John Scalzi, The Last Colony [Library of Babel]

You might not have noticed, but John Scalzi has a new book out. The Last Colony is the third book in the Old Man's War series. It's narrated by John Perry from Old Man's War, now happily married to Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades, and working as a colonial administrator on a planet called Huckleberry. At least, that's what they're doing until an old acquaintance from the military turns up to ask them to take over running a new colony, the first to draw its colonists from already established human colonies, rather than third world countries on Earth. Predictably, this creates a somewhat delicate situation:

[The Department of Colonization] decided to play Solomon by saying that each of the agitants could contribute a limited number of colonists to the first wave colony. So now we have a seed colony of about twenty-five hundred people, wih two hundred and fifty from ten different colonies. But now we don't have anyone to lead them. None of the colonies want the other colonies' people in charge."

"There are more than ten colonies," I said. "You could recruit your colony leaders from one of those."

"Theoretically, that could work," Rybicki said. "In the real universe, however, the other colonies are pissed off that they didn't get their people on the colony roster. We've promised that if this colony works out we'll entertain the idea of opening other worlds. But for now it's a mess and no one else is inclined to play along."

"Who was the idiot who suggested this plan in the first place?" Jane asked.

"As it happens, that idiot was me," Rybicki said."

"Well done," Jane said. I reflected on the fact it was a good thing she wasn't still in the military.

John and Jane eventually agree to take on this mission, and take ship for the new colony world of Roanoke. Where they find that not only is the story they were given not the full story, it's only the first of several incomplete stories that they'll get in the course of the book. The universe is a deadly place, it turns out, and they're going to have to use every resource at their disposal to keep their colony alive.

This is an excellent book. It's more polished than Old Man's War, but a little lighter in tone than The Ghost Brigades (there's a certain slapstick element to some of the solutions John and Jane find for their problems, and some sharply satirical bits regarding the Colonial Union). The plot moves along nicely, never falling into a rut, and it covers a lot of ground, from some details of the colonization process, to intricate interstellar politics.

By the end, the book manages to provide answers to many (but not all) of the outstanding mysteries from the first two books, and brings together important elements from earlier plots in a satisfying way. There's a fun plots-within-plots structure to the mission John and Jane have been given, as a series of different explanations unfold, each one showing them to be in even deeper shit than they had thought.

There are, of course, a couple of minor hiccups. One of the later obstacles they encounter feels a little contrived, and there's one plot point that gets brought up and then dropped. Five or six years ago, I would've also objected that the central idea behind one of the schemes in the book was too stupid to exist outside of satire, but the Bush administration has pushed the borders of satire out quite a ways, making John's job easier.

Anyway, those are minor quibbles, not to be taken too seriously. It's a really fun read in a very clever setting. John claims he's done with it (though he's backed off to saying that he's done with the two main characters), but he could do a lot worse than writing a whole slew of books in this universe. I'll keep reading them, that's for sure.