The Ghost Brigades

Go grab a cold drink and a snack because you wont want to leave your seat during another exciting BOOK REVIEW! That’s right boys and girls Im up to a third grade reading level and am reading all the books I can get my grubby little hands on. On todays menu is a sequel to a book Ive previously reviewed, John Scalzi’s Old Mans War. In the first book we’re introduced to the Colonial Defense Forces and humanities struggles to survive in an extremely hostile galaxy. In The Ghost Brigades the story is picked up about a year after the events of the first book and reintroduces a couple of familiar characters and an entire slew of new ones.

The Ghost Brigades are the CDF equivalent of Special Forces which are assigned the dirty jobs the military doesn’t want anyone else handling. However in the future these aren’t just any ordinary special forces, these “Ghosts” are genetically engineered from the DNA of dead people with a wiped mind. The minds are then implanted with a consciousness which from the moment is awoken is trained to kill, kill and kill without question. This brings up the theme of morality that was prevalent in the first book. These soldiers have essentially newborn brains in hyper modified bodies designed for combat and are exposed to nothing but defending humanity in brutal combat from the moment of their births. It would be very easy to say that these people are either mindless killers or for the author to pass them off as sympathetic slave characters pitied by the reader. This book does neither of those things. As the chapters progress a steady maturing process is taking place among these soldiers as their young minds, hardened by months of combat, begin to form their own opinions of right and wrong and their place in the galaxy. One extremely well written example of this is when the Special Forces are sent on a mission to kidnap the princess of an alien race and then use the princess as ransom to get them to break the alliance they have with another race who is preparing to attack the CDF. At the end of the chapter the main character of the book, Jared Dirac, makes the statement that he has never seen the human colonists he is supposed to be defending and has never seen a human child (having been born into an adult body and shipped off to the front lines and all), and yet he is expected to kill this alien child just to complete his mission (which he cant bring himself to do). It’s the depth of the characters such as this, which makes the people interesting without being overbearing.

I do have a couple of knocks on the book that I didn’t have on the first one. Where as the first book is told from the perspective of a character who is nothing more then a front line, everyday, Joe-Nobody type. He is handed a modified body and a gun and sent out to kill people on the front lines. This leads to combat and events, which involve huge armies of humans and aliens clashing in planet wide conflicts for supremacy. It’s the type of combat you would expect from a sci-fi novel. However in the second book the focus on Special Forces brings in the “a small team of highly trained soldiers attack a large number of enemy troops and manage to kill them against all odds”. Some of the combat scenes in the book feel like bad Anime instead of good sci-fi. What I did enjoy that and balanced out the less stellar combat was the broadened focus on the political make up of the galaxy the humans live in. In the first book we get only glimpses of the behind the scenes action. Now we find out about many other races, they’re numbers, and some of their motivations in their struggles with each other and humans. We learn more about the origins of the CDF and humanities colonization of the stars and why we have to fight constantly to hold our ground (of the 612 sentient races humanity has encountered they have gone to war with 577 of them). Best of all the ending leaves wide open the plot line for a third book which promises to expand exploration of these political themes even more.

Overall I would say I enjoyed the second book equally as much as the first. Though I found the combat to be somewhat lacking I did find the more expanded view of Scalzi’s universe to make up for it. I am looking forward to the third book which I hope is planned because the ending of this one just begs for it.