Phil | March 5, 2007 11:28 PM

Ok, here goes nothing... I tried to pretend I was writing for a progressive college newspaper. Man, it just flowed

A Reader's Nightmare

I have just finished John Scalzi's latest novel in the Android's Dream universe, The Return of the Lamb of The Android's Dream. Right now I feel like scooping my eyeballs out with a spoon and cleansing the sockets with bleach. A more insipid, joyless novel I've never come across. Well, perhaps it's not quite as bad as a work by Dan Brown, but that's like saying wading though three feet of fecal matter is not quite as bad as doing the same through four feet of the stuff. After five novels in the Android's Dream universe and ten (ten!) in the Old Man's War universe, we get it John Scalzi. You've run out of ideas, but can recycle old one's at a prodigious pace. Unfortunately, the end product is the Ipecac of literature, except less pleasant.


As usual, Sclazi seems unable to resist injecting his neocon, Heinleinesque philosophy into his science fiction. He revels in the use of violence as a problem solving tool throughout this novel. It's the same tired plot he's used over and over. Assassinations, murder, gun fights, you name it; these atrocities appear with frightening regularity. And when violence won't turn the trick, base blackmail saves the day. All to forward the policies of a future US still on the reprehensible course of imperialism.

Yes, unfortunately in this particular future the US still exists. Although there is mention of a world-wide government, presumably run by the UN, the preeminent power on Earth is still the United States. He never explicitly spells it out, but it's easy to infer his glorifying of US hegemony in the subtext. There's lip service given to diplomacy, but it's mostly used to further the insular interests of the United States, regardless of the effect policy may have on other species or cultures. In other words, the same old same old.

And let us not forget the shadowy religion pulling strings behind the scenes. He just can't let go of his Church of Evolved Lamb as a literary device; this is the fourth novel in which they appear. While the surface similarities seem to draw parallels to Scientology, this church is nowhere near as benign. Manipulating political and economic policies over large periods of time to achieve its own insular, near-sighted goals... Hm, sound familiar? Yes, it is more Roman Catholic than the positive, life affirming religion he poorly attempts to lampoon. The Evolved Lamb is just a fancy way of saying they want a docile, compliant population. Easily controlled by those who currently hold the reins of power. Way to perpetuate the tenets of a decrepit, decaying theological framework.

Now, if Scalzi had taken a different direction, perhaps if he had painted a bleak, stark dystopian vision of the future that incorporated these elements, he may have actually created a story worth reading. Instead he takes the easy way out by dumping his repugnant vision of how the world of tomorrow will be if the neocons have their way. Murder, violence, deception and religious domination.



I seriously cannot recommend this book to anyone. If you do end up buying this trash, I suggest you take it along when camping. Just in case you forget to pack toilet paper.

Kelsey | March 6, 2007 12:24 AM

Choose Your Own Adventure is dead. Someone forgot to tell John Scalzi.

The opening scene of Platypussy belongs scrawled on the back of a junior high bathroom stall. If you, the dashing computer nerd agent / blogger trying to save the world from the giant lesbian Platypussies, choose to face the malefic multi-pouched marsupials by cramming the bong-like object up your rear and farting the alphabet until they drift to sleep in order to bring harmony to the universe, turn to page 57.

If you, a grown adult who spent $45 on the collector’s edition so you could have your name listed as one of the unlucky villagers who were squashed during the Mating Season, choose to spend an afternoon expanding your mind, put down the book. Sit on your hand. Fart. Lift hand to nose. Breathe in.

Michele | March 6, 2007 12:57 AM

Perhaps when Scalzi penned You're Only Fooling Your Mother When You Take Your Laptop To a Laundromat: Scalzi on Even More Writing, he was only trying to fool his mother. Anyone else who takes even a cursory glance at this tome will not be fooled that has has anything worthwhile to say about writing.

Not that Scalzi has much to say at all. Half of this book is filled with examples drawn from his own pathetic attempts at fiction, such as last year's Sheep Brigades, (as if they were the epitomy of fine literature). To almost completely remove the need for fresh content, each of the brief chapters starts with either a lengthy quote from his daughter or comments from his "Whatever" blog.

