Set in the far future, Humanity is just one of many hundred sentient species essentially fighting over the same real estate: habitable planets. The back of Old Man's War reads:
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.
The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place.
So: we fight. To defend Earth (a target for our new enemies, should we let them get close enough) and to stake our own claim to planetary real estate. Far from Earth, the war has gone on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.
Earth itself is a backwater. The bulk of humanity's resources are in the hands of the Colonial Defence Force, which shields the home planet from too much knowledge of the situation. What's known to everybody is that when you reach retirement age, you can join the CDF. They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You'll be taken off Earth and never allowed to return. You'll serve your time at the front. And if you survive, you'll be given a generous homestead stake of your own, on one of our hard-won colony planets.
John Perry is taking that deal. He has only the vaguest idea what to expect. Because the actual fight, light-years from home, is far, far harder than he can imagine-and what he will become is far stranger.
The story takes off from there, through numerous twists and turns, the first two books focus on different characters, then they later get together in a climactic finish to the whole series. I REALLY enjoyed these books. Not because of the big space battles and epic invasions - that's not what you will find here. Instead the characters are filled with moral and conscious choices about what is right and what is wrong in a rather anarchistic galaxy where the survival of Humanity is constantly threatened. Some reviewers have compared it to Heinlen's Starship Troopers, but I thought it was more a blend of that and John Haldeman'sThe Forever War for thought provoking ideas.
I'm deliberately being vague because I really enjoyed the twists and dont want to give away spoilers.
But I highly recommend these books and cant believe I havent read them before.
