
Goodreads Project, part 7: Science Fiction
I’m working on a Goodreads project, reading a book from each of the fifteen categories Goodreads uses for its Best Book of the Year Award. If you click back through my last six blog entries, you can see reviews of the books I read in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Thriller, Romance, Romantasy, and Fantasy. When I started, readers were still voting. Since then, Goodreads has announced the winners.
I’ve now reached the Science Fiction category. I’d already read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The rules I set for my project meant I had to choose a new book, too. I selected John Scalzi’s Starter Villain.
Children of Time
Children of Time is the kind of science fiction that explores implications of parts of science. It’s the story of a spaceship that flees a collapsing Earth with a collection of people in suspended animation. They’re bound for a planet that scientists think might support life, but it’s centuries away. The ship occasionally awakens passengers with various skills to perform needed tasks. Our point of view on the ship is one of those passengers.
In the meantime, a separate scientist heads for a planet that’s promising but not quite right. She launches two probes at the planet. One contains something that speeds up evolution. The other contains some primates. The probe with the primates goes astray, but the other one lands. As a result, the ants and spiders on this planet evolve into intelligent, cooperative life forms. Spiders are our point of view here. Tchaikovsky does a fascinating job of showing us the world as an intelligent spider might perceive it.
The two ships’ courses intersect. Fighting breaks out between them, and they become allies or enemies of the ants and spiders.
I’d call this book interesting rather than emotionally engaging. My favorite character was one of the spiders. But I admire the way Tschaikovsky imagines the insects. I’ve recently tried to imagine how dragons would see the world if they didn’t have speech, and I can tell you, it’s difficult.
Starter Villain
I’ve enjoyed various Scalzi books before, which is one reason I chose Starter Villain. As I’ve mentioned, the most common reason a reader chooses a book is a good experience with a previous book by the same author. Also, I’m biased in Scalzi’s favor. He’s generous to his fellow authors, including me. For instance, he’s let me make author guest posts on his blog, most recently for Glass Girl.
Starter Villain is about Charlie, whose life is at a low point when an uncle he barely knew leaves him a company. The company turns out to be an evil enterprise that needs a villain at its head. Its headquarters is even set on a volcanic island. As that description suggests, the book plays with tropes. In that, it’s like Tress of the Emerald Sea, though Starter Villain‘s tone is more consistently comedic. Twisting tropes is often a good way to generate a new plot.
The book includes sentient cats and dolphins, which unexpectedly echoes the sentient insects in Children of Time. Other than that, Starter Villain is about as far as you can get from Children of Time and still be science fiction. The questions the book asks aren’t really about science. Instead, it asks about the way extremely rich people have the power to exploit and harm everybody else. Also, Scalzi means to give the reader a good time. In that he succeeds.
I also got a personal surprise from this book. It starts and ends in Barrington, Illinois, which is where I live. Scalzi has Charlie walking streets I recognize. He also has Charlie wanting to buy McDougal’s Pub, a thinly veiled version of McGonigal’s, which has been in Barrington for fourteen years. My writer group once held its Christmas party there. Sadly, I recently saw a newspaper story that McGonigal’s is closing.
Next
Next up: Horror. Another genre I don’t usually read. Send help.
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Finders Keepers
Twelve-year-old Cade discovers he’s a Finder, one able to sense the presence of precious heart stones, at the moment his mother is arrested for having the same ability. While trying to avoid contact with the potentially addictive stones, Cade sets out to rescue her, aided (maybe?) by a girl who wants Cade to help her steal every heart stone he can find.
