scalzi has definitely matured as a writer between his first (or is it his second?) book and this one. I definitely look forward to reading the third book in this universe, The Last Colony.

Unfortunately, some things didn’t change. The novel is set in exactly the same implausible “science fantasy” universe, with hundreds of intelligent alien species that all happen to have roughly equal military capabilities, wave-of-the-hand FTL (”skip drive”), and a ridiculous over-emphasis on hand-to-hand combat. These aspects weren’t so grating as when I read the first book because I’ve been acclimated to them by now, but I still wish they weren’t there.

And ironically enough, after complaining bitterly that the protagonist John Perry in Old Man’s War was clearly a stand-in for the author, John Scalzi, I actually liked the main character in that book better than this one. The protagonist in The Ghost Brigades is Jared Dirac, a Special Forces soldier born into a cloned adult body. He’s fully intellectually capable from birth, yet has no memories, no past, no personality, etc. Eventually as the book progresses and he puts a few months on he develops more of a personality, but it isn’t one that I particularly feel any empathy for. The Special Forces (the “Ghost Brigades”) are bred from birth to be killing machines. They’re not emotionless by any means, but they are cruel, efficient, subordinate, and very focused on getting the mission done. In other words, not the best choice for a protagonist.

Judging by the progression from book one to book two, I’m guessing that The Last Colony will be even better. If John Scalzi just writes in a better main character, and refrains from having all of his characters exhibit the exact same dry sense of humor that he has, he has the potential to come up with something that is really good. That last part is a particular sticking point: one of Scalzi’s consistent weaknesses is an inability to write characters significantly different than himself. I don’t know if he’s capable of it or not; nothing even demonstrates he’s tried.

The caveats aside, put me down firmly in the “Endorsements” column for this book. Having read the first two in this universe and itching to read the third, I’d say that John Scalzi has done a pretty decent job. I can’t say the same for many other books I’ve read, some of which have left me with little desire to read anything further by the author. So like I said with Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades isn’t great, but it’s a good, fun read. I recommend it.

I discovered John Scalzi’s blog Whatever a couple months back and I’ve been reading nearly everything he’s posted to it since. The name of the blog is blah, but don’t let that fool you. He’s been doing this blogging thing for longer than the word “blog” has existed, so the name of his site was more passable then than now. But ignoring that issue, he’s a very witty writer, and his blog posts are consistently entertaining. And since he’s become a published science fiction author in recent years, he’s also done a fair bit of promotion of his books (Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, The Android’s Dream, The Last Colony, and the upcoming Zoe’s Tale). So for my flight back from Phoenix, I bought Old Man’s War and settled in for a marathon reading session.

First off, let me begin by saying that I started the book about an hour into the flight, didn’t put it down until I deplaned, read most of the rest of it after driving home from the airport, fell asleep, woke up, and read the remaining few pages before breakfast. So on that count alone, I won’t deny liking it. I’ve read many novels that simply weren’t able to grab me; Old Man’s War did. Heck, some novels I find so lacking in entertainment that I don’t ever get around to finishing.

But I did have some problems with the novel. John Scalzi seems to possess only one writing style. On his blog, it works excellently, but his absurdist humor kind of felt out of place in a novel that takes itself so seriously. For instance, his main character, John Perry, gets blown out of an exploded shuttle, with shrapnel slicing away the lower part of his head, and then as his body ragdolls through mid-air, he becomes “possibly the first person in history to kick himself in the uvula.” Come on. It had me chuckling, or rather, marveling at the absurdity of what I had just read. It was also jarring, and temporarily broke my immersion in the story. The rest of the novel contains similar snippets like this. And John Perry is so consistently making dark and dry jokes you can just tell John Scalzi based John Perry off himself. If that and the shared first name aren’t enough of a clue, John Perry was a writer before he became a soldier.

I also had some problems with some of the cliché characters. There’s an idiotic loud-mouthed soldier, the standard caricature of a gung-ho, cock-sure warrior with more machismo than sense, who is so impatient for battle to begin that he promptly gets himself killed by peeking out from cover in excitement after killing an alien as he mouths off about the awesomeness of war. And then the description of his death is especially visceral, with bullet-shockwave-pressurized brain matter spewing forth from his head as he’s shot, as if to especially emphasize to the reader that this guy deserved to die for his foolishness.

There’s also a smarmy, condescending politician-cum-soldier who thinks so highly of himself that he believes he can single-handedly negotiate peace in the middle of war; he drops his weapon, approaches a group of aliens, and is instantly turned into a fine bloody mist when all of the aliens simultaneously fire their club-shaped traditional weapons (which just so happen to be shotguns). It was another especially gruesome death, carefully written by Scalzi as if to say “This jerkwad deserved it”. And I’m not sure I like the message of it either; it’s a non sequitur attack against giving diplomacy a chance.

You could see the deaths of both of these cliché characters telegraphed from pages away. While I suppose these scenes were intended to be satisfying, indulging a schadenfreudist delight in watching idiots get their just desserts, they just left me feeling hollow, and especially in the case of the first character, contradictory. The soldiers in these scenes are all 75-year-olds given new bodies right before being shipped off to war; how many of the elderly still retain such levels of foolishness and impudence that can only be found in youth?

And now here’s where I really get really nit picky. I had some fundamental problems with the universe of Old Man’s War. It’s full of alien races all vying for a limited number of star systems, all of them at a sufficiently equal enough level of technology so as to make all battles fair. This simply doesn’t make any sense. Considering how far warfare progresses in a single generation here on Earth, and considering that the universe is 13.5 billion years old, the odds of having many different civilizations all at essentially equal levels of technology are zilch. The first species to achieve intelligence, even if they only won the race by a thousand years, would dominate the galaxy. There wouldn’t be battles, there would be massacres. Here on Earth we’ve progressed from cavalry to nuclear aircraft carriers in the span of a single century. Picture how imbalanced that war would be, and then expand the difference in war-fighting technology out to millions of years.

Don’t go thinking, from all of my criticism, that I didn’t enjoy the book; I did. I purchased the sequel, The Ghost Brigades, and I will be reading it. But I just wouldn’t call this novel revolutionary. It sits squarely within Robert A. Heinlein’s and Joe Haldeman’s genre of action-packed military science fiction, with some of Scalzi’s own quirks, but it does not push its boundaries or attempt to transcend them. This is most unfortunate, because what I appreciate more than anything else in my science fiction is making me think. I would attempt to compare this novel against another scifi novel that I recently read, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, but there really is no comparison there. I would love to see Scalzi make one possible with a future novel, though.