John Perry enlisted in the Colonial Defense Forces on his 75th birthday. On Earth, that’s the earliest you can sign up. The CDF doesn’t want young soldiers. They want people with a lifetime of experience, people who’ve lived enough to know what they’re fighting for. In exchange for service, recruits get new bodies: young, green-skinned, genetically enhanced, and far stronger than anything biology produced naturally.
Perry’s wife Kathy had died before he could enlist. He visited her grave on the day he left Earth, knowing he could never return. That loss sits underneath the action of the first novel. Perry fights alien species across multiple worlds, but his internal story is about grief, identity, and whether the person in the new body is still the same person who buried his wife.
John Scalzi wrote Perry as an ordinary, thoughtful man put into extraordinary circumstances. Perry observes, questions, and often cracks jokes. He’s not a natural soldier. He’s a retired advertising writer who happens to be good at staying alive. His common sense and willingness to think differently give him an edge that raw combat ability doesn’t.
In The Last Colony, Perry is given command of a new human settlement caught between competing alien factions. He has to navigate politics, deception, and the possibility that humanity’s own government is working against its colonists.
Reading Order
See the complete Old Man’s War reading order for all books featuring John Perry.