Edged in Blue

[Full disclosure:  John Scalzi has a restraining order against me. Maybe I should never have said I liked Greg Rollie in Journey better than Steve Perry, but there you go.]

After he said he’d take a break from the Old Man’s War universe, John Scalzi got the itch to build a story around the adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan.  In some ways, Zoe’s Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony from Zoe Boutin-Perry’s point of view, and yet it’s more.  It is more the story of a teenage girl who must deal with adolescence on top of being a treaty condition and a near-divine figure to an entire alien race and squarely in the crosshairs of a huge alliance of alien races who don’t like humans or anyone else not joining the club.

Zoe begins as a simple teenage girl, largely isolated from the political storms swirling about her.  Her only reminder that she’s not just any girl are her two Obin bodyguards, Hickory and Dickory (her names.)  When the Perry family is moved to a colony that, it turns out, is hidden so the human Colonial Union can thumb their noses at their new enemy, things get interesting.  All electronics are taken away.  Everything is done on paper, and a colony of people from all the other major colonies in the CU has to learn to do things the old fashioned way.  Wasn’t it nice the CU sent along some Mennonites to help?

Zoe spends her year isolated from modern civilization doing what teenage girls do when they’re not trying to bring in crops to feed a colony or building a home on an alien world that reeks of gym sock.  She’s into music and boys and develops a deep relationship with a fellow colonist named Enzo.  Along the way, she also learns she’s as smart as her biological father (an antagonist in The Ghost Brigades) and as skilled at diplomacy as her adopted parents.  It’s often Zoe or her friend Gretchen who break up schoolyard fights.  It’s also Zoe who saves two boys from the planet’s main predator, intelligent carnivores she dubs “werewolves.”

The novel deviates from The Last Colony (which the plot parallels) as Zoe is not always around her parents during the events of the former novel.  Indeed, some of the events are hinted at in TLC and fleshed out or grafted in in Zoe’s Tale.

The big feature is the voice.  Some of the prose is clearly John Scalzi with his light sarcasm, but he manages to put it convincingly in the mouth of a teenage girl.  Zoe’s true strength, and the crux of the story, is her internal battle.  Zoe is the daughter of a scientist and his wife, both dead, as well as Perry and Sagan.  That’s who she is.  She has a harder time dealing with what she is, especially when she is made a political football by the Obin and the CU.  But rather than turn her back on being the most revered figure in Obin culture and a treaty condition between them and the CU, she learns to accept it and use it.  “Demand something back,” Sagan tells her late in the book when Zoe has to grow up and try to save her dad.  She does from some very powerful enemies and even some reluctant allies.

Zoe’s Tale is definitely not a rehash of The Last Colony.  It’s an entirely new story built on the same events.

[Hey, whattaya know? Zoe's Tale is up for a Hugo.]