Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

“The Ghost Brigades” is the second book by John Scalzi set in the “Old Man’s War” universe.  It is a very fun read, but parts of the story just didn’t connect with me.  While “Old Man’s War” was a very high four stars, “The Ghost Brigades” rates a very low four stars.  There are plenty of scenes of the Scalzian brilliance that made “Old Man’s War” so memorable, but they are muted somewhat by a plot that seems forced.

The biggest problem for me was the motivations of Charles Boutin.  John Scalzi is usually very good at describing characters in such a way that makes them both unique and believable.  Aliens seem alien yet still relatable.  Special Forces soldiers seem like kids in grown peoples’ bodies.  Charles Boutin seems like a paper cutout character who, despite being a brilliant scientist, makes very hard to understand choices which just happen to further the plot.  I imagine John Scalzi had a bunch of great ideas that could be thrown into a story about the Ghost Brigades but then struggled mightily to tie all the great ideas together.  The result being a great book with a passable plot.

Those bunches of great ideas are pretty great, though.  The Ghost Brigades are infinitely interesting.  Reading how they are created and trained, how they relate to each other and to others, the ethical and practical implications of their existence is some fascinating material.  You are not going to find much better sci-fi out there than the inner workings of the Colonial Defense Force and the aliens that they fight.

I am definitely hooked on the “Old Man’s War” universe.  I’ve already started reading the next in the series, “The Last Colony”, and am already enjoying it immensely.  If John Scalzi put the “Old Man’s War” tag on a coloring book, I’d probably read it.  Heck, I’m likely to read everything Scalzian in existence at this point.  Not only does he write incredibly well, he also seems like a pretty cool cat.  Check out his Whatever blog if you get a chance.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

My guess is that Paolo Bacigalupi does not hold out much hope for the human race.  “Pump Six and Other Stories” contains a series of stories that share many themes, none of them very pretty.  Water shortages, oil shortages, corporate control of resources, fiefdoms run by celebrities, humans devolving into morons, humans filled with environmental chemicals; all can be found in this book.  And it is all beautifully done.

A few of the short stories end a bit suddenly, but endings are the bane of the short story writer.  That a few of the short stories obviously take place in the same “world” helps this, though.  Even thought one story may leave you wanting more, another picks up and introduces more of the same world to you leaving you sated.

Another thing that makes these stories work so well is that Paolo Bacigalupi is obviously one twisted individual.  I mean that with the utmost respect.  Some of the concepts he invents and the images he evokes left me awed by their sheer audacity and imagination.

Short stories are my favorite literary form.  It is good to have another author whose short stories I love after a many years drought of good short stories.  I highly recommend you pick this one up and despair for humanity.

One thing that I thought strange is why Paolo Bacigalupi chose “Pump Six” as the titular story for this collection.  There is no doubt that it was enjoyable, but I found it one of the weaker stories in the collection.  I can only assume that it was his breakthrough story that more people would recognize.

This book was another from the Humble Bundle package that I purchased.  I think that makes it about 50-50 between great books and meh books.  Not a bad record.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading “A Princess of Mars”, one thought popped into my mind over and over again; wow is this racist.  Either Edgar Rice Burroughs was a racist or he wrote the book portraying John Carter as a racist.  I lean heavily towards the former.  Of course, this can be written off as more a sign of the times in which it was written than a condemnation of the man who wrote it.

So, the racism…

The whole book is told narrative style by the protagonist, John Carter.  It starts out almost immediately with descriptions of Native Americans as bloodthirsty and such.  That didn’t bother me so much because it would be a fairly accurate description of how White men thought of Native Americans at the time.  Things then move to Mars where John Carter quickly falls into the hands of the Green Martians who are tall and beastly and distinctly non-human and have a warlike culture with a Klingon-like sense of honor.  They are described as primitive and savage and there are many instances of their culture being disparaged by John Carter.  All of them, that is, except the two he happens to befriend.  They are described in a very positive light and as two who are completely out of place with the culture that they belong to.  Reading the book, I could almost hear John Carter saying, “I can’t be racist, some of my best friends are Green Martians!”

Then there’s the Red Martians.  They are described as humans only with red skin.  They are described as cultured and sophisticated and peace loving.  All this despite the fact that, like their Green inhabitants, they all seem to be at war with everybody.  The few Red Martians that John Carter befriends are, indeed, how he describes Red Martians in general, but the rest of the Red Martians are virtually indistinguishable in savageness from the Green Martians except that the Red Martian’s culture much more closely resembles White Earthling culture and the Green Martian’s culture is the stereotypical conquering White Man’s description of Africans.

I do not say any of this to talk you out of reading the book.  It is quite a fascinating read and very rightly was an inspiration of many modern writers and scientists.  I found the racism fascinating instead of off-putting.  It’s like an anthropological look into the mind of a racist.

The story itself is kind of blah.  Man travels to Mars.  Man falls in love with a captured princess.  Man rescues said princess again and again.  We’ve seen this before.  Where it stands out, though, is in Burroughs’ insights into Mars and the technologies Burroughs creates for Mars, many of which are astoundingly prescient.  For instant, the newly discovered at the time radioactive isotope radium is used to both create abundant power and make bullets much more deadly.  Besides the fact that we now use uranium and plutonium for such, this is very reminiscent of nuclear power plants and depleted uranium ammunition.  There are also world altering atmospheric generators that keep Martians able to breathe which still hold a place of high regard in science fiction.

That isn’t to say that Burroughs was firmly on the science of the possible.  He also had really cool and massive air ships that were able to support their bulk by collecting light and breaking it into components unknown on Earth to create an anti-gravity field.  It’s interesting in the way he describes it, but pretty laughable scientifically now.  Even his description of light, though, sounds like he’s describing infrared and ultraviolet light which I am not sure was actually discovered when he wrote the book.

