Review: The Ghost Brigades

[megwrites]

Title: The Ghost Brigades
Author: John Scalzi (scalzi.com)
Genre Science Fiction
Page Count:
Publisher





Basic Plotline: In a loose sequel to Old Man's War, taking place in the same universe with a couple of the same characters, The Ghost Brigades follows the events that happen when scientist Charles Boutin betrays humanity to it's alien enemies, the CDF creates a creates a hybrid from his DNA in order to dump his consciousness into it's brain to find out what he knows and what he plans are. When that fails, the resulting soldier is Jared Dirac, who is given to the Ghost Brigades. After training and integrating with his platoon, the memories and feelings of Boutin begin to re-emerge in Jared's mind, making him either the answer to finding out what Boutin is doing, or turning him into a potential traitor, just like his genetic progenitor.


The Positives: Like Old Man's War, this book is an enjoyable tale and a worthy entry in the military SF subgenre. While it's not strictly necessary to read the first book, it helps a lot. And you only need to remember a few details from the first book.

In this book, Scalzi explores one of the more fascinating and mysterious branches of the CDF that was only briefly touched on in Old Man's War. He sets up a believable and sympathetic system in which soldiers who are created instead of born create their own culture and way of life while trying to fulfill their mission of helping defend humanity against it's many alien enemies. These range from coming up with names for people who aren't created ("realborn") and free-for-all post-mission orgies.

The ethical quandaries abound, and the novel acknowledges those though not exploring them fully or showing their consequences as much as I would have liked.

The alien characters are also made very real and sympathetic, particularly the Rraey prisoner Cainen, who seems to have a greater grasp on the value of human life than some of the humans in the book.

As with the last book, there are moments of wit and humor, and the occasional reference to pop culture (such as "only mostly dead" in reference to the Princess Bride), and the book movies very smoothly and quickly through it's plot with military efficiency.

The world of the CDF and humanity's fight to stay alive amongst the stars is an enjoyable, complex world worth revisiting, even though the first book was, indeed, better.


The Negatives: I didn't enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed Old Man's War, and I think that's due to a few things.

First, there were moments where it seemed like Scalzi had already begun recycling old material. Jared Dirac, the story's main character, had some similiarities to John Perry from the last book. Particularly, he starts out a wide-eyed innocent who manages to figure out some novel use about a feature that hundreds of other people have used before him and apparently never even contemplated. Perry figured out the BrainPal thing, Jared figures out SmartBlood. Then, he figures out trees and how to climb them to ambush an enemy from above. Because none of the other soldiers before him ever thought of that.

There does tend to be a touch of Mary Sue in both characters, though this time I understood why Jared was a special case.

There are a few SF cliches that Scalzi unfortunately falls prey to in this novel. Most irritatingly, the "We Name Thing After Old Science Fiction Writers" trope, which seems self-referential in a masturbatory way. While I love SF/F as a genre, it seems a little far fetched that people will be naming things after SF/F authors just because it's the future. After all, two hundred years in the future, we're not naming a lot of things after the authors of the 18th or 19th centuries, are we? It also presumes that SF/F will somehow become a more important genre than any others (romance, mystery, literary, etc) in the future, and I don't think that's true.

The trope bugs me because it almost singularly used as a way for a writer to send a shout out to his author buddies and/or heroes. Which is annoying. I can't stand namechecking. Also? Charles Stross? Really? The guy who's book features a CGI woman with the galaxy's most obvious boob job on the cover is who we're gonna remember of science fiction? Not Asimov, not Clarke, not Octavia friggin' Butler or anything.

Scalzi takes it a step further when he actually goes through a review of the Ghost Brigade's science fiction reading/viewing and name checks Ender's Game. Because apparently we're still reading only literature written by Old Dead White Guys in the future. Nice to know.

The other irritating nitpicky thing was when character would reference an object that they had "only seen in pictures" or "only seen in movies" rather than objects or things that they encounter in daily life, especially when they're describing these things in a moment of excitement, panic, or otherwise heightened emotions. It's doubly bothersome because it's clear the point of that description is to emphasize how far form Earth these people are. We get it, they're soldiers in space.

I also felt like the ending pulled it's punches instead of being the tense, riveting conclusion it could have been. Rather than leaving the reader to wonder whether the CDF is or is not a positive force in humanity's existence and as bad as Boutin claims, Scalzi sticks in some mutter about a "counter-Conclave" which justifies the CDF refusing to join the Alien UN (what he calls The Conclave). I feel the book would have been improved by leaving the reader to chew on the dilemma and the ethics rather than trying to salvage the CDF as good guys.

That's the thing about being in the military. While the soldiers on the ground might be good people just trying to follow orders, it doesn't mean that their cause is just or their leaders are making wise, ethical decisions concerning what orders they give. And I think flinching away from that, especially in the current political climate, feels cowardly in a way.