It is truly unfortunate that his publishers didn't realize that his previous highly successful book on writing did not require a sequel.

Ellen | March 6, 2007 12:57 AM

Review of: AYN RAND'S DREAM
By: John Scalzi

When John Scalzi published his much-acclaimed THE ANDROID'S DREAM in 2007, little did we know that he had used up his last original ideas in its writing, and would base an entire series on the concept that made that book famous: THE WIZARD'S DREAM, THE CAT-LOVING SLEUTH'S DREAM, CHOOSE YOUR OWN DREAM, and now, his most recent work, AYN RAND'S DREAM.

The beginning of this book does nothing to disguise the author's dependence on the much-overused gag that defines the series:

"Ayn Rand didn't know if she could fart her way into an extremely influential philosophical movement. But she was ready to find out."

CHOOSE YOUR OWN DREAM was by far the worst-reviewed of the series to date, exhorting readers, as it did, to choose the meal which immediately preceded the opening gaseous jest. I think, however, AYN RAND will surpass CHOOSE YOUR OWN as the rock bottom of this increasingly feeble-minded series, even as it skyrockets onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Mr. Scalzi, ballooning sales numbers to the contrary, beginning each of your books with a chapter-long fart joke is not the way to win fans. It worked once, to be sure, but I think I speak on behalf of all of your readers when I say, Let it go already.

Fin | March 6, 2007 01:01 AM

One Minute Reviews:

Keepers of the Moon God - John Scalzi
What has 341 pages and reads like the aborted love-child of Heinlein and Dick? Why, the world's most overpriced window prop, of course!

Josh E. | March 6, 2007 01:05 AM

Sneak Preview of "A (Secret) Agent to the Stars"

Just when I thought that science fiction literature had begun to reach a new zenith in the works of John Ringo, David Weber, and the like, compelling evidence to the contrary comes along. John Scalzi, who is almost certainly better remembered for such compelling novels as Old Man's War and The Android's Dream has really and truly Lost It. Attempting to speculate what Mr. Scalzi's thought processes were when he wrote A(S)AttS is nigh-upon impossible, unless you have recently had a full frontal lobotomy.



The story revolves around the character of a genetically engineered, cybernetically augmented feline in the service of the Royal Dauphine, Magnesia. I think that's supposed to be funny, but it's quite possible that the book is intended as torture; it's not very clear which it is. In case the utter vapidity of the book is not quite clear, let's just say that it defies physics and probability by getting worse from there. To wit:



Dauphine: "Oh, my dear agent! You've been hurt! Your bacon armor has been torn apart!"

Agent Perryneal: "IM WAS PWNED IN UR YARD!"




Mr. Scalzi seems to think that because his (what used to be called) blog called "Whatever" was successful in both generating story ideas and sales that he doesn't need to exert effort to write anymore, a disappointment when looking at his past body of work. In addition, he has the misguided notion that both he and his blog's audience are both relevant and interesting. Maybe I'll visit there and leave a picture in a language suitable for his consumption: "UR TEH SUX!"



--C. Felix Garfield, The New York Times Book Review, 24 April 2009

Djscman | March 6, 2007 04:18 AM

[This is out of love and/or envy and/or because you literally asked for it.]

What happened to the Young Lion of the Spaceways? For the last two years, speculative fiction fans have been shaking their heads over the mysterious implosion of the award-winning author once called John Scalzi. His sudden appearance and...whatever happened...on the literary stage redefined (or perhaps clarified) the term "meteoric": it was a streak of radiance snuffed out by an increasingly abrasive atmosphere. Somewhere at the bottom of the gravity well, kinetic energy is inflicting a kilocrapload of damage.

