Tag: john scalzi

Constituent Service by John  Scalzi (Science Fiction)

A short (152 pages) offering from master humorist and speculator John Scalzi about what it would be like to be the Community Liaison in an alien majority district. Fresh graduate Ashley Perrin is human, unlike most of the constituents she serves in the role. The variety of aliens with their shapes (one looks like a potted plant), sounds, behaviors, and preferences are legion and … somehow actually believable? I don’t know how Scalzi does that, but I’m happy he does. Our protagonist is calm, cool, collected and chock full of witty ripostes. I loved that I got to laugh out loud often — a lovely palate cleanser in a lot of bleak reading I seem to be doing these days. The action takes place over a few days. All of the various complaints Ashley handles in her first week at the office pipeline into one extra-terrestrial powder keg with some brilliant just-in-time intervention. The whole thing was (literally) a blast, with quite a charming ending.

Thank you to Subterranean Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on November 30th, 2025.

The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi (Sci Fi)

Another fun Scalzi book — they don’t come any other way! Starts off fast and keeps up the pace. Plenty of humorous snark coupled with characters of strong principles who don’t shy away from getting into the tangle and making (good) things happen. Some pretty cool aliens with thought-provoking characteristics and some explorations of the kind of physics that might be uncovered when a superior race has had millenia to develop really advanced technology. I liked the fact that a lot of the story focussed on getting different species with wildly different characteristics and values to get along with each other. Humans were not the easiest. This is book seven in the Old Man’s War universe and I had to look up a few character and plot points that I didn’t remember (it’s been over a decade and how many brain cells can I keep devoted to the plot of every book I’ve read??). However, you can easily enjoy this book without having read the others.

Thank you to Tor Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on September 16th, 2025.

The Dispatcher: Travel By Bullet by John Scalzi (Sci Fi)

Scalzi always has a Big Idea behind each one of his books, which he then wraps with action, humor and some world class banter. His characters are always smart asses — the kind I’d like to hang out with, not the adolescent smirking types that I’m utterly sick of. And he always draws me in with the very first line — in this case: “It was 2:48 PM on a Tuesday, and I was about to do the same thing for the third time since I began work at noon: convince some distraught people that I shouldn’t, in fact, kill their loved one.”

The premise of The Dispatcher: for reasons no one understands, if someone intentionally kills someone else, that person will come back to life 999/1000 times — buck naked and in a place they consider safe, with a body in the state it was in about a day earlier. The new Family Compassion Act gives families the right to request dispatch.

Toss in cryptocurrency, some very rich people with their own twisted philosophy about what makes life worthwhile, and a loner hero with strong ideas about friendship and you have a very entertaining Scalzi ride.

Thank you to Subterranean Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book was published on April 30th, 2023

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (SF)

Laugh out loud funny and full of action (which normally bores me to tears but Scalzi always manages to pull it off), this latest standalone novel from one of my favorite SF authors is a breath of fresh air.

Jamie Gray — a recently fired, PhD drop out (her dissertation was going to be on utopian and dystopian literature), is making an unhappy living as a deliverator when a chance customer offers her a job with an animal rights organization. Only as it turns out, the “animals” are more ecosystem than animal, are absolutely humongous (and scary), and don’t exactly live on this particular version of Earth. Armed with her sci-fi mindset and a talent for lifting things (think heavy, not theft), Jamie manages to save the day … quite often. Added bonuses: Godzilla origin story explained and Snow Crash properly revered.

For Scalzi newbies, a few writing extracts:

“It’s more like we have a workable service relationship with a tenuous personal history.”

“It was stupidly perfect how all my problems were suddenly solved with the strategic application of money.”

“I’m officially skeptical about this Godzilla origin story.”

“That thing looks like H.P. Lovecraft’s panic attack.”

“It’s not the trees, you dense argumentative spoon.”

Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 15th, 2022.

Head On by John Scalzi

Writing: 5 Characters: 3.5 Plot: 4.5

Classic Scalzi — a cool, well-explored, futuristic world with non-stop and non-predictable action and funny banter. This is the second book in his “Lock In” series. It can be read on its own, but “Lock In” was great, too, so why not read it first?

Both books are mysteries in a sci-fi setting. In this world, 1% of the global population has Haden’s syndrome — a condition where the person is “locked in” to his/her own body. A number of technologies have been developed to support this population — implantable neural networks that link their brains directly to the outside world to humanoid personal transport units (called “threeps” after C-3PO) and an online universe called “The Agora.”

In this installment, FBI Agents Chris Shane (himself a Haden) and Leslie Vann (a female version of the crotchety senior detective persona) tackle a difficult case: the physical death of a Hilketa player during a game in which the play is all via threeps and should be no danger whatsoever to the human player. Hilketa is a (very weird to me) game played by decapitating a targeted player and carrying his / her head across the goal line.

I’m happy to say that Scalzi is back in top form. This is only the second book published after he signed a huge multi-million dollar, multi-year, multi-book deal with Tor. The first book published after the contract was Collapsing Empire — the only Scalzi book I have ever disliked (and I’ve read them all) — so I’m quite relieved that he is back on track.

Great writing and pacing, plenty of plot twists, and generally difficult to put down. I started in the morning and finished as I went to bed (only put it down briefly when I was grudgingly dragged outside to help shovel dirt into the new tomato planter). This is accessible to all readers — similar to Andy Weir’s books (The Martian; Artemis) but funnier, more inventive, and offers more exploration of the cultural and political impact of the technologies in addition to the scientific-technical angles.