Character-wise, there were stock characters. The Asshole Bully who eventually becomes friends with Our Hero, and The Soldier Who Loves Destruction, and the Overworked, Long Sighing General Who Tiredly Makes Hard Choices (I saw this in Ender's Game, too).

Boutin, the traitor who is the impetus for all the events in the book, seems too much like a stock villian who goes "bwahahaha" and goes on a long monologue about his methods and madness. Not to mention that I didn't find his plan plausible in light of what I knew about the universe.

I also found it sort of silly that nobody would remember to put anti-virus software on the BrainPals, which is the crux of Boutin's evil plot.

But for all this, the read was enjoyable and worth the time, if not as exciting as Old Man's War.


CoC Score: 2. There are a few backgrounded CoC's, nobody in a major role, and I don't think anyone who was a CoC even got a speaking part. Scalzi's racial outline of the future is somewhat bothersome, because apparently he still imagines that in the future America and western European countries will continue to be the dominant economic forces and that India and China will still be developing nations that lag behind us to the point where they're filled to the brim with poor people desperate to get out.

Apparently, he hasn't paid attention to such details as the fact that India now has the world's fastest growing economy. In a hundred years or so, I imagine that countries America now regards as developing will probably have overtaken us in terms of economic and political strength.

Not to mention that even if somehow he can explain in non-racist terms why he thinks the growth and pre-eminence of such countries would be thwarted, it still ignores that given the current statistics for the United States, caucasians will quickly become a minority in the future and that Americans will be very much people of color.

So there ought to have been plenty of room for people of color, if only American people of color. But alas, no.


GLBT Score 0. None mentioned this time.

Gender Score: 1. Oh, Scalzi. You fail at gender this time. You fail hard.

Yet again, the women in this book exist to be somebody's love interest and then to die. I'm not even sure that you technically passed the Bechdel Test, either. I don't know if Sagan and Pauling actually ever talk to each other. I think they are part of the same group conversations, but I don't think they ever directly address each other.

Also, I don't think Jane barking order at the entire platoon counts as a way to pass the Bechdel Test, either.

With the sole exception of five-year-old Zoe and Jane Sagan who ends up being less of a major character than I anticipated she would be, every woman in this book dies.

You begin the book by portraying aliens, and the one alien woman in that scene made me cringe because she's a) shown as being stupider than her boyfriend male scientist counterpart and is, of course, sleeping with her male superior, then she

b) hands a gun that could be used to protect herself off to her boyfriend with a "tee hee, I don't know how to shoot guns!" and, of course:

c) dies.

Seriously, Scalzi? Even the alien females are idiots, incompetents, and inferiors in your universe? What the hell's up with that?

The two named women in the Ghost Brigades platoon die as well. They die twice, technically. First in the training exercise, they die first (they're girls, they're not as good at military stuff in Scalzi's world, so of course they'd fail first) and then when the platoon hit real combat, they die again!

There's no reason in that scene that Pauling and Andrea Gell-Mann (who is only mentioned as she fails) should have been the ones who sucked at their training exercise. The point of the scene was to have Jared figure out how to climb in a tree to ambush people (because again, none of the hundreds of special forces before him ever figured that out) and save Seabourg's ass so they can be kinda-buds. You couldn't have one of the guys bite it out on the outset? Or god forbid one of the girls had figured out the tree thing.

Even though in the book Dirac's "girlfriend" is clearly the superior soldier and able to best him thoroughly in combat because he isn't even paying attention to what he's doing, but somehow she's the one who dies first in the training exercise?

There are no women with a higher rank than Jane's (lieutenant, I think) and there are no women generals, nothing. There aren't even any high ranking female scientists. Even if you somehow accept the military as being male-dominated, trust me, in the future there are going to be a glut of female scientists. If for nothing else than because women are currently outperforming men in higher education and that trend does not look to stop. Instead, in this world, everyone except for a handful of aliens and soon-to-die soldiers is male.

I just wanted to scream, "Seriously, Scalzi? You couldn't toss in a few token chick scientists or something?"

Then, the one woman who survives the book and learns of the horrible, horrible things that the CDF may be doing doesn't want to stay in service and try to fix what's going wrong. No, she's perfectly happy to scoop up Zoe and go live on a farm somewhere with the husband of her deceased genetic progenitor. Because instead of fighting for sweet justice, she'd prefer to live as a replacement for a dead woman, without forging her own identity or anything outside of the male-dominated structures of the Special Forces.

Because god forbid it should be a woman who takes on the system and wins. No, we need another wide-eyed, improbable male protagonist to figure that. Maybe he can start out fresh and new to the CDF and then discover things about common objects and proceedures that nobody else has. This looks like a job for...GARY STU!

Next book there are gonna be harems of clone wives or something. *facepalm*. Though, I don't know if I can bring myself to be told how unimportant I'm going to be in the future due to that little Having a Vagina problem I've got. Or that I, as a class of reader, am beneath consideration.