Before Christmas, I clicked on a link on Eric Mayer's journal (I think) and was taken to a funny story about the Nativity scene, written as an interview with the innkeeper who owned the barn where the Christ child was born. The writer of the story was John Scalzi, a SF author I'd heard of but never read.

The Borders store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago was closing, and we happened into the store on New Year's Eve. They had 40% off everything, and I found a Scalzi novel called The Last Colony there. I would not have even looked at it if I hadn't read that story a couple weeks earlier. But since I had read the story, I decided to take the chance and buy the book.

It was a really good book. I enjoyed it immensely. But it was the third book in a series. So when I saw the first book, Old Man's War, at another Borders (hey, I've been doing my part to keep them in business!) I bought it.

In this book, I learned all the background details for the series, like how do these old people become soldiers in the first place, and how John met his wife Jane, and how these Special Forces soldiers come to be. Scalzi acknowledges the debt his material owes to the fiction of Robert Heinlein, and I've read enough Heinlein that I can see the influences.

I've picked up the second and fourth books of this series, titled The Ghost Brigades and Zoe's Tale. I'm just about 60 pages into The Ghost Brigades, and I'm enjoying it quite a lot. I'll try to perhaps "review" the entire series once I'm done with it.

That's all for now!

*****