I ran through all these and by the time I was reading “The Human Division”, the new book was out. I had a signed copy sitting in my living room. So I was a little motivated to get to the end and dig in.

I was also experiencing something I’ve run into in the past when I go back and re-read something that was originally spread out over a long time frame. Everything hits harder when you are into it over a much more compact time frame. You ‘know’ everyone a little bit better and the world just feels a bit more concrete.

“The End of All Things” might be my favorite book of the series so far. It was published as a series of novellas and they are impactful. I hate to be a plot spoiler so I’m not going to discuss specifics but they all really put on display Scalzi’s ability to be at once irreverant, exciting and deeply heartfelt. I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do - to put all these elements together and keep a balance. A lot of what I read can be very action oriented, but doesn’t have the same emotional pull. All the humor is here, and the cool battle scenes and future military tech. But, and maybe it’s just me, I feel like the emotional component is the strongest of the series.

This is the last post for my re-read and I’m going to try and post a full review for “The Shattering Peace”. That’s a lot more work, so we’ll see if it happens, but I’m going to try.

I can’t get Hungarian covers for all the books. It makes me sad I don’t live in Hugary any more, so don’t give me grief about it.

As mentioned previously, The Last Colony/Zoe’s Tale was the end of an arc. The Human Division is the start of the next. Now as Forrest Gump said, “I am not a amart man.”, I’m not. In writing up my thoughts about the read through, I find myself realizing things I’m sure everyone else got the first time around. And The Human Division, as the title of a military sci-fi book has always made me think about just one definition of Division. I completely missed the more obvious one.

As an aside, this reminds me of a question I ran into in high school English that gave me trouble for years - decades really. I don’t remember the exact question any more, but it was basically about how a different spelling of “A Separate Peace” could change the meaning. And I kid you not, it wasn’t until many, many years later I finally realized they were talking about the word Peace. I just kept thinking, “There aren’t other ways to spell separate are there?” I told you, I’m not a smart man.

Back to the point. We have a new arc. Some familiar characters to link to the previous books, some new characters, same world and we keep moving the story forward. it was originally published as a set of 13 serial stories. I never read it that way - just as the full book. It all ties together really well. We come back around to a much more “military” feel than the last two books, in my opinion. We don’t lose the big picture story but it just get’s a little more fighty. We also pick up a lot of mystery that will drive the arc.

I really enjoyed it of course. I mean, if it’s not clear, I’m a Scalzi fan boy. Other than Red Shirts I’m pretty much a full on fan of it all. And even then - that book is executed so well - I just don’t like that kind of story. Anyways - The Human Division is solid. Ton’s of adventure, intrigue and awesome super soldier fun.

I have to come clean - I read the rest of the series, and the new books without writing the rest of the posts. So now I’m going back and trying to remember. I feel bad. But not too bad. Life got busy and I needed to finish the series so I could get to my new book. Ok - so my conscience is clear. Here we go.

Zoe’s Tale is the end of an arc. And it is apparently Mr. Scalzi’s favorite. I heard him say this at a book signing, and he mentioned he’d said it before - so feel free to check - it made sense. He was writing about the kind of person his daughter might become at the time. ( If I remember right, apologies if I messed that up.) Regardless, I think a person may see it differently and I’d like to speak to what are possible objections to the book.

1. Why would I read the same book again? This feels like Nintendo selling me the same games over and over.
2. Why would I read a juvenile by a guy not known for juvenitles? This feels like a commercial offering to make more money off fans.

They are pretty tighly related. Here’s my answer to both.

The story is really different from The Last Colony. Yes, same world, same time frame, lots of overlapping characters - but so very, very different. It holds as a stand-alone frankly. You could hand this someone, they could read it and love it. I know I did. And this re-read I read them back to back with very little time between them. If it was going to feel repetitive, this would have been the time to feel it. I didn’t. Think back to whe you were a teen. How much of your life did your parents have zero idea what you were up to?

For number two. I have no idea if that factored in. Mr. Scalzi isn’t stupid and is very open in talking about the commercial aspects of his work. But I think that the story is compelling and even if the motivation were cynical, the story isn’t. The problem is when you have stories that are so obviously trying to ride some trend or target some audience, but don’t tell a good story. This is a good story.

That’s it. Zoe’s Tale is great.

