The novel “The End of All Things” by John Scalzi was published for the first time in 2015 putting together some novellas published previously. It’s part of the “Old Man’s War” series and follows “The Human Division“.
Rafe Daquin has just found an assignment as a pilot on a merchant starship, but during the first journey it’s boarded by the Rraey, who work with the Colonial Union Deputy Secretary of State Tyson Ocampo, who is officially on board for a vacation. The other crew members are killed while Rafe’s brain gets extracted from his body and connected to equipment that allows him to communicate with the outside world.
Convinced to collaborate with the promise of a new body, Rafe Daquin is trained to control the starship with his mind. Thanks to his experience as a computer engineer, he manages to penetrate and take control of the on-board systems, but before trying to free himself from his captors he must look for information on what’s happening to him and to the Colonial Union.
Like “The Human Division”, “The End of All Things” is made up of various parts originally published as separate e-books. In the case of the last novel of the “Old Man’s War” series, these are four novellas told from various points of view that continue the story of the clash between the Colonial Union and the Conclave after the break-up with Earth. A number of parts much smaller than the previous novel is the element that immediately catches the eye. In my opinion it was a positive choice because it reduced the fragmentation of the many stories that John Scalzi developed around that interstellar conflict.
The four parts of “The End of All Things” are still uneven in the sense that various aspects of the great story developed in previous novels continue, from the more strictly military to the political and diplomatic ones. Clashes between opponents, but also internal feuds between factions that are supposed to be allies made the series increasingly complex to reach what is finally the grand finale.
John Scalzi puts together the various pieces of the story also telling a last mission of the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) that offers some of the twists but honestly it seems built too much with the aim to provide some information useful at the end. It’s a part with characters who are a little over the top because of their humor. That’s a typical element of Scalzi’s stories, but in my opinion in this case the author exaggerated giving the impression that the dialogues between the characters served only as fillers in a story useful only as part of the bigger picture.
Honestly, after “The Human Division” I feared worse because of the impression I had that John Scalzi was now extending the series for purely commercial reasons, with no strong ideas to develop. Lower expectations and an ending for the “Old Man’s War” series helped to give me more positive feelings. Actually, the ending seemed to me far from extraordinary, but there’s a resolution to the great story developed in the last novels.
John Scalzi could continue the “Old Man’s War” series because the ending determines a new situation on an interstellar level with new possible stories to tell. The author seems to have focused on other series and, given the ups and downs of the stories that formed the last two novels, it’s better that the series ended here.
In the end, I think you could stop after the third novel of the “Old Man’s War” series. With the fourth novel, important changes are introduced in the interstellar situation, and at that point you have to read “The Human Division” and “The End of All Things” to reach the end knowing that it will come with ups and downs.
