Zoe's Tale

In this fourth book in the Old Man's War trilogy, John Scalzi takes a page from Orson Scott Card by retelling the events of the third novel, The Last Colony, through the eyes of a teenage girl, Zoë Boutin-Perry.  Zoe's Tale (Tor, August 2008; editor: Patrick Nielsen Hayden) is the story of the teenage adoptive daughter of the soldier-couple who were the lead characters in the first three books.  I deliberately did not reread The Last Colony before reading Zoe's Tale, and I found that the story worked well with only what I recalled from two readings (most recently in June) of the earlier book.  (My thoughts on The Last Colony are here.)  The story is written in first-person, and Scalzi successfully narrows it to just what Zoë herself knows and experiences, which is appropriately and satisfyingly divergent from what her parents knew and experienced in The Last Colony.  It's nice to have more information from reading the earlier books, but it's not necessary, and I believe this would also work as a standalone novel.  I'm not a big fan of recycling stories this way, but Scalzi pulls it off very successfully.

The story of a colony set on a planet called Roanoke is what you'd expect from the planet's name: it's not only a last colony but a lost colony.  Zoë accompanies her parents, the colony administrators, to Roanoke and is in turn accompanied by two aliens (whom she has named Hickory and Dickory) who are representatives of an alien race which feels indebted to her late biological father for helping them achieve consciousness.  As a result, they both guard Zoë and use her as a model for conscious existence, recording her every action for broadcast like a reality TV show.  That's quite a burden for a teenager to live with, especially one who's taking the first tentative steps into romance and would occasionally like some privacy.  When the colony faces alien attack, Zoë's relationship with her alien bodyguard-companions becomes central to both her and the colony's survival.  The plot whips along briskly, with even the extended life-on-primitive-colony-world section quite entertaining.  I cried copiously at the beautifully done eulogy chapter and then quietly leaked tears for the rest of the book.  I cry at everything, but these tears were particularly well-earned.

Zoe's Tale fairly effectively addresses my two problems with The Last Colony: the plot-irrelevant alien race on the colony planet and the deus ex machina solution to a lopsided fight.  I obviously was not the only reader who complained about these two elements.  While this doesn't fix the earlier work it does improve my satisfaction with the series as a whole.

The main problem with the book is that Scalzi only intermittently captures the teenage level of immaturity.  Sometimes he hits it dead on, but more often Zoë and her friend Gretchen are far too self-aware in their ability to analyze and step back from emotions.  I was a smart and reasonably precocious teenage girl way-back-when, but I'd have killed to have understood myself and others so well and managed my first relationships this successfully instead of flailing around in a clueless hormonal fog.  Zoë is just too rational and too reasonable to feel quite real.  And I don't think there are too many girls (or anyone outside the medical profession) who actually use the term menarche rather than some sort of evasion or euphemism. 

Scalzi also can't quite suppress his own scintillating wit; many of his characters seem to have the same dryly sarcastic sense of humor.  But it's so fun to read that the price in less distinct characterization is worth it.  Also on the humor front, I enjoyed the alien race's naming scheme and the list of future popular musical genres, including "chango-soca," "groundthump," and "doowa capella."  Scalzi did fall into the common mistake of assuming that waltz is, was, or will always be limited to three-quarter time, which anyone on the cutting edge of today's social waltzing (not the fossilized ballroom stuff) or who knows anything about dance history could have told him wasn't true originally, isn't true now, and probably won't be true in the future either.  Ah, well.

I suspect that at the current pace of technological change his characters' playlists and PDAs may make the book feel dated relatively quickly.  And the way he uses dodgeball suggests that he doesn't realize or remember exactly how traumatic an experience being forced to play that game in school was for many of us.

Some external issues:
Careless copyediting.  There's a doozy of an error on page 213 of the hardcover: a major issue at that point is what will happen if two characters fail to do something, but it's expressed as a consequence of what will happen if they do it, instead.  That's more than a typo and unfortunate in a novel that might be expected to be fairly high profile, given Scalzi's recent success.

