The Last Colony

[sawyl]

I've just finished The Last Colony, John Scalzi's penultimate Old Man's War novel. The story is set on Roanoke and events unfolds in parallel with that of Zoe's Tale, but this time they're seen from John Perry's point of view.

The story begins when John Perry and Jane Sagan are asked to become joint heads of the new Roanoke colony project. Despite some minor pre-departure oddities and some cultural tension, which John defuses by setting up a dodgeball league, the trip out to Roanoke proceeds without incident. On arrival, Perry's assistant Savitri notices that they seem to have arrived at the wrong planet, the Captain finds that his ship will no longer answer its controls, and the executive council receives a note telling them that they're going to have to abandon almost all the modern technology they were planning to use to colonise the planet.

Fortunately for the colony, its members include a large group of Mennonites who are au fait with retro farming equipment and able to train the rest of the group in its use. As a result, they survive their first year relatively unscathed, excepting a couple of drownings and number of deaths at the hands of the local sentients — a species that look a lot like werewolves. And it's during the fallout from the werewolf incidents that Perry and Sagan uncover some information that shows just how badly they've been screwed over by the Colonial Union.

Reading The Last Colony after Zoe's Tale meant that I already knew the main plot and had a pretty good take on the dynamics and the culture of the camp. It also meant that I knew the secret behind the deus ex machina ending — Scalzi was absolutely right to say in his afterword to Zoe's Tale that the origins of the gadget really needed to be explained. But it also meant that I had no real idea what General Rybicki said to John and Jane in the corn field, what happened when John was summoned to Phoenix, why no one was terribly bothered when Jane was attacked by the werewolves and just how the final battle was won, because Zoe wasn't really aware of any of those things. But it also meant that there were things I expected to be there, details from Zoe's life that didn't even register in John's mind and I have to admit that that threw me a little bit.

All in all, I liked the book a lot — although I suspect that Zoe's tale might be the better of the two — and I thought the ending was clever and true to the emotional tone of the whole series. Despite the slightly gung-ho militarism of Old Man's War — this is a slightly unfair characterisation, given that Scalzi doesn't shy away from showing the emotional and physical costs of being a soldier in the CDF — I was slightly bothered by the lack of criticism of the genocidal nature of the Colonial Union. But I needn't have worried. The Ghost Brigades showed that Scalzi was aware of the problems of his polity, the second class treatment handed out to the CDF and, especially, the Special Forces troops; then The Last Colony and Zoe's War he made the problems manifest, before providing a solution which ought to mitigate the worst excesses of the Colonial Union regime.