The Human Division

Title: The Human Division
Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Science Fiction
Published: 2013
Rating: 7/10

Review: The unusual thing about The Human Division is it's format. It came out as a series of episodes that you could buy separately once per week. Each episode is telling a stand-alone story and together they are tied into a larger interconnecting story arch. I am not a huge fan of doing episodic reading, so I waited for all the episodes to be published as a book before I bought it.

The book is set in the Old Man's War universe after the events of The Last Colony. It generally follows Lieutenant Harry Wilson whom we've met previously in the series and the crew of the diplomatic ship Clarke that he's attached to. They take on missions of various improbability and ingenuity and generally come out ahead.

I enjoyed the episodes. The characters are bright, with a sense of humor, and it's fun to watch them deal with difficult situations and come out on top. You definitely get to cheer them on quite a bit through the book. There's some politics and some space battles, this is an easy read with plenty of fun and not a lot of depth. My biggest dissatisfaction with the book is its refusal to actually come to some sort of a resolution at the end. There's certainly a climax, but then it just ends, no explanation to the main story arch suspense point and to me that was really a let down.

Nevertheless, The Human Division is fun, funny, and worth reading for the pure entertainment value. Though perhaps you should wait for the next book (if such should exist) to actually get some sort of closure.