Fiction Reviews
The Shattering Peace
(2025) John Scalzi, Tor, £14.99, pbk, 279pp, ISBN 978-1-509-83539-3
This is a welcome addition to Scalzi's 'Old Man's War' series of books that began two decades ago.
Our part of the over-crowded Galaxy sees an uneasy peace with the 'Conclave' of species. The Conclave has gone as far as to attempt to see if Conclave species can actually live side-by-side inside a giant asteroid space station in a far flung planetary system. But news has come in that this space-colony has simply vanished!
Enter Gretchen (whom we met in Zoe's Tale) a former soldier and now a sort of ambassadorial bureaucrat who is tasked with her assistant of the alien species the Obin which have themselves been 'uplifted' by the highly advanced and mysterious Consu species. She is tasked with heading up the human element of a multi-species Conclave ship sent to investigate the asteroid world's disappearance…
The first two thirds of the book make for a stonkingly engaging space opera romp as the investigation proceeds to uncover what has happened, and what has happened is not good…
And though the book's final third saw the plot threads wrap up, there was an element of Deus Ex Machina and the protagonist Gretchen comes across as an increasingly over-confident-to-the-point-of arrogance sprat. Yet, The Shattering Peace is all so gung-ho that most readers will be likely swept along and enjoy the ride. Indeed, fans of the television series Babylon 5 and its long, multi-season plot arc, will see certain resonances with The Shattering Peace.
The other thing is that commendable, unlike with Old Man's War two decades ago, Tor have got their act together with the release of The Shattering Peace: Old Man's War came out in Britain two years after it did in the States which meant that in 2006 when it was short-listed for the Hugo few readers in the British Isles knew what all the fuss was about, though it did win a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not to be confused with the other juried, hence less meaningful, Campbell Award). This time, The Shattering Peace has come out more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Pond and that can only be a good thing.
Without spoilers, it has to be said that this novel's conceit does undermine Old Man's War Malthusian premise, though at the end of the day the author manages to correctly put back all the Old Man's War toys in their box so we can play again should Scalzi ever wish.
Readers may want to digest Old Man's War and Zoe's Tale first before tackling The Shattering Peace, though it is possible to read this as a standalone, jumping straight in here will mean missing out on the backstory to some of the characters and species. And here there is good news for readers fresh to this run of books: they can read them all in fairly quick succession, whereas those of us coming the long way round had to wait sometimes many years between instalments.
Jonathan Cowie
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