Old Man’s War starts from an idea you can explain in one line. At seventy-five, John Perry joins the Colonial Defense Forces and gets a new body in return: young, engineered in a lab, with green skin and a computer in his head. He can never go back to Earth.
What stays with you after the last page is the accounting. Every upgrade has a cost, and somebody pays it. If you are looking for more books built on that question, here are four novels that approach it from different sides, plus one I wrote myself, flagged as such at the end.
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein (1959)
The ancestor, and the book Old Man’s War is most often compared to. Juan Rico enlists in the Mobile Infantry in a society where the right to vote is earned through federal service. Powered armor multiplies the strength of a single soldier, and Heinlein describes training with an almost technical precision. Reading it right after Scalzi shows how much the way we write about soldiers has changed in sixty years. It won the Hugo Award in 1960.
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)
Here the body being prepared for war belongs to a child. Andrew Wiggin is taken to a military school in orbit, where battles are played out in a zero-gravity room and the training itself becomes the weapon. Card puts at the center a question Scalzi leaves in the background: who decides for a recruit too young to decide. The novel won both the Hugo and the Nebula.
The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut (1959)
The most disorienting of the four. Malachi Constant, the richest man in America, ends up on Mars in an army whose soldiers have had their memories wiped and are steered by antennas implanted in their skulls. Vonnegut uses science fiction for a satire on free will, and the remotely controlled body is the darkest version of the deal Perry signs of his own accord.
Red Rising, Pierce Brown (2014)
On a Mars divided into color castes, Darrow is a miner from the lowest one. To infiltrate the elite he is surgically remade until he becomes one of them. It is the closest to a thriller of the four, and the one that shows most clearly that a new body leaves the class you came from untouched.
And last, H.O.M.S.
I’ll close with a book of my own, and I say so because it counts as a biased recommendation. The first volume of the H.O.M.S. trilogy, Space Conspiracy, starts from Scalzi’s question and moves it from the front line to the marketplace. The trilogy was written in Italian and is available in English translation.
The Homs, Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens, are humans genetically modified in a lab. The procedure is expensive, and people with little money turned to cheap or clandestine labs, with side effects that sometimes leave them disabled for life. Many saw it as a way up. Then the new abilities became almost common and stopped making a difference.
Marvin Hale, the protagonist, is an officer of the police corps created specifically to deal with the Homs, the Inclusive Police. He finds the name hypocritical himself, because the real job is keeping them under control. A suspicious incident at a lunar mine opens an investigation that reaches as far as Mars.
The trilogy is complete and all three volumes are in Kindle Unlimited. Start with H.O.M.S. Phase One: Space Conspiracy.
If this list was useful, the blog also has books like Altered Carbon and books like Dune.
Background photo in the featured image: NASA/ESA/STScI
