I would namecheck 2001, however instead of TRON… candybowl

ISS Startrails – TRONized from Christoph Malin on Vimeo.

as opposed to last time!

candybowl

So it’s been some time since I read a John Scalzi book. While I enjoyed the Old Man’s War series, that was some time ago. I tried to read Fuzzy Nation, but just couldn’t get into it, so gave up. But then a few weeks ago I came across The Android’s Dream and thought it’d give it a shot. In a nutshell – a great read!

What’s interesting here is that again, Scalzi wears his Heinlein influences well. While Heinlein’s The Star Beast was originally billed as ‘young adult fiction’ when it was written – like some of his other YA books of that era, it’s easily interesting enough to be enjoyed by adults, too. In The Android’s Dream, I felt Scalzi was offering hints of the same humorous background tone as TSB, and his handling of the alien species seemed similar too – meaning that the humans initially discount and condescend to the aliens as weird, lesser species or just petlike – but in the meantime we see the aliens develop over the course of the story to be much more by the end.

In TAD, of course the Nidu are treated as largely human-equivalent but more obnoxious and intense in most cases; the Thragh alien definitely gets his own set of obstacles to examine and overcome, and the humans in the story are fairly cut and dried heroes or villains in turn – you are definitely meant to either root for them strongly or hate them deeply.

The opener is certainly one of the most unique in all the sci-fi books I’ve read, but i’ll either let you read the book (or a spoiler in someone else’s review) to find out more.

The pacing of the book is kept up throughout and definitely kept me keen on the result – there are hints of a key Minority Report (movie) scene in one chapter you may recognize, and I liked the (distant?) echoes of Old Man’s War as we find out more about Harry Creek’s background. Finally, there is more than a bit of implied commentary about the current state of affairs in Washington DC here – and I think Scalzi is as annoyed with things as the rest of us are – but I think he’s optimistic in the end that a few key people with their hearts in the right place may yet prevail.

Defnitely an entertaining read – a nice contrast to the overly serious stuff (e.g. Gideon’s Trumpet, not a sci-fi book) I’ve been reading lately – check it out!

candybowl