This is the seventh book in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, one of his most popular and I think his longest (… checks Wikipedia …); yes, it’s definitely his most extensive series. I’ve read at least two others, maybe three, but I don’t remember much about any of them except the eponymous first book. The series is as entertaining as anything Scalzi has written and his most straightforward entry in the space opera subgenre.
Humanity is competing for real estate out in the broader galaxy, via technology known as the skip drive. It’s a very stiff and often violent competition, with the Colonial Defense Forces representing humans in the fight. The CDF siphons off a lot of Earth’s resources for the wars but Earth gets very little in return except protection from alien powers. The Colonial Union has jumped light years ahead of Earth in many areas of technology, including the ability to heavily manipulate the human body and brain.
One of the CFS’ weapons is a corps of modified humans. They recruit retired Earthers and harvest their DNA to build them new superhuman bodies, including a neural interface called the Brain Buddy that lets these new super soldiers communicate directly with each other. One condition of their extended lifespan is they can’t return to Earth.
The Shattering Peace is the story of how Gretchen Trujillo, an analyst in the Colonial Union diplomatic corps, keeps the fragile peace between the CU, Earth and several other civilizations known as the Conclave from, well, shattering. Gretchen’s secret is that she has military training and experience from the battle for a planet called Roanoak, along with CDF soldiers John Perry and Jane Sagan and their adopted daughter Zoë Boutin-Perry, all of whom were major characters in Old Man’s War and other early installments in the series that I no longer remember.
Part of the peace agreement among Earth, Colonial Union and Conclave is an experiment in living together on a hollowed-out asteroid space station called Unity. It hasn’t been going all that well, and now, against all probability, it has disappeared (with Gretchen’s former boyfriend on it). There’s some suspicion that the Consu, a much more advanced civilization that’s very warlike and highly religious, is involved somehow. The Consu also showed up in the earlier books. They had raised the Obin (described as giraffe-spiders by Gretchen) to sentience but not given them consciousness; the Obin had been fierce opponents of the CDF until Gretchen’s late best friend Zoë Boutin-Perry helped give them a consciousness collar, and now they’re humans’ allies, but still enamored of the Consu.
That’s a lot of set-up, and Scalzi handles it with his usual aplomb, after first hooking us with an amusing opening chapter in which Gretchen “kills” a roomful of diplomatic security trainees — three times. She learned combat techniques from the Obin, and her personal assistant is an Obin named Ran, who may have some secrets of its own. Scalzi does humor as well as anyone in SFF these days, and The Shattering Peace has a handful of running jokes involving Ran, and Gretchen’s propensity for leaving her personal digital assistant behind, and especially Gretchen’s propensity for being underestimated.
It’s all great fun. Scalzi writes in a breezy but not frivolous style; he takes these characters seriously even if they don’t take always do so. The Shattering Peace is highly entertaining, character-driven SF that I couldn’t put down, a superb distraction from whatever idiocy is going on in the real world. Now I’m going to have to go back and read (or re-read) the rest of the series to see how we got here.
(Tor, 2025)
