Fighting for peace
John Scalzi's return to his Old Man's War series is a timely, optimistic story of unity in a violent universe
Earlier this year, John Scalzi celebrated the 20th anniversary of his debut novel Old Man's War, a military science fiction novel that follows a 75 year old name John Perry who enlists in humanity's interstellar armed forces, the Colonial Union Defense Force. He's given a new body with superhuman abilities, and is sent off into the depths of space to fight on behalf of humanity for territory in a crowded and violent universe.
Over the years, Scalzi has sparingly added to the series – first with more traditional continuations The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony, and then with increasingly experimental books like the YA Zoe's Tale and serialized The Human Division and The End of All Things. He's frequently noted that he's happy to add to the series when he has something to say, and a decade after the release of the last installment, he's returned with a new one: The Shattering Peace. After years of playing with stories told in unconventional ways (his other 2025 novel, When the Moon Hits Your Eye is certainly that), this is almost a refreshing, straight-forward novel that takes the series and world into new territory. It's a fast, fun adventure that feels like it's running in the same circles as Babylon 5, sketching out an optimistic tone for humanity's future in the cosmos.
Andrew Liptak
In the Old Man's War universe, humanity became an interstellar species and promptly ran into problems: we were just one of many civilizations out there, and everyone was fighting over the habitable planets available to colonize. Those spacefaring humans set up the Colonial Union to protect Earth, and goes on the offensive, using genetic engineering, advanced weapons, and scientific innovation to get an edge, and rely on aging humans from Earth to keep their numbers up.
After centuries of brutal warfare, Earth eventually wises up to the Colonial Union's tactics and the true nature of the threat against humanity. They end up forcing a deal with the larger collective of alien civilizations, the Conclave, which puts a halt to the rampant colonization efforts that have been fueled the ongoing warfare, and for nearly a decade, the galaxy has been at some form of peace.
Spoilers ahead for The Shattering Peace.
Scalzi picks up this story at that point with a new development: in an effort to further interspecies cooperation, humans and another species, the Obin, have set up a covert experiment, Unity. It's a hollowed-out asteroid with a city constructed in it, populated by a number of representatives of different civilizations. If it works, it could be a model to ensure a long-lasting peace for everyone, and if it doesn't, well, it's a secret project.
Everything seems to be going well until the station abruptly vanishes.
Enter Gretchen Trujillo, who appeared in Zoe's Tale as the best friend of the book's titular character. She's advanced through the ranks of the Colonial Union's State Department as an analyst on the Obin desk, helping to work through diplomacy to advance humanity's interests. She's called in to a secretive meeting with the officials in charge of the Unity project, where she's briefed and assigned to a mission to try and figure out what happened to it.
One of the challenges when you engage in a long-running series is that to maintain continuity, authors and creators are increasingly hemmed in by the choices they made in earlier installments. Old Man's War is no exception, and Scalzi ends up mining some of the earlier installments for inspiration. He finds that in the form of the Consu, an enormously advanced alien civilization that John Perry ended up running into in Old Man's War. The Consu "so far advanced from everyone else in the neighborhood that comparing ourselves to them was like comparing Cro-Magnons to spacefaring humans," and they've taken to experimenting and fighting other civilizations in various ways. The Obin were one such experiment: when the Consu discovered the their animal-like predecessors on a moon, they "uplifted [them] into sentience, without consciousness, just to see what would happen."
Gretchen soon learns that the Consu, who usually keep to themselves, have been taking an outsized interest in the Obin and humanity. By the time they reach the place where Unity station orbited, they find that it's completely gone: there's no debris to suggest that it was destroyed, no exhaust plumes that would indicate that it was pushed out of orbit, nothing. After a bit of searching, they find something weird: a cloaked object, and when they bring it onboard, they find a single Consu onboard.
