Takeaway: I forgot how much I enjoyed the Scalzi/Wheaton author/narrator combo.
I first read John Scalzi because of Old Man’s War, a book that reimagined Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers. That was a pretty standard sci-fi book that started a series that kept the main sci-fi conventions in place. It uses war and violence to critique war and violence. (Starship Troopers was originally published in 1959, after the Korean War and at the start of US involvement in Vietnam.) Heinlein is known now for his sexism and his embrace of eugenics and his rejection of traditional sexual morality in his books, so I have a hard time recommending Heinlein, even though I read a ton of him as a teen. But I do recommend Scalzi because he has learned from the classic scifi tropes and plays with them, but spins them on their head.
This is evident in Scalzi’s rewriting of H. Beam Piper novel Little Fuzzy. When that Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation came out, the audiobook of Little Fuzzy was included with the purchase of Fuzzy Nation so that the reader could understand the book that Scalzi was reinterpreting. The longer I have read Scalzi, the more I appreciate the role of humor in his writing. It is not that I don’t like the traditional serious scifi like Old Man’s War series, but I think the humor is what draws me back to him. Scalzi’s first book was Agent to the Stars, a book about a Hollywood agent that is hired by aliens to coordinate the revelation of their species to humans. The premise was great and it was a good example of Scalzi taking his one central idea and allowing it to be the center of a book. In the case of Agent to the Stars, the aliens only communicate through smell and humans find the smells repulsive. But the aliens realize that they need a PR person to help them win over humans and what better PR person could be found than a Hollywood agent.
That was Scalzi’s first book, but it was given away free until after Old Man’s War when it was published traditionally. After that other humor book like Red Shirts (a send up of Star Trek where the below deck characters realize that they are slowly dying off on away missions and that the main characters always life and they are the ones being sacrificed. So they work to avoid ever going on away missions.)
For me, the Scalzi and Wil Wheaton are an audiobook team. Wheaton narrated Agent to the Stars and Redshirts and many other of Scalzi’s humorous scifi. And it is a perfect duo. Wheaton gets the humor and dry timing. He plays it very straight so that the laughs really work. It has been several years since I last picked up a Scalzi/Wheaton book and I missed them. I saw Starter Villain was on sale on audible and I picked it up and couldn’t put it down. I finished the audiobook in 48 hours.
The central idea in Starter Villain is that Charlie is a down on his luck laid off financial reporter. His wife divorced him, he is working as a substitute teacher, living in his recently deceased father’s house and about to be homeless. But then his uncle, who he hasn’t seen since he was five, dies. That starts a series of events that leads to Charlie realizing that there is a network of super villains around the world and his uncle was one of them. He ends up inheriting a volcano lair with super gadgets. But he also finds out that the super villains have all of their funds tied up in projects and they don’t have any liquidity, so they are all essentially broke. And his background in financial reporting comes into play.
This is a very fun book. It is light, without being frivolous. It takes serious topics seriously, but also realizes that the world we live in is actually ridiculous in many ways. And the characters are ones you want to keep reading about.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook