Catching lightning in a bottle: the story of John Scalzi's Old Man's War

On January 1st 2005, Tor Books published a new military science fiction novel: John Scalzi's Old Man's War. It follows a man named John Perry who joins a futuristic military, goes through training, and ends up involved in a much larger conflict. Scalzi put a twist on that formula: Perry is 75 years old, and in this future, the military recruits the elderly, putting them into enhanced, cloned bodies, and sends them out into a brutal interstellar war.

It was an unassuming start that Scalzi has turned into a remarkable career. From its modest origins as a serialized novel on his personal website, Old Man's War has become in the last two decades a major part of his back catalog, serving as an accessible entry point for the 18 books that he's written since, and it's the first part of an ongoing series that has expanded over five additional (and often experimental) installments, with a seventh entry in the series, The Shattering Peace due out in September 2025. 20 years later, Scalzi shows no sign of slowing down: last year, he signed an extended deal with Tor Books that will see him write another 10 books for the publisher.

The success of Old Man's War and its subsequent installments represent an interesting study in storytelling, and how Scalzi used his experience as a journalist, attention to tropes, marketing, and luck to guide his career over the last twenty years.

John Scalzi was born on May 10th, 1969 in Fairfield, California, and grew up near Los Angeles. One of three children to a single mother, he grew up in impoverished surroundings, which he recounted in a 2005 post called "Being Poor." In his collection of posts from his blog, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, he wrote that he had a supportive upbringing: his mother "made sure that when I did show an interest in something, she would help me take my interest as far as I wanted to take it."

She enrolled him in The Webb School of California on a scholarship, and after graduating in 1987, he attended the University of Chicago, with the goal of becoming a writer. There, he served as the editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper, The Chicago Maroon and eventually settled on majoring in philosophy. Following his graduation in 1991, he went on to hold a variety of jobs as a journalist: a columnist and film critic for The Fresno Bee in California, and as a writer for AOL in 1996.

That job was ultimately short-lived: in March 1998, he was laid off, and deciding that he needed a place to showcase his work as he segued into life as a freelance writer, launched a blog in September, Whatever.

It was a good time to launch a site: blogging was in its infancy in the mid-1990s, and as the internet began to seep into the homes of new users across the world during the Dot-com bubble, blogs and their writers became notable destinations for readers looking for new and regular content. Scalzi populated Whatever with a range of content, from political commentary to observations about the world to the minutia of his day, gathering a devoted group of readers and commenters. In 2023, he recounted that it helped him pick up work as a freelancer before becoming part of the larger blogging movement in the early 2000s.

When he decided to publish his first novel, Whatever was an ideal outlet.

After years of working as a journalist and columnist, Scalzi decided to try something new: write a novel. In 1997, he sat down and set about working on one, Agent to the Stars. "I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it – not the selling of it," he recounted in his introduction to the book, "which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was."

Agent to the Stars follows a Hollywood agent who was hired to represent an alien species that humanity found repulsive, a blend of science fiction and comedy. After completing it in a couple of months, he embarked on the usual process that most authors take: taking it to agents with the hopes that they would take it to publishers. "This was not particularly successful," he wrote, noting that while the people he showed it liked it, he was told that humorous science fiction was a difficult sell.

He ended up shelving the book for a year before trying a different tactic: he had just launched his blog and had some readers: if agents weren't interested, maybe his readers would be. If they enjoyed it, he reasoned, they could mail him a dollar. He posted up his address.

The scheme worked for him. Years later, he estimated that readers sent him nearly $4,000 before he turned off the solicitation.

Agent to the Stars might have been his first novel, but it wasn't the first out the door into regular bookstores. His freelance work with AOL brought him to the attention of guidebook publisher Rough Guides, which reached out to him to invite him to write a guide: The Rough Guide to Money Online: How to Bank, Invest, and Make Finance Work On the Internet in the US and Canada came out in 2000, and despite flopping – it came out in the months after the burst of the Dot-com bubble and in the weeks after that year's contested presidential election, it led to other books from the company: The Rough Guide to the Universe (2003) and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies (2005).