Despite the fact that the plot is terribly unoriginal, Edgar Rice Burroughs does a great job of throwing a lot of originality into the story that the plot doesn’t matter that much.  The book must certainly be read with one eye on when it was written, but I would definitely recommend it to science fiction fans as an example of what likely inspired some of their favorite authors.  “A Princess of Mars” is actually the first in the “Barsoom” series and I will certainly at least read the next one to see if Burroughs continues his amazingly accurate predictions.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Another award winning novel that I didn’t much care for.  I had a very hard time getting into “Zoo City” so take what I have to say here with a grain of salt.

“Zoo City” takes place in semi-modern day Johannesburg, South Africa.  The title refers to a slum section of the city where those who have been “animalled” live.  Being animalled is like having your own familiar.  The way an individual is animalled is a bit vague, but it has something to do with committing a serious crime.  Commit a serious crime and soon thereafter an animal will appear at your side and you are forever tied to it.  Separation from the animal causes immense pain and the death of the animal causes the human to be drawn in by the Undertow which kills you.  Animals can range from lions to butterflies and all have extended life spans and human.  The animals also unlock some sort of magical power in the humans.  This power varies from person to person.  Being animalled is like wearing a scarlet letter and the affected individuals are usually scorned by society.  It is an interesting concept with lots of avenues of possible exploration, but they are mostly avoided in this book.

The main character is Zinzi December who is animalled with a sloth.  She is an ex-druggie that owes lots of money to all the wrong people.  She is slowly paying that money back by using her magical power offinding lost things for people for money and running spam e-mail scams (of the Nigerian Royalty needing seed money to release a vast fortune variety) for the person to whom she owes the money.  She became animalled by doing something that led to the death of her brother.  What that something was is not entirely clear but it had something to do with drugs.  I find this incredibly frustrating.  Why even go into how Zizi got animalled if you’re not going to give the whole story?  It would be better if they simply left you to wonder how Zinzi got animalled.  There is a lot of stuff to choose from.

The plot centers around Zinzi being hired by a reclusive music mogul to find the female half of a set of twins who comprises his biggest current hit band.  She disappeared days before the band’s new album is supposed to drop.  The money is good so she goes against her usual rule of not using her power to find lost people.  What follows is a series of really hard to follow events leading up to the discovery of the lost girl.  This discovery is entirely anticlimactic and everything that follows afterwards makes no sense.  It is not entirely clear why Zinzi took the job when she certainly could have broken her rules and made a lot of money for finding missing people long before this.  It is especially not clear why Zinzi would continue on the case when it becomes abundantly clear that there’s a lot of bad mojo surrounding the twins and the music mogul.  And it makes no sense whatsoever why Zinzi would continue to pursue the case after the twin is found.

Outside of the main plot, though, there are some really cool, if depressing, views into South African life.  The peeks into the 419 fraud e-mail scams is legitimately interesting.  Zoo City itself is supposed to be a fairly real life look into one of Johannesburg’s suburban ghettos.  There are also glimpses into African issues like child soldiering, rebel warlords, and war refugee families.  These are all side stories but I found them much more compelling than the actual main plot.

I finished reading “Zoo City” with so many unanswered questions.  Maybe my inability to get into the book made me miss some key points in the plot and that’s why I have so many questions.  It is a possibility.  But I am a fairly astute reader and, while I can pass a point or two on something I just didn’t pick up on, this book just had too many of them for me to recommend to anyone.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention one other thing that I though was pretty cool about the book.  Race was almost completely invisible while being set in a country known for it’s racial issues.  At no point was I conscious of the race of any of the main characters.  It wasn’t until probably three quarters of the way through that I realized it.  It’s quite an accomplishment in my book.

Jean-Paul’s Rating 5/5 stars

Open letter to Brad Pitt:  Dear Mr. Pitt, what were you thinking?  Your movie version of “World War Z” was, to put it kindly, not very good.  If I had read the book prior to watching the movie I would have likely given the movie version only one star.  The similarities between the book and the movie were this: they both had zombies.  Partially, this is not your fault.  A book the breadth of “World War Z” is by no means a good fit for the silver screen and that’s what you know.  If you still own the rights to “World War Z”, you can salvage this disaster.  I humbly recommend staying true to spirit of the book and producing a series of vignettes as seen through the eyes of a reporter collecting post-war stories from around the globe.  A web service like Netflix would be superb for this.  With Netflix, you can feel free to tell the stories in a series of episodes without having to worry about how long each episode is.  Each season would be a specific time period in the War.  Stories could be taken straight from the book or new ones could be created for the show.  This needs to happen.  Make it so.  Thank you.

I was not surprised to learn that Max Brooks has basically created a “World War Z” empire around this book.  It is a compelling look at not just a world at war with a remorseless enemy, but also believable tales of humanity as told by individuals who were lucky enough to survive the war.  It is the believability that makes the book so excellent.  You believe that people would prey off fear to become rich.  You believe that the army could be that stupid.  You believe that a limited nuclear war could break out.  You believe that Israel could be that paranoid.  You believe Russia could descend into an autocratic theocracy.  The zombies are ever present in the text, but they are in many ways secondary.  At it’s soul, “World War Z” is not a book about zombies.  It’s a book about how humanity reacts to dire situations.  In this case, the dire situation just happens to be the zombie apocalypse.

Like J.K. Rowling, Max Brooks has successfully created a world that will quickly spin out of his immediate control.  The way the book is put together almost guarantees it.  There are likely already thousands of fan fiction pieces set in the “World War Z” world.  This is because Brooks succeeds in doing the one thing that is most difficult to accomplish; the book ends but he leaves you wanting more.  Bravo, Mr. Brooks.  Bravo.