Open Thread: January 2010

Kaj_Sotala

And happy new year to everyone.

It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who hated Old Man's War, though our reasons might be different.

It's been a while since I've read it, but I think the character who came out in favor of an infrastructure attack (was that the genocidal war?) turned out to be wrong.

What I didn't like about the book was largely that it was science fiction lite-- the world building was weak and vague, and the viewpoint character was way too trusting. I've been told that more is explained in later books, but I had no desire to read them.

There's a profoundly anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist theme in Heinlein, but most Heinlein fans don't seem to pick up on it.

What I didn't like about the book was largely that it was science fiction lite-- the world building was weak and vague, and the viewpoint character was way too trusting. I've been told that more is explained in later books, but I had no desire to read them.

Nor I - I've read Agent to the Stars, which was just as bad, so I have no expectation of improvement.

5Risto_Saarelma16y

The most glaring SF-lite problem for me was that in both Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, the protagonist was basically written as a generic twenty-something Competent Man character, despite both books deliberately setting the protagonist up as very unusual compared to the archetype character. in Old Man's War, the protagonist is a 70-year old retiree in a retooled body, and in The Ghost Brigades something else entirely. Both of these instantly point to what I thought would have been the most interesting thing about the book, how does someone who's coming from a very different place psychologically approach stuff that's normally tackled by people in their twenties. And then pretty much nothing at all is done with this angle. Weird.