THE SHATTERING PEACE

Just like it says on the tin: Powerful and disgustingly condescending aliens threaten a fragile peace in the seventh installment of the Old Man’s War series.

Ten years have passed since the publication of Book 6, The End of All Things (2015), and the same amount of time has passed in the storyline, when the humans of Earth, the humans of the Colonial Union, and the aliens of the Conclave signed a treaty that halted colonization of new planets. So Colonial Union diplomatic analyst Gretchen Trujillo is fairly surprised to learn that the three political entities have jointly founded a secret colony called Unity on a remote asteroid space station in an attempt to determine if citizens from all three governments could manage to get along. What’s more surprising is that the space station and its 50,000 inhabitants have apparently vanished without a trace. If the story of Unity Colony and its disappearance were to become widely known, it would seriously threaten the treaty. Tasked with discreetly investigating the situation, Gretchen quickly learns that the likely culprit is the Consu, a technologically advanced alien race who consider all non-Consu as barely sentient animals. Why would the Consu make the colony disappear? And if the Unity colonists are still alive, is there any way of persuading the Consu to recover them, given that the Consu refuse to negotiate with beings so far beneath them? Scalzi enjoys constructing intricate puzzle-box crises that somehow the protagonist is just the right person at the right time with the right amount of smarts to defuse, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. This plot device teeters on the edge of seeming contrived, but the visceral pleasure of reading about people using their brains to triumph over superior forces outweighs that potential flaw, as well as the slightly spoiler-y observation that the novel’s conclusion seems to borrow some elements of Scalzi’s Interdependency series. We need more books about smart people winning.

Classic Scalzi space opera at its wisecracking, politically pointed, and, somehow, fiercely optimistic finest.