Most former fans agree that his line of batshit loopyswirls was crossed last year. Several online forums still debate whether the trigger was geometric prolificacy or the personal tragedy that, out of respect, I will not recap here. (Everybody reading this already knows about his daughter's trial, anyway. But seriously, little girls should not be allowed to build jet packs, or arm them with homemade explosives. Baaad parenting!) Anyway, he sucked ever since. When Scalzi legally dropped his first name in August of 2008, he had finished his third sequel to The Last Colony. Scalzi was still calling TLC "the last book in the Old Man's War universe." Young Man At Peace was critically panned and commercially ignored. By November, he had finished his fourth crossover novel (One Sheep, Two Sheep, Old Man, Blue Sheep) awkwardly connecting the so-called Perryverse and Sheeptrices. "I wanted to see if I could write a novel in the second person, and you better believe you still got it!" Scalzi wrote on his long-running personal web page. By this point, Scalzi's publishers were passing on his manuscripts. His John W. Campbell award was rescinded, which was an unprecedented censure by the science fiction community.

His latest disappointment, Uncle Ruff's Guide To Sci Fi Movie Money, is available in e-book form from SubTORaneanPressGetIt.com, a hitherto unknown publishing company. Please remember to update your antivirus software. The only way to enjoy this book is not to read it. Don't even pirate it. Out of a grim sense of duty and guilt, I did both.

The Uncle Ruff's Guide To Sci Fi Movie Money collects the poorly edited ravings of a necrotic brain. Look, I adore the works of Faulkner. I reread the "retard caveman" sequence in Alan Moore's A Voice in the Fire every two or three months, and fall in love with that poor kid every time. Last October I got about twenty pages into Finnegan's Wake. I can recognize when an avant–garde text requires a bit of work to decipher; the reward is well worth it. This nonsense isn't even close. Passages like, "Ground 4 reel to reel malc Matrix Reloaded beleaguered Jedi's Return 300 kajillion times!!!!" ensure that-- Well, I was going to say "Scalzi won't be getting the Nobel Prize in Literature any time soon," but that would be a cheap shot. I just hope he finds the help he needs.

The title seems to refer to his non-fiction roots, but discerning any kind of thematic underpinning is nigh impossible. There are repeated collections of words which might describe a character, inconsistently referred to as John, Malcolm, or Steve Timberlake, as he navigates badly formatted Excel spreadsheets depicting Hollywood blockbuster earnings. I think. A good third of the e-book's 1400 pages consist of those charts! The numbers, of course, are pure fantasy. Garishly colored sidebars push deep into the body of the text, offering non sequiturs such as, "blad (sic) zippers Mothra back drop another million yen."

The Timberlake "character" appears to have a loosely defined arc. The initial sets of movie titles and what could be financial figures are accompanied by Timberlake's comments, which could very well be connected. For example, "Solaris 46 mill when Criterion Lem has Clooney space dove. John Timberlake said, 'Number too low, revise revise!' said malcolm Stever-T." Near the end of the text, the Timberlake character gives a long and stately monologue about alien creatures in a ritual knife fight. It's by far the highlight of the entire novel, if only because it uses complete sentences. [Editor's note: This sequence appears to be a chapter cut and pasted from Scalzi's first major novel, Old Man's War.] Adjunct English professors from the world of tomorrow have the only chance of gleaning any meaning from this rubbish. Scalzi, seriously, what the hell?

Djscman's review blurb for Uncle Ruff's Guide To Sci Fi Movie Money: Pure Fantasy!

hnu | March 6, 2007 04:58 AM

YOUNG MAN'S WAR, ANOTHER SCALZI(TM) PIECE OF JUNK
Nicholas Bear for balon.com, online in the January 2010 archive section

