On the spaceship Intrepid, low level crew members die at an alarming rate. The premise is right there on the cover: They were expendable…until they started comparing notes. Whether you have watched the original Star Trek series or not, most people know that the guy in the red shirt was going to die. In Redshirts, Scalzi explores what would happen if, rather than actors who went home at the end of a day of shooting, the characters were just going about their lives until everyone started […]
Leia Organa, Huttslayer
What’s happening to me, personally, doesn’t matter. If it’s not the ideal time, well, it’s the only time we’ve got.” As I was listening to a section about a third of the way into Bloodline I was struck by the deeply screwed up dynamic of the Skywalker family. Some friends and I joke that Anakin and Luke Skywalker are the biggest drama queens in the galaxy. Listening to Leia recount being tortured for hours by the man she now knows was her father, it doesn’t feel like […]
Your smile will tell you what warms your heart, or How to go from zen bliss to a massacre in three easy steps
James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, is officially dead, but in his universe, there is all kinds of dead. While he tries to figure out where he is and why he’s there, he’s trying not to get deader. At the end of The Perdition Score, Death, formerly known as Samael, formerly known as Lucifer, has left him on a mountain at the edge of Hell looking at a sandstorm. The sandstorm is the Havoc, a Mad Max style caravan with a portable gallows led by a […]
Business is Business
I was planning on saving Lock In for another time, but after listening to The Dispatcher, I needed to listen to Lock In. I listened to the Wil Wheaton narration. Listening to Wheaton’s narration made me think of Armada, which I had just listened to him narrate. Very briefly, the title of this review was “That’s how you do nostalgia, Cline!” I changed it because that would have been unfair to John Scalzi, Ernst Cline and their respective books. Just so you know, though, Scalzi […]
Patience and Time and Silence
Last year, John Scalzi’s written for Audible novella, The Dispatcher, narrated by Zachary Quinto, was offered for free. I snapped it up, but didn’t listen until yesterday. Scalzi is one of those authors who has been on my list, but remained unread. I enjoyed both Scalzi’s story and Quinto’s performance. In the near future, people who are murdered come back to life. No one knows why or how, just that it happens. It has given rise to a new profession, the Dispatcher. Dispatchers are trained, […]
I think many of us would like to visit this library
3.5 stars Irene is an agent of the Library, a place that exists outside normal space and time. In fact, as long as the agents and librarians that work for the Library are there, they do not age in the slightest. Only when they are out in the different worlds of the multiverse, do they visibly age, and how much depends how time passes in the various worlds they find themselves. As an agent of the Library, Irene is sent to retrieve books that are […]