In The Human Division, John Scalzi extends and enriches his popular Old Man's War series with a collection of rousing tales of adventure across known space. The novel--originally serialized and distributed electronically in weekly installments--takes place after the events of The Last Colony, in which the people of Earth discover that they are part of a larger (and not super-friendly) universe, information the Colonial Union has withheld as it maintains Earth as a source of soldiers and colonists.
The Human Division is structured as a set of self-contained short stories, easily understood on its own yet contributing to an overall narrative arc that's frequently (but not exclusively) centered on Colonial Defense Forces Lieutenant Harry Wilson, who's been assigned to provide technical support to Ambassador Abumwe and her staff. This group, though it's generally assigned to bottom-of-the-barrel diplomatic missions, consistently performs well under pressure, and soon the "B-Team" finds itself thrust into ever less predictable or winnable situations.
Scalzi's stories are typically fun, full of clever bits of wordplay and structure, and rocket along like any good space opera should. It's not until the final few chapters that the entire story comes together, making a brilliant kind of sense and engaging a humanistic sense of pathos. What they find out about the real politics behind the galaxy-spanning conflicts sets the stage for the next book in the series, one that can't come soon enough. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor