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title = "The Last Colony (Old Man's War #3) - John Scalzi"
date = 2016-04-23
[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "john scalzi", "scifi", "old man's war", "reviews",
"5 stars"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88071.The_Last_Colony):
Retired from his fighting days, John Perry is now village ombudsman for a
human colony on distant Huckleberry. With his wife, former Special Forces
warrior Jane Sagan, he farms several acres, adjudicates local disputes, and
enjoys watching his adopted daughter grow up.
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{{ stars(stars=5) }}
What would happen if genetic soldiers, after returning to their normal selves,
had to fight a different fight?
John Perry and Jane Sagan, now being the parents of Zoë Boutin, have to manage
and save a colony in a time when every other race in the universe decided to
fight the human expansion.
In some ways, it felt like the boring parts of _Children of the Mind_, with
annoying descriptions of a different planet, with its different fauna and
flora and whatnot. I mean, for something more thoughtful, it gets boring
pretty quick.
Also, there is this weird "let me show how John is smart, because he has
almost 100 years" thingy. Every time the colony gets into trouble, John comes
with a solution. It's not Jane, the intelligence soldier that solves this,
'cause she's only 10 or so years old. Actually, Jane logistics is rarely
brought into play, so she mostly sits on the background like a deus ex machina
due her past. And John never gets into a corner he can't escape.
Although these things are annoying, it doesn't bring the whole story to the
ground: yup, the flora and fauna are boring, but they are a couple of pages;
yup, Jane logistics is mostly through under the rug, but we have John; John
never gets into a corner he can't escape or doesn't have a solution, either by
intelligence or politics, but at least the story doesn't stall in those
situations (well, because the situations don't exists, anyway).
As usual, a good, fast paced sci-fi book, like the others from Scalzi.