Ever since he increased his output from one or two books a year and three to four blog posts a day to five-six novels a year and twenty to thirty posts on his Whatever blog, I have lost interest in reading John Scalzi (TM)'s works of an ever decreasing lamentable quality. Something I read last week on DoingDoing (more specifically, the discovery of one of his ghost writers' name, one Robert Anson Lovecraft) made go online at gamazone.com (the recenntly google-refurbished online bookstore that took amazon.com's place in the buyers' hearts) and order his latest tree-killer, YOUNG MAN'S WAR. DoingDoing speculated that this book might be the work of R. A. Lovecraft, based on the fact that it was about a young man and it had an asylum in it. I had previously read a couple of R. A. Lovecraft juveniles, liked them moderately and decided to see if, not like the other presumed ghost writers employed by John Scalzi (TM), he might have given a much-needed CPR to this dying (to me, at least) brandname.
Unfortunately, such was not the case. And I can affirm with 99,9% certitude that this particular novel, YOUNG MAN'S WAR, is not R.A.L.'s work, or, if it is, he's managed a terrific job of sounding exactly like the guy he's writing for.
The plot is an over-complicated rehash of Scalzi (TM)'s debut novel, OLD MAN'S WAR. But, instead of an old man seeking purpose and rejuvenation by joining the army, YMW features a young man who's seeking for a way to contract progeria, so he might accelerate his aging, so that he will qualify for the rejuvenation process that comes with joining the army, hoping that this will help him start over a life that he has irremediably fucked up (and down and sideways). As a patented loser, our hero fails getting admitted in the army and ends in an asylum. The last 500 of the book's (too many!) 890 pages tell of his repeated attempts to escape and try to redeem himself. In the spirit of all the post-Bush American military science fiction, there's a happy ending: the hero escapes the asylum, finally manages to join the army, is rejuvenated and becomes a happy five-year-old trainee sent to Battle Academy.
There's hint for a sequel, as our hero meets at Battle Academy two familiar characters from another overlong literary franchise. Can you guess? Naaah, I won't make you buy the book just to find this out: the familiary characters' names are Ender and Bean. Does that ring any bell?
Phew! That was hard, and it really made my compulsory need to finish each book, no matter how stupid, an even less pleasant one. It also decided me to start an online campaign to collect funds much needed to support the victims of acute Scalzi(TM)-phobia. You'll find more about this campaign at www.stopscalzitm.org.

Editor's note: Nicholas Bear is a writer, columnist and reviewer for balon.com and other online literary gossip zines. His latest essays collection, WHY SHOULD I CUT YOUR BALLS WHEN I COULD JUST SUCK THEM is available from Golden Unicorn Press, and has received rave reviews from the likes of David Louis Edelman, Jeff VanderMeer, KJ Bishop and others.

has | March 6, 2007 06:00 AM

"Global Warming is a Big Fat Lie, and Anyone Who Says Otherwise Is a Filthy Child Molester" by John Scalzi

Ohio is a giant flood plain. This is not entirely a bad thing.

-- Parno Hicks, Critic

Graeme Williams | March 6, 2007 08:55 AM

Award-winning copywriter John Scalzi, best known for his "Mutton: It's the leg of a lamb" campaign, has made another tired attempt to revive his flagging reputation as a fiction writer with his new book, "It's Wool Will Keep My Dreaming Warm".

If Scalzi can't escape his regrettable addiction to writing about himself, this time the tedium is diluted by his inexplicable choice to make his alter ego -- actually ego would be more accurate -- a woman, Scalza. Naturally, her sidekick is an intelligent sheep, Mutt. And he's carried the limits on his imaginative powers to their logical conclusion by dropping Mutt and the aging Scalza onto the planet Ohi. Any subtle differences between this snowy planet and his native Ohio are, I'm afraid, beyond the discrimination of this reviewer.

Scalzi is well known for championing clarity in advertising -- he's one of the founders of "The New Comprehensible" movement. But however laudable the goals of this pompous group might be in the commercial realm, readers are ill-served here. If the dialog starts to sound like Madison Avenue tag lines after the first few dozen pages, readers will be encouraged that it rapidly dwindles, to be replaced by descriptions of "snowy glades barely warmed by the distant suns" and "the crunch of hoverboots skating over the icy lake". The best thing you can say about Scalzi's prose style is that it's as clear as his ad copy.

Which is not something you can say about the plot. When the gravity fails on Ohi, Scalza and Mutt are as surprised as the author, resulting in a tedious parade of Scalzi's signature gun battles, the two heroes battling it out with ever more improbable enemies. If I have to read one more explanation of how mass and velocity determine the arc of a bullet in zero gravity, I think I'll hurl, something that Mutt seems to do all too frequently in response to any impact, fall or wound. The only saving grace is that Mutt soon dies -- that's not a spoiler, Scalzi always kills off the sheep -- and won't be available to pollute the inevitable sequelae. Or for that matter, turn our dreams into nightmares.

