John Scalzi is returning to his Old Man's War universe
Book #7: coming in 2025
Here's some welcome news for military SF fans: John Scalzi has announced that he'll be returning to the world of his Old Man's War series with a new entry in 2025! He made the announcement in a blog post explaining that he won't have a novel out in 2024, but rather two in 2025.
The reason for that is that the slot that Tor had allocated to him was November 1st, aka Election Day 2024, which he noted is likely going to be a bit of a mess, so they've opted to bump that book (which he described as being similar in tone to the Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain) to February 2025.
2025 also marks the 20th anniversary of his debut novel, Old Man's War, and he noted that it's a good time to return to that particular universe. It's a bit of an overdue return: that novel put Scalzi on the map, and he's released a number of sequels over the years, including The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe's Tale, The Human Division, and The End of All Things. That last one came out in 2016, and while he's moved on to other space opera stories in that time, it's clearly been something that fans have asked him over the years.
If you haven't read them, Old Man's War is something of Scalzi's take on Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers: a military science fiction adventure that throws its protagonist John Perry into the midst of a galactic war as humanity works to keep its foothold against all the other alien civilizations out there. The premise is a fun one: the Colonial Defense Force recruits elderly citizens to serve in its ranks, using the premise that they've got considerable life experiences that will aid them in battle. These recruits are given new, genetically-engineered bodies, weapons, and are then sent out to the battlefield.
Scalzi hasn't revealed any sort of details about what this new entry would be about: he hasn't begun writing it yet, and explained that he's "still in 'moving bits around to see how they play together' mode" when it comes to characters.
They're fun books, but Scalzi's managed to build out the series in some interesting ways as the series has progressed, penning a YA novel (Zoe's Tale) from one character's perspective, and playing with episodic form (Human Division and End of All Things) to tell some interesting stories in this particular world. I've consistently thought that they're his better works: while I enjoyed Kaiju Preservation Society and his Collapsing Empire trilogy, I felt like they were a bit hamstrung by his writing schedule and need for something a bit more light and fluffy. They're fine reads, but they're something more along the lines of a bag of chips, rather than an actual meal.
When Scalzi finished The End of All Things back in 2015, he noted that despite the title, it wasn't necessarily the end of the series: it was just something he was putting aside, and that he was only planning to "write books in the series if I enjoy the process and have someplace new to take the universe." I can appreciate that attitude: there's nothing worse than a series that's overstayed its welcome.
So, we'll see what that looks like in a couple of years. It sounds like he's got a bunch of irons in the fire in the meantime. I wonder if any of those are the long-in-the-works adaptation in development of Old Man's War over at Netflix, which Scalzi's hinted is still in play. Now that the writer's and actor's strikes are over (and with another big space opera series, Rebel Moon in the works over there) maybe there'll be some movement on that front.