The cover art is both unfortunate and deceptive.  The giant phallic orange spaceship with the X-wing fighter and the big smoking hole in the side makes it look like this is a space-battle tale.  It's not.  The only onstage combat is hand-to-hand and occupies only a few pages.  Zoë is not directly involved in the two brief space battles.  For a book which is driven more by plot than by space shoot-'em-ups, and which one might reasonably expect to aim partly at teenage girls for its readership, this is a pretty drastic marketing mistake.  But the book doesn't seem to be labeled YA, and my library is shelving it in adult SF, so perhaps they're only going for Scalzi's adult readership and fans of space opera.  That's too bad. 

I also have a generic aesthetic objection to an orange spaceship on a green background with red and dark green lettering (the lettering in the image below is colored differently from that on the actual book cover.)  Perhaps people who are red-green colorblind will find this less headache-inducing.  I do realize that the cover art is not the author's fault.

I've no idea why the diaeresis mark over the e in Zoë is included in the story itself but not in the title.  The inconsistency is irritating, but I've duly observed it here.

Despite these quibbles, I highly recommend Zoe's Tale and expect to strongly consider it when I get around to nominating for the Hugos in the spring.  Read it for yourself:

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

SFBC doesn't have it yet. I expected it in the last mailer, so maybe the next. You should email Patrick about the error. He was pleased to have the typos I found in The Ghost Brigades and this way it can be fixed before it goes to mmpb.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Patrick has indicated that I'm not to email him until he emails me, which event I'm not exactly holding my breath on, it having been over a year since he said he was going to do so. You can point him at my post or cut-and-paste that paragraph and send it to him if you like. I'd be surprised if someone hadn't already pointed it out to Scalzi himself on Whatever, though. It's a pretty dramatic mistake and Scalzi's commenters are not exactly shrinking violets.

[Serge]

Scalzi also can't quite suppress his own scintillating wit; many of his characters seem to have the same dryly sarcastic sense of humor.

Interesting. I met him at Denvention and, while that was a brief encounter, I never got the sense that he is that kind of person. I guess he becomes a different person in the word world. (Meanwhile, I've been told that in the not-word world that is the real world, I myself can be quite sarcastic. That greatly surprised me.)

[Susan de Guardiola]

I've never met him in person; I'm going by his writing on Whatever. I don't think he's mean, he's just got a very good sense of snark. I like his nonfiction writing every bit as much as his fiction.

[Susan de Guardiola]

You know what's weird? I was reading my Hugo-voter e-copy of The Last Colony and the scene in that book has the exact same error. I'm starting to wonder if I have a reading comprehension problem. Check me via the excerpt below in rot13, someone who's read one or the other book or is unconcerned about a noncritical spoiler:

V fghqvrq Uvpxbel pnershyyl. "Jung jbhyq unccra vs V naq Wnar pubfr abg gb fheeraqre gur pbybal?" V nfxrq. "Jung vs fur naq V qrpvqrq gur pbybal fubhyq or qrfgeblrq vafgrnq?"
[favc sbe yratgu]
"Jr jbhyq xvyy lbh naq Yvrhgranag Fntna," Uvpxbel fnvq. "Lbh naq nal bgure pbybavfg yrnqre jub jbhyq nhgubevmr gur qrfgehpgvba bs gur pbybal."
"Lbh jbhyq xvyy hf?" V fnvq.
[favc sbe yratgu]
"Yngre, Mbë," Wnar fnvq, naq ghearq ure nggragvba onpx gb Uvpxbel. "Jung nobhg abj?" Wnar nfxrq. "Jbhyq lbh fgvyy xvyy zr naq Wbua?"
"Vs lbh pubbfr gb fheeraqre gur pbybal, lrf," Uvpxbel fnvq.

Am I insane, or are the two italicized bits (my italics) completely opposite in meaning due to the absence of a "not" in the second one?

[Marilee J. Layman]

They should be opposite. They're two different acts. But I'm guessing you meant the bit before the first italics, and that's not an error, either. He's just checking Hickory's rules. Uvpxbel naq Qvpxbel'f cevznel checbfr vf gb fnir Mbr, naq fvapr rvgure fheeraqrevat be qrfgeblvat gur pbybal jbhyq qnzntr ure, gurl jbhyq xvyy gur nqhygf va rvgure pnfr.