John F. Opie | March 6, 2007 09:02 AM

Review of "In The Garden of Delights" by John Scalzi

There is the last book by John Scalzi. Or at least the rest of the civilized world desperately hopes so.

After his apparent conversion to radical Islam in the spring of 2009 after the election of Jenna Bush to the Presidency, with Barbara Bush as Vice President, the first women ever elected to such national office, which seems to have pushed him over the brink - like so many Americans - and the mysterious disappearance of his wife and daughter (there are rumors of wife-beating and torture, but that's probably the result of his wife reading the galleys to this book), John Scalzi - known by his new name as Mohammed Lackanookie, but who continues to publish under his infidel name - apparently decided to inflict his pain and suffering on the world.

To describe "The Gardens of Delight" is as difficult a task as understanding the run-on sentence in that last paragraph. The book - which runs to more than 800 pages - is as confused and difficult to understand as a Thomas Pynchon novel, if Pynchon wrote romantic comedies. But even this description is misleading: the book is difficult to understand, but not because the reader must keep track of so many characters - the last reviewer who tried to keep track is responding to medication quite well, thanks for the get-well wishes! - but because the book reads like a series of sentences simply thrown into a cuisinart and put onto hi-speed blend.

Perhaps not even sentences: the forward from the publisher, Bob Guccione, apologizes to the reader for inflicting the book on anyone besides trained Jesuit priests, but everyone understood the reasons that the book was published (we understand that almost half of the body parts have been recovered and that a ceremony can be held in the near future for at least 300 of the victims).

What is, exactly, then, "The Garden of Delights"?

It is, at best, the product of a deranged mind, a hateful mind, Hannibal Lector on a really bad hair day. "The Garden of Delights" celebrates torture, would make the Marquis de Sade jealous in its tales of sexual perversities (this reviewer will never look at iguanas and donkeys without becoming physically ill again), is incoherent in its political rambling and calls for death and destruction. It is not so much the call for death and destruction, but much more the incoherence that charachterizes this hopefully last work of Scalzi.

Yet the author describes it as "a utopian adventure and romantic comedy".

There is still public debate about the novel and the events leading up to it. Why, we are not certain. Perhaps the fact that John Scalzi is still out there somewhere, a free man, after inflicting so much pain and misery upon the world in order to get this novel published. There are those who insist that the novel be confiscated and destroyed, so that no other aspiring writer follows in his footsteps.

The academic world, however, does not agree, and this is perhaps the only group that actually refers to Scalzi by his wrting name and not as he is usually known, "The Butcher of Bakersfield".

Let us try, though, to give sense to the novel. "The Garden of Delight" starts off badly enough, with a hair-raising tale of death and mutilation of children by the protaganist, Mr. Peeps. The sickness of the portrayal - Mr. Salzi's knowledge of human anatomy is quite detailed - and the sheer terror of having children serially tortured is nightmarish at best and horribly appalling in any case.

The hate that percolates through the book is as palpable as the hate that Mr. Scalzi apparently succumbed to after the collapse of the Clinton/Obama campaign in the days leading up to the election. His wife, before her disappearance, spoke darkly of drinking and the development of unhealthy appetites for things stolen from cemetaries. The disappearance of children from the neighborhood and the finding of their gnawed bones gives credence to her desperate calls to 911 and makes the inaction of the police even stranger.

This is not merely the hate of a political opportunist or political hack: this is the hate of someone who became the Bakersfield Butcher, and only by reading the novel can you really understand that.

Once you have been introduced to Mr. Peeps, the novel springs back and forth between the past, the future and the present. Scalzi fails utterly to make any sense of time at all, leading the reader to try to dicipher such sentences as:

"She will be twisted under the pain of the broken leg, having remembered the events of the next ten days, and will be coming to understand the misery that she had inflicted on Mr. Peeps when he would visit her in three weeks' time."

