37. The Last Colony, by John Scalzi
While I requested this book through interlibrary loan* at the same time as The Android’s Dream, I did not intend to read these books back to back. What happened is the book I intended to read between TAD and The Last Colony was so deathly dull, so unspeakably tedious, so “things you want to pound and pound with a shovel” irritating that I dropped it about eighty-five pages in, and turned to a second helping of Scalzi.
The books are different enough that I needn’t have worried about repetition or overkill. Where TAD presented new characters and situations, TLC was the conclusion of the story cycle** Mr. Scalzi began in Old Man’s War and continued in The Ghost Brigades.
Where the first book is about war, and the second about secrets (and lies), TLC is about politics and diplomacy. That is to say it’s about war and secrets and lies all rolled into one, and how the interplay of these dynamics variously costs and saves lives, maintains and shatters the status quo.
These dyamics all coverge on the shoulders of John Perry, the hero of Old Man’s War, and his wife, ex-special forces officer and The Ghost Brigades protagonist Jane Sagan. They are recruited to lead a new human colony which, unbeknownst to them is not yet another home for humans among the stars, but the linchpin of a plan to force a conflict between the human Colonial Union and the alien Conclave. Moreover, as the story progresses, Perry and Sagan learn that the plan they’re serving benefits more from their colony’s obliteration than from its success. This information makes them…unhappy…and drives them to search for a way to thwart the destructive ambitions of opponents on both sides of a game of empires.
Although this is a science fiction novel — you can tell by the space ships and the genetically engineered human warriors, and the aliens with eye-stalks — The Last Colony is a novel of ideas and situations set against a futuristic backdrop rather than a simple space fantasy. The ideas and situations advance through the actions of interesting characters and strong dialogue, but the larger issues of colonization and hegemony, expansion and isolation, war and diplomacy are timeless.
*Let’s hear it for the Western Massachusetts public library system shall we? In fact, let’s hear it for public libraries in general while we’re at it.
**I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a trilogy. While the books feature the same major characters, the situations are different enough, and the stories self-contained enough, that they can stand alone without too much reader confusion. While a reader of The Last Colony will benefit from knowing what happened in Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, the story doesn’t depend on familarity with these details, except to the degree that a reader possessed of such familiarity may have a richer appreciation of the details behind the context information Mr. Scalzi references.
