What If We Sent Old Men To War?

January 23, 2015August 26, 2025 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

That’s the premise of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which I’ve just started reading. Scalzi envisions a time in the future when people from earth have colonized distant world, and presumably have encroached on the space of others, precipitating wars in space. The colonists, whose technology is far in advance of those living here on earth have a unique recruiting strategy. You cannot enlist until you are 75, and if you do, you can never return to earth. You have died and gone to the heavens. Why then do people do it? It is because the colonists have figured out how to rejuvenate the old bodies who have nothing and maybe no one left on earth to live for and are tired of living in old bodies.

I’m really liking the book so far, and not just because of the author’s Ohio roots and references. It raises all kinds of questions for me. Will old people, who become more their own people as the years go by, be able to live under military discipline? Will the reprieve from aging make them more or less courageous in the face of death? Will they have more or less to lose? Can we have the potential for endless life without entering into some form of Faustian bargain?

Why would a government want old people in young bodies to fight it wars–all kinds of people, not just the intelligent ones? I could see that this might be a great alternative to Social Security and Medicare.

What is more interesting yet is that this explores the fear so many of us have in growing old. Sooner or later, we face the losing battle of failing bodies or minds. Better to risk a battle one might win than battles that we always in the end lose, and often in great pain, or in utter embarrassment to our sense of dignity.

The question this book raises above all is whether there might be good reasons to warrant the choice not to pursue a rejuvenated body–to accept the indignities of physical or mental decline with grace. Grace indeed, I wonder, the grace that in John Newton’s words “has brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.”

I’m looking forward to seeing how Scalzi works this out. At any rate it is a fascinating alternative to old men and women deciding to send young men and women to fight and to die. Should not the old die for the young?

I’ll keep you posted.

Review: American Gods

August 29, 2014August 29, 2014 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

American Gods is a hard-to-classify book. Most consider it sci-fi or fantasy and the book has won Hugo and Nebula awards often given to books in these genres. Yet Gaiman himself described the book as “a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip” as well as a book about the immigrant experience.

Whatever this book is, and I think it could be argued to be all these things, I was enthralled. I don’t read many in this genre but numerous friends had talked about it so I decided to take the plunge.

The narrative begins with Shadow, the central character in the story, as he is about to get out of prison. He is released early because of the death of his wife Laura in an auto accident that occurred with a mutual friend with whom she was sexually involved at the moment of the accident. As he absorbs this news and his changed future, he meets up with “Wednesday” who wants to hire him as a personal assistant and driver. He’s given a gold coin, which he tosses on his wife’s grave, and because of this she becomes one of the walking dead, dogging his steps through the narrative, and rescuing him at several points including the climactic episodes of the story.

Eventually Shadow discovers that Wednesday is a god (Odin) and traveling about the country to mobilize other gods in a battle between the ancient gods that came to America with the various immigrant peoples and the modern, high tech, material gods of the culture. None of the ancient gods seem particularly noble and Wednesday makes his way through petty “grifting” where he tricks people out of their money. Much of the first half of the narrative is a series of roadtrips around Midwestern America, and a few other locations, enlisting the gods in the coming battle. Eventually, Shadow is hidden away under the name Mike Ainsel in an idyllic community in northern Wisconsin by the name of Lakeside, idyllic except for the fact that a child goes missing from the town every year and is never found.

Part of the reason Shadow is hidden away is that we discover that he is considered important to both factions of this war for a reason he does not understand. Laura rescues him from one attempt of the moderns to seize him. Eventually he is arrested and then rescued as war clouds gather. Wednesday is killed and Shadow fulfills a commitment to keep vigil over his body even though it means his probable death. Action moves between physical reality, dream sequences, and the “backstage” reality as events move toward the climactic battle in a tourist location, Rock City (a real place).

This is definitely an “adult” book in terms of violence and sexuality. Unless there is more to such books than this, I’m not terribly interested. There was to this book. It explores the American landscape and the replacement of the spirituality of the various immigrants to the country with gods of technology, machines, media (one god bears this name) and more. It also explores the dark realities that often lurk behind our ideals and idyllic representations of American life–sordid and violent realities that belie the image we would project of ourselves.

Most fascinating to me was the character of Shadow. Gaiman only references Christianity in passing in an overt sense yet Shadow is one of the most striking “Christ figures” I’ve come across in contemporary literature. He is central to the conflict and yet hidden. He has a surprising identity (which I won’t give away). He embraces motifs of death and sacrifice (he is in fact hung on a tree at one point) and a mediatorial role on which everything comes to hinge in the plot.

This is definitely a “long read”. The edition I read 12,000 words longer than earlier editions and the author’s preferred edition. I could be wrong, but I think this work will be around for some time as an exploration of the American mythos and part of our cultural parlance. Not bad for the work of a U.K citizen, as Gaiman is!

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A Review of Stanislaw Lem’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot

August 22, 2013August 23, 2013 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Stanislaw Lem is a Polish science fiction writer who died in 2006. His writing is set in a futuristic, space travel setting but really explores the inner world of his characters. With Pirx, he explores in separate chapters that could more or less stand alone, phenomenon of lateral thinking and problem solving, sensory deprivation, the fatal mental errors we can make in stress situations, our urges to avoid anything associated with death and dying (Albatross), and the ways we (projected in this case upon a robot, Terminus) we carry around bits and snatches of significant dialogues. I don’t know if there is a category of psychological fiction but Lem’s work might fit here. One also feels at times that he writes with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. There is a zany or quirky element to his stories that keep readers engaged.

Didn’t really say what I thought about this book when I first posted this, probably because I’m still trying to make up my mind about Lem. I guess I find him strangely fascinating at times, and just odd at others. But I have several more titles of his on my Kindle and so will probably come back to him and some point in the not too distant future.