More we shall not say. There are more than 800 pages of this style, and we recognize that only the threats and terror acts that Mr. Scalzi inflicted on Bakerfield can explain that it was published anywhere. The novel is the work of a truly deranged mind, and the copycat killings in Canton, Ohio and Moscow, Idaho underscore the noxious effects of the novel on the feeble-minded and weak-willed.

The critical reader will ask why the new Bush administration is considering banning the book: we can only tell that critical reader that in this case, the Bush Administration is right.

The terror inflicted and the human cost alone are more than adequate reasons to ban this work. This reviewer would go one step further and recommend that all works by John Scalzi be burned, that no one, even in criminology, should teach using the works of John Scalzi, and that the name John Scalzi be forgotten entirely and that his ashes, when he is caught and brought to justice, be strewn upon a public urinal.

We feel deeply for the parents and relatives of the victims of Mr. Scalzi. Take a stand in this day of ambiguity and do not buy this book: we know that he will, in all likelihood, kill the remaining children if his book doesn't sell.

It's worth it. Our heartfelt apologies to the parents and relatives of this sacrifice, but the world deserves to be cleansed of this writer.

There are only two redeeming things that can be truly said about this work: that the sheer hideousness is definite proof that, for this atheist, the devil is among us, and secondly that we shall await the second volume of the trilogy with great interest.

(Our publisher made us put that in, as his daughter went missing at Bakersfield and is reported to be 12th on the list of victims.)

petrofsk | March 6, 2007 09:12 AM

It is this reviewer's sad duty to acknowledge a new low in the spiraling descent of the new American sci-fi meta-humor alternate-history genre. NewAm-SciFi-MetHum-AltHist was once a thriving force in modern writing, but thanks to the diligent

efforts of word kiddies like John Scalzi and his blogging counterparts we have arrived at today's tour de Farce, Scalzi's "Corner

Booth." The aptly named Subterranean Press continues to dig itself deeper, publishing this pap in a limited edition, (each copy

signed and prayed over by the author), made to look like a playbill from the Ford Theater.

In a fit of self-obssessed geneaological vanity, Scalzi has composed a 450 page opus in which a supposedly successful and

internet-famous sci-fi author uses his peculiar combination of moderate wealth and mediocre Photoshop skills to build a time

machine which allows him to go back in time and right a terrible wrong. I'll let Scalzi's level of talent speak for itself, on

page 195 we read:

John stood in the alley behind the theater, waiting anxiously for the actors to come out. The machine had worked
perfectly, it was 6 months before the planned assassination, and now was his chance to set his ancestor straight.
As John paced the alley he couldn't stop thinking about what waited for him back home. "This will make the best
post since that last picture of the dog! I might even have to start a whole subsite devoted to this
trip. I'll call it Lincoln Blogs!" Finally, Booth skipped out of the back door, humming slightly to himself.
John approached him confidently and delivered the line he had prepared, "You don't know me, but let me tell
you, your plan sucks!" Booth looked in his general direction, eyes a bit glazed from the post-show drinks,
and swung wildly, a slow haymaker. John, panicking about the ontological paradox involved in beating up his
own ancestor, turned and ran, shouting behind him, "Really, jumping from the box, that's your plan!?" Booth
looked after him bemusedly, and went to find a bottle and an easy woman.

As you can see, Scalzi has produced a work worthy of the intellectual love child of Spider Robinson and Bizzaro Heinlein

(you know, the Heinlein from the alternate universe where he writes talentlessly about alternate universes and time travel). Puns

and paradox, anachronistic dialog and a ridiculous plot combine in what can only be called a crap romp. In case you're wondering,

our hero convinces Booth to poison Lincoln in his sleep, twenty years later, and only after a fifteen page monologue about how much

he admires him, but how the inflexibility of the space-time continuum requires that he, Booth, be his killer.

From his promising early days when he only wrote chapter-length fart jokes, Scalzi has dragged us all, kicking and

screaming, and unwillingly humming Booth's theme song, "Jack the Knife" (alternate lyrics cruelly provided by Subterranean in the

end notes), into a world where an atrocity like "Corner Booth" can be published with impunity. If Scalzi dares set one more word

to paper, limited vellum edition or no, this reviewer may well understand the temptation of the assassin. For now, scraping the

lingering soil of "Corner Booth" from our brains, we shall live by Scalzi's motto, "Let's Hope it Doesn't Come to That."

