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Book review: The Last Colony
Dec. 17th, 2008 03:33 pmToday's book review is The Last Colony by John Scalzi.
This is the third book in the series that started with Old Man's War and continued in The Ghost Brigades. There are a few things that wouldn't really make sense without reading the earlier books.
This is a fast paced adventure story, with plenty of tension, explosions, and good comic relief. Some of the plot is contrived enough to be a bit of a stretch, especially to the extent where some of the odder twists and turns are actually mostly planned. People certainly aren't above such crazy long-range schemes, but they don't really work that well. Underlying the running around and exploding, there are a lot of threads of interesting things to think about, about how governments control people, and about what it means to be human in a universe with other people. It's a bit painful, because I have my own feelings about how I'd like the world to be, and Scalzi, realistically but depressingly, shows us that humans are not likely to go along with it. In one thread of the story, he seems to be working up to the idea that species isn't terribly important to what makes us people, and then on another thread he seems to undercut that with the notion that people have to be fully human (in a genetic sense) to have the right to be fully part of society (or perhaps it would be better to say that the genetically-human people aren't going to accept people who aren't genetically fully human as their equals. We slightly meet one very interesting alien species, and then we don't see them again for the rest of the book, since they don't figure in the main line of the plot. I'd like to see how they turn out, which could be a whole nother book, only slightly connected to the series. It's the way the story ends, though, that leaves me a little cold. It's fine in terms of the historically significant events, but it's kind of a let down in personal terms for the protagonist. I didn't like it quite as much as the first two.
7 out of 10.
( plot summary )
This is the third book in the series that started with Old Man's War and continued in The Ghost Brigades. There are a few things that wouldn't really make sense without reading the earlier books.
This is a fast paced adventure story, with plenty of tension, explosions, and good comic relief. Some of the plot is contrived enough to be a bit of a stretch, especially to the extent where some of the odder twists and turns are actually mostly planned. People certainly aren't above such crazy long-range schemes, but they don't really work that well. Underlying the running around and exploding, there are a lot of threads of interesting things to think about, about how governments control people, and about what it means to be human in a universe with other people. It's a bit painful, because I have my own feelings about how I'd like the world to be, and Scalzi, realistically but depressingly, shows us that humans are not likely to go along with it. In one thread of the story, he seems to be working up to the idea that species isn't terribly important to what makes us people, and then on another thread he seems to undercut that with the notion that people have to be fully human (in a genetic sense) to have the right to be fully part of society (or perhaps it would be better to say that the genetically-human people aren't going to accept people who aren't genetically fully human as their equals. We slightly meet one very interesting alien species, and then we don't see them again for the rest of the book, since they don't figure in the main line of the plot. I'd like to see how they turn out, which could be a whole nother book, only slightly connected to the series. It's the way the story ends, though, that leaves me a little cold. It's fine in terms of the historically significant events, but it's kind of a let down in personal terms for the protagonist. I didn't like it quite as much as the first two.
7 out of 10.
( plot summary )