★★★★ (3.8 of 5)

• Full Title: The Human Division
• Author: John Scalzi
• Year: 2013 (mine was 2014 mass market paperback)
• Pages: 493
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-6955-0 (paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Following the events of The Last Colony and the same story retold in Zoë’s Tale — in which Earth has been notified of the Colonial Union’s shenanigans, this book sets off to deal with the consequences. Now without Earth as a continuous source of new soldiers and colonists, the Colonial Union is in a precarious position with respect to the hundreds of surrounding non-human species.

Much of what happens in The Human Division is diplomacy, conversation, and professional relationships as humanity deals with its place in the universe. Mainly, both the Colonial Union and the ET federation called the “Conclave” both notice some of their ships going missing and each suspects the other. Despite a nice climactic space battle scene near the end, we (SPOILER!) don’t actually find out what’s going on in this book.

Unlike the other novels in the Old Man’s War series, this one was apparently written as 13 separately published ebooks, or a serialized novel with 13 “episodes”, only later collected as a novel — though the novelization was intended all along. Each episode has its own plot arc, while all of them add up together to form an overall plot as a novel.

Then, at the time of compilation into book form, two more short stories (both available from Tor, here) were added at the end as “Extras”. They’re called After The Coup and Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today.

 

Praise

As a reader, I really liked the format as 13 separate short stories or novelettes, though Scalzi says in the “Acknowledgements” that it made it more difficult as a writer. For me, it was better that each of the “episodes” were relatively self-contained so they can easily be read in bite-size chunks.

As always, Scalzi’s lighthearted prose is fun (and quick) to read. His characters are full of snark and sarcasm even in moments of doom, so one never puts down one of these books in a dark mood.

Scalzi spent more time describing the ETs in this book than he usually does, so it was easier to picture them. And he seemed to have come up with quite a few interesting and/or unique short story ideas and squeezed them all into the multiple-short-story format of this novel. Which worked really well for me.

The climax was surprisingly action-packed after the mostly subtle character of the action earlier in the book, bringing the events to a swift wrap-up (even if the plot is left hanging).

 

Gripes

There was little to dislike here. A couple of things I noticed were almost certainly the faults of the publishing company, not the author.

For example, one of the “Extras” (After The Coup) takes place prior to the events in the novel, but was tacked on the end of the book. While it’s not crucial to understanding the novel, I thought it would have made more sense to be added at the beginning — perhaps as a prologue. (The other extra story is chronologically after the events of the novel, so it’s fine at the end.)

Secondly, this book had narrower center margins than usual. All the margins are narrow (I assume to save on space/paper), but it’s less important on the outer edges where a reader can simply move her thumbs to uncover words. The problem is in the middle (see photo). On somes page, one can easily read to the end of the line, but on many pages the words just go careening into that steepening crevice. If the word is long, like “interstellar”, then the last few letters can be guessed. But if the word is short like “I”, then it gets lost in there. It required a fairly significant squeeze to mash the center open wide enough to see all the way to the end of the lines — to the point I worried about damaging the book — and after 30 minutes of reading my thumb would become numb from the constant pressure.

On Scalzi’s end, he continued his habitual practice of avoiding descriptions of his characters, though he did better this time with the non-humans. And, perhaps due to the nature of the 13 self-contained stories, I didn’t have nearly the problems I usually do with his forward-backward time jumps. While subplots were concluded within each “episode”, the overall story didn’t end, perhaps awaiting the sixth and final book of the series, The End Of All Things (which I understand to be four novellas collected into one binding).

 

Conclusion

It’s difficult to say, but I think this was my favorite of the Old Man’s War books so far, with the possible exception of the first one, which I might go back and re-read someday (I still own it).

 

 

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