The Ghost Brigades
Oct. 27th, 2007 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI just finished John Scalzi's military SF novel The Ghost Brigades, his follow-on to Old Man's War. I liked Old Man's War, but this is better (and is an independent enough story to function as a standalone, though the books have one major character in common).
The plot is more complicated in a good, character-driven way, and hinges on interesting questions of identity and free will, while bringing into question a lot of what we were told about the world in Old Man's War.
In Scalzi's future, Earth and its colonies are defended from aliens, and aggressively expanded at the expense of aliens, under the aegis of the Colonial Union, whose army mostly consists of old people whose minds have been sideloaded into new, super-powered milspec bodies that are heavily upgraded clones of their old bodies. Then there are the Special Forces, or Ghost Brigades, cloned from those who enlisted but died before the mind transfer, who don't have preexisting minds but are born as physical adults with brand-new ones, indoctrinated and mentally integrated into command-control-communication networks from birth. In place of the life experience of the "realborn" regular army, they're valued for their unique fighting abilities, and for their willingness to follow orders--since a lot of what they do seems to consist of what most of us would call war crimes.
The story follows a newly created Special Forces soldier named Jared Dirac, and goes through the usual Starship Troopers-ish account of his peculiar training; but Dirac is no ordinary member of the Ghost Brigades, having been cloned from a missing scientist who turned traitor, leaving behind something unique--a recording of his personality. The military tried to implant the recorded personality into Jared Dirac to gain information about the traitor's whereabouts, motivations and plans, but the experiment apparently failed, and Dirac was inducted into the Special Forces, in part as a means of continuing the experiment in case something interesting happens. Which, of course, it does. Dirac eventually has to confront the treasonous scientist's past trauma and decide who he actually is, while judging the implications of new revelations about the Colonial Union and the universe of hostile aliens that it spends so much effort fighting.
There is an emotional arc here that is parallel to the one in Old Man's War. That novel gained much of its power from its depiction of the protagonist's grief for his dead wife; The Ghost Brigades in turn explores the grief of a parent for a child, and, I think, succeeds to an even greater extent.
I have pedantic nitpicks about the science in the book (Scalzi makes a physics error in the second paragraph of the novel, and seemed amused when I pointed that out on his blog) but this series was never intended as hard SF anyway.
The plot is more complicated in a good, character-driven way, and hinges on interesting questions of identity and free will, while bringing into question a lot of what we were told about the world in Old Man's War.
In Scalzi's future, Earth and its colonies are defended from aliens, and aggressively expanded at the expense of aliens, under the aegis of the Colonial Union, whose army mostly consists of old people whose minds have been sideloaded into new, super-powered milspec bodies that are heavily upgraded clones of their old bodies. Then there are the Special Forces, or Ghost Brigades, cloned from those who enlisted but died before the mind transfer, who don't have preexisting minds but are born as physical adults with brand-new ones, indoctrinated and mentally integrated into command-control-communication networks from birth. In place of the life experience of the "realborn" regular army, they're valued for their unique fighting abilities, and for their willingness to follow orders--since a lot of what they do seems to consist of what most of us would call war crimes.
The story follows a newly created Special Forces soldier named Jared Dirac, and goes through the usual Starship Troopers-ish account of his peculiar training; but Dirac is no ordinary member of the Ghost Brigades, having been cloned from a missing scientist who turned traitor, leaving behind something unique--a recording of his personality. The military tried to implant the recorded personality into Jared Dirac to gain information about the traitor's whereabouts, motivations and plans, but the experiment apparently failed, and Dirac was inducted into the Special Forces, in part as a means of continuing the experiment in case something interesting happens. Which, of course, it does. Dirac eventually has to confront the treasonous scientist's past trauma and decide who he actually is, while judging the implications of new revelations about the Colonial Union and the universe of hostile aliens that it spends so much effort fighting.
There is an emotional arc here that is parallel to the one in Old Man's War. That novel gained much of its power from its depiction of the protagonist's grief for his dead wife; The Ghost Brigades in turn explores the grief of a parent for a child, and, I think, succeeds to an even greater extent.
I have pedantic nitpicks about the science in the book (Scalzi makes a physics error in the second paragraph of the novel, and seemed amused when I pointed that out on his blog) but this series was never intended as hard SF anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-28 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-28 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-28 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-28 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-28 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-29 04:05 am (UTC)While doing that, I came up with a possible theory of how Scalzi's phrase could have come about: astronomers trying to calculate the motion of a newly discovered comet from a small number of observations will sometimes start by calculating a parabolic orbit, as a rough approximation for the motion near perihelion. So if you poked around a few web pages of this sort, you might well come across a reference to somebody calculating a parabolic orbit for what turned out to be a short-period comet.
Of course, I suppose I could ask him, but I bugged him about it once already.