Fucking Humans

John Scalzi has created a fascinating sci-fi universe in his Old Man’s War series. The Ghost Brigades is as much a horror story as a sci-fi adventure. Scalzi references Frankenstein repeatedly as he plants questions about the boundaries of being human, the ethics of creating life,  corporate control, and who we consider monsters. Scalzi presents some interesting and deep questions, but ultimately sidesteps the more problematic answers by wrapping up his stories with happyish endings. Which is fine. These days I’m reading for neater resolutions and happier endings. If I wante to run screaming into the wilderness, I’d pay more attention to the news.

We learned in the first book that humans have expanded into space and have learned how to turn the elderly into super soldiers. The Colonial Defense Force (CDF) can build super soldier bodies and transfer in the consciousness of elderly humans giving them new lives. We also found out about the CDF special forces, the so called ghost brigades. The Ghost Brigades are super soldiers built from a mishmash of DNA’s and consciousnesses. They are born into adult bodies with no previous life experience. Their brains are conditioned to make certain choices, and the hardware inside their brains, the BrainPal, keeps them integrated with their squadrons. Unlike the rest of humanity, an integrated special forces soldier is never alone.

There is a traitor. One of the scientists who works on consciousness transference and BrainPals, Charles Boutin, has faked his own death and made a deal with one of the enemy races, the Obin. Boutin’s consciousness is downloaded into a new super soldier body, but the resulting person is not, as they hoped, Charles Boutin. Jared Dirac is integrated into a special forces unit, and we learn more about the universe from the perspective of a ghost in a body.

More questions are raised than answered, but the overall answer seems to be that people who screw around with consciousness and create others just to see what will happen are the real monsters. The Ghost Brigades is more adventure than philosophical thought piece. The questions Scalzi alludes to though, occasionally filled me with existential dread and horror.