The Last Colony
Going into this third book of the “trilogy”, you already know what to expect from scalzi. Sharp witty dialogue, interesting characters, and probably a semi-complex plot. Well, this book delivers all that and in spades. In this book, we fall back once again with the protagonist from Old Man’s War, John Perry, this time accompanied by his wife Jane, and his adopted kid from The Ghost Brigades, Zoe.
They’re all happily out of the military and are part of a colony where John’s the ombudsman and Jane, the constable. Zoe is now 16’ish and fully a teenager with all the snark and pep born of having permissive and loving parents.
Of course, there’s no real story if there’s no drama, so the drama comes in when John’s family is asked to lead a new colony. They’re hand picked mostly because the colony isn’t a colony from old Earth, but rather from the new colonies. Given that most of the colonies are not old enough to fully populate them, its a bit of a wonder why they even WANT to colonize a new planet. That aside, John’s family is asked to lead it mostly to avoid a political crisis.
Things are never that simple of course, and soon enough, the new colony finds itself in the midde of a galactic wide intrigue whereby new colonies by any species are not permitted unless they are part of this new alliance. Our heroes find a way to prevail and get their way, and a bunch of hi-jinks happens. The end of this book basically kick starts the premise of “The Human Division” and other “Old Man’s War” universe books, but I have to say, this was not as strong a book as the first two.
Still worth reading mostly because of the snappy dialogues and conversations, but don’t go into this thinking it’ll be as good as the first two.