The Last Colony<\/cite> in which John and Jane, as leaders of the latest colony founded by the CDF had to fight off the Conclave, a four hundred members strong alien alliance as well as the CDF’s own plans to turn the colonists into martyrs. Amongst those colonists? Their own, adopted, daughter Zo\u00eb.\n<\/p>\n\nAs you may have guessed from the title, Zoe’s Tale<\/cite> retells and extends the story of The Last Colony<\/cite> from Zo\u00eb’s point of view. On its own it’s therefore slightly less than a whole novel and can only be properly understood if you’ve read the previous novel. Things happen for reasons that are only partially explained, with major plot developments happening off screen, “as you know bobbed” later; at the same time Zoe’s Tale<\/cite> was partially written to explain some of the plot holes from The Last Colony<\/cite>. For me, it had been more than two years since I’d read it, so some of its plot was a bit hazy while reading this; not entirely dissimilar to Zo\u00eb’s experiences.\n<\/p>\n\nZo\u00eb is the seventeen year old daughter of a defeated adversary, not just adopted by John and Jane, but also the living symbol of Earth’s treaty with the Obin, an alien species with intelligence but no consciousness, until her natural father created a device to give them consciousness artificially. As a consequence Zo\u00eb is accompanied at all times by two Obin bodyguards and friends of the family, Hickory and Dickory. One of the main plot threads in the book is her continuing discovery of how much she means to the Obin and the consequences this has for her.\n<\/p>\n
\nZoe’s Tale<\/cite> is told entirely through her eyes, first person. Having a fortysomething male writer write from a teenage girl’s perspective is always tricky but fortunately for all his Heinleinian influences Scalzi is much better at writing female characters than he ever was. Not that Zo\u00eb is entirely believable: she’s far too reasonable, obedient and mature for her age, unless the plot demands otherwise. Granted, she’s of course not quite the average teenage girl, what with that whole Obin thing, but despite this it still felt a bit off to me.\n<\/p>\n\nThe novel starts with Zo\u00eb and her family coming to their new colony homeworld, then discovering not everything is as it seems and that they’re going to function as bait, though it takes a while for that to become common knowledge. A large part of the story is taken up with Zo\u00eb’s adventures on the journey to the new colony and her experience in it, before the Conclave come. This feels somewhat jumbled and episodic and things seem to happen because they happened in The Last Colony<\/cite> rather than flowing organically from the plot. As said, Zo\u00eb remains unaware or is only told later about major developments, while in the previous novel you were right there.\n<\/p>\n\nTwo of the plotlines however are exactly the opposite, showing the details of things only sketched in in The Last Colony<\/cite>, viz what happened with the “werewolf” like aborigines that turned out to live on the planet, as well as the story of how Zo\u00eb escaped from the colony to seek help amongst the Obin. These are the strongest sections of the story and the places where Zo\u00eb comes to the fore, an active participant rather than an observer.\n<\/p>\n\nIn the end Zoe’s Tale<\/cite> was a decent enough read, but only because I’d already read the previous novels, if several years before. It’s somewhat weaker than them, largely due to the fact that this was partially intended to repair some of the plot holes in the previous novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zoe’s Tale John Scalzi 406 pages published in 2008 John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was popular enough to spawn four sequels so far, of which Zoe’s Tale is the third. Military science fiction set in a Heinleinian dog eat dog universe, with hundred of alien races competing for new colonies and humanity only a middling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[430,563],"class_list":["post-2915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-john-scalzi","tag-zoes-tale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2915"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2918,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions\/2918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Cover](\"\/pictures\/books\/zoes-tale.jpg\")
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