Am I somehow unusual for being seriously weirded out by the cultural undertones in Scalzi's Old Man's War books? I keep seeing people in generally enlightened forums gushing over his stuff, but the book read pretty nastily to me with its mix of very juvenile approach to science, psychology and pretty much everything it took on, and its glorification of genocidal war without alternatives. It brought up too much associations to telling kids who don't know better about the utter necessity of genocidal war in simple and exiting terms in real-world history, and seemed too little aware of this itself to be enjoyable.

Maybe it's a Heinlein thing. Heinlein is pretty obscure here in Europe, but seems to be woven into the nostalgia trigger gene in the American SF fan DNA, and I guess Scalzi was going for something of a Heinlein pastiche.