The End of All Things by John Scalzi

Either Scalzi has some major new novel in the works, and had to deliver something to satisfy his contract, or he's gotten to the point where he has nothing novel-length left to say in his Old Man's War universe. This book is another stitched-together set of related stories about, for the most part, Ambassador Abumwe and her friends trying to hold the center for the Colonial Union.

I seriously thought, given the title, that he might even be wrapping things up in some destructive fashion.

There's a secretive cabal busily working to set the Conclave, the Colonial Union and Earth at each other's throats, so as to reduce the powers of all three after an all-out war, so that they can take power for themselves when all is said and done. Our old friends and an unlikely group of allies must get very lucky in order to thwart their evil plans.

This one is mildly entertaining, but I'm glad I borrowed it from the library and didn't pay hardback prices for it.

Lock In by John Scalzi

Scalzi has gone in a new and rather cool direction with this near future plague novel, served up as a mystery. A highly contagious disease, Haden's syndrome, similar to meningitis and polio, has swept the world, killing millions and leaving millions more "locked in", completely paralyzed, though fully aware of their surroundings. As the First Lady of the U.S. was one of the early victims, the government threw massive resources into researching the disease, and while a cure has not been found, a palliative measure has been massively adopted - the implantation of neural nets in the brains of the victims, through which they are able to control android bodies called "threeps" (Star Wars fans will get it) and go about the semi-normal functions of daily life. There is also a virtual realm open to the Hadens, called The Agora, where they can interact more fully with others of their kind. There is a third type of Haden's victim, who make a full physical recover from the disease, but their brain structure is changed to the point where, with the implanting of a neural network, and some specialized training, they can allow the paralyzed Hadens to use their body to experience the real world for a time. They are called Integrators, and they are well-paid.

At the beginning of the story, new legislation has been passed which will remove most of the government funding supporting government research and medical treatment for this victim class. One of the Hadens, Chris Shane, the son of a prominent billionaire and Senate candidate, is starting his first day on the job as an FBI agent as things kick off. He and his partner, Leslie Vann, a former Integrator, are assigned to a murder case involving an Integrator, and things get complicated from there. There's a good "cop buddy movie" vibe to their interactions - veteran and rookie style.

Ok, so Scalzi has to use the cardboard cutout popular villain of the Left, the unscrupulous billionaire, to provide the impetus for the plot device, and it's fairly obvious that the Hadens are allegorical stand-ins for whatever the victim du jour of the Progressives happens to be, as they are insulted, assaulted and subject to both overt and subtle prejudice from "normal" people.

Despite this, it remains a good and entertaining story, and Scalzi's exploration of the whole "what if?" of an epidemic which leaves its victims unable to interact with the world in any normal fashion, and the technology arising from such a situation, as well as the potential economic, social and political effects, makes for a quick, yet thought provoking tale.

Sometimes, in investigative mystery novels, the protagonist has to travel to different locations, and loses time doing so, while the killer is  going about his plotting and mayhem. But Shane can simply jump to a "rent a threep" at Alamo or Hertz, in L.A. or Alburquerque. So that was a new twist. There's also a simple fact about Shane that caught me completely by surprise about two thirds of the way through the book, which in retrospect Scalzi foreshadowed quite nicely.

In the afterward, as he is thanking people, he mentions that he won a Hugo for Redshirts. Really? I must have missed something there, as I thought it was nowhere near his best work.

If you were a bit discouraged by the last couple of Scalzi's novels, this one will be a very pleasant surprise.

The Human Division by John Scalzi

 I kept trying to remember what this book reminded me of, and finally it came to me - the Retief books, by Keith Laumer, where Retief of the CDT (Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne) falls into one odd adventure after another, and constantly solves problems in ways his bosses never expected nor condoned. The novel was originally "serialized" as 99 cent Kindle shorts, then linked together into a broader story, which made it nice to read in small doses when I had ten or fifteen minutes to spare.

