Zoe's Tale

[sawyl]

Not being able to find The Last Colony in my local bookshops, I decided to continue my current John Scalzi-fest with Zoe's War, the fourth of his Old Man's War novels. This features the account of 17 year-old Zoe Boutin Perry, a peripheral character in The Ghost Brigades, as she had her adopted parents, John Perry and Jane Sagan, try to get a seed colony up and running on the planet of Roanoke — never a good name to pick for a new colonial outpost.

When John Perry is offered the job of heading up a new colony, the first to be composed of people from the Colonial Union and not emigrants drawn directly from Earth, the Sagan-Perry family make the collective decision to head out into the unknown. During an initial period of boredom, Zoe hits it off with the equally sarcastic Gretchen and the two pass the otherwise uneventful voyage to Roanoke flirting with a couple of boys and mocking their prowess at dodgeball.

When the ship arrives at its destination, something goes wrong and the colonists find themselves deprived of most of their advanced technology. Zoe finds herself forced to work harder than most. Required to study with the rest of the kids, she also finds herself press-ganged into combat training by her alien bodyguards, a pair of Obin called Hickory and Dickory who record their experiences and transmit them back to the Obin homeworld in an attempt to teach their species how to be conscious. While events unfold around her, Zoe finds herself caught up in the usual sort of things that happen to teenagers: boyfriend problems, bailing out friends when their own stupidity places them in danger, saving everyone on her planet, that sort of thing.

Not really aware of Scalzi's reasons for writing Zoe's War, I noticed some of the slightly odd narrative choices but shrugged them off as a feature of his intent to write from a first person perspective. Thus I chalked up the fact that John and Jane, the main characters from the previous novels, spent a lot of time doing interesting sounding things off-stage as a feature of the fact that Zoe wouldn't have any reason to know the precise details of what they'd been up to. So although it was mildly annoying not to know what they were talking to General Rybicki about or how Jane became injured fighting some of Roanoake's native inhabitants, I didn't mind because it was true to the structure of the narrative and because the consequences of their actions came out in Zoe's account of events.

Although I started to have suspicions around the denouement, it was only with the afterword that I realised what was really going on: the events of Zoe's War exactly match those of The Last Colony, but from the perspective of a different narrator — something Scalzi did in order to revisit Zoe's character and to use her story to fix a lacuna in the narrative of the other book. Suddenly it all made sense: there was no need to break the flow of Zoe's narrative by having her recount John and Jane's off-stage adventures because these had been stage-centre in Colony and the slight feeling of oddness I'd been getting was down to the fact that I'd chosen to read the books in the wrong order.

Not that I feel I've lost anything by reading the books in the wrong order. The narrative works well, despite the fact that some of the action remains hidden, and Zoe's emotional journey and her gradual acceptance of who and what she is is extremely satisfying. I particularly liked the way she came to understand her peculiar existence as an icon for the Obin and the cost of trading on it to ask them for help. The final big encounter of the book, between Zoe and a delightfully sinister consu — a moment full of gladiatorial allusions — was quite wonderful.