Zoe's Tale
February 24, 2025 9:04 AM - Subscribe

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history?

Written by MeFi's own jscalzi.

I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.

Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don't know my tale: How I did what I did — how I did what I had to do — not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I'm going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try to make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.

It's a story you know. But you don't know it all.


In honor of the 20th anniversary of Old Man's War, and in anticipation of September's release of book 7 of the series The Shattering Peace, we're revisiting this SF mainstay with one post a week for the next 3 weeks.

This is a 'Reread' post, comments that touch on future events in the series are most welcome.
posted by Frayed Knot (2 comments total)
 
I know some folks were ASTOUNDED at the notion of re-telling a story from a second viewpoint, but Orson Scott card (*spit*) also did it with multiple overs parallel to his Ender's Game novels, which Wikipedia describes as " a spin-off 'shadow' series in the Ender's Game universe that is told from the point of view of other characters" including five books.

But I remember this novel as having a rather different voice for its main character than the Old Man's War novels whjich preceded it. It was well done, not childish or affected.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:54 PM on February 24 [1 favorite]


I read this book but none of the other books from its apparent series. It was mostly coherent though there were definitely some indications that I was supposed to be familiar with things already.
posted by one for the books at 3:17 PM on March 18


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