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Narrated by Wil Wheaton
Fantasy, science fiction or pure absurdist literature? You’ll need to make your own mind up about that. It’s probably all three. The premise is that the moon, all of a sudden, turns to cheese. What kind of cheese? Not sure, but because cheese is less dense than rock and because the moon’s mass has not altered, it’s suddenly bigger and brighter and everyone notices. Rather than following one main character this book works as a series of interspersed stories as people from different walks of life react differently. First we meet the staff of a museum which holds a piece of moon rock; rock until it isn’t. Then there’s an academic turned pop-science author, a bunch of NASA astronauts whose dreams have been shattered, three retirees who meet in a diner to put the world to rights, a young girl who simply wants to write her great fantasy novel, and a tech-bro billionaire who manages to stowaway on his own rocket -- not to mention the American top-brass and the president of the United States. This is quirky and absurd. Wil Wheaton’s reading is at once serious and funny. Maybe this isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the listen.
Audiobook narrated by Zachary Quinto
Tony Valdez is a dispatcher. He kills people for a living. No, not like that. In this world those people murdered (as opposed to those who die naturally, or by accident, or suicide) come back to life, reappearing in the place they’ve always felt safest. So, licensed dispatchers can kill those maimed in an accident or on the verge of death because of (say) surgery that’s gone wrong, and they’ll reappear (probably in their own beds) to have another chance of living, restored to the condition they were in a few hours earlier. Tony is busy doing his job in a hospital (which includes counselling families about when dispatch is not right for their loved ones – ones with terminal illness for instance) when he’s called to the emergency room, to an old friend who has been badly injured falling out of a car on the freeway. Before the friend is dispatched, he secretly gives Tony a crypto-wallet, and from then on Tony is involved in a world of schemes and billion-dollar plots with vast cryptocurrency accounts in the balance, and some of Chicago’s wealthiest billionaires vying with each other for both the crypto-wallet and Tony’s friend. It’s a tightly-knitted plot and Zachary Quinto is perfect to voice Tony Valdez. In fact, if they ever film this, he IS Tony Valdez – and I’d like to see that.
Audiobook read by Amber Benson.
Ashley Perrin, fresh out of college, takes a job as Community Liaison for the Thi8rd District - the only area of the city with more aliens than humans. Right from Day One she's fielding weird complaints and strange requests from requests to cancel the annual Lupidian parade to a Kamikaze chicken con against the city's buses. She's just about keeping up with things when an illegal alien import, a swarm of dangerous, flesh-eating hornets, threatens the whole city at parade time. (Note: and the chicken is not what she seems.) Ashley has to come up with a Plan B when there isn'r even a Plan A - either that or lose her job. Short and quirky, this is nicely read.
Narrated by Wil Wheaton.
When a human diplomat creates an international incident by killing an alien diplomat in a highly unusual way, the government of Earth must scramble to find a way to placate the Needu. They agree to find and provide a rare breed of sheep – the Android’s Dream – which is an essential component in the Needu coronation ceremony for their new ruler. It should be simple, but it isn’t. It turns out all the sheep in question have been (illicitly) killed and the nearest DNA sample that can be found is part of the ‘junk’ DNA in a human woman – Robin Baker. The job of sorting the mess falls to Harry Creek, war hero, hacker, and ex-cop, together with his dead friend, now a computer intelligence, Brian Javna, Harry goes up against both government departments and alien antagonists, not to mention the acolytes of a weird religion invented by a science fiction author. Harry has to not only protect Robin and a boat-load of veterans on a tourist trip, but also save Earth and humanity. Wil Wheaton (yes, that Wil Wheaton – once Wesley Crusher in Star Trek TNG) narrates Scalzi’s books with just the right amount of dry humour.
Tom Stein is a smart-ass Hollywood agent who's just pulled off a major coup - getting a milti-million dollar deal for one of his actress-clients. He's feeling a bit smug when his boss drops a bombshell. The space-faring Yherajk are in orbit around Earth and they want the agency to negotiate for their entire alien race. Rhey want to be introduced to humanity in a non-threatening way. The problem is that they're ugly blobs of jelly and they communicate by farting. Oh joy! Enter Joshua, Yherajk ambassador and nmow Tom's most important client. Part satire, part quirky comedy with a science fictional core (aliens!) . This is light, fast-paced and enjoyable. The audio book is well read by Wil Wheaton.
This book is delicious. I couldn’t put it down. Charlie Fitzer, a down-on-his-luck substitute teacher, inherits his estranged uncle’s supervillain business, complete with volcanic island lair, minions, and rivals who want him dead. Oh, yes, and there are also sentient dolphins (currently in the middle of a labour dispute) and computer-savvy cats. He needs to hit the ground running if he’s going to hold his own against an organisation of supervillains who want his billions. Who can he trust, his uncle’s (now his) personal assistant, his uncle’s chief rival, or his cat? This is lighthearted, amusingly quirky, and a fun read despite the body count, the explosions and the assassination attempts. Due for publication in September I had an e-arc from Netgalley. All I can say is place your advance order now. This is not to be missed. 
