• Full Title: Zoe’s Tale
• Authors: John Scalzi
• Year: 2008
• Genre: Science Fiction, Interstellar War
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-1698-6 (library hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

I admit I was surprised again by the Old Man’s War series. I had expected, based on reading the front-jacket foldover, to read a standalone novel about Zoë Boutin Perry, the adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, main characters in the previous three novels. I assumed it might recount — at some point — her unusual history, but then cover a period of time after the third book, The Last Colony. Instead, it is a retelling of The Last Colony, from Zoë’s viewpoint. The timeframe is the same, as are the events, locations, characters, and even most of the scenes. Only instead of John Perry telling it in the first person, Zoë tells it in the first person. I am pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever read any book that simply retells the same story as another book but from another character’s perspective.

 

What I Liked Least About It

One weird thing caught my eye in this story. A character uses “upwind” when he means “downwind” and no one corrects him. It could have been an editing error, but it bugged me that something so simple would be missed. Specifically, on page 135, Zoë’s boyfriend Enzo notes that alien creatures couldn’t smell the humans because the humans were “upwind” of the aliens. I even wondered if I’d been using the word incorrectly my entire life and looked it up to be sure. Upwind is the direction the wind is coming from. So the human characters’ scent would have gone directly to the alien creatures, not away from them. Unless they were downwind. If you’re ever outdoors and don’t want something to smell you, you move downwind of them.

Also weird: The book’s title used a normal “e” in Zoë’s name, while the text inside always used the umlaut. I don’t know of any explanation for this. Personally, if I was named Zoë, I would rather like the umlaut, just to be cute about it, but then it would be more difficult to type it (use ALT+0235 on Windows keyboards). But it struck me as strange that the publishers didn’t stick with one or the other.

Also: lack of character descriptions and forward-backward time jumps.

 

What I Liked Most About It

What I enjoyed most, I think, was the effort. Interestingly, I had recently been contemplating doing something similar with my next short story — writing it four times, once each from the perspective of four different characters. So, although I had recently read the exact same story in The Last Colony, I read with interest, seeing the same events from the perspective of a teenage girl rather than from the viewpoint of an old man from Earth who’d been reborn as a space soldier and then again as a colonist. Besides this, the story filled in a few gaps I’d wondered about in the previous book — things that couldn’t have been told because John Perry didn’t know about them.

I later learned that other authors have tried the same thing. Emily Griffin, for example, wrote Something Borrowed and then later Something Blue, which tell of mostly the same events from two different perspectives. Orson Scott Card did it with Ender’s Shadow, which runs parallel to Ender’s Game. Of all those, I’ve read only Ender’s Game, so I can’t say how well any of them parallel the other. Zoe’s Tale paralleled The Last Colony VERY closely.

 

Conclusion

For anyone who read and enjoyed either of the first three books, I think you’ll like this one too; not only is it similar in style but it fills in a few gaps from the previous book. It was fun and easy relief following as it did my attempts with Hitchens and Stephenson.

Related: Old Man’s War • The Ghost Brigades • The Last Colony

 

 

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