55 pages • 1-hour read
Old Man's War
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and graphic violence.
The Ethics of War
With the raging intergalactic war as its central conflict, Old Man’s War examines the morality of warfare, particularly as a means of colonialism and expansion. The Colonial Union and its Colonial Defense Force are a machine, expending money, technology, and human lives to fight for control of the galaxy while slaughtering other sentient species, all under the guise of ensuring the survival of the human race. The novel thus paints a portrait of war as violent, duplicitous, and counterproductive, ultimately eroding the very humanity it claims to protect.
Hints of this emerge even in the recruiting of CDF soldiers. The parameters for enlistment in the CDF are designed to entice humanity: The military only takes 75-year-olds, and the soldiers are promised a new life. This promise of excitement and exploration masks the true reality of war—quite literally, as the fact that soldiers do not return to Earth after their service prevents word of that reality from spreading. These methods of recruitment call into question the morality of military recruitment as a whole, suggesting a fundamental disregard for the autonomy of recruits.
As John’s journey unfolds, the novel elaborates on this portrayal, showing how his service leads to isolation and loss of humanity. The clinical, detached way that John reports on the deaths of his friends throughout the novel reflects both numbness born of constant exposure to violence and evolving disenchantment with the CDF. As he refers to his friends as “cogs,” he acknowledges the role that they play in the overall war: They are pieces that the CDF is willing to lose in its quest for victory. After John watches his fellow Ghost Brigade members fight the Consu soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, he reports on the brutality of the battle: One soldier loses an arm, another is incapacitated by a deep slash to their body, and a third is decapitated in the fight. Despite this, the CDF—and even John—considers the war a “victory,” as it is able to ask the questions that it wants of the Consu. The CDF thus utilizes an endless supply of humans to meet its own ends, giving little thought to the individual lives lost or to the psychological impact on survivors.
This disregard for life extends to the alien species that the CDF is conquering. As John notes, the CDF is willing to destroy entire civilizations for the sake of expansion, insisting that diplomacy and peace are not options. The innumerable deaths on both sides of every battle emphasize the lack of morality in a world bent on exercising power through violence.
The Duality of Technological Advancement
Central to the Colonial Union and its success is the use of science and technology. From the moment that John steps onto the beanstalk, it is clear that the CU is advanced well beyond Earth’s standards, as it has built a literal escalator to the sky. Through Harry’s exposition, the reader learns of the benefits of that technology to the CU—namely, the sheer power that it allows the CU to wield. That same benefit, however, is also a drawback, at least for those at the mercy of the CU. In this way, the novel introduces the duality of technology: It both makes life easier and serves as a source of control and domination.
As the piece of technology most central to the daily lives of CDF soldiers, the BrainPal embodies this tension. Soldiers like John are simultaneously agents and victims of the CDF, and their Brainpals are similarly ambivalent, bettering their lives while also dehumanizing them. From the moment that John is introduced to the BrainPal, an implant in his new body, he has mixed feelings about it, feeling both shocked by its seemingly unlimited knowledge and intruded upon by its presence. This duality never disappears. The BrainPal becomes a valuable tool to his survival, providing him with vital information about his enemies, allowing him to control his gun, and supplying a form of immediate communication with the other soldiers. However, the BrainPal also exacerbates the alienation he feels, as he no longer needs to socialize with the other soldiers or learn about them; all the information he could want is readily available in his mind. The BrainPal reflects the dehumanization of the soldiers, which facilitates their dehumanization of others.
The world that the novel portrays centers on technological advancement, as the CDF’s ability to travel through space, access more information than its enemies, and develop stronger weapons is key to its conquest of the galaxy. At the same time, however, the CDF is representative of the unchecked power that scientific “progress” can enable, as it uses its technology to destroy the lives of millions of aliens and humans.
Colonization and the Conflict Between Self and Other
From the moment John is recruited into the Colonial Defense Force, he is told that it has one primary objective: colonizing the universe. As Lieutenant Colonel Higgee stands before John and the other new recruits, he explains that the CDF has “become an invading force” (120), finding new planets for colonization, eliminating inhabitants of existing planets that refuse to work with the CDF, and defending existing colonies from invasion. These tenets define the CDF, which seeks to destroy other species in the name of protecting humanity. However, as the events of the novel unfold, the line between “human” and “Other” begins to blur, complicating the ideology of colonization.
The soldiers in the Ghost Brigade, like Jane, are emblematic of the complexity of humanity in the novel. They are human beings in that they are created from the DNA of dead humans, yet they differ from “normal” humans in many ways. First, they are genetically engineered in a lab and then “born” as fully grown adults. Second, they lack any sort of history or memory prior to their service. Finally, they are created solely to fight and thus never know pivotal human experiences like maturation, love, and personal connection. Nevertheless, the Ghost Brigade soldiers are a key component of the CDF’s success, operating as its strongest unit and pivotal to many of its victories. Since the CDF is purportedly waging its war on behalf of humanity, this calls into question what defines a human and why.
This in turn calls into question the entire idea of the Other—the CDF’s justification for genocide and xenophobia—pointing to the hollowness of colonization as a whole. Like real-world colonial powers, the CDF attempts to distinguish categorically between colonizers and colonized in ways that make little sense. It insists that the Ghost Brigade, as well as John and the other genetically modified humans, are in fact human despite their massively divergent experiences; with bodies that run on photosynthesis, the soldiers in some ways barely resemble animals, let alone human beings. At the same time, it casts alien species as the Other without fully understanding them, overlooking the many points of similarity between these species and humanity. Ironically, those similarities include the colonialist impulse itself, as the Consu demonstrate. Ultimately, just as John struggles to understand the Consu, Scalzi’s novel implores the reader to find connections within humanity, disavowing colonialism in exchange for commonality and human connection.
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