With Agent to the Stars, Scalzi learned that not only could he write a novel, but there was something of an audience that would be willing to pay for his work. He decided that it would be time to try again. "The motivation was 'well, now I've written one novel, so I know I can write a novel, now I should write one to try to sell,'" he explained to me in an interview.

Scalzi decided to begin work on this new book in 2000, starting with a bit of market research. He stopped by a local bookstore "to see what was selling, which appeared to be military science fiction, and then after that, figuring out what sort of military science fiction story I would want to write (and read)." 

To prepare, he read a handful of books, such as Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but also military histories like Daniel Da Crus's Boot and John Keegan's The Face of Battle. After talking through the plot with his wife, he began writing in the spring of 2001 and finished in October 2001.

From there he sat on the story for a year. "Once I wrote it," he explained to me, "the thought of actually submitting it bored me, so that's when it was stuffed into a virtual drawer for a year. I really am that lazy." 

Scalzi decided to follow the path he took with Agent to the Stars: publish it on Whatever. Starting in October 2002, he began posting the book chapter by chapter, capping it off with a post about what he learned about writing it in December. Old Man's War, he explained, was "modeled" after Heinlein's Starship Troopers in a couple of ways, and Heinlein's popularity, he noted, came down to the quality of his writing and use of characters. His novels were accessible, presented a world where his characters can learn and grow, and where readers could see themselves as the characters.

By emulating some of the elements of Heinlein's work, he was able to set up a small-scale human drama against the much larger backdrop of an interstellar war. "One of my favorite comments about the novel came my friend Erin," he wrote, "who read an early version of the novel and noted that the novel comes on like a sci-fi action thriller but is really a love story."

With the book now online, Scalzi made a consequential step: he emailed an editor at Tor Books, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, about it. In his ten-year retrospective of the book, he recalled that he'd been a regular reader of Nielsen Hayden's blog, Electrolite, and decided to forward the post after reading a discussion on characters, telling him that wasn't "a backdoor attempt to get you to read the novel itself."

Nielsen Hayden read the post and novel and emailed him after he finished it: "It’s an interesting afterword, but it’s an even more interesting novel. I read the whole thing last night; as the blurb cliché goes, I couldn’t put it down." He went on to offer to buy the book for Tor, saying "this is exactly the kind of action-oriented-and-yet-not-stupid SF we never see enough of."

Scalzi ended up accepting, saying in a followup post that it wouldn't exactly be like Agent to the Stars, where readers could send him money: "The reason for this is that, well, I kind of sold it."

Looking back on the book for its 10th anniversary in 2015, Scalzi noted that the offer was a life-changing moment. "The eight novels I have written since are because of that offer and everything that’s resulted from it."

From there, Scalzi signed a deal with Tor Books: the publisher would take on Old Man's War, and an additional novel as well. Tor didn't need to do much to the book: it went through a formal copyediting process, and Scalzi says that they "literally changed three lines. That was it."

While the story was complete, it still took the better part of a year to work its way through the publication process. The publisher commissioned artist Donato Giancola to produce the art for the cover and dated it for a January 1st, 2005 release. In the meantime, Scalzi continued to write for Whatever and other outlets, and began plotting out his next book. He released another nonfiction book, Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb in November 2003, and started a second one not too long after.

In the months that followed, Tor was able to put into play its resources: its publicists solicited reviews and brought the book out to booksellers, got blurbs from authors (Cory Doctorow, Ken MacLeod and Robert Charles Wilson), set up promotional deals with the Science Fiction Book Club. At the same time, Scalzi set out to attend that year's WorldCon in Boston to meet and network with his fellow writers.

By that fall, the book was available for preorders and the major trade publications had begun to issue their reviews for the book. Scalzi noted that the books began appearing in stores in the middle of December, while Amazon made the book available around the same time.