Nathan | March 6, 2007 10:07 AM

INTO THE LION’S DEN
A Journey Through The Fetid Precincts of the Publishing Industry

By John Scalzi.

982 pp. PublishAmerica. $68.
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews

In early 2007, John Scalzi announced the dawn of “The New Comprehensible". And with the publication of “Into The Lion’s Den”, he has clearly abandoned his pet movement. The dust jacket describes the book as a “caustic expose’ of the cesspit that is the modern publishing industry”. Mr. Scalzi wishes to join a growing number of writers, filmmakers and recording artists who appear on the scene, garner well-earned praise (and sales), and then go on to avenge themselves on their benefactors by charging them with abandoning art and truth (except, perhaps, in their decision to have brought the artists’ works to the public, which we’re left to infer was their last enlightened act before they gave themselves over to full decline).

All of this might be an entertaining jaunt (at 1/3rd the word count), but he does not remotely succeed at his stated mission. Consider the first paragraph of Chapter Three: Practices in Printing.

“Contaminated wipes may be regulated as hazardous waste and can be a source of regulatory problems. Also, significant VOC emissions and personnel exposure are associated with press cleaning operations. If the shop towels are laundered, make certain that the towels are being handled properly. Dry cleaning may also be an option for used shop towels. An annual visit to the laundry facility should be part of the waste management program in order to review the handling procedure for your wipes. The printer may need guidance from a technical assistance person on what to ask and how to interpret the answers. Check with the local POTW (publicly owned treatment works) that services the laundry to determine if the laundry is complying with sewerage discharge limits. A written description of how the printer's towels are handled should be requested from the laundry and kept on file. Note that the regulations about shop towels have been changing in recent years. Check with the proper regulatory authorities for the latest statutes.”

Does Mr. Scalzi truly think his readers are interested in this arcane subject matter? And though I applaud experimentation with forms of structure and presentation, what possible justification can he offer for subjecting us to a work that contains four chapters consisting solely of haiku in transliterated Sumerian? Is there really an audience champing at the bit for page after page of binary code? And while it may have been cute, in previous volumes to see fictional characters named after his friends and fellow authors, the 38-page chapter “People I’ve Heard Of” is clearly a useless exercise in name-dropping.

The only thing made clear by this book is that Mr. Scalzi has made enough money and has no intention of ever earning any more.

Joe Rybicki | March 6, 2007 10:52 AM

All About Sam by John Scalzi
Just what the hell happened here?

You may have known John Scalzi as a prolific writer of science fiction (2005's Old Man's War), high fantasy (2008's A Dragon Awakening) and low humor (the perennial Book of the Dumb series, incorporating Book of the Dumb 1 and 2, Book of the Dumber, Book of the Spectacularly Dumb, and last years Look People, You're All a Bunch of F***ing Idiots, Stop Making My Job So Easy.

I say "may have known" because while All About Sam is attributed to the previously well-regarded John Scalzi, it reads like the deranged scribblings of an inbred, half-witted mouthbreather with a personal vendetta against God, country, and you, the reader.

This fourth installment in the Android's Dream universe focuses on a bit character from the first book: the excruciatingly gender-neutral Sam. It was a fun trick the first time around, where Scalzi carefully tiptoed around the issue of Sam's gender. Each of Sam's scenes was crafted in such a way as to give the reader no clues as to Sam's personal equipment, leaving the reader to wonder whether key characters were gay, straight, or into smooth-crotched androgynes of the future.

Like I say, a fun trick. If the reader had any experience with Scalzi's nonfiction, particularly his daily (or when on deadline, thrice-daily) blog, "The Whatever," it was clear Scalzi was making a subtle, winking statement about gay rights. But hanging an entire sf book around the concept is...well, I'll put it this way: In the continuum of bad ideas, All About Sam's premise ranks somewhere between polyester underwear and the Third Reich.