It's been so long since I read the Old Man's War series that I'd forgotten where things left off, but if this book takes up from that point, not in a good place for humans. The Colonial Union is estranged from Earth these days, and opposed by the Conclave, an alliance of about four hundred intelligent races from around the galaxy, as well as under attack by some shadowy conspiracy which keeps putting the protagonists of the stories into deep trouble.

Ambassador Abumwe and her aides are definitely not the A-Team, perhaps not even the C-Team, so they draw the assignments that either no one else wants or which are doomed to failure from the start. Her technical geek, Harry Wilson, is on detached assignment from the Colonial Defense Force, and has a tendency to take a skewed perspective on problems. Her assistant undersecretary gopher flunky, Hart Schmidt, comes from a very powerful family on the colonial world of Phoenix, but prefers to toil in obscurity, where at least he feels like he's making a difference. The captain of the Clarke, the starship they all get around the galaxy in, when they're not getting it destroyed, Sophia Coloma, takes it all in stride.

Fun little vignettes, good dialog, mysterious plots afoot - no happy endings, but it made me smile.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Scalzi seems to have gotten away from his "hard" science fiction days of the Old Man's War saga, and into some lighter fare these days. It seems like a riff on early SF TV, like Star Trek, poking fun at the genre. The characters are mostly forgettable, but the idea - that people in an alternate universe are either generated by or affected by a science fiction show of the early twenty-first century - contains some fun ideas and food for thought.

The crew aboard the Universal Union ship, Intrepid, seems to encounter more than their normal share of deadly encounters with alien life forms, rogue robots, plagues and explosions. The captain, first officer, and the bridge crew are mostly immune to the tragedies around them, but the newly arrived crew mostly just end up messily dead. When a group of the latest recruits finally figures out what's going on, they have to travel back in time (via the effects surrounding a black hole) and convince the writers of the television show to stop what they're doing.

For old Star Trek fans, some of the "rules" that govern events aboard Intrepid will seem familiar.

"...the Intrepid's inertial dampeners don't work as well in crisis situations... the ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and you'd never notice. But whenever there's a dramatic event, there goes your footing."

"Decks six through twelve will almost always sustain damages during an attack. It's because these are the decks the show has sets for. They can cut away from the bridge for shots of explosions and crew being flung backward."

"Every battle is designed for maximum drama. This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically."

"A fact you didn't know before just pops into your head. You make a decision or take an action you wouldn't otherwise make. It's like an irresistable impulse because it's an irresistable impulse - your will isn't your own, you're just a pawn for a writer to move around."

"...having one get through (torpedos) will be more dramatic."

"Something will explode on the bridge. That's where the camera spends nearly all its time. There has to be damage here, whether it makes sense or not."

"Every once in a while Abernathy or one of the other officers will say something dramatic, or rhetorical, or leading, and then he and everyone else will be quiet for a few seconds. That's a lead out to a commercial break."

Not terribly memorable, but amusing and mildly sarcastic. Scalzi can write, but I wish he'd go back to his strengths.

Short Takes

(12/9/09) Read an entire novel by Scalzi, The Last Colony, in one sitting. At one point in time, the main character of the novel, John Perry, gets addressed as Commodore Perry, as a joke. I wonder at this point if all three of the volumes in the series had to be back-edited to make the main character's last name Perry, or if Scalzi had the joke in mind all along.

(12/16/09) Still reading through all the Scalzi the library holds. Agent to the Stars was pretty cute, and The Android's Dream is fair to middlin' but finishes with a big deus ex)

(12/24/09) Finished Crossover, by Shepherd. A fairly good new author. Reading his second book in the series, Breakaway.

Short Takes

(11/28/09) Reading John Christopher's Bad Dream, which is not very engrossing. I think he peaked with his young adult novels back in the 60s. Ah well.

(11/29/09) Finished the Christopher this morning - I still have no idea what it was all about, could it have been the middle novel in a trilogy?

(11/30/09) Scalzi's Old Man's War was remiscent of Heinlein and Haldeman. Put some more of his stuff on reserve at the library.

(12/2/09) Finished Blindman's Bluff by Kellerman. It was an ok read, but not riveting