Old Man's War Series:
This discounted ebundle includes: Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, Zoe’s Tale, The Human Division, The End of All Things New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi takes you on an epic romp of galactic conquest and exploration, with some laughs along the way. "Gripping and surpassingly original." —Cory Doctorow Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defense Force, which shields the home planet from too much knowledge of the situation. What's known to everybody is that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve your time at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets. Old Man’s War — John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army, with only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight is far more difficult than he can imagine—and what he will become is far stranger. The Ghost Brigades — At first, Jared is a perfect soldier, but as another man's memories slowly surface, Jared begins to intuit the reasons for their betrayal. Time is running out: The alliance is preparing its offensive, and some of them plan worse things than humanity's mere military defeat.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
24mentions
22people
2008–2025years
67% recommend29% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Things I really liked:
- The Murderbot Diaries (all of them)
- Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy) – perfection
- Discworld series (almost all of them)
- Bobiverse serise (all of them)
- Old Man's War series
- Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir – Werner Herzog's autobiography
- The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin
- Kissinger: A Biography (approval of Kissinger not required)
- various collected works of Borges
- various works of Carl Jung
- Starship Troopers
- A Man Called Ove – made me cry
- A Stitch in Time – a star trek actor novelizing his headcannon of the character he played
- Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
- Mickey7
- Solaris
- Flowers for Algernon
- Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Things I disliked:
- The Wheel of Time (I forget how many I got through)
- Eruption – a posthumous Michael Crichton book was really terrible
- The Book of the New Sun
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being – an artist trying and failing to talk about science
- You might enjoy John Scalzi's latest - The Shattering Peace. It's part of his Old Man's War series, and probably benefits from familiarity with his other books in that series, but is self contained enough to stand alone I think. It has a nice twist to spacetime and FTL travel physics.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/16/the-shattering-peace-...
- The Old Man's War series by Scalzi is a solid example of this, but if you want to go much further back for a classic similar story, try "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. Absolutely wonderful, and a bit more neatly dry than Scalzi, like an aged whiskey.
- Bobiverse series (Dennis E. Taylor)
Old Man's War series (John Scalzi)
The Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells)
- A few I really enjoyed in the last few months:
- The Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells) - Dune (Frank Herbert) - The Shadow of the Torturer (Gene Wolfe) - Old Man's War series (John Scalzi) - Bobiverse Series (Dennis E. Taylor) - I'm more of the space battles and hard science SF fan. so:
I only recently read The Three Body problem, I really really enjoyed it. Can't remember the author, it's Chinese.
The Old Man's War series by Scalzi
If you are interested in the singularity Stross's books come to mind, the best probably Accelerando.
I think these are all in the last 10 years or so.
But you need to ask someone younger than me. "The golden age of science fiction..is twelve."
