The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi is a sequel (of sorts) to Old Man’s War. The book focuses on a new character, but a couple of the characters from the first book appear. Scalzi uses the same settings to tell a different story and does a decent job with it.

Jared Dirac is a new member of the Ghost Brigades. If you’ve read the first book, you know that the Ghost Brigades use the base DNA of a human, but not the brain. They are basically new people. The downside is they have less life experience than human volunteers, but the upside is that they are more integrated with their advanced capabilities and can do more (and do it faster) than human hybrids.

Jared’s body is based on of scientist Charles Boutin. Boutin practically invented a lot of the brain implant technology that humans have and he has disappeared and is a traitor. In order to find out more about what or where Boutin has done, the clone of Boutin is grown and Boutin’s memories are placed in him. When the memories don’t take, Boutin (now named Jared Divac) joins the rest of the Ghost Brigade troops in war fun and games. This brings us in contact with Jane Sagan, John Perry’s special friend from the first novel. But as Jared endures Special Forces battles, the memories start coming back and Jared needs to keep himself in control while accessing the memories to help find out what’s really going on.

Scalzi has done a good job creating character and a good job in developing the universe around them. But the characters and setting don’t always match and there is too much back story thrown in too fast at times as well. Overall The Ghost Brigades is a decent sequel. It’s not as fun as Old Man’s War, but it’s not bad. Recommended.

This post is part of the thread: Old Man’s War – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.