The Ghost Brigades
by John Scalzi
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Book Reviews of The Ghost Brigades
Book Review: A Brain Possessed
Summary: 5 Stars
The Ghost Brigades (2006) is the second novel in the Old Man's War series, following Old Man's War. In the previous volume, John Perry became an official CDF hero and made barnstorming tours around the colonies. Jane Sagan went back to work in the Special Forces, AKA the Ghost Brigades.
In this novel, Jane leads a raid on an Obin colony world. The Special Forces take one Rraey prisoner from the Eneshan facility. After a slight biological adjustment of his body, Jane convinces the Rraey to cooperate.
The prisoner Cainen tells of a concerted effort by the Rraey, Eneshan and Obin to conquer the Terran colonies. This alliance has resulted from the defection of one human -- Charles Boutin -- who had been a senior scientist in Military Research. The Colonial Defense Forces were greatly surprised at this news, since Boutin was already dead and buried.
When Harry Wilson finds a recording of Boutin's consciousness among his effects, the CDF decides to create another version of the man. The standard Special Forces processing is used to produce a modified body from Boutin's DNA. Then the recorded consciousness is downloaded into it. Everything goes according to plan, except that the resulting mind seems to be a tabula rasa.
In this story, the new body is named Jared Dirac and integrated into a Special Forces training squad. After his training, Jared is assigned to a Special Forces ship under Lieutenant Jane Sagan. He serves in the Special Forces for almost a year before something brings back one of Boutin's memories.
Jared is reassigned to Military Research to try to stimulate more memories. Cainen and Harry Wilson work with him on the project. He is gradually gaining more memories and his mind displays are looking more like Boutin's every day. Then they send him to Boutin's former home station in hopes that the familiar surroundings will bring further progress. Since the station is now in Obin hands, Jared has to sneak into the habitat and the aliens detect his presence.
This story provides more information on the CDF, the Colonial Union, and their relationships with the nearby aliens. It also mentions weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons and biological warfare. The nukes are used as shipkillers and one passage implies that they have been used against alien colonies. The Obin have also used a virus to destroy an army of alien clones.
This tale also introduces a new type of WMD: cybernetic weapons. Computer viruses and other hostile softwares have appeared prominently in many SF stories. Now, however, the author has created a possibility of mass destruction through such a virus.
This sequel builds upon, but differs greatly from, the first novel. Some continuity is provided by characters and institutions, but the plot is nothing like the first story. A difficult effect, but well done. Enjoy!
Highly recommended for Scalzi fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of military operations, transferred consciousness, and dutiful persons.
-Arthur W. Jordin
Book Review: Wow... Ghost Brigades may be even better than Old Man's War
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed Old Man's War a lot. While it had a lot of familiar sci-fi elements, Scalzi's writing style is unique and refreshing; full of clever humor, great characters and intense action. In The Ghost Brigades, Scalzi simply takes all of these elements and enhances on them. I think I liked this book even better.
The Ghost Brigades is a much different book than Old Man's War. It seems to me that with this book, Scalzi drifts a bit from Heinlein territory and truly breaks into his own. Old Man's War didn't really have a solitary focus, other than the life of it's main character John Perry. It was all over the place from one alien battle to another. The Ghost Brigades has a more singular plot, which is to prevent the destruction of humanity from 3 alien races that have allied against mankind. At the heart of this is a civilian scientiest turned traitor who has sold mankind's best secrects to this new alliance.
Enter Jared Dirac: a clone of this scientest with the man's memories and conciousness implanted directly on top of his brain. The purpose of his creation is to find out exactly why Boutin betrayed the human race and see if there is a way to stop this war. The copy seemed not to work at all and Jared becomes his own man, joining the special forces as they try and prevent this war the hard way.
Jared is a very interesting character and nearly the complete opposite of John Perry from the first book. Rather than an aged and experienced man who's grown tired of his boring life on Earth and joins the army, we have a newborn man who's knowlege is programmed straight into him, forced into the special forces and forced to experience life's harsh realities very quickly. We see him slowly turn from a naive and noble child into a man that begins to resemble the one he was cloned from.