Compared to some Scalzis, this is lightweight, but fun. In his afterword Mr S likens it to a pop song rather than a classical symphony, and that's about right, but it's still well worth reading. Jamie Gray loses his executive job and in the middle of a pandemic ends up working as a food delivery driver. A chance meeting with an old acquaintance leads him to taking a job with an animal rights organisation doing grunt work for a field team. What he doesn't know is that the job is on another world (an alternate earth, deadly on many levels) and the animals in question are enormous (more than enormous) Kaiju, equipped with biologically developed nuclear reactors, and covered in deadly parasites, any one of which can take down a full-sized human. Jamie and his group of friends - also new to the KPS - have barely settled into the world when disaster strikes, and they're the ones on the spot. A real page-turner. Highly recommended.
Audiobook. 3 hours and 33 minutes. I enjoyed the first Dispatcher book so much that I went straight on to the second in the Dispatcher series. Tony Valdez, licensed dispatcher, kills people who are on the point of death in order to save their lives. (999 times out of 1000, murdered people reappear, naked and alive, in their own beds.) There's a grey area, however, and it pays good money. This is two years on from the events in the first dispatcher story and Valdez is a little down on his luck and taking jobs that are closer to the dark end of the grey area. He's standing in line at his bank to pay in some of his money from a strictly cash job when there's a robbery. The robbers try to get away by shooting each other so they reappear in their own safe space, except that one of them in the one out of a thousand who stays dead… and Tony knows him. Shortly after that, people start to die by suicide (suicides stay dead) and Tony ends up unofficially working with Langdon again, trying to sort it all out before more people die. Well read by Zachary Quinto.
Audiobook. 2 hours 18 minutes. This is probably a short novella length not a full novel, but it packs a lot in. Tony Valdez is a licensed dispatcher, he kills people for a living in order to save their lives. Some years earlier, murder victims began reappearing, alive and naked, in their own beds. No one knows how or why, so just take it as a given. Dispatchers, working legally, murder people who are already at death's door, so that they reset themselves in the condition they were some six hours earlier. It's a brilliant recovery for (say) accident victims, and it's also used for dangerous medical procedures. The dispatcher is on hand in surgery, so if a procedure goes wrong they can reset the patient to before the procedure started. It doesn't heal them, but it gives the surgeon another chance in the full knowledge of what went wrong last time. Those are the legitimate dispatches, but there's a grey area, private commissions etc. OK, so that's the background. One of Tony's dispatcher colleagues, Jimmy, is missing and it looks like a grey area case. Jimmy's wife blames Tony for (some years ago) leading him into those gret areas. Tony is 'clean' now, but suspects Jimmy is not. He's coerced into working with a Chicago police woman to solve the mystery of the missing Jimmy. It's a short listen, but engaging. Performed beautifully by Zachary Quinto.
This is presented as a single book, but it's actually a collection of thirteen semi-connected short stories which gives me more context for reading The End of All Things (which I read out of order). Many of the stories feature Harry Wilson (Colonial Defence Force), Ambassador Abumwe (Colonial Union) and Hart, Harry's friend and Ambassador Abumwe's aid. The stories (especially Harry's) move the situation forward as the CU/CDF try to figure out who is stealing their starships, while trying to repair the CU/CDF's damaged relationship with Earth and open a backchannel to negotiate with the Conclave who might or might not be their enemy.
This retells the story told in The Last Colony (Old Man's War) from Zoe's first person viewpoint. It revisits the story from the point at which John Perry and Jane Sagan are asked to take on the leadership of Roanoke colony. Zoe, their adopted daughter, a teenager is considered a special person by the Obin who were given the gift of (artificial) consciousness by her birth father Charles Boutin. As a result she has two Obin minders who (as part of a peace treaty) relay her every activity back to their planet for all to see. This charts Zoe's relationships with her minders, a girl who quickly becomes her best friend, and her first boyfriend. There are things that Zoe experiences that her adoptive parents don't know about, and one section where Zoe's actions affect the outcome when Roanoke is threatened.
Mr Scalzi gets the teen voice right and it's fun following Zoe filling in the gaps like Rozencrantz and Guildenstern filled in the gaps in Hamlet.
