Ghost Brigades and Screwtape Letters
Posted by andyslack on 25 January 2009
This week, I have been reading C S Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, and John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades.
The Screwtape Letters, for those not familiar with it, dates from the 1940s, and is a collection of short essays on how to be a good Christian, couched in the form of letters from a senior devil to a junior one, advising him on how to tempt his ‘patient’ from the path of light. I’ve encountered it before, and found it even funnier this time; but as an adult, especially having just read the same author’s Mere Christianity, I can see layers of philosophical meaning that passed me by the first time. It is now thought-provoking as well as funny. One of those books that has to be read in short chunks so one has time to digest the ideas.
The Ghost Brigades is the second novel in John Scalzi’s Colonial Union series. The first one, Old Man’s War, is reminiscent of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and outlines the CU universe by following a recently-recruited soldier through his training and early missions. The premise there is that every other race in the galaxy is fighting all the others for access to the limited number of habitable planets, and humanity has emerged in the midst of this. The book explores how far humanity might go in terms of modifying its soldiers to fight such a war, and what it would do with them afterwards; in this it covers similar territory to Timothy Zahn’s Cobra stories. Towards the end it involves the Ghost Brigades – CU Special Forces, genetically engineered from scratch and literally trained from birth to be soldiers, with no other culture at all.
The Ghost Brigades explores what it would be like to be one of those, and also the question of how a being might be made to turn traitor to his entire species, both from the human and alien viewpoints. The overall storyline also progresses, as the simplistic CU politics outlined in the first book turn out not to be the complete truth. This feels like a middle book in a series, and like an exploration of interesting questions, not answered in the first book because they were tangential to that storyline. I did manage to put it down once, so can’t say it was impossible to put down; but it nearly was.
