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It’s kinda hot when someone can reply to your sarcasm with sarcasm instead of just getting offended
For Sale: Baby Shoes. Heavy wear, almost as if the baby had been hiking.
this is the funniest shit of 2017 everyone else delete your posts
Old Man’s War | John Scalzi
A few weeks ago, I was at one of my children’s friend’s homes, watching the two of them do a dubious job on a joint project and nattering away about fiction with the friend’s father. At the end of the day, he pressed Scalzi’s Old Man’s War into my hands. He didn’t pitch it. He just said I’d like it.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew Scalzi — I follow him on Twitter, we’ve sat on panels together, I could pick him out in a line up with confidence — but none of these things necessarily translates into someone’s fiction. Can you tell what my novels will be like after reading my Twitter feed, after shooting the breeze with me over a school project, after seeing me stride across a parking lot? Who knows.
But it turned out that that it did translate. Online, Scalzi is a warm, unflinching, sentimental, humorous shit-stirrer. And Old Man’s War is a warm, unflinching, sentimental, humorous shit-stirring sci-fi. It has a good hook — in the future, old folks can sign up to be young again in exchange for fighting in a galactic war — but lots of novels have good hooks. What Old Man’s War has is an enormous beating heart powering all the training montages and alien action sequences. The novel is interested in training montages and alien action sequences, but it is also very interested in friendship and in being deeply, madly, truly in love with your wife. The combination is sparkling, whimsical, and infinitely readable.
I read this not too long after reading The Sparrow and quite a long time after reading Ender’s Game, and I think they’d be a kind of charming threesome to read altogether — a month of training montages, ethically complex aliens, friends, friends who are actually people you’d like to have carnal knowledge of, linguistics, and light space ship action.
My first Scalzi but not my last.
pervasive doubt 