John Scalzi Archives - Martin's Booklog

Short SF Marathon Day 25: Kelly Sandoval, John Scalzi, Veronica Schanoes

Published on March 1, 2015Leave a comment

Kelly Sandoval, “The One They Took Before.” Shimmer #22, November 2014.

I think this is going on my Hugo short story shortlist, an urban fantasy story that looks at what happens after you get back from fairy land. It reminded me a bit of Jo Walton’s Relentlessly Mundane, about the same general emotions of loss and bitterness, but in a different key so to speak.

John Scalzi, “Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome.” Tor.com, May 13, 2014.

Scalzi takes the oral history format that’s become popular in the last couple of years to remember anything from the 25th anniversary of Ghostbusters to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in America in the early eighties and uses it to chronicle the spread of his fictional disease from his novel Locked In. A bit of a tear jerker in places.

Some of the developments seem to have gone a bit too quick or easy to be totally believable, but that’s more of a question of how much room there is in a novella. It’s funny to think that Scalzi has basically taken the exposition from his novel and reworked it into this.

Veronica Schanoes, “Among the Thorns.” Tor.com, May 7, 2014.

I’ve mentioned before I don’t like fairy tale inspired fantasy, but once again I have to make an exception. Apparantly there was a Brothers Grimm fairy tale in which a lowly peddler tricks an evil Jew and robs him of his money, then kills him by dancing him to death in a thorn bush. Veronica Schanoes uses this as the base of her story and puts it in the context of the actual antisemitism and brutality against Jews as happened in the period the fairy tale was roughly set in. Then she takes the daughter of the murdered Jew and let her take her revenge on the people who killed her father.

There are some horrible scenes in the first paragraphs of the story, but the violence isn’t gratitious. What I liked was this was both brutal and humane; the people who killed the protagonist’s father aren’t nazi caricatures but ordinary human beings and way Schanoes described the crowd who watched his death reminded me also of lynching mobs from American history. Ordinary, decent people can take great delight in watching the other being tortured and murdered in the right circumstances and Schanoes isn’t shy to point this out. But it’s not a story totally devoid of hope and decency. Revenge is taken but not total, Itte is too human to be as horrible as the tormentors of her father were.

Well done. On the Hugo ballot it goes.

Zoe’s Tale — John Scalzi

Published on January 26, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Zoe's Tale

Zoe’s Tale
John Scalzi
406 pages
published in 2008

John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was popular enough to spawn four sequels so far, of which Zoe’s Tale is the third. Military science fiction set in a Heinleinian dog eat dog universe, with hundred of alien races competing for new colonies and humanity only a middling power, the first three novels in the series followed new recruit John Perry and Special Forces specialist Jane Sagan through increasingly high stakes adventures, in the process learning that the Colonial Defence Forces they’re fighting for might not be entirely trustworthy. Things came to a head in the third novel, The Last Colony in which John and Jane, as leaders of the latest colony founded by the CDF had to fight off the Conclave, a four hundred members strong alien alliance as well as the CDF’s own plans to turn the colonists into martyrs. Amongst those colonists? Their own, adopted, daughter Zoë.

As you may have guessed from the title, Zoe’s Tale retells and extends the story of The Last Colony from Zoë’s point of view. On its own it’s therefore slightly less than a whole novel and can only be properly understood if you’ve read the previous novel. Things happen for reasons that are only partially explained, with major plot developments happening off screen, “as you know bobbed” later; at the same time Zoe’s Tale was partially written to explain some of the plot holes from The Last Colony. For me, it had been more than two years since I’d read it, so some of its plot was a bit hazy while reading this; not entirely dissimilar to Zoë’s experiences.

Zoë is the seventeen year old daughter of a defeated adversary, not just adopted by John and Jane, but also the living symbol of Earth’s treaty with the Obin, an alien species with intelligence but no consciousness, until her natural father created a device to give them consciousness artificially. As a consequence Zoë is accompanied at all times by two Obin bodyguards and friends of the family, Hickory and Dickory. One of the main plot threads in the book is her continuing discovery of how much she means to the Obin and the consequences this has for her.

Zoe’s Tale is told entirely through her eyes, first person. Having a fortysomething male writer write from a teenage girl’s perspective is always tricky but fortunately for all his Heinleinian influences Scalzi is much better at writing female characters than he ever was. Not that Zoë is entirely believable: she’s far too reasonable, obedient and mature for her age, unless the plot demands otherwise. Granted, she’s of course not quite the average teenage girl, what with that whole Obin thing, but despite this it still felt a bit off to me.

