Product Description

The Ghost Brigades are the Special Forces of the Colonial Defense Forces, elite troops created from the DNA of the dead and turned into the perfect soldiers for the CDF's toughest operations. They're young, they're fast and strong, and they're totally without normal human qualms. The universe is a dangerous place for humanity--and it's about to become far more dangerous. Three races that humans have clashed with before have allied to halt our expansion into space. Their linchpin: the turncoat military scientist Charles Boutin, who knows the CDF's biggest military secrets. To prevail, the CDF must find out why Boutin did what he did. Jared Dirac is the only human who can provide answers -- a superhuman hybrid, created from Boutin's DNA, Jared's brain should be able to access Boutin's electronic memories. But when the memory transplant appears to fail, Jared is given to the Ghost Brigades. At first, Jared is a perfect soldier, but as Boutin's memories slowly surface, Jared begins to intuit the reason's for Boutin's betrayal. As Jared desperately hunts for his "father," he must also come to grips with his own choices. Time is running out: The alliance is preparing its offensive, and some of them plan worse things than humanity's mere military defeat...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3544 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
'The Ghost Brigades is amongst the best sci-fi novels I've read in ages and Scalzi deserves a lot of success.'
--NextRead.co.uk

Customer Reviews

Loved it!
Love this author's writing style, a great new read, complex and well developed plots, no loose ends...:)

The Human Empire: You are either with us or against us
Not as much fun as Old Man's War. Not using the first person narrative of the previous book in the series makes everything a little impersonal and it is not until you literally (via BrainPal) get inside the head of the newly created Special Forces character Jared Dirac does the book stop being populated by a series of faceless generals and scientists. When the young clone soldiers in his squad are shown old science fiction films as part of their training their reaction to Star Wars is hilarious. Although I disagree with their opinion that Starship Troopers is dumb and lacks philosophy. However that could be a charge leveled at this book where the one philosophy seems to be "kill them and take their planets before they kill you and take yours". In fact for the most part this reads like an imperialist dream, with the interests of the Human Empire needing to be protected from hordes of violent unworthy alien savages. The war crimes committed by the human forces to "protect" the colonies begin to their toll on the reader. The alternative offered by the human traitor is no better, making this a fairly uncomfortable book. It is only in the final few chapters the missing emotional attachment is recovered and you start to care again and the story becomes just as involving as its predecessor. By the end my faith was restored sufficiently that I am now looking forward to reading The Last Colony.

A superb follow up to Old Man's War
The Colonial Defense Force his discovered a traitor to humanity, Charles Boutin, who faked his own death and is working with three other alien races to bring a war against the CDF. However, the project Boutin was working on, a way to transfer a consciousness into a blank clone, has left an interesting development - during his research he stored a copy of his own consciousness in a system.

Now that the CDF have found it they want to use it to get into the enemies mind and create a clone of Boutin. Although this is not a normal clone, they have used their advanced techniques to grow a body fit for the Ghost Brigades: the special forces of the CDF made up from the DNA of volunteers that died before starting duty. Fully grown and built for fighting the Ghost Brigades are a deadly force.

The attempt at transferring the memories of Boutin into the clone appears to fail and he is given a new identity: Jared Dirac. Dirac is sent off to train with his fellow soldiers and assigned to the squad of Jane Sagan who is ordered to watch him in case of any developments. And developments there are which turn into a race against time to find Boutin before war breaks out.

Following on from Old Man's War I doubted that The Ghost Brigades could live up to my expectations. After all, Old Man's War was a fantastic novel full of everything that is good about science fiction. Well, Ghost Brigades did live up to those expectations in a spectacular fashion, delivering more of what was good about OMW and expanding on it further.

This time around the narrative is no longer in the first person allowing plenty of freedom for Scalzi to fill us in on the little bits of information we missed out on in OMW. This one is definitely more descriptive, with a few examples of info dumping, but Scalzi keeps the story well paced with few diversions. Although the humour found in OMW isn't as prevalent in Ghost Brigades, the times it does appear it is wholly suited to the situation and will bring a smile to your face, if not make you laugh out loud.

This brings me to what I like about Scalzi's writing - it's down to Earth without all the usual in depth descriptions of other science fiction authors I read. These are books that you can pick up and enjoy at any point and will appeal to almost any science fiction fan.

Ghost Brigades is yet another example of science fiction at its finest. An action packed, straight to the point novel, it will keep you turning those pages - and not just to find out what happens next, you'll want to read more of writing like this. I'm fully signed up to John Scalzi now and he can count me in as a fan for life, his stuff truly is exceptional.