My skepticism about the Hugo-worthiness of the competent and enjoyable Old Man’s War notwithstanding, I was looking forward to reading The Ghost Brigades. I needn’t think a book is all awardable’n’stuff to be a good read, and OMW was a good read, and I had every reason to believe that Ghost would be a good read. And it was.
Again, I have to emphasize that it was well-written—not brilliantly written, not shockingly wonderful in its wordcraft, not infuriatingly inconsistent in flashes of genius interspersed with the inevitable wreckage of genius failure, but well-written. And that’s good enough for me.
The main difference between this and OMW, for me, was that where OMW was episodic, in that our protagonist falls into a new life and then one damn thing after another happens to him, without any overarching goal particularly, in Ghost it’s clear from the outset that there is a goal. Our hero is essentially a weapon aimed at a target, and the suspense is whether he will hit it. Well, really, it’s in how he will hit it, because, c’mon. That ain’t a complaint, bye-the-bye; the suspense ought to be in how he will hit it, and it is, and we have fun along the way.
And, OK, a cavil: I know that the sex in this book is, you know, in the tradition of Heinlein and Asimov (more the latter than the former, discreetly leering and all), but the whole trope of good healthy young people having good healthy sex with their good healthy hormones blah blah blah came off just a little ... airbrushed. I know I wouldn’t have actually preferred there to be one fellow in the troop with a low libido, or one who couldn’t get into it without restraints and a blindfold, or one who just wanted to be alone, because that would not have worked within the Ghost Brigade setup Mr. Scalzi had carefully presented. But the result was ... well, as I say, airbrushed. I mean, I know that Mr. Scalzi appreciates that people are different, one to another (not only from his Whatever but from this novel itself), so I don’t think it’s from any impulse on his part to impose sexual conformity, but the end result is the same, to my eyes.
Well, and it’s a minor part of the book. Mostly the book is all about the plot, which involves war and knocking over planets, and genetically modified human turtles salvaging burnt-out space stations, and evil aliens without real self-awareness attempting to gain souls by wiping out the human race. You know. Good stuff.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.