I had it in my head that The Old Man's War sequence was a trilogy, so when I saw this was the concluding book I grabbed it and read it, only realising when I was too far into the book to stop, that the OMW series has SIX books, and so I was reading the final one out of sequence. Bummer. I hate that. The good thing is that even though I skipped from Book 2 to Book 6, I wasn't left behind, so yes, you could potentially read it as a standalone if you really wanted to. Harry Wilson (from Old man's War and Ghost Brigades) is a point of view character, but then the story skips forward as a collection of novellas, each moving forward the reconciliation between the Colonial Union, Earth and the Conclave. I enjoyed revisiting Harry Wilson, and meeting Ode Abumwe and Hafte Sorvalh – both strong and clever women. There's a lot of politicking, but it's very enjoyable… now all I have to do is go back and read the three books that I missed.
I read Old Man's War some time ago and am only just getting around to reading the rest. The premise is that Earth's elderly can sign up for a tour of duty as space soldiers in the Colonial Defence Force. They get a new, young, tough body with the advantage of a mature brain. The first book was John Perry. The second features Jared Dirac and Jane Sagan, a special forces intelligence officer who happens to be in a body cloned from John Perry's late wife (which doesn't have much bearing on this book until the end and then carries forward into Book 3). Jared Dirac has been created from renegade scientist, Charles Boutin's DNA in the hopes that he could extract information from Boutin's stored consciousness. He can't (at first) and is transferred into the Ghost Brigade, but ends up as a decanted consciousness in a warship (shades on Anne McCaffrey's 'The Ship Who sang' maybe?) Anyhow the plot is twisty. It's military SF concerning skirmishes and battles with a number of alien species, during which Jane Sagan, imbued with speed, strength and resilience beyond that of regular humans, plays an important part. The story is fast paced – a real page-turner. Though it's a sequel to Old Man's War, it doesn't feature John Perry but both Jane Sagan and Harry Wilson are strong secondary characters.
I review the full book here. https://jacey.dreamwidth.org/623655.html This is the audiobook, well read by Will Wheaton - Wesley Crusher from Star Trek. He's a very appropriate narrator for this book about a bunch of people on a starship who work out the real reason that they are being killed off one by one on away missions while the Captain and main officers escape time after time. They're being killed by the narrative because they are… redshirts. They find a unique way of escaping their fate. For any Star Trek fans (aren't we all) this more than a nod to the several series, particularly TOS and TNG. 
It's rare these days that I read one series/trilogy book after another, but this is my third 'Interdependency' book in a row, so you can take it for granted that I've been enjoying them immensely. The Flow, a naturally occurring highway between star systems is collapsing and Emperox Grayland II and her lover, Marce, a Flow scientist are trying to find a way to save all the far flung habitats of humanity, while the merchant families are treating the end of civilisation as a business opportunity. Kiva Lagos has been appointed by the Emperox to manage the business of the treasonous (and treacherous) Nohamapetan family. But the Nohamapetans are not yet tamed, and the Emperox is threatened once more and must make a difficult decision in order to save humanity. Though this is the final book in a trilogy I wonder if there could be something else set in this universe, since there are a couple of loose-ish ends. (Trying not to deliver spoilers.)
The Interdependency is a series of human habitats in space, some of them artificial, some adapted planets, but only one which humans can live on the surface of. These interdependent habitats are linked by the Flow, extra-dimensional streams which make the distances between habitats manageable. Picking up where The Collapsing Empire left off, this book sees Cardenia, Emperox Grayland II, growing into her role as ruler of the known universe, while Kiva gets stuck into managing the Nohamapetan business on Hub, and Marce continues to learn more about the Flow streams collapsing, including a very surprising discovery. I can't tell you any more because of spoilers for the first book in the series, but I can tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the surprise ending. So much so that I went on to the third book, The Last Emperox, immediatelyBooklog 48/2019 - John Scalzi: Redshirts
Jul. 30th, 2019 10:17 am
I've had this lined up on my kindle for a couple of years and not managed to read it, which is simply too bad. I've been missing out because it's brilliant. Anyone who's ever seen Star Trek (or Galaxy Quest) will be familiar with the concept of the crewman who's on an away mission for the express purpose of being killed off, but Scalzi takes that concept and turns it on its head. Written from the point of view of the redshirts assigned to the Universal Union flagship, Intrepid we start with Ensign Andrew Dahl, newly assigned to the Xenobiology laboratory. He's delighted until he works out why his fellow crewmembers avoid going on away missions at all costs. A) Every away mission involves some kind of confrontation with aliens in which at least one low-ranking crewmember is killed. B) The ship's captain, the chief science officer and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive. C) Kerensky always gets hurt, sometimes with the kind of injuries that should kill him, but the following week he's recovered enough to go on the next away mission. Dahl and his fellow redshirts (with a bit of help) finally figure out that they're suffering from narrativium and work out a high risk way to fix it, but it involves kidnapping Lieutenant Kerensky and time travelling. And just when you think the story is over there are three delicious vignettes from the viewpoint of… well… you'll see. If you haven't read this already READ IT NOW! This really deserved its Hugo win!