The novel starts with Zoë and her family coming to their new colony homeworld, then discovering not everything is as it seems and that they’re going to function as bait, though it takes a while for that to become common knowledge. A large part of the story is taken up with Zoë’s adventures on the journey to the new colony and her experience in it, before the Conclave come. This feels somewhat jumbled and episodic and things seem to happen because they happened in The Last Colony rather than flowing organically from the plot. As said, Zoë remains unaware or is only told later about major developments, while in the previous novel you were right there.

Two of the plotlines however are exactly the opposite, showing the details of things only sketched in in The Last Colony, viz what happened with the “werewolf” like aborigines that turned out to live on the planet, as well as the story of how Zoë escaped from the colony to seek help amongst the Obin. These are the strongest sections of the story and the places where Zoë comes to the fore, an active participant rather than an observer.

In the end Zoe’s Tale was a decent enough read, but only because I’d already read the previous novels, if several years before. It’s somewhat weaker than them, largely due to the fact that this was partially intended to repair some of the plot holes in the previous novel.

Old Man’s War — John Scalzi

Published on September 11, 2011Leave a comment

Cover of Old Man's War

Old Man’s War
John Scalzi
311 pages
published in 2005

John Scalzi’s debts to Heinlein in Old Man’s War are indeed obvious as he says in his afterword. Even without what looks to be a shootout to the opening scenes of Starship Troopers halfway through the novel it’s pretty obvious where Scalzi got his inspiration from. In structure, plot and protagonist Old Man’s War could fit in neatly with any of Heinlein’s coming of age stories like Space Cadet or The Tunnel in the Sky in which a young man is forced to grow up quickly to confront a hostile universe. The only difference is that John Perry is not a young man, but a seventyfive years old widower when he signs up for his stint with the Colonial Defence Forces.

Apart from that, John fulfills the same role as Rico in Starship Troopers, that of the new recruit who we’ll follow through basis training and combat, somebody who needs to be educated in the true nature of the world he lives in and who can function as a stand in for the reader. Where the two differ is that John obviously is not a callow teenager, but somebody who lived a long and fulfilling life, who saw a chance to regain his youth and took it, without knowing or caring too much about what he’s getting himself into.

Which turns out to be getting his consciousness transferred into a completely new body, adapted for combat, faster, better, stronger, tougher than a regular human body. It’s obviously also much younger than his old one and is fully functional biologically too, without any unpleasant side effects — cue the orgy as hundreds of seventyfive year olds who’ve gotten their youth back get it on. That’s all part of the leisurely introduction of the first part of the book, with things getting kicked up a notch when John and his mates finally get to proper training. Which thanks to their new bodies and especially their integrated onboard computer or “brainpal” as the CDF has named it, is massively accelerated.

Through his training and first battles with various alien species, John Perry learns how the universe really works. Habitable planets are rare in the universe and most species want the same sort of planet, which means that often they have to be fought for. The CDF is there not just to protect humanity’s existing colonies, but also to take over planets from weaker races when possible, while avoiding as much as possible the attention of stronger peoples. It’s a dog eats alien dog eat universe and CDF soldiers can’t allow themselves any illusions about the situation they’re in: their ten year hitch will likely see most of them killed. So far it’s still very much like Starship Troopers but Scalzi lacks Heinlein’s conviction that this is for the best: there are some hints that the situation in Scalzi’s universe isn’t as black and white as all that.

In the third and final part of the book John Perry gets involved into the big battle for Coral, a human colony attacked by the Rraey, one of the alien races most antagonistic to humans, if only because they like the taste of human meat… Scalzi here sets up the conditions for eventual sequels, which indeed were not long in coming, with three so far having been published. Old Man’s War however is a complete story on its own and doesn’t need them to be enjoyed.

But that will probably not stop you from reading them anyway, as Scalzi is such a fun and engaging storyteller that if you have any interest in mil-sf, you’ll want to read these stories. Old Man’s War is a familiar story well told, an updated Starship Troopers without the pseudofascist ideology of Heinlein’s original. Ideologically the idea of humanity versus an universe filled with hostile alien races who can’t be argued with but have to be shot at is still suspect of course, considering the implications of that sort of idea in actually existing history, but you never get the feeling as you do with Heinlein that Scalzi actually believes this stuff other than for the story.

Well written, entertaining, fastpaced and with some depth to it, Old Man’s War is one of the best mil-sf novels I’ve ever read.