For his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife’s grave and enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces. The CDF remake him and his peers into su­per­sol­diers with decades of experience in enhanced bodies. Their mission is to protect the human colonies and to take new worlds. It’s an alien-eat-alien multiverse (sometimes literally) and the habitable planets are much contested.

Scalzi owes a debt to Robert A. Heinlein (ac­knowl­edged at the end of the book). The wise old man, the citizen soldier, enduring love, youth re­gained—­some of RAH’s favorite topics. Too, it owes not a little to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War: dis­il­lu­sion­ment, soldiers as pawns.

Rec­om­mend­ed.