The Last Colony

Two retired soldiers are running a farm and raising a teenager when the recruiters arrive, and the pitch is a colony of their own.

The swap in this volume is a soldier for an administrator. Perry spent the earlier book learning to fight and spends this one attending meetings, negotiating with Mennonites about power tools, and working out that his own government has not told him what he is for. The rifle is gone. The lying has scaled up.

Roanoke is not a subtle name and Scalzi is not being subtle. A colony placed where it should not be, staffed from ten existing worlds rather than from Earth, cut off from the technology that would let it call for help. Each of those decisions gets explained to Perry as prudence. None of them is.

Patience is what this one asks for. Whoever likes watching a competent man work out that he has been handled will find the shape satisfying. A reader who wants him to act will spend a long stretch waiting, and the discovery cannot be had without the waiting, because waiting is what discovery looks like from the inside.

Withholding is the engine and the engine is visible. Perry narrates, so information kept from him is information kept from her, and every turn therefore arrives as somebody senior walking in to explain that the ground has moved. Once that shape becomes legible, tension stops being about what will happen and becomes anticipation of the next briefing. The book runs the move more times than it can support.

Their adopted daughter is the surprise of the novel. A teenager with two alien bodyguards who regard her as a religious object, played for comedy until abruptly it is not, and Scalzi lets her be funny and frightening inside the same scene without flagging the change.

General Gau is the other reason to be here. Leader of a union of four hundred species, forbidding new colonies because expansion is what the wars keep being about, and he is written as a man holding a defensible position rather than as an obstacle. The series' habit of turning aliens into problems takes a holiday.

The Colonial Union is the real antagonist and has been from the start. A government that will spend its own colonists, a fleet that knew, a chain of command that arranged this and called it a promotion. Scalzi had been assembling the case across three volumes without announcing it, and here he files it.

Colony fiction usually runs on competence against environment. This runs on competence against paperwork, and the predators on Roanoke get less attention than a supply manifest. That is a defensible choice and it disappoints a specific reader, the one who came for a frontier.

Perry narrates and the voice is the series' load-bearing asset. Dry, self-deprecating, reliably funny under pressure, and by now it has done an enormous amount of work. It also means each crisis arrives pre-processed into wryness, so a reader looking for dread will find it filed down before it reaches her.

The politics here are why the series lasted. Not the powered armour and not the brain computers, but a steady argument about what a state owes the people it builds, recruits and posts to the far edge of its map.

Somebody decided all of this before he arrived. He spends the book finding out how long before.