The Last Colony is of course, awesome. It’s also a considerable shift. Is this military sci-fi? I would say no. Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades are very much military sci-fi, but as we close the first arc of the Old Man’s war books, we shift to something different.

Szilard is back, which made me really happy. And so much I love about Scalzi is here. The humor, the relatable characters, the really creative story telling, and the emotional payoff. He knows how to start, develop and finish a story. Based on a lot of what I’ve read, not a lot of author’s can do all that well. I think it’s a huge part of why he’s been so successful. There are some author’s I love who can create amazing worlds and problems - but to be frank, they struggle to stick the landing.

Scalzi knows how to bring a great story to a great close.

The Shattered Peace is out now, I’m waiting to get through 3 more books before I read it.

Next up: Zoe’s Tale

It’s been a long time since I last read these books. I remember the broad strokes but I had forgotten so many particulars. As I said in the Old Man’s War post, I’m really, really enjoying it.

Pretty much everything I said about the first book is true of this sophomore effort. Solid action, great story, hits you in the feels on the regular.

But here is the thing that really hit me hard with this one. I’ve got to give a little context.

Last year, John Scalzi was in the Phoenix area to do a book signing and I went. It was super fun. It was for Starter Villain. As John talked about all kinds of thing and answered questions, he ended up talking about how he does research and puts things in a real world setting. His example was that there is an even in Kaiju Preservation Society where the characters arrive at a place. ( I’m not spoiling this. ) and the weather for that day, is the real weather for that place that day.

Later as I was in line with my wife, waiting to get my books signed, I told her that I kind of felt bad. He’s bringing all this effort to the table and I’m just casually reading it for fun. I was kind of joking.

Well as I’m re-reading The Ghost Brigades this week, there is something really different now from the first time. This time I’ve read “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”. Now, not only do I know who Leó Szilárd is, he’s a hero of mine, to the extent that I consider people heros. My mind was blown as I was reading about a character named after him and it just clicked so many things together. I felt like this time around I didn’t come to the table from my side, so ill prepared as in the past. I wonder what else I’m missing. :)

Side note. I think if Szilard were alive today and had been living in the USA at the start of this year, he’d be gone by now.

Many years ago I was writing book reviews pretty regularly and I became aware of author I had not heard of. He’d written some military sci-fi ( I’m interested ) that was said to be in the vein of Starship Troopers. ( I’m VERY interested )

I read it, I liked it. I started reading Whatever. I read Agent to the Stars ( It’s free - but so good! ) and here were are, he’s my favorite. So why am I talking about this old book now?

Well, the 7th book in the series is coming out soon. Mr. Scalzi will be here in Arizona later this month. I’ll be going. Mostly because I was a bit of a hot mess when I met him at the book signing for Starter Villain. I want to go and be a normal human. Plus, he’s just really good at these appearances and they are immensely entertaining.

All right so back to the topic on hand. I’m re-reading the Old Man’s War books to get ready for The Shattered Peace. I figured I’ll post about each as I read them. These aren’t proper reviews. I haven’t written one of those in ages. And to be fair, I’ve read pretty much all the fiction that John has published over these many years and I pretty much love every bit of it. At this point I’m not as objective as I was once. ( I will say Red Shirts was not my favorite. Though it’s not because it’s a bad book. It’s executed so well - I just don’t prefer that kind of story. )

I jumped into Old Man’s war and the beginning I remember pretty well but once we started to get into it I found myself laughing out loud and just enjoying the story so much. I had forgotten just how quickly John’s creates relatable, believable characters. I’m just getting going and I’m laughing and thinking, “That is so Thomas!”. I love shows that do this but it usually takes a while to get to that point. In a couple chapters Old Man’s War has me invested quickly.

This may sound odd, or make me seem dense, but I also realized on this read just how much Old Man’s War does mirror Starship Troopers. I think I was enjoying all that made the story fresh to me before, that I just didn’t process this meta-information on the side. It really is laid out in a similar way. But in many ways OMW is better. I don’t this distracts from ST- it’s just that I don’t miss all the preachy sections of ST. It’s similar to how Fuzzy Nation is so refreshing with it’s lack of sexism.

There are some great nods to Starship Troopers and Scalzi never, ever takes any swipes at it, to my mind. ( Again like Fuzzy Nation ) He just shows that a story can be just as good without the baggage.

The action is amazing. The portrayal of alien races is awesome. The ideas of a far different future are fun and interesting to consider. And the end is such a big gut punch. I love it.

