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After reading Old Man's War I used a spare five minutes to do a little research on our illustrious author and after visiting his blog and reading a few of his interviews posted throughout the World Wide Web I've become sort of a John Scalzi expert. So let me take you through the building process that I believe led to Old Man's War;
Go to a bookstore.
Figure out what book's are the hottest sellers
Eliminate all the genre's that you might know even a little bit about
Go home and Google "Military Science Fiction Classics"
Go back to the bookstore and buy Starship Troopers
Find out that a lot of people hated Heinlein for writing that "tongue-in-cheek, fascist, genocidal" novel
Overgeneralize many of the themes present in Starship Troopers
Add a ton of sex to make the novel more "mature"
Add several overdoses of boring sarcasm and lame jokes
Include biblical passages for "religious zealot" effect
Post unedited unrevised novel on blog and wait for the publishers to come knocking
Writing a novel is a hard thing to do, writing a good one is even harder. You can't take short-cuts, you need inspiration, and above all you must be open minded. I love John Scalzi but that doesn't mean that I read and like his books and his blogs. To be sure good is a matter of opinion. As such I'm of the opinion that this book sucks.
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Old Man's War by John Scalzi
TalkingHand , May 29, 2010
After reading Old Man's War I used a spare five minutes to do a little research on our illustrious author and after visiting his blog and reading a few of his interviews posted throughout the World Wide Web I've become sort of a John Scalzi expert. So let me take you through the building process that I believe led to Old Man's War;Go to a bookstore.
Figure out what book's are the hottest sellers
Eliminate all the genre's that you might know even a little bit about
Go home and Google "Military Science Fiction Classics"
Go back to the bookstore and buy Starship Troopers
Find out that a lot of people hated Heinlein for writing that "tongue-in-cheek, fascist, genocidal" novel
Overgeneralize many of the themes present in Starship Troopers
Add a ton of sex to make the novel more "mature"
Add several overdoses of boring sarcasm and lame jokes
Include biblical passages for "religious zealot" effect
Post unedited unrevised novel on blog and wait for the publishers to come knocking
Writing a novel is a hard thing to do, writing a good one is even harder. You can't take short-cuts, you need inspiration, and above all you must be open minded. I love John Scalzi but that doesn't mean that I read and like his books and his blogs. To be sure good is a matter of opinion. As such I'm of the opinion that this book sucks.
(0 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)