Old Man's War
2005 novel by John Scalzi

Old Man's War is a military science fiction novel by American writer John Scalzi, published in 2005. His debut novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006.
Old Man's War is the first novel in Scalzi's Old Man's War series, which won the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Series. A sequel, The Ghost Brigades, was published in 2006, followed by two other books, The Last Colony (2007) and Zoe's Tale (2008). Another book in the series, The Human Division, was published as a serial and then collected in a novel (2013). The next book in the series, The End of All Things, was published in June 2015 as four novellas. The seventh novel, The Shattering Peace, was released in September 2025.
It was optioned by Paramount Pictures in 2011.
Plot
Introduction
Old Man's War is the story of retiree John Perry and his exploits as a soldier in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). The first-person narrative follows Perry's military career from CDF recruit to the rank of captain.
“Old Man's War” enters the record as 2005 novel by John Scalzi. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Man's, novel and John can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Old Man's War” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Man's, novel and John provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1339232. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2006, 2026 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Old Man's War” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.