Not-Quite-Wednesday Reading: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

[chomiji]

I must point out something first.

In Scalzi's earlier book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, we have Jamie Gray, who in the opening pages of the book loses his unremunerative job as a food delivery courier and then gets dragged into a mysterious international organization that is doing things that are pretty unbelievable.

In Starter Villain, we have Charlie Fitzer, who in the opening pages of the book loses his home and is spirited away from his unremunerative career as a substitute teacher to get dragged into a mysterious international organization that is doing things that are pretty unbelievable.

Just sayin'.

Now, there really are differences. Jamie is a mouthy asshole but actually turns out to be pretty brave and competent as an action hero. Charlie is meek and almost milquetoast but stubborn and loyal - and also actually pretty brave. Where Jamie was dragged into a very sci-fi scenario involving preserving magical megafauna on a planet that's apparently in another dimension, Charlie is dragged into a merely James Bondian scenario involving a secret cabal of obnoxious supervillains, with whom his recently deceased uncle was somehow involved.

Oh, and also "talking" cats - although they have to use specially modified keyboards to communicate. If this reminds anyone of science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal's cat Elsie, it's not by accident, as the author notes in an afterword.

This was a moderately entertaining book, but not a great one.

I feel that Scalzi is being done a disservice by his editorial staff at all levels here. He has a deal that involves his turning out a certain number of books in a certain amount of time. Perhaps as a result of this, it seems that all of his efforts, no matter how slight, are being published.

Perhaps as another side effect of this deal, no one seems to be copy editing his books very thoroughly. For example, at one point we get the sentence. "They walked toward Williams, Morrison, and I." Really? It's not "They walked toward […] I," it's "They walked toward […] me," folks. We also get the same dialog tags repeated over and over again within the same scene. It's not terrible but it's not great either.

Anyway, on to the plot. Charlie's uncle was involved with a sinister organization called the Lombardy Convocation, consisting of half a dozen crooks from a wide variety of nations (still, mostly European). He may or may not have actually been a member of said organization - this point is the source of some of the dramatic tension in the story. Uncle Jake had screwed these villains over many times; they all hated him, and the feeling was obviously mutual. As Jake's heir, Charlie has inherited all the complications with the Convocation as well as his uncle's amazing Caribbean volcanic island base. The island comes with many technology labs, underground vaults, the breeding project for the hyper-intelligent cats (including Charlie's cat Hera), and a lagoon full of very snarky, rude talking dolphins, who are attempting to unionize. We learn all this in what I think of as Episode 1.

Episode 2 involves a trip to Europe (Lake Como, to be specific) for a secret convocation of the Convocation. There are some amusing set pieces, then things blow up and people are killed - including the one member of the Convocation that Charlie seems to find least repugnant, and almost including Charlie and Hera.

In Episode 3, Charlie and his advisors lure the remaining members of the Convocation to his island base with the promise of some mysterious treasure that Jake had stashed there in a high-tech vault that needs at least 6 members of the Convocation to open. Large numbers of violent incidents ensue. And to nobody's surprise, Charlie decides this is not the life for him.

It's a slight tale, indifferently told for the most part. However, the coda, which tells us what finally happens to Charlie, is rather sweet.

The awful thing about this is that I like Scalzi as a human being. He has done a number of very good things for science fiction and its fandom, and he is IMO one of the wittiest people on Earth with a tweet (or whatever they're being called these days). But this is not his best effort. I might have been able to ignore that if this book hadn't been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.