The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

John Scalzi is an excellent writer. This is eminently readable and highly enjoyable.

In this sequel to Old Man's War, we spend our time with the special forces. A military scientist has betrayed humanity and gone to work with an alliance of species that are planning an attack on the human worlds. When the plan to copy the traitor and ask the memory-enhanced clone does not work, he is placed in combat where he can be useful or die trying. Then memories begin to emerge.

The main note is quality of writing. It is just a pleasure to read John Scalzi, an effortless flight through carefully crafted work. He does well in friendship and introspection, he does well in sex and violence. There is variety in settings and activities, and it is all good.

The variety is baked right in. As in Old Man's War, thousands of worlds are just a skip drive jump away, in addition to training, different operations, and squad "turnover" in a wartime military story. Things move, things change, and the writing remains excellent.

There is some introspection time to consider the implications of the plot background. I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoiling the first book, but I have already said that our protagonist is a man-made human. That is important, as is being made with a built-in brain-computer interface. The latter is addressed in Old Man's War and gets more attention here.

The book falls short in being conservative about the implications. The story remains human, which is good storytelling but sells its characters short. When it is explicit that we have a transhuman cast, keeping the thought and discussion on a human scale is a disappointment. There are early indications that things are working at a different speed on a different scale, but then nothing comes of it, and the characters default to human behavioral norms despite being raised without them.

I can understand wanting to be human because of having been created as a non-human Other. Maybe that is meant to be implicit, but multiple characters explicitly reject it, and I expect them to act more fully on being high-bandwidth digital telepaths with hive mind potential. Little else is done with that idea after the revelation that it makes for really great sex.

My other criticism is that our returning character from Old Man's War does not add much from the original. This was the case in Marooned in Realtime as well: the character is there in name, and it is the same character, but it fails to build. That is great for someone entering on this book without having read the first, but the setting does build on the previous book, so we have character re-use without character advancement. This would be less notable if the point of view did not shift to that character at times; if we stuck with our protagonist exclusively, the inability to see inside others' heads would resolve that. Except that they can see inside each others' heads.

Moving past criticism, we have the neutral point that some pieces are obvious tropes or adaptations. Mr. Scalzi cites some of them himself, such as borrowing "uplift." Bad artists borrow, good artists steal. You can also see the sci fi fandom and geekery as the characters enjoy our modern books. They suggest that sci fi died as a genre once space travel was possible and they saw what the universe was like, but it reads suspiciously like a list of the author's favorite books. Other tropes exist, such as the trick from training that becomes critical later, although with a few variations.

Wait, no, one more criticism stemming from "they saw what the universe was like." I have mentioned in other books the difficulty of remaining just a little transhuman for hundreds of years. Maybe adding hundreds of enemy species puts economic pressure that slows that, but it should certainly add distance in other directions. The book addresses my point from last time, why not use all/mostly special forces, but "they creep us out" does not outweigh the cost and effectiveness benefits when at war with 90% of the galaxy. (If anything, the costs for special forces are even lower than implied in the first book.) Humanity would have been wiped out, and a species that engages in preemptive intergalactic terrorism hardly seems like it would have any scruples against tactics that undermine its own humanity. On the other hand, humanity is doing a middling job of not bullying the dragon, and I am waiting for the story about a special forces rebellion.

That there are details to think and argue about is a good thing. Many stories require suspension of disbelief such that you must forgive pretty much everything to get started. It takes this level of coherence for thoughts deeper than the awesomeness of laser swords. In a thinking person's action-adventure story, we think. And maybe the next explanation will patch it instead of opening new questions.

Although, new questions are great sequel hooks. A few of the characters note problems, like Eurocentrism given the rest of the setting, and I am willing to give John Scalzi the benefit of the doubt that he has thought through some things (rather than just lampshade hanging).

While I may argue some plot points (and the author has already won, so who cares?), and that only happens when the plot is good and thoughtful enough to be worth arguing, the writing is less subject to criticism. John Scalzi does a great job bouncing from familial love to the horrors of war. We have philosophical discussion next to comic relief in a way that works.