Publisher's Weekly described the book in its review as "like an original work by the late grand master [Robert Heinlein]" and that "this virtuoso debut pays tribute to SF's past while showing that well-worn tropes still can have real zip when they're approached with ingenuity." It was a glowing review that keyed plenty of readers to it.

January 1st, Scalzi explained to me, "is legitimately the worst possible day to release a book. 'Let's release it on a national holiday, when no stores are open after everybody's spent all their money." Tor, it seemed, was willing to put some resources behind the book, but had low expectations. While Scalzi had an online following, it was just another book on their schedule for the year.

Tor ordered an initial print run was for around 3,700 hardcovers, and as the release date came and went, it became quickly apparent that that wasn't enough: readers had begun to report that they were having trouble finding it. "It’s never a good thing when people are looking for your book and can’t find it," Scalzi wrote on January 6th, "and it’s particularly not a good thing when the person in question is an editor of one of the most influential science fiction magazines out there."

While scary for a new author, the scarcity seems to have been a confluence of positive things: the groundwork that Tor had laid down ahead of time, its positive reviews, networking at science fiction conventions, and Scalzi's updates over the course of the fall seem to have helped move the initial print run of copies from store shelves to readers quickly.

The scarcity didn't go unnoticed by Tor Books. "Apparently [when] Tom Doherty [the founder and CEO of Tor Books] heard that [the book was selling out]" Scalzi said, "he basically stomped down to the department that does the hardcovers and trade paperbacks and basically said to them 'you done fucked up and now you owe me.'"

The publisher quickly realized that it had a hit on its hands. "From Tor's point of view," Scalzi explained, "we're catching lightning in a bottle, let's go ahead and invest some promotional time [for it]." Tor was able to land reviews and profiles in The New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, and commissioned a new cover by John Harris "that said this is space fiction."

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Tor also made the unusual step of reprinting the novel as a trade paperback, rather than a smaller and cheaper mass market paperback. "It went into trade paperback first because trade paperback and hardcover handled by the same people," Scalzi explained, "and basically Tom [Doherty] put a fire and under their asses to actually promote this because he was like 'we've got something here, now it's time to get it.'"

That's the truth of it," Scalzi said, "Old Man's War really actually took off in the trade paperback edition as opposed to the hardcover because only 3700 hardcovers ever actually existed."

The January release date also helped in some other ways. Scalzi pointed out that the book had a longer time to sit with readers when it came to the upcoming awards season. Old Man's War made those ballots: WorldCon members nominated it for a Hugo Award for Best novel, while it also appeared as a finalist on Locus Magazine's awards for Best New Novel and Best SF Novel.

While it didn't win those awards, it did earn Scalzi the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: a prize that honors rising professionals in the field, with authors such as C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Elizabeth Bear, and plenty of others amongst their numbers.

The book was a hit. Now, Scalzi had another job ahead of him: write another.

Scalzi sold more than Old Man's War in that initial deal with Tor Book: he had another book to write. In the days after he made the announcement, he noted that his next book wouldn't be a sequel: "I will say that it is science fiction, and involves a “diplomatic troubleshooter” who is called in to resolve tricky situations, usually through the use of action sequences and snappy dialogue." That book was The Android’s Dream, which he began writing in May 0f 2003 and completed in February 2004.

When Old Man's War took off in 2005, it earned out both its advance and the one for The Android's Dream. Tor went to Scalzi: they wanted him to write a sequel, and they wanted to put it out before The Android's Dream hit stores. He ended up signing a second contract with Tor for the book. "It wasn't too much of a problem to write it, because having the journalism don't-miss-your-deadlines-mentality.

He wrote The Ghost Brigades over the course of 2005, and the timing worked out well for him. In November, he announced that he'd signed a new deal with Tor for three new novels, including a third installment of the Old Man's War series: The Last Colony, and to cap off the end of the year, Tor re-released Old Man's War in its trade paperback form with the new John Harris cover art. It also boasted a label: a "Sci-Fi Essential Book."