Of the characters in Jared's platoon, only 2 others really get any in depth development. One is Sarah Pauling whom Jared bonds with quickly, who have some sort of relationship between them that is about as mature as you can expect from people who are less than a year old. The other is a fairly major player from Old Man's War, Jane Sagan. If you've read that, you're already emotionally invested in her. We do have other interesting characters outside of his platoon, namley Cainen (sp), a Rheah who was captured in the beginning and has in depth knowlege of the triple alliance against the Colonial Defense Force. He is given a disease and then kept alive by a daily antidote that will only be given if he cooperates. Despite this, he actually comes to care about Jared and his human captors. I found him to be probably the most interesting character of this story.
And let's not forget the action. There's not as much space combat as there was in Old Man's War, but the ground missions are incredibly intense, and much more interesting than those in OMW, as the goals are much more specific and the stakes larger.
This is a great book and Scalzi has a fan for life. I'll be reading Android's Dream and await Last Colony to come out on paperback next month.
Book Review: The Ghost Brigades
Summary: 4 Stars
The Ghost Brigades
by kairosdreaming, May 11 '10
This was a fairly impressive book. While it didn't hold quite the allure for me as Scalzi's first book Old Man's War, it still had a decent plot and did quite a bit to further the reader's knowledge about the universe its set in.
Jared Dirac is a member of the Ghost Brigades, or as they prefer to call it, the Colonial Defense Force's Special Forces. Unlike the rest of the CDF's recruits, the Special Forces are a unique breed of human. They are put into a body that once belonged to a dead person and have higher capacity for thinking and combat than most humans do.
Dirac is not just any Special Forces member however. He is an experiment that failed. Originally created to house the consciousness of a scientist named Charles Boutin, when the consciousness doesn't stick, he is sent to be part of the Special Forces. Boutin, once a great inventor for the BrainPal system that CDF uses in its army, had become a traitor and when knowledge of an attack coming from three joined enemy alien races is learned, the CDF needs to find out just what Boutin knows. Hence, Dirac is created.
While at the beginning he is just a regular Special Force recruit, he gradually feels himself remembering things that are not from his own life, but from a life he learns was Boutins. As he grows a deeper understanding of the man he has to choose between helping the CDF or turning traitor as he understands Boutin's beliefs.
While this novel is technically a sequel to Old Man's War, it could easily be read on its own. Some characters reoccur, most notably Jane Sagan from the first novel, the romantic interest of the protagonist in that novel. A few army leaders as well reappear but don't play nearly as large a role as she does. In fact, Dirac is placed in Sagan's care after he joins the Special Forces.
Unlike the first book, this one is written from a 3rd person perspective. It makes the novel somewhat lose the relatability the first has, but does not hinder the telling of the story. Many of Scalzi's innovations were quite creative and believable that such technology would be available this far in the future. He describes them with such ease it isn't impossible to understand the concepts of how they work.
My only complaint about this book would be that the alien races aren't really described very well. Scalzi gives you have half descriptions and you are left to try to figure out the rest of the society of these beings and even sometimes how they look. I would have liked to see some more description when he introduces these characters to his novel.
While I had hoped for a continuation of the first story, this was a good book on its own. My only hope is that the next novel in the series continues on with the characters I grew to like in the first one.
The Ghost Brigades
Copyright 2006
343 pages
Book Review: really a 3 1/2...contains a few spoilers
Summary: 3 Stars
I enjoyed this book well enough to follow the story 'til the end., but I'm not sure it's quite the modern-day classic that some other readers seem to believe.
The universe Scalzi develops in this book (a follow-up to _Old Man's War_) is intriguingly post-modern. Not only does Scalzi borrow from other classic Sci-Fi authors, but he even refers to them in the book. In particular, he draws on Heinlein's, _Starship Troopers_ and Wollstonecraft-Shelley's _Frankenstein_. Themes from these books and others pervade this one, but Scalzi brings enough of his own imagination to make a worthwhile read.