Pretty much everything works. He is just that good. I still think of John Scalzi as one of the new lights in science fiction, and he is perhaps the brightest.

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Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge

Across Realtime, book two

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This is famously a book about people who missed The Singularity. I did not expect it to be a murder mystery.

The human era is long past. There were billions of people, all of whom disappeared in what was the ascension, suicide, or murder of the human race. Whatever it was, about 300 people missed it, shunted outside time for various reasons. Millions of years later, the last group is awakening, joining the others who have mostly waited in stasis for the rest of humanity to emerge. This is the human race's last chance to start over, with just enough people to ensure genetic diversity, with just enough technology to get everything started before the high-tech equipment wears out. The plan has a narrow margin of error, and it never accounted for having a murderer amongst the survivors.

This has layers of mystery. On a grand scale, what happened to the human race? There are competing perspectives about self-immolation, self-improvement, and alien attacks. On the plot-driving scale, who is the murderer? Linking the two, what is the hidden enemy trying to accomplish? We have what may be a holocaust in the distant past, a very recent single killing, and a potential completion of the human genocide.

Our protagonist has his own version of this running. He never intended to leap into the future. He was a police investigator not long before the human Singularity/Extermination, when a suspect sent him 100 years into the future. For his family, that was like killing him; for him, that was like killing everyone he ever knew; as a large side effect, the entire species disappeared in the interim, really eliminating everything. The standard punishment for such a time displacement was sending the criminal forward slightly further, with a note left for the victim so he can do as he sees fit. The protagonist's rescuers picked up that guy too, and hid his identity in the interest of saving as many people as possible. 300 humans left, and one of them took away everything he ever had.

If The Singularity is an unfamiliar term, Google can assist, or just read the book. The idea is that humanity develops into something post-human, most likely due to intelligence-enhancing technology. Once you can improve your brain, you become smart enough to improve your brain further, and so on. As this accelerates, you can quickly become something incomprehensible to a present-day human. Along the way, you probably develop the power to wipe yourselves out as a byproduct. Good luck!

For those stranded, time and preparation make a big difference. If you intentionally jumped forward, you brought the best your time had to offer; if you were shanghaied, you brought whatever you had with you. If you left a year or two later, your technology was more advanced, with that nearly inhuman speed of improvement. You have a different scale of operation when you have thought-controlled robots and anti-gravity units, as opposed to the best technology that 1982 had to offer.

Of course, everything wears out eventually. I could not replace this computer myself. This creates a hard deadline for getting the species going again: how many years will the current equipment last, especially when it needs to support 300 people, many of whom never planned to leap into the future.

Shall we return to the murder mystery? All the "high tech" humans are suspects, so they turn to our protagonist, from a slightly earlier age. Someone had a reason to kill, and they may by trying to kill or conquer the rest of the human race. And s/he is one of a small group that lives among you, probably with the technology to nuke things, definitely with the competence to sabotage hyper-advanced computer systems.

This interaction of low and high tech, and the differing perspectives of individuals and groups, drives the setting. It also creates a problem for the narrative itself, because we are following an investigator who is not technologically capable of understanding his quarry, and there is no reason to think that the killer is any more comprehensible. Give someone the medical technology to live for hundreds or thousands of years, the computer technology to vastly expand their memory and thought speed, and a time-skipping device so that they can operate gradually over a multi-million-year timeframe. Can you even guess what that might do to your worldview? Our protagonist is a normal investigator, no different from a modern-age human, who is somehow using his intuition and person-reading skills to deduce motives and who is lying. This is like your pet trying to out-think you. Granted, I sometimes have trouble getting my cat into her carrier, but I'm pretty sure I'll always win in the long run.

Although I notice that I feed her and clean her litter, and she sleeps on the couch while I am at work. Hmm.

I have dealt more with the technological side than the personal side here. Vernor Vinge is good as ever on how the two interact, but the breadth of the story makes the depth of characterization more shallow than usual. We spend a lot of time in our protagonist's skull, and we have some interesting supporting cast, but there are many suspects and more people beyond them to understand. A low-tech faction may be addressed as a group, and its members may not be suspects, but we must consider its leadership, internal strife, disputes with other groups, plans for the surviving humans, and how it fits in others' plans and disputes. Even with a surprisingly small number of high-tech suspects, there is a lot of ground to cover, to say nothing of developing the world of the distant future.