The label was the result of a new partnership between the Sci-Fi Channel and Tor Books. The cable network had been on a critical upswing: it had launched a news website, the Sci-Fi Wire, and had released some major shows, like Taken (a 2003 Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries about UFOs), adaptations of Frank Herbert's Dune and Children of Dune, and a critically-acclaimed remake of Battlestar Galactica. Scalzi noted that the label was beneficial for the book's visibility with audiences, especially in the lead up to the next installment in March.

February brought another update: Tor announced that it was partnering with Baen Books to begin releasing some of its titles as eBooks. This was notable because the eBook market was still very much in its infancy: while there were a handful of dedicated eBook readers on the market, it wouldn't be until November 2007 that Amazon announced its own eReader, the Kindle. Old Man's War would be part of the first batch of titles included in the deal.

In February, Tor released the next installment in the series, The Ghost Brigades. "What I was concerned about was having lived with the problem of the book not being available to people for about a month until they got the second printing done," Scalzi recounted. The delays meant the possibility of a second installment of a series that few people had read. "I wrote The Ghost Brigades specifically to be something that could be read even if you had not read the first one."

Instead of picking up John Perry's story from the last installment, Scalzi shifted gears, following a character named Jared Dirac, a clone of one a Colonial Union scientist who had defected, Charles Boutin. Jared was something of a failed experiment and sent to serve in the Colonial Union's special forces division (introduced in Old Man's War) the Ghost Brigades.

Tor appears to have been happy with the performance of both books, and on March 1st, Scalzi revealed on Whatever that he had officially begun writing the third installment of the series, The Last Colony.

It would be a busy year for him: after being preempted by The Ghost Brigades, Scalzi's next book The Android's Dream, hit stores that October, while in December, he announced that he'd be releasing a novelette set in the series, The Sagan Diaries, through Subterranean Press in February 2007.

The third installment of the Old Man's War series, The Last Colony, hit stores in April 2007. This entry returned the action to the lives of John Perry and his wife, Jane Sagan, who'd retired to a colony world, only to have their pasts in the Colonial Union catch up to them.

Scalzi had noted earlier that he'd be taking a break from the Old Man's War universe for a short while. He explained that while Tor would have been content to have him only write new installments of the Old Man's War series, he didn't want to be pinned down with the series. "When Old Man's War took off, [Tor] said 'we want a sequel', and I was like 'Okay, what about this other book that you have me under contract for?' They were like 'whatever' They didn't care.'"

Scalzi noted that the moment was eye-opening for him. "If you really are going to let me do whatever the fuck I want, then here we go." The first chapter of Android's Dream is "literally somebody farting somebody else to death because I'm like 'if you don't care, and I can do whatever I want, I'm going to take your word at that.'"

"The whole idea that I could become the person who only writes the Old Man's War novels and every once in a while write something that wasn't in the series," he said.

"I thought about that, the idea of this 40-book series in the Old Man's War universe, and that would be the engine of my career, and the other stuff would be this side thing that happened. I have to tell you that that filled me with a deep existential terror, because on one hand, every novelist wants to be able to have the sort of career where you know that you won't ever be out of print. But the flip side of that is because you're chained to this universe that you might get sick of."

Scalzi mused that it was ironic that he was saying that as the seventh book in the series is set to be published later this year, but that it was the 7th book in in the series over the course of two decades. "That's because we do Old Man's War books when I decide that there's a reason for me to get back into the universe as opposed to 'this is how we all actually make money'. And, writing standalone or non-Old Man's War books had worked out well for him: Redshirts earned him a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2013, a while "The Interdependency series worked very well as a discrete three book series, the Lock-In series did perfectly fine. It turns out that chained to Old Man's War in the way that I was worried I would be."

Scalzi wasn't done with the series after The Lost Colony, but he wasn't interested in continuing the series with installment after installment. In July, he wrote a short story called "After the Coup" for Tor.com, and in August 2008, he released a new entry, Zoe's Tale. Like the other books, it was a jump in perspective, following Zoe Boutin Perry, the daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, during the events of The Last Colony. And, it was explicitly written as a YA novel. It "was the most difficult book I’ve had to write," he reported on Whatever after finishing it.

