5th April 2025

The third in what I call John Scalzi’s “What if…?” series finds us in the world created by the question “What if the moon turned into cheese?”.

It’s a sort of anthology of short stories about different characters in the world when this happens, and we get to see the impact on a wide range of Americans from different backgrounds and in different personal and professional circumstances.

It feels very much a satire as well, blending good storytelling with reflections on the US of today. There are oblique references, and then characters who are clearly inspired by identifiable individuals and therefore whose actions, while absurd, are also entirely believable, because that’s the world we’ve found ourselves in.

Really nice end to this pseudo-trilogy. I’m really glad that Scalzi has the freedom to write such a range of output, and look forward to seeing what comes next.

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23rd September 2023

Scalzi has done it again with a short, fun, comic novel that makes you think.

Charlie is just a normal bloke, down on his luck, cat to feed, and dreams of running a pub. Until his estranged uncle dies and a surprising inheritance lands in his lap.

I love how the books starts of feeling like it’s one thing and then just totally surprises at every turn with what comes next. I’d deliberately not read much in advance about this book, and am really glad because it was a really enjoyable rollercoaster of a romp.

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1st May 2022

John Scalzi has produced a great, light-hearted yet incredibly serious novel, set during but not about the pandemic, which kept me well entertained.

After being sacked and forced to work for a corrupt food delivery firm, an old friend offers Jamie a mystery job which turns out to be working for the titular Kaiju Preservation Society.

The opening is particularly funny to the extent that I had to read passages aloud. It’s a long time since something has opened so well, and a little disappointing that the same level of amusement wasn’t kept up through the subsequent chapters.

However the plot picks up then and keeps the reader engaged. There’s an element that’s almost Harry Potter - we’re aligned with a character who is totally new to this world, lives in a dorm room with his friends, gets lessons, fights monsters, and ends up having to save the day. There are more spoilery parallels too.

That’s not to say it’s derivative, just an amusing observation about how this sort of story works.

I really enjoyed it, and am glad that the author found some time amid the grim few years of pandemic to produce something that is a bit fun, as well as having a serious message for our time.

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24th July 2020

Oh wow. Recently I’ve been a bit slower at reading - the mindless drudgery of lockdown having sapped my enthusiasm and attention span - but this book was very different.

I’ve read Scalzi before, but this was me dipping my toe into what I worried might be a bit harder sci-fi and thus outside my comfort zone. I was wrong though.

This is a novel about people - realistic and believable people - living in a space empire that’s clearly allegorical, and yet living lives that are compelling and which made me, for possibly the first time in the over ten years I’ve been tracking my reading, want to immediately read the next book in the series and find out what’s going to happen to them next.

I loved many things about this novel - the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, the allegory, the details that are crafted so as to give the reader flexibility in interpretation. Superb.

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15th December 2018

This is a fascinating work of fiction. Set in the world of Scalzi’s novel Locked In (and subsequent sequel Head On), this book gives a lot of the background to the illness which prompts the main plots.

It’s told from an in universe point of view as a journalistic work, based on interviews with dozens of characters, each of whom tells part of the story of how the illness began, spread, and affected the world.

It’s a really interesting take on a novel, and a great companion piece to the original - and i would definitely recommend reading the novel first.

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7th July 2018

The sequel to Lock In, this novel continues the adventures of FBI agent Chris, a ‘Hayden’, who is one of many people with locked in syndrome who carry out their daily lives by controlling Android-like avatars over the Internet.

Scalzi has built-out the world in a new and interesting direction by looking to the arena of sport. This makes for a fascinating bit of world-building and suggests an author who puts a fair amount of thought into the repercussions of his storytelling choices.

One of the key elements of interest in the first novel was that Chris’ gender remains unrivalled throughout. This continues in this sequel, but unlike the first book, I aware of it in advance. I’m not sure how much difference it makes to my experience of reading - I’d hope little, but I’m not sure if that’s because my brain is just defaulting to male regardless, or if I truly am thinking of the character with no regard for gender.

It’s a really enjoyable story, and I’m glad there is a sequel. I hope that Scalzi chooses to write more of these stories and can continue to build out this world and see what other changes his fictional disease might cause in the global culture.

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18th November 2017

The fourth book in the Old Man's War series is one of the strangest novels I've read. Not because of anything in the novel itself - it's the tale of a young girl on a new colony, settling in and learning about herself and the world she's arrived in. Instead because of how it fits into the series. This is the same story as told in the previous book, The Last Colony, just from a different point of view.

While in some ways this is a fascinating idea, and somewhat typical of the adventurous approach to storytelling taken by John Scalzi in his novels (Redshirts and Lock In which I've read both play with novel ideas too), it gives the reader a strange sense of deja vu, particularly as it's some time (nearly two years)( since I read the previous novel.

Despite that, it's still a great story that works really well, and I felt that Scazi captured the voice of a young sarcastic girl well. The range of characters that we get to see is different, and this helps to build a richer world, and there's still a river of politics flowing through that even a 12-year-old girl can get involved in.

And enjoyable read, if a weird experience. Definitely a world I want to return to and an author who's on my must-buy list.

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