I was traveling yesterday and today – quick trip to Boston for work. While it kept me from posting last night, it did give me a chance to finish Scalzi’s sequel to “Old Man’s War”. “The Ghost Brigades” is the second of six books in this series with the next being “The Last Colony”. There’s also a long short story or a short novella – not sure how it should be classified – called “The Sagan Diary”.
First things first – I’ve decided to go ahead and finally read through this series – now that I’ve started back in, I feel I should finally finish. Unless something changes, however, this is the last single book post I’ll make for the series. My impressions of “The Ghost Brigades” were similar to those I had of “Old Man’s War” and I don’t want to keep writing the same critical review over and over.
Before reading this, you might want to go back to my post on “Old Man’s War” since many of the criticisms will be similar. There’s nothing remarkable about the Scalzi’s writing – it’s sparse and I didn’t find it complex or captivating. I found the plot kind of clunky and many of the sentiments a little too cliche and overblown. It doesn’t stand out as Military Science Fiction. Finally, the characters were unremarkable and one dimensional. I found the antagonist to be particularly silly and caricatured. Overall, after reading two of these, I just cant’ escape the impression that Scalzi took a pretty interesting idea and just didn’t do it justice. They’re not bad stories – just not as good as they should be.
As I started into this book, I’d initially felt like it might represent an improvement or evolution compared to “Old Man’s War” – a fact I commented on in my “All Systems Red” post. That didn’t turn out to be the case. In “Old Man’s War”, the Ghost Brigades are introduced as a mysterious, unique and extremely capable Special Forces component of the larger Colonial Defense Forces. I’d expected Scalzi to take those hints and do something truly novel with them in the second book. Scalzi’s concept for Ghost Brigades personnel is that they’re vat grown, hyper-augmented bodies that receive an artificially generated consciousness – soldiers purposefully designed to be equal to or superior to any of the numerous alien species challenging humans for a place in the universe.
This is a blank slate that could have been used to develop a supremely interesting concept – something vaguely human yet shockingly and awe-inspiringly different. Instead, as the book progresses, these soldiers are humanized to an almost disappointing degree until they’re ultimately not that different from the regular Colonial Defense Forces personnel at the heart of “Old Man’s War”. I’m sure that many don’t share my perspective on this but – to me – it just felt like a miss. I kept asking myself why Scalzi developed the concept and then chose to do so little with it.
As I’ve said, they’re not bad books and I am going to finish the remaining four installments – if for no other reason than to get closure on the story. I’ll continue to hope that something magical happens and I will post again once I’ve finished the series. Given what I’ve read so far, however, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone start down this road. There are much better books out there. Besides, you’ll probably get the chance to see this on NetFlix in the not too distant future.