The Ghost Brigades

[sawyl]

Having read and loved John Scalzi's Old Man's War a couple of weeks ago, I decided to follow it up with The Ghost Brigades, the second novel set in the same universe. And I'm pleased to say I was not disappointed: it's every bit as good as its predecessor, but possessed of a darker, more contemplative tone.

Investigating the apparent suicide of Charles Boutin, an elite scientist with top secret clearances, the Colonial Union uncover a series of clues that suggest that Boutin has faked his own death in order to defect to a group of humanity's enemies. Digging through the remnants of Boutin's research, they find a recording of the man's mind stored in an alien computer and decide to upload the contents into a clone. But when Boutin's consciousness fail to wake up, the clone, Jared Dirac, is sent off to be trained as a special forces soldier.

After going through two weeks of basic training, during which he and his squad mates assimilate vast amounts of both military and cultural information, Jared and his friend Sarah are attached to an operational force under Lieutenant Jane Sagan, a familiar face from Old Man's War. Gradually, as his sense of self grows as he gains more experience of the world at large, Jared finds Boutin's memories starting to intrude on his own.

At its heart, The Ghost Brigades concerns three big questions: what does it mean to make a free choice; what does memory contribute to sense of a larger self; and what does it take for a person to renounce their loyalties and turn traitor. It also features sub-themes about the natures of consciousness and happiness, and takes a couple of sideswipes at intelligent design.

Jared is a clone of Boutin, created for the specific purpose of housing a copy of his consciousness — not something he can have chosen for himself. Likewise he is pushed into special forces training without being given a choice. Although it is not entirely clear whether, even if he had assented, he would have been able, at an hour old and with almost no knowledge of the world around him, to give anything like informed consent. When he joins, he is told that special forces are unique. Unlike all other humans, they are born — created — with a specific purpose: to fight and kill for the good of humanity, of which they're most definitely a part regardless of their unnatural origins. But as another character notes, this effectively means that they're slaves. They are indoctrinated from the first to believe that they can do nothing but serve. They are tightly integrated with their squadmates through brain implants that normalise their subservience (very Foucauldian!) and prevent them from deviating. And, outside of limited combat situations, they are given almost no opportunity to choose paths for themselves.

Then there is the question of how memory relates to character and how it forms each individual. When Jared first meets his squad mates, they are all less than two days old and completely without experience, yet all of them have unique characters. Jared has a dry wit even he doesn't yet realise it. Sarah Paulling is outgoing and kind with a sense of humour, while Steve Seaborg is insecure and has a crush on Sarah and covers it by being a bit of an arse. From this, from Jane Sagan's general behaviour, and from Daniel Harvey's comment later on that he suspects that his progenitor must have been really antisocial given his own propensity for violence and destruction, I suspect we're supposed to believe that a certain amount of character is genetically determined (I know that this is a bit of reach but I wonder if Harvey might not be a clone of Leon Deak, John Perry's appalling roomie in Old Man's War).

But as Boutin's memories start to unspool in Jared's head, his character definitely changes. He becomes more assertive, more emotional and more sarcastic. But at the same time, he can't see that he has changed. In his mind, he remains the same person he has always even though it's obvious to the reader and the characters around him that he has radically altered. But even carrying Boutin's memories and even with a mind that matches the map of Boutin's consciousness, he remains his own person and comes to conclusions that almost completely opposed to those of the real Charles Boutin: where Charlie, in his arrogance, decides to betray his own species, Jared realises that he doesn't know enough to condemn the human race based on evidence that is, at best, partisan and unreliable.

Which brings us to the theme of loyalty. As he comes to understand more about Boutin's history, Jared struggles to pinpoint the event that caused the man to defect. But, perhaps due to his special forces indoctrination, he can't seem to identify it. In frustration he discusses his problem with Cainen, an alien scientist captured and tortured by Jane Sagan in an early raid on a hidden research base run jointly by the Rraey and the Eneshun, who, being a defector himself, is well positioned to help explain. Cainen notes that it is hard to tell why someone might change their loyalties because it might turn on an apparently insignificant event such as, in his case, an series of unexpected kindnesses on the part of Sagan. All of which helps to guide Jared to his final decision — one he would have been unable to take had he remained a simple soldier with minimal free choice — on whether to throw his lot in with Boutin or whether to oppose him for the sake of humanity.

Questions about the nature of consciousness too, pervade the novel. The early section featuring Jared's creation explains much of the mechanics between the consciousness transfer technology used in Old Man's War, making it clear why memories can't be upload to a computer and why they can't be copied from the body of one person to another. This also explains how the special forces a brought to consciousness using their embedded implants — the superbly named BrainPal — to provide an artificial scaffold until their brain itself is able to integrate enough of its own elements to produce a genuine human mind.

Consciousness is also the obsession of the Obin, one of the main alien antagonists. The Obin come across as large scale ants; able to think and act collectively but, on an individual bases, completely lacking in consciousness. Consequently, they are deeply utilitarian, completely lacking in culture, unable to converse in anything other than simple statements of fact, and completely and utterly fearless. They are good at science but, lacking the requisite imagination, they are only really able to optimise the discoveries of others rather discover things for themselves. But the central horror of the Obin is that they are acutely aware of the huge hole in their existence — the perfect happiness that might otherwise stem from their total lack of ego is destroyed by their knowledge that they are incomplete. They may be, as Boutin sarcastically notes, poor insensate alien Adam's and Eve's, but they are Adam's and Eve's who are aware of their own ignorance and who are living in garden where the tree of knowledge is completely out of reach.

For all that I've dwelt rather fulsomely on the philosophical elements of the novel, it's more than possible to ignore them and read the book as straight piece of military SF, with superhuman soldiers who travel the universe meeting new aliens and killing them in unique and horrible ways. While more serious and less wise-cracking than Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades is every bit as enjoyable as its predecessor, deepening and strengthening the universe of the Colonial Union along the way.