"I wrote it from the point of view of a sixteen year old girl," he wrote, "I wanted to give the impression to the readers that the events of the book are having a profound effect on her and are, in essence, making her character’s voice mature through the course of the book. And on top of that, I wanted to be sure that Zoe reacted to her situation in ways that make sense — i.e., she can’t just be a Heinleinian “Competent Man” in cutesy gender camouflage. Think this is easy? Try it."

And while it was taking place at the same time as its predecessor, he realized that he had to bring something new to the events taking place in it. And, it was something of an experiment for both him and Tor: "we wanted to make it accessible for teen readers...part of my mission with this book was to write a story that would give the longtime fans everything they come to the OMW universe for, and at the same time leave open the door to younger readers."

It seems that experimentation didn't quite pan out: Scalzi noted that he had planned on continuing Zoe's story as a trilogy of books: "but they shoved it into the adult market, and it just became 'the original trilogy plus Zoe's Tale.'"

From there, Scalzi took a break from the series, writing a string of other books: The God Engines in 2009, Fuzzy Nation (a reimagining of H. Beam Piper's novel Little Fuzzy) in 2011, and Redshirts in 2012. He also found himself busy with some other projects: in 2009, he was hired as a creative consultant for the Syfy Channel's new entry in its Stargate franchise, Stargate Universe (in which a copy of Old Man's War made a brief cameo), and in 2011, Paramount Pictures optioned Old Man's War for a film adaptation, with Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct.

In 2012, Scalzi announced his return to the Old Man's War series with a new entry, The Human Division. He explained that he wanted to avoid churning out installment after installment: "I’d return to it when I had something new to say in it," and that after four years, "I knew what I wanted to do next in the universe." The problem was, he wasn't quite sure how to approach the story he wanted to tell: it didn't quite fit into the standard novel package.

Five years earlier, Amazon had begun selling its Kindle device and the eBook format brought with it some enormous changes: not only new opportunity for authors looking for easy ways to publish their stories, but a new delivery method that meant that they could experiment with form and length in ways that weren't practical until that point. Amazon's store would prove to be incredibly useful for authors such as Andy Weir, who began serializing his novel The Martian in 2014, Hugh Howey (who began serializing Wool in 2011), and Craig Alanson (who began self-publishing his Expeditionary Force series in 2016)

This new book would be something completely different, however: rather than a straight-forward narrative, it would be an episodic novel made up of shorter entries. Tor would release 13 installments online as eBooks and audiobooks, and after the serialization was complete, it would release the entire package as a hardcover book. Each story was designed to stand on their own as a self-contained story, but when read in their entirety, would tell a complete story.

In the announcement for the project, Nielsen Hayden described the book as an experiment: "an episodic novel, released initially in digital, serialized form." A new chapter would drop each week on eBook and audiobook platforms starting on January 15th, 2013 with "The B-Team."

The unconventional story that Scalzi had in mind dovetailed nicely with some experimentation that Tor wanted to embark on. "The second arc of books," Scalzi explained, "were literally written, not only because I wanted to go back into the universe, but specifically because Tor was like 'we need to find out if we can sell stuff electronically and if people will buy it.'"

The entire endeavor, Scalzi says, was a research experience. "My payment for those books came out of Tor and Macmillan's R&D budget, and I was assured that if they failed miserably, they absolutely would not blame me because it was literally an experiment."

In April, with the conclusion of the first batch of installments, Scalzi announced that "The Human Division has been renewed for a second season," and that the series had thus far been a success. It was a good thing, too: the series ended on a cliffhanger. For the non-ebook reading crowd, Tor published a hardcover edition of the story on May 14th.

