When I read Old Man's War, by John Scalzi, I thought not bad.... kind of ran out of the justification for the catchy title fairly soon, but the rest was okay. So when I saw he wrote a sequel, The Ghost Brigades, I thought, Well, sequels usually suck, but the beginning of that other one was good, so....
This one, the whole damn book is good. Decent characters. Believable aliens. Plausible cliff hangers. And a villain who isn't stupid or exceedingly arrogant.
Apparently, not everything he's written is good -- there's an excerpt from a novel called Redshirts, on his blog, and it reads like something from fan fiction -- but The Ghost Brigades is quite good.
3 comments:
Redshirts is "okay". It's a bit of a strange one, but I found it interesting simply because it was so unusual.
I like John Scalzi, but I do agree that he ran out reasons for the title! I think there are three books, and one adjunct, in that series. I'd have to check. Frankly, I found his writing refreshing after the Tom Clancy-like machinations of John Ringo/David Weber/et al and the overly complicated political stuff of Eric Flint.
I've not actually read a science fiction book since Redshirts; they just don't interest me - too formulaic. You could set your watch by what happens when!
Formulaic is an excellent way to put it. Just reading that Redshirts excerpt, you could almost see the decision tree on What should happen next? It's difficult for me to believe that the same person who wrote Ghost Brigades wrote that.
I love them all.
Perhaps because I read Redshirts first, I didn't get the formula.
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