The End of All Things Review

Title: The End of All Things
Author: John Scalzi
Date Purchased: 2/12/2017
Price Paid: $3.17
Date Finished: 3/14/2017
Rating: 4/5

Now that I’ve finally finished the Old Man’s War series, I’m left wondering if I would have felt the same about these books had I read them all at once. I have a recollection of loving the first book and quite enjoying the second, which is what led to me purchasing the entire series. And I enjoyed them, but did time help that?

With a several year gap between my reading of the first two books and the last four, I don’t really have a good memory of just how good the first two books were. Is it possible that had I read them all at once I wouldn’t have enjoyed the final four as much? Have I distanced myself from the first book enough for the comparison to not be as important?

Before I dive too far into examining the series as a whole, I should speak about the sixth book. Much like the previous offering, The End of All Things was written and released as a serial and later turned into a full length novel. Scalzi used these stories to wrap up the plot points he’s built up over the past three books, and weaves familiar characters in throughout.

I don’t have a ton of new things to say about this book as it runs pretty close to The Human Division – it was written in a serial format, the narrative point of view changes from story to story, and each set of stories works to advance the plot. In a lot of ways it ticks many of the same boxes, but I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much. The stories were heavier, the stakes a lot higher, and this lent a darker tone to the book.

One minor quibble is that The End of All Things felt more like a plot-driven story than a character-driven story. I’m not totally surprised that this happened – Scalzi had painted on a pretty large canvas with the series, and filling in quite a few blank spots took some work. That work was made a lot easier by letting the plot take the wheel instead of the characters, which got the reader where we needed to go a lot quicker.

All in all, I really enjoyed the Old Man’s War series. In fact, if I didn’t have a massive list to work through, I would have reread the first two books to refresh my memory. But while I’m sure I still would have liked the final four books, I don’t know if they would have held up to the standard set by Old Man’s War. It’s almost like the opposite of recency bias – my rating of them was increased because of the time that had elapsed.

The focus of the books shifted a lot throughout the series, with the start leaning heavily into military science fiction and the end heavily involved in galactic politics. While both of those sub-genres are ones I enjoy, the shift in gears made the back half of the series feel quite a bit different from the front half. I’m sure this contributed to the feeling that I might not have liked them as much if they’d been read in one shot.

Final Thoughts: A good culmination to the series, one which I would recommend as a whole.