Beyond successfully launching another installment of the series, "all that information just got bundled over into releasing novellas through Tordotcom," says Scalzi. In 2014, Tor Books announced that it was launching a new imprint, Tordotcom. While the company's website had been an outlet for news about the science fiction world alongside short fiction (Disclaimer: I wrote for Tor.com–now Reactor–from 2019 to 2021), it would now begin releasing its own print novelette and novella-length books, with a focus on ebooks and print-on-demand titles. It's an imprint that has had an outsized impact in the science fiction publishing world, producing a number of enormously popular novellas and short novels like Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries.

In 2015, the experiment continued: Scalzi picked up the story that he started in The Human Division with The End of All Things, another episodic novel. This time, it was made up of four novella-length installments released in June and collected into a single volume that August.

When I interviewed Scalzi for The Verge in 2017, he noted the premise of the project was a real risk: how would readers respond to a novel that was published in an unconventional way? Serializations had long been part of the science fiction literary world, but it was a form that had largely been overtaken by the conventional novel and a publishing industry designed to deliver it. Scalzi noted that was one reason why he opted to use the Old Man's War series to try it: "we were fiddling with format, and to compensate for that, to hold people’s hands while we did this weird stuff, we gave them Old Man’s War, which we already knew they liked and were comfortable with."

Looking back on the two books, he characterized the project as a success: "We learned that there is an appetite for serialized fiction. We also learned that it’s possible to sell fiction in shorter lengths, that people will go, 'Sure, I’ll spend 99 cents on this, or $2.99.'" Since then, he's published a handful of other shorter works, such as his Dispatcher stories, while his next novel, When The Moon Hits Your Eye is another similar experiment: a story about what happens when the Moon turns into cheese, told across a series of episodic chapters, each representing a day in the lunar cycle.

Scalzi noted that he'd be taking another break from the series for the foreseeable future, although he didn't rule out a return to the series down the road.

In 2014, there were other developments in the works outside of the books for the series. After several years of development, the film adaptation of Old Man's War morphed into a television project at the Syfy Channel under the title The Ghost Brigades, and eventually fizzled out. Three years later, Netflix announced that it had picked up the rights to adapt the novel as a film. (As of now, it's still in the works.) He also wrote for a Netflix series, Love, Death + Robots, an animated anthology show adapting a number of science fiction short stories.

Scalzi busied himself with other projects in the meantime: In 2016, he released an audio story, The Dispatcher (he published a sequel, Murder by Other Means in 2020). The following year, he launched a new space opera series The Interdependency, which kicked off with The Collapsing Empire, and was followed by The Consuming Fire in 2018 and The Last Emperox in 2019. 2018 also saw a sequel to 2014's Lock In, Head On.

Facing burnout and anxiety over the state of the world in 2020, Scalzi shifted gears and returned to his starting point: comedic science fiction in the form of a new standalone novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society in 2022, which followed a character named Jamie Gray who's hired by a mysterious NGO that's tasked with protecting Kaiji in an alternate universe. He followed it up in 2023 with another comedy-thriller, Starter Villain, about the heir to a supervillain organization.

Each of those novels earned their spots on various bestseller and awards lists following their publication, helping to turn Scalzi's concerns about being chained to the Old Man's War series aside.

2025 marks the 20th anniversary of that first novel, and to prepare, Tor began re-releasing the novels as trade paperbacks with new minimalist covers: the first two installments (Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades) hit stores in December with new introductions by Scalzi, with the next two (The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale) slated for February, and with the final two (The Human Division and End of All Things) in August, all leading up to the next and seventh installment of the series, The Shattering Peace.

Like its predecessors, The Shattering Peace looks as though it won't quite fit the mold of what's come before. Not only will it jump forward in time and follow some new characters (as well as some familiar faces), it'll cover some new ground that Scalzi says that he's been mulling over for a while. "For a few years, Tor and I have been thinking we should do something with [the anniversary]," Scalzi explained. "One of the reasons I suggested it to them was that I had a story that I was thinking about. Without going into too much detail about it, it was looking at an aspect of the universe that has basically been taken for granted because we need it – the concept of the skip drive."

