Scalzi, John: The Ghost Brigades
The Ghost Brigades
Writer: John Scalzi
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 374
When I read Old Man's War, I found myself immediately sucked in. If I hadn't had to go to work the next day, I would've stayed up all night to finish the book. I was that enthralled. So you can imagine I was a little concerned about reading the sequel, as I assumed I'd get so sucked in I'd get nothing done.
That didn't happen.
The Ghost Brigades is a good book with interesting ideas on what it means to be human. It's a good read. But it's also a very different book from Old Man's War, so much so that it took me a couple of days to finish it.
One of the first and biggest differences between The Ghost Brigades and Old Man's War is voice and POV. In OMW, we've got a first person narrator with a fun, easy voice to go along with. We are stuck that character, John Perry, for the whole of the novel, and everything we experience, we experience through his eyes.
Not so with TGB. While Perry is mentioned, he is not in this book. That's fine, because another favorite from OMW, Jane Sagan, is. Yet, not really. I thought at first this would be her story, and while she's a strong supporting character in this story, it's not hers.
Instead, through a series of random action sequences and viewpoints, we finally meet our hero, Jared Dirac, who is a Special Forces officer created from the genes of a traitor, Charles Boutin, and who's given the man's consciousness as well in order to figure out what Boutin's plan is. Only it doesn't take, not at first. We get some fantastic sequences from Jared's POV (the best POV in the book) that focus on his birth, his training, and his life with his Special Forces training mates. This is really good stuff. I enjoyed learning how the BrainPals work to integrate the Special Forces officers, and Scalzi does a great job at making them both human and "other," the latter of which raises some interesting interracial questions, IMHO, when it comes to what it means to be human and what the value is of human life, especially if the human life in question is looked down upon or feared by those in power.
But I digress. The real story picks up when Boutin's memories finally start leaking into Jared's consciousness, and he has to learn who Boutin is, why the man turned traitor, and ultimately, try to bring the man to justice.
All of this is good stuff. Only, I found it lacking in focus. The opening sequence is a little coy, showing a couple of scientists in a base that's getting invaded, and by the end of the section you suddenly realize these scientists are aliens and the invaders are humans. I guess that's a good way to get your reader to sympathize with the alien in question--make them read as human, and once they sympathize, you pull the rug out from under them, though for my taste, I found that coyness a rather cheap trick.
TGB also suffered from an insane amount of info-dumping. I remember hearing info-dumping was a problem in OMW, but if it was, it didn't bother me because I was in a POV voice I enjoyed and trusted, and since he didn't know what was going on, we didn't either, so I didn't mind learning. There's no such handy trick available in TGB. We get POVs of people whose only purpose is to update us on the war and traitor situation, scenes which I found rather boring and difficult to get through, even though useful information was being revealed. And then there's the pure random bits of info-dump provided in no context. It's just THERE, dumped into the narrative without any character learning about it or explaining it to someone who doesn't. Those were even more difficult to get through, because while I knew the information was important, the lack of context made me not care.
POV was also very, very fishy in this book. You can barely call it loose-third person, but it's really not omniscient either. Sometimes I thought I was in Jared's head, but the I'd get a detail that only Sagan would know, and frankly, it became really difficult to get grounded with all the slips of POV. On one hand, that may have been somewhat intentional, given the integration of the platoon members and all that, but still, I wish it would've felt a little more deliberate so that I knew exactly what was going on, rather than getting yanked out of my assumption.
And let me just say, the fact that we didn't get this book from Jared's first person POV (which would've been tricky, admittedly), clued me in really fast that Jared was going to die. I didn't like figuring that out so early.
The Ghost Brigades definitely feels like the "sophomore slump***," but it's still a really good, entertaining story with some great ideas. I was disappointed that it didn't sweep me away like Old Man's War did, but I was still happy with the story I got, and the set up for the next book in the series, of which I read the sample of in the back of TGB. Reading this made me want to go back and re-read Old Man's War, just to refresh my memory on all the wonderful little details of this universe, and I will say to anyone who's interested in this series, you must read these books in order. I think The Ghost Brigades could stand on its own, but it's so much more satisfying if you have Old Man's War under your belt.
*** = I know that, technically speaking, The Ghost Brigades is not Scalzi's second book, but since it IS the second book in this series, I feel it fair to use the term. :)
Next up: The Sagan Diaries by John Scalzi