Superlative Book-Sorry It Ended.

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	• The Last Colony John Scalzi Tor Books, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 58 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An effective end to the trilogy

The Last Colony is the third and apparently final book in the series that started with "Old Man's War" and "The Ghost Brigades". In Old Man's War we were introduced to John Perry, a soldier who volunteers in the Colonial Defence Force and steadily rises through the ranks while being involved in numerous battles with alien races. The Ghost Brigades dealt more with the mysterious CDF special forces and special forces soldier Jane Sagan who eventually marries Perry when they both retire from the CDF.

The Last Colony finds Perry and Sagan living in semi retirement on a Colony world with their adopted daughter Zoe and her two alien minders. They are offered the role of administrators of a new colony world rather ominously named Roanoke after the failed 16th century english colony in North America. The colonists for this world are drawn from numerous other colony worlds elsewhere in human space which is a new way of doing it as previous colonists came directly from earth.

All is not what it seems however as the colonists are settled on a completely different planet to the original Roanoke. The reason for this is to apparently deceive a previously unknown (at least to the colonists) alien confederation called the Conclave who have decreed that no further colonies from races outside the Conclave are to be allowed. Things get even worse though when Perry and Sagan find that the Conclave is not quite the evil organisation that the human Colonial Union says it is and in fact Roanoke is a pawn in an elaborate plot to discredit and destroy the Conclave. Perry has to juggle political alliances and call in favours in order to guarantee Roanoke's survival.

John Scalzi has that rare gift amongst science fiction authors of being able to combine believable characters that you can relate to with feasible science and mix it all together into a good story and he is definitely a great new talent. Still, I didn't think this was quite as good as "Old Man's War". The Colonial Union plot seems incredibly risky and ham fisted for an organisation like this to even contemplate and the alien protagonists aren't terribly competent. It's still a comfortable four stars though.

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Best yet

Having read Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, my opinion is that this book is the best of the three. Like many of the other reviewers, I couldn't put the book down and read through the entire thing in one evening. My only frustration was finding out that Scalzi doesn't plan to write any more stories for these great characters!

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Superlative Book-Sorry It Ended.

I just finished reading this book, and I am suffering from "book hangover." The author flawlessly creates another world, and I do not want it to end. I read the first two books in this series, and I have found each to be very different in tone, content, and level of action. Nevertheless, I loved all three, individually. I was engaged by the characters, John Perry and Jane Sagan. The plots are very clever, with many unexpected twists. The action is riveting. There is always some great humorous passages and relationships that are moving. The science fiction is engrossing. I hope John Scalzi reconsiders his decision to end this series and instead brings these characters back in many more books.

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Last Colony A Great Finish!

The Last Colony purports to be the final chapter in the 'Old Man's War' Trilogy (would the Sagan Trilogy be a better name?), and it certainly lives up to the task. As always, I found this Scalzi venture a fun read, as well as action packed. This time, John Perry and Jane Sagan are husband and wife, living with an adopted daughter and her bodyguards on a colony, peacefully living their lives, when they get asked to be the leaders of a new colony. That gets them thrown into a whole new world of trouble (literally!).

The characterizations are pretty spot on, and I am sad to see the main characters go. I am not sure we got inside Perry's head as much as we did during OMW, or Jane's during TGB, but nonetheless we get a good sense of who these people are.

The book is a quick read at 300 pages, and frankly, it could have been twice as long, or even split into two books. I say that because sometimes it feels rushed. Months pass by in a couple of pages, and I would have liked to see life on the new colony unfold in a little more detailed manner. There's enough action to satisfy the Saganverse fan, but I felt the strength of the book was in the parts that focused on the life on the colony and the interaction between the other colonists besides the Perry household.

Brevity besides, The Last Colony is a great read, and has some real plot twists I couldn't figure out, which is rare for most Sci-Fi books I come across. There was one character that reminded me of a certain starship captain (or maybe a close parody of him), and I'm not sure that was intentional or not, it could just be my brain playing into that archetype.

All in all, if you've read the first two parts of the trilogy, The Last Colony is well worth it. And if you haven't, the Old Man's War mass market paperback is out now, and so is the one for The Ghost Brigades. Money well spent for any Sci-Fi fan.

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Has the feel of a rush job

"The Last Colony" is not up to the level of its predecessors, which were some of the best science fiction- or just plain fiction- I've ever read. It seemed at times like the author was up against a deadline and cut some corners. What happened to the werewolf-like natives of Roanoke ? They receded into the background after one encounter. And the book suffers from some atrocious editing- Croatan is repeatedly misspelled, and there are too many sentences containing simple grammatical errors. I wish Scalzi could have taken more time with these great characters and sent them out in style.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, page 9, 10, 11, 12

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