Next up: The Ghost Brigades

I started playing table top role playing games in junior high. Let’s go with 1982. I got the reading bug early and by that time I was tearing through the librarie’s scif-fi and fantasy sections like there was no tomorrow. Junior High and High School would be the years I read like no other. I would never have that amount of time again to just read and read. ( At the cost of my grades a lot of the time, but I’m not sure that was a bad trade off. )

Anyway I was reading fantasy that included Dungeon Crawls and then DnD came on the radar for me and I was instantly pulled in. There was one problem. Money. I never had much and D&D books were really expensive. I couldn’t afford them. So my first ttrpg was D&J. You haven’t hear of it? I’m shocked. My friend David and I spent hours making maps and creating rules. It just used D6s because that’s all we had.

By High School I was able to make money here and there. But really most of the TTRPG stuff I did was based off someone else buying books and running games I played and it was never D&D. It was Gurps, or Top Secret or others. I made a Top Secret module myself and it probably wasn’t that good but I have to say the cover I made for it was decent.

So here I am. In my 50s and my life is starting to have time again. And I’m not completely broke any more. So I’m playing D&D for the first time. I found a group to play with at a local game store. We are playing with the new 2024 rules. I intend to start a series of posts around what is happening there. Am I a D&D expert? No. Will I be able to talk aobut all the differences there are in the new version? No. To me the 2024 rules are the only rules. I’ve got the Players Handbook and the DM Guide. Stay tuned for my, probably stupid, takes.

I’m not gonna lie, I think this is kind of funny. I finally have what I’ve wanted for a long time and I can self host. But my workflow for posting here was all around pushing updates to Digital Ocean and it took me this long to set up things so that I could push them from here to the computer in the other room. Unreal, right?

When someone rings our doorbell, I answer. I don’t want to usually but you just never know.

A few weeks ago the guy at my door said he was working for a new ISP that is providing fiber. Then he said I’d need an antenna on my roof. I asked some questions and found out what he’s selling is “Wireless Fiber” which is egregious in my mind, but whatever. It’s still supposed to be faster than Cox and cheaper. So I asked some more questions.

Is lag bad? Is it symetrical?

He told me my pings would be great and I could get a couple gig up and down - completely symetrical. He said they’d put the antenna on the roof and run fiber from it down into my house.

I decided to give it a go. WHy not.

The install wasn’t bad at all. I was neverous about what it would do to my roof. They don’t drill anything in. The antenna sits on a weighted down plate that rests over the peak of my roof. That made me happy. They ran cat 6 down the side of the house and came into my office through the wall. ( The idea that it would be fiber from the antenna into my house never made sense so I wasn’t surprised it was cat 6. )

Their modem they profide is not ideal. It has to be configured via an app on my phone. It does not have any way to connect to it directly over the network and configure it. Kind of annoying. I can live with it for now. If I get more serious about things I’ll look into my options to use my own hardware. From what I’ve seen online it looks like some people have been able to do this.

I’m getting 2 GB for a little more than half of what I paid Cox for 1.

My actual is around 1.5 down and 1.3 up. I’m happy with that. My 1 GB from Cox was never a full gig either. So I feel like I’m still double and my up with Cox was pretty bad.

The one other thing that I’m excited about is they said for an additional $10 a month I can have a fixed IP and host stuff from my home. Cox blocks the ports that would let me run a server from my house and the only way around it is a very expensive business plan. If I get self host from my house, I’ll be able to save some more money by dropping Digital Ocean. I love Digital Ocean and have been a customer for years so I’ll be sad to leave them, but it just helps the shift over make more sense.

I’m keeping my Cox plan active at a lower level. I want to run on this a while and make sure it’s reliable before I completely cut over, but I hope I can.

I plan to provide another update in 6 months unless something drastic happens that warrants a report sooner.

Current Projects

I’ve got a few things cooking. What are they you ask?

I’m writing a ttrpg for children. It will be foss, under a creative commons license. The fact that it’s for fun and wont be sold really frees me up to just have fun with it. I am trying to do it well though.

I’m working on learning Django. I want to build a secret santa site for my family. We will all sign up, get assigned a family member and then we will each be able to create a list of the things we would like.

I feel like both of these are doable. I just need to keep chipping away.

On the probably never gonna happen front I have like 4 books to finish writing.