Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

John Perry is 75 years old. He has been living alone since his wife passed away from a stroke many years before. He doesn’t have much to offer the world anymore and so he decides to enlist with the Colonial Defense Force. The CDF recruits old people as a standard practice. Older people have more life experience and would make better soldiers, except of course their bodies are beaten up and broken down. But that isn’t a real hindrance. The CDF has ways to cheat infirmity and old age. They’ll just grow you a new body. A green body, with chlorophyll. A body with a computer embedded within the brain that allows you to access books, languages, fighting skills, and a billion other things. A body that is genetically perfect for combat. Would you trade youth to be a Frankenstein’s monster? Especially a monster routinely sent to kill other intelligent life all because humanity and the other sentient races of the universe are competing for the same inhabitable planets?

It is a tough question. That is why the CDF doesn’t tell you what they will do to you before you join. You just think you are being made young again. Then you wake up as a green muscle bound freak. And then, you know, there is the war.

For a man with not much to live for, John Perry sure won’t die easy. He has fought all sorts of aliens, crab aliens, aliens who eat human babies, even aliens that are only an inch tall. But John keeps going searching for that elusive something that will help him make sense of his life and the war. First he finds it in friends, but they soon die. He fights for his platoon, but the soldiers who don’t take the war seriously die easy. John Perry just keeps going and remembering his long dead wife. That is, until he meets her one day on an alien planet, young and green just like him. But how can that be? Now John Perry has something new to live and fight for, a dream come true.

I enjoyed Old Man’s War. It is your basic sci-fi war novel. If you are a fan of other sci-fi, or space opera, you’ll like this. Appropriate for ages 14 and up and recommended to boys who like war, sci-fi, or who just want a quick summer read with plenty of action.