In Scalzi's universe, his characters move from place to place not by travelling fast through space, but by appearing in alternate universes that are indistinguishable from our own, which solved the problem of breaking the light's speed limit. With the 20th anniversary coming up, Scalzi says that he wanted to "wrap a wrap an actual story around that, and basically explore some of the consequences of what it means for the characters."

Set ten years after The End of All Things, The Shattering Peace will find that the universe has been largely peaceful between the Colonial Union, Earth, and the alien government known as the Conclave. But now, there's a new threat to that peaceful era: the Consu – a highly advanced civilization introduced in the first book, is falling into civil war, and threatens to pull the rest of the galaxy into that conflict.

The past two decades have been complicated and full of change and upheaval. Scalzi began writing the book that would kick off his career in the spring of 2001 – months before the world-changing events of September 11th, and has continued to publish through the ups and downs of everything that followed: devastating wars in the Middle East, economic recessions, political turmoil and the rise of authoritarianism, along with enormous technological changes in the publishing industry.

I can't help but think back to something that Scalzi noted when I interviewed him in 2017 when he described himself as a cockroach: "what that means is that as a writer, you have to recognize that nothing lasts and things change, that there’s no one time in the history of publishing where everything was one way, and then all of a sudden there was change. It’s always changing. So we will definitely try new things to see if they work. And if they don’t, you don’t do them again, or you wait for the market to come around to them again, whatever."

Looking back over the course of his career since Old Man's War, it's clear to see that Scalzi has experimented with publishing each step along the way: publishing his novels on his website, playing with the form and structure of the stories themselves, jumping on new technologies and formats as they emerge, and pushing against the expectation to churn out installment after installment of his series and even leaving it when he needs to.

To be clear, Scalzi has a sales record that that most authors will never have, one that allows him an unusual amount of freedom to write what he'd like to. There's an enormous amount of luck at play: a book that readers gravitated toward even when copies were scarce, a publisher that recognized its potential and success, and a willingness to use it as a jumping-off point to try new things. Scalzi characterized the early success of Old Man's War was like catching lightning in a bottle: "they literally shoved me out on January 1st, they were not expecting for that to happen."

"I do think that like the legend of lighting, it only strikes in the same place once," Scalzi explained, and "that what I did was a thing that happened to me; that isn't necessarily going to happen to someone like Travis Baldree, and the thing that happened to Travis Baldree isn't necessarily going to happen to Tamsyn Muir. We don't know how the next lightning in the bottle is going to happen. We know that it probably will and that in retrospect it seems inevitable, even if it wasn't."

There's an adage in publishing that nobody knows what makes for a successful book or even how to build a career off of one. Much of the process is left to chance: that the right readers will find the right book at the right moment and tell the right people. Publishers can try and anticipate some of that: they know when they have a good or promising book on their release schedules and have budgets for marketing and promotions and networks of booksellers and reviewers to push it out to. But even then, there's no guarantee that a book will take off and earn out the advance the publisher paid to the author.

Looking back, there are so many points where Old Man's War could have stalled: the lack of copies in stores in 2005, that his readers would recommend his book to others, that editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden didn't ignore an email in his inbox or that Tor CEO Tom Doherty didn't march down to an office and order a reprint. The success of Old Man's War isn't just down to the fact that they're good reads: it's that both Scalzi and Tor Books were able to recognize the moment they were successful, positioning their bottle just right to take advantage of the conditions and hope that they did it right.

In the 20 years since, Scalzi has noted that Old Man's War has been a reliable and steady part of his backlist, consistently bringing in new readers not only to his own growing shelves of stories, but to other novels and authors in the genre as well.

The breadth of Scalzi's career reveals a couple of things: that luck can be an important part of the publishing industry, but also being in the position to take advantage of those fortuitous moments is equally as important. As publishing faces an ever-uncertain future in a fragmented media environment where books face competition from movies, TV shows, Tiktok, video games, and other mediums, the ability to remain flexible and to adapt has never been more important, and could lead to the next big, unexpected hit. In the meantime, Scalzi has more stories to tell, in one form or another.