Starter Villian
This is another one of those breezy reads by John Scalzi. I wonder if he’d ever write epics like the Old Man’s War series or even Head On again. The last 2 books, this book (starter villian) and the kaiju preservation society has been disappointing to me. This less so, perhaps because I’m already used to the idea that he’s not going to do space opera epics again, it seems that the pandemic affected some folks more than others and clearly Scalzi is one of those.
The premise is that the protagonist inherited his uncle’s evil empire, complete with talking intelligent cats, volcano base, weather changing (or satellite destroying) lasers etc etc. It also comes complete with an evil society that, logically as with all evil societies, seems on the verge of imploding.
The main character starts off as pretty much down on his luck, divorced, on the verge of losing his house, estranged from family who doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know him, he’s just been rejected for a bank loan to buy a bar because he has no income…basically you’re seeing the character at his lowest.
Then the rise begins, of course. You see him go from can’t finagle a loan to outwitting master criminals, and knowing more about the bad guys business from basically a 2 week crash course.
I usually don’t call out unrealistic stuff in scifi mostly because that’s why you’re reading scifi right?
But that’s pretty much the end of the twists. You find out that his uncle is a super villian, and he now owns the super villian org. There’s one more twist at the end, but its a relatively minor one. The rest of it is just scalzi stuff, snazzy dialogue, epic showdown with the big bad, and the resolution.
Formulaic, and uninspired were my thoughts while reading it. Its pretty short though.
I’ll give scalzi one more read for his next book, and I hope he goes back to writing epics and more stories in his old man war’s books. His interdependency books were really good too, so its sad that its come down to these short stories that dont’ do much for me.