It's uncooperative, telling them that they've interfered with its noble death, and that now that they've pulled it from hiding, the rest of its civilization know that it's still alive. If they can keep it alive during the attack that soon follows, it'll tell them what happened to the colony. They do, and it does: it had been experimenting with Skip Drives – Scalzi's handwavy technology for faster than light travel – and it had taken the entire colony and skipped it out to a very different parallel universe. That isn't supposed to be possible: skipping involves jumping a ship from one universe to another, near-identical alternate universe in order to travel vast distances across space. Skipping to another universe that goes beyond that universe-thats-the-same-but-with-one-miniscule-difference range is immensely difficult to accomplish, and somehow, this particular Consu (which Gretchen nicknamed Kitty) figured out, and he ends up taking them there, where they find that the station is safe, but running out of supplies.
As it turns out, the Consu have come to a civilization-wide moment of decision. As a sort of elder species, they've taken it upon themselves to try and advance the younger civilizations: instigating wars, experimenting with them, and generally setting up a galactic-wide trial by fire to make sure everyone who survives is tough and worthy.
Action ensues as Gretchen, her Obin assistant Ran, and other members of her mission work to figure out how to get back to their home universe and stave off the two factions of the Consu, one that wants to turn up the heat on humanity and Conclave – a surefire way to test anyone's mettle – and the one that wants to let things play out a bit more smoothly.
In a lot of ways, The Shattering Peace reminded me quite a bit of the setup to J. Michael Straczynski's ambitious classic series Babylon 5, in which after a devastating interstellar war, humanity sets up a diplomatic outpost that's designed as a sort of neutral ground for the various civilizations to work out their differences, all while a couple of the super ancient races, the Shadows and the Vorlons, are manipulating them to their own ends to ensure that whomever survives will be strong enough to inherit the galaxy.
Andrew Liptak
The theme of cooperation as a means of survival is a common trope in science fiction – shows like The Expanse and various iterations of Star Trek and Stargate has also played with these ideas – and it's one that feels like a welcome distraction in a world that feels increasingly chaotic, grim, and mean. It's also a nice evolution for Scalzi's series, which started out as a take on Robert Heinlein's militaristic Starship Troopers, and which could have easily followed the path of so many other imitators: the next battle and campaign for the heroes as they fight their way to a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity.
While the Old Man's War series has started out in that mode, Scalzi's increasingly shifted away from it, taking on a Theodore Roosevelt-like ethos of "Talk softly and carry a big stick." Military force is on the table in the form of the CDF and their skilled operatives, but his characters are largely more interested in talking things out and finding some sort of middle ground where everyone can find a way to get along. As in all of his other novels, his characters are smart, fast-talking, and sarcastic people who're often finding ways to avoid conflicts with one another.
There's a telling moment midway through the book that exemplifies this: Gretchen, Ran, and their companion Magdy are confronted by a group of xenophobic Unity residents who're more than willing to throw down. Gretchen puts one in a painful hold when she's shoved, and tells him that she's more than willing to break fingers if they keep at it. When they're confronted again, Gretchen talks them down, reasoning that they're not really willing to fight, and that if they do come to blows, they have no hope of winning. Their would-be assailants relent.
Scalzi's chatty characters and rapid, back-and-forth dialogue can wear thin after successive books, but there is something comforting about watching as well-intentioned, competent people go about their jobs. It's why shows like The West Wing have long maintained their appeal: it's comforting to think that there are smart, motivated people leading us, even if we know there's a lot more to the story.
In doing so, Scalzi brings us to a new chapter for his series and world: humanity's now aware of the Consu's intentions and our place in it, and there's any number of places that he could take it from there: some larger threat lurking out in the depths of the galaxy? The looming threat of renewed, interstellar war? Either way, there are a ton of exciting possibilities, and given that Scalzi signed another major deal with Tor last year for another decade of novels, I'm sure that we'll see where he takes the story at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Regardless of where it goes, I can appreciate a story that focuses on people taking taking the difficult, let's-solve-this-problem-with-our-words type of approach rather than going in guns blazing to take care of whatever new problem that the heroes need to face. As evolutions go, it's a positive, optimistic, and idealistic direction, and that's something I think we sorely need in the present.