Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

"Following the events of The Last Colony, John Scalzi tells the story of the fight to maintain the unity of the human race.

The people of Earth now know that the human Colonial Union has kept them ignorant of the dangerous universe around them. For generations the CU had defended humanity against hostile aliens, deliberately keeping Earth an ignorant backwater and a source of military recruits. Now the CU’s secrets are known to all. Other alien races have come on the scene and formed a new alliance—an alliance against the Colonial Union. And they’ve invited the people of Earth to join them. For a shaken and betrayed Earth, the choice isn't obvious or easy.

Against such possibilities, managing the survival of the Colonial Union won’t be easy, either. It will take diplomatic finesse, political cunning…and a brilliant “B Team,” centered on the resourceful Lieutenant Harry Wilson, that can be deployed to deal with the unpredictable and unexpected things the universe throws at you when you’re struggling to preserve the unity of the human race.

Being published online from January to April 2013 as a three-month digital serial, The Human Division will appear as a full-length novel of the Old Man’s War universe, plus—for the first time in print—the first tale of Lieutenant Harry Wilson, and a coda that wasn’t part of the digital serialization."

This is book 5 of Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and while it could be read as a new starting point of the series, I really don't think that it should be as it would spoil the early books.

Scalzi did something interesting with this book. He wrote it as a series of short stories which, when taken together, tell a larger tale. Then he released them in installments, twice a month.

Knowing that I prefer to read my books whole and in just a few days, I avoided this book until it was complete, and then after finding out that the story continued into the next volume, the End of All Things, I waited until all were released before starting., This was the wrong thing to do. These were definitely written to be read spaced out over a long period of time and the reminders of what had happened previously were a real detriment when I was reading them all at once.

Still, props for trying something new.

The series reading order is:

Old Man's War (Novel)
Questions for a Soldier (Short Story)
The Ghost Brigades (Novel)
The Sagan Diary (Novella)
The Last Colony (Novel)
Zoe's Tale (YA Novel)
After the Coup (Short Story)
The Human Division (Novel)
Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today (Short Story)
The End of All Things (Novel)

Both the short story that immediately proceeds and the one which follows The Human Division came with my efile in the Extras section. They definitely work well as a prologue and epilogue. The story completes in The End of All Things.