We follow Jared Dirac, a member of a Special Forces unit who differs in a particular way: he carries within him the memories of a traitorous scientist whose actions threaten the future of mankind not only in space, but on earth itself. Some of the questions readers are invted to contemplate are: Will Jared be himself or just a shadow of the defector Boutin? What actions are acceptable in war? What is the nature of humanity? What is the role of the individual vs the group (including on the species level)?
These are great questions, and Scalzi makes some progress addressing them. The problem is that the book gets caught up in battle, minor political intrigue, and ridiculous (TMI albeit non-explicit) sex scenes (which actually could have been used to explore the nature love vs sex, the role of memory in sex, the role of consequences in sex, etc...but they aren't). When we reach the plot points of significant depth, they are rushed, if used at all: the killing of human vs alien children, the role of humans in the greater universe, personality as the total of memories (an ancient Greek theory, if I recall), whether the ends justify the means, etc. The issue of identity is the only philosophical problem addressed in-depth, but it's resolved early on when we see that Jared is his own person. Also, the end of the book--the final showdown between Jared and Boutin--is rushed, as is the denouement. Certain psychological elements of that whole sequence do not ring true: Boutin's personality, Jared's reaction, Zoe (I know Scalzi has his own daughter, but he doesn't write the child Zoe convincingly here in dialogue or action). There's a lot of explanation of the Obin, but it's a lot of tell-not-show and so we don't really feel so very threatened by them.
Also, there's too much bad language. I understand that the characters are soldiers, but the aforementioned _Starship Troopers_ proved you don't have to portray them in all their foul-mouthed glory. Foul language is just an excuse for bad diction in my book (pun intended). The dialogue in this book isn't the best-written (but not the worst either).
Despite these quibbles, I found enough substance to justify reading the book. I'm just not running out to read another Scalzi book or recommend it to everyone.
Book Review: Underwhelming sequel
Summary: 3 Stars
I just finished "The Ghost Brigades" the other day, the story is told in the third-person (whereas "Old Man's War" was in the first-person). It was enjoyable enough and was not bad by any means, just adequate. The problem is that it unlike its predecessor, "Old Man's War", it never really rises above the average. It's just decent, nothing more and nothing less. OMW had better pacing, better characters, better characterization, and *far* better writing (there is an awful lot of redundancy in TGB, both through the restatement of information that we are already keenly aware of and through the overuse of certain words. A thesaurus was clearly not kept on hand while this book was being written). That said, TGB does have its shining moments, but they're overshadowed by the general mediocrity of the writing. The majority of the characters are pretty flat; Jane Sagan for example could have been replaced by any other no-name person and it would have made almost no difference whatsoever, which is a shame because she was an important part of OMW. I was starting to lose interest about halfway in, but it was probably due in part to it not living up to my high expectations after having enjoyed OMW so much.
It is a little disappointing though, because Scalzi has already proven himself an excellent writer and I feel that he could have done a lot better if he wasn't in a hurry to "strike while the iron is hot" and push out a sequel, as it is it feels like a bit of a rush job. It also wouldn't have killed them to proofread it before printing up hundreds of thousands of copies because there are quite a lot of typographical errors (at least in the mass-market paperback, which is what I purchased). I once saw "soldier" misspelled as "solider" twice on one page, and on the very next page there was a sentence missing the word "the", leaving it looking like broken English. There were many other similar instances sprinkled throughout; not a huge deal, but enough that it starts to get annoying after awhile.
In spite of its flaws it's still worth reading if you just can't get enough of the OMW universe, just don't get your hopes up too high, if this book were a movie it'd probably be straight-to-DVD. We do learn more about the CDF Special Forces though, which is kind of interesting and helps to flesh things out. I'm still going to read "The Last Colony", but once I'm finished with that I'll probably just stick to OMW for re-reads. In summary: I highly recommend Scalzi's "Old Man's War" to anyone who enjoys sci-fi, it's quite excellent, but "The Ghost Brigades" is a little harder to suggest. It's worth it if you just can't get enough of the series but does not stand that well on its own, it's a bit underwhelming and just doesn't live up to its predecessor.