The Ghost Brigades John Scalzi The follow up to Old Man’s War is a curious beast. It’s set in the same context, even features a couple of characters from that first novel, but it’s protagonist is entirely different. Jared Dirac is a Special Forces soldier in the CDF, what the regular forces call The Ghost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,2,50,4,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b-2","category-books","category-fiction","category-rated","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span>The follow up to Old Man’s War is a curious beast. It’s set in the same context, even features a couple of characters from that first novel, but it’s protagonist is entirely different.
\nJared Dirac is a Special Forces soldier in the CDF, what the regular forces call The Ghost Brigades. Unlike every other Special Forces soldier Dirac was created to host the conciousness of another man. Charles Boutin was the brilliant scientist behind the BrainPal and the transfer of conciousness that allows the CDF special forces to exist, but now he’s gone renegade and betrayed humanity to competing alien forces. However the transfer seems to fail and Dirac becomes a regular SF grunt.
\nThe book follows Dirac through basic training and into full-blown combat and on to a confrontation with Boutin himself after he gains access to the man’s memories.
\nIt’s a fun book but flawed in that it lacks a real sense of coherence and succeeds better in providing a satisfying ending to the story in the first book than anything else.
\nIt’s still worth a read if you want a quick blast of Heinlein like old school science fiction, like.<\/p>\n