The Ghost Brigades

From Publishers Weekly This fast-paced interstellar military drama doesn't quite meet the high expectations set by its predecessor, Scalzi's acclaimed Old Man's War (2005), but it comes impressively close. Shifting focus from seniors in young bodies to infants in old bodies, it follows Jared Dirac, a superhuman soldier, from unusual birth to ambiguous death. Dirac is an altered clone of Charles Boutin, a military scientist who betrayed humankind to alien aggressors, and the Colonial Defense Forces' only hope of finding Boutin lies in transplanting his memories into Dirac's brain. When the transplant seems to fail, Dirac is sent to Special Forces, known as the Ghost Brigades for their habit of creating new soldiers from the DNA of the dead. His indoctrination there comes in handy when Boutin's memories begin to surface. Scalzi pays gleeful homage to Ender's Game , The Forever War and Starship Troopers , sometimes at the expense of originality. All he needs to make the jump from good to great is to trust in his own ideas. (Mar.) Copyright В© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Though it's a sequel of sorts to his 2005 debut, Old Man's War , John Scalzi's new novel is hardly business as usual. Beyond the battles and the portent of humanity's end, Scalzi plays with deeper issues of identity in an increasingly technological world in this second volume of a proposed trilogy. A switch from first person to third and one narrator (Dirac) who is unaware of his own role in the story might hold the book back from must-read status, but otherwise The Ghost Brigades gleams with the best traits of thoughtful SF.[HTML_REMOVED] Copyright В© 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.