We mostly see humanity from a good distance up, rather than a few people up close. It works fine at that level, although I suspect you would want more if you were really trying to solve a murder. It is hard to get to know people at that distance.

Finally, things pick up at the end. It never becomes hard-boiled, but there is action once events spiral towards their close. Given the high-tech humans' scale of operation, where each can conveniently carry around the equivalent of entire nuclear arsenals, that can be quite a spectacle, yet this becomes to most personal and small-scale part of the book. If the explosion is close enough for you to see much, you will probably be dead before you get to enjoy it, so combat is kept at a safe distance as much as possible.

The big reveal is a bit cliche. The book lampshades it, pointing out why the cliche is usually a bad idea, but a double-subversion becomes playing it straight. I would like to comment on the lady's impressive turn, but if I have gotten this far with no Peace War spoilers, I can close without spoiling this book.

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This was supposed to have been posted months ago. I somehow moved it to my "posted" pile without ever posting it.

The Ruins by Scott Smith

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This is a circumscribed 3. I would not recommend it to most people, but there is definitely an audience that would enjoy it.

Six young adults on vacation take a day trip to an archeological dig at the vine-covered ruins of a Mayan mining camp. As you might expect from a horror novel, now that they have entered The Ruins, they may never leave.

The dominant mood is dread. It is a slow-moving story with little going on and few moving pieces. Until events come together all at once, the pattern is to dwell upon each significant event at length. Ponder bad things that have happened, ponder greater problems still to come. It is all about anticipation, waiting for the blow to come. The themes are of seclusion and predation.

If that sounds good, and you like your horror with more brooding and less slashing, this could be for you. I imagine that the film version has a faster pace, since each fifty-page chunk of story would translate to about nine minutes on the screen. Unless my reading speed has improved recently, this is a surprisingly fast read for 500 densely printed pages, where the pace of page-turning offsets the languid storytelling.

So you know what type of horror you are getting into, and this hardly counts as a spoiler given the (original) cover and how early it comes up, the vine is the enemy. The dominant problem is basic outdoor survival on a barren hilltop, but the vine is the reason and increasingly the direct antagonist. The paragraph after next will contain some mild spoilers, so this could be a good stopping point if you plan to read/watch it.

The human element is very good. The limited third-person perspective flips between four characters, and while we have fifty pages of introduction and fifty pages of getting to the ruins, we do not really know them until we see them interact under pressure. All six contribute to the problems in their own ways, with a spread of personalities that one character notes as just perfect for a movie cast. Since we spend most of our time inside their heads, instead of having events, we get a good sense of them. The exception is Mathias, a character who seems to exist as a plot device, silent mirror, and extra pair of hands.

The story would work better if it remained low-key. There are few things besides our cast: a hill, a hole, two tents, and a tangle of vine. Having the vine be an aggressive, predatory kudzu with acidic sap was quite enough. It was not necessary to add other abilities to it, and making it multi-lingual and creative was not the most absurd. Seriously, apple pie? Maybe this is my hard sci fi background, but I find more horror in an impersonal and implacable destroyer than an actively malignant one. The man against nature story is turned into one with a villain, and again back to that character's comments, just perfect for a movie. Asimov's impersonal forces do not necessarily film well.

On a minor note, the book was written just before the tipping point in the cellular communication revolution. This means that the characters refer to cell phones with the now-implausible addition that no one brought one. It seems like an easy problem to resolve, declare there to be no signal in the Mayan jungle. If anyone wants to chat about how you get around the plot problem caused by this or my previous suggestion, we can take those spoilers to the comments.

Finally, Mathias has a good point late in the book: how and how long has this gone on without anyone noticing? I do not know how the Mexican government reacts to people disappearing in the jungle, but there is an implication that the ruins have had many victims. There will be a serious investigation at some point, with all that implies, and there probably should have been one already. The characters have some thoughts on the matter, but the book seems to be relying on distance and a sense of foreignness.

Amazon link