REVIEW: "Old Man's War" series by John Scalzi - Part 1 (Books 1-5)

Memory, Identity and the Bodies We're Allowed to Have

I’ve been deep in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, and after reading Charlie Jane Anders’ piece on the rise of “memory‑sharing” fiction, I’ve been thinking a lot about how these books handle identity, embodiment, and what actually makes a person who they are. Scalzi was playing with memory transfer almost twenty years ago, but reading it now — in a moment when SFF is finally digging into the messy implications of memory and consciousness — makes the limits of his worldbuilding stand out.

The basic setup is that you sign up with the Colonial Defense Forces, and on your 75 birthday head to the recruiting station to go to space to serve for 10 years. You give up your family, property and all connection to Earth: you can never return. There's a vague promise of physical improvement - but nobody expects that their mind, memories and consciousness will be transferred into a new body. It’s engineered, green, enhanced, and built from your DNA. You get SmartBlood™, a BrainPal™, and a body that can do things your original one never could. But it’s still recognizably “you.” Same gender. Same general shape. Same hair color. No one asks whether they can choose something different — a different gender, a different form, something adapted for a specific environment, or even something non‑human. In a universe with hundreds of alien species, the idea that the only acceptable upgrade is “you, but greener and stronger” feels like a huge missed opportunity.

What’s even stranger is how little the recruits ask about any of this. They don’t ask what else they’re giving up. They don’t ask what happens to their consciousness if they die. They don’t ask whether backups exist. They don’t question about the combat death rate, which is shockingly high. More than three‑quarters of them won’t survive the ten‑year service requirement. And no one asks what happens to their DNA if they die before they ever leave Earth.

Some of these questions are answered in the second book, The Ghost Brigades, where we learn that the Colonial Union uses the DNA of recruits who die early to create entirely new soldiers. These aren’t clones or resurrected versions. They’re new people — engineered bodies with no memories, no Earth ties, and personalities shaped by training and tech. It’s a massive ethical leap, and the story treats it as routine.

There’s also the moment when John Perry meets a woman grown from his dead wife’s DNA. She isn’t his wife. She isn’t a copy. But she has echoes of the woman he loved, and they eventually build a relationship. It’s emotionally complicated, and the book acknowledges that, but it never really sits with the implications of creating a person who looks like someone you lost.

Scalzi does occasionally push into deeper territory. There’s the soldier seeded with the memories of a traitorous scientist, who starts experiencing impulses that aren’t his own. There are the debates in The Human Division about whether the upgraded soldiers are the same people they were before or just copies running on new hardware. These moments are fascinating, and then the story moves on. The series keeps brushing up against the big questions without fully committing to them. Initially, the series started off as satire of the genre - but as I get through more installments, it seems like the author is more fully committing to this universe, tropes be damned.

Charlie Jane Anders wrote about a trend in SFF around memory sharing (see https://reactormag.com/the-most-surprising-book-trend-right-now-memory-sharing/ ). This piece helped me see the contrast more clearly. Scalzi planted the seeds of the memory‑sharing trend, but the genre has since moved into much more ambitious territory. Today’s SFF treats memory as a technology, a vulnerability, a political tool, a form of intimacy, a destabilizing force. Scalzi hints at all of this, but he keeps the frame narrow. The result is a universe full of potential that the narrative doesn’t quite explore.

And honestly, that tension — the ideas he sets up versus the ones he doesn’t follow — is part of what makes reading the series now so interesting. I have several more books to go in the series and will report back on any developments I catch in books 6 and 7.