By the end of the third page, we get the joke. Yes, you're not telling us Sam's gender. Clever Scalzi, here's a cookie. By the end of the fourth page, we're already wondering how long he can possibly keep it up. By the six hundred and seventeenth page, we're fantasizing about tracking Scalzi down, backing him into a corner, and beating him about the head and neck with this overlong, overwrought waste of paper until he both confirms Sam's gender and swears by all the gods he believes in never to write again.

It's not that Sam is completely worthless. There are high points; one memorable scene features freelance policewoman Cherie Doctorow squaring off against international terrorist China Gaiman in a particularly well-crafted fight scene, peppered with dialogue displaying Scalzi's familiar blend of sharp wit and scatological humor. Another clever scene involves physicist Tobias Nielsen Hayden, a room full of radioactive scorpions, and a case of Easy Cheese. (I won't get into specifics, as I don't want to spoil it for you should you ever decide, against my warnings and the will of all that is holy, to purchase this book.)

So yes, there are moments where you won't want to drive a fountain pen deep into your ear. But all the good (or at least, tolerable) scenes in this profoundly flawed work share one thing in common: The main character is not in them. When Scalzi lets Sam wander off to be excruciatingly asexual offstage, we see glimmers of his (at this point, we must assume former) skill as a writer and storyteller.

The problem is, Scalzi is so in love with his own cleverness that, in the entire course of this almost impressively awful work, he gives the reader a reprieve from Sam exactly four times. Of the six hundred or so pages, I counted exactly twenty-three that did not star the titular hero. (Heroine? Ah Christ, my head!) To be fair, though, I may have miscounted, as the tears of agony made it difficult to read the page numbers from time to time.

In case I haven't been clear enough in relating how I feel about this book, allow me to sum up:

The fact that this book actually managed to make it to market without imploding from its own foul weight is compelling proof that there is no God.

Now excuse me while I go wash.

tim | March 6, 2007 11:22 AM

THE ADORNOITE EYE

Review of: The Defiled Warrior by John Scalzi

Campbell Award-winning author John Scalzi has, in the past, admitted the difficulty in writing love scenes for his work. One might suggest that given this acknowledged weakness, he would avoid filling his latest tome, The Defiled Warrior, with enough sexual content to make even the most jaded internet-porn auteur blush.

Then again, no one ever accused Mr. Scalzi of being a great decision-maker. He does choose to live in Ohio, after all. Yet to call his new work "tripe" would be an insult to the first, second, and third stomachs of ruminants worldwide. The Defiled Warrior is best described as sub-tripe; perhaps originating from the abomasum or duodenum regions.

The hubris with which Scalzi hoists his nonsense upon what has (until now but undoubtedly never again will be) been a dedicated, loyal audience, is patently offensive and makes one question whether he has taken up smoking opium. Consider this ludicrous offering from the book's exposition:

Cpl. Yorke's exoskeleton unfolded into what seemed to Jennie a hundred segments. His taupe skin radiated a firm but exotic beauty, reminding her of the sun that warmed her skin on the ore ranch upon which she spent her childhood. As his

I apologize to the reader. My fingers will not cooperate to transcribe from my preview copy any further, as Mr. Scalzi's prose is simply too disagreeable for them. One hopes The Defiled Warrior is never translated into Braille, as it would surely render any reader to become immediately illiterate.

The repetition by which Mr. Scalzi emphasizes key qualities of his characters resonates like a jackhammer upon the reader's skull, or much like the series of television spots for recently-disgraced analgesic "Head-On" did for viewers several years ago. It is enough to mention the size of Colonel Kryx's phlebmotes once, or at most twice; the repeated use of "gargantuan" and "prodigious" demonstrates no writing skill other than that of consulting a thick thesaurus, which is to say no writing skill at all.

It is unfortunate that Mr. Scalzi took it upon himself to shove several flathead screwdrivers into his skull mere hours after President Huckabee's election this past November. His loyal readers will, inevitably, wish he had at least waited until the final revision of The Defiled Warrior was finished before undertaking his fateful self-lobotomy. Alas, we are left to consider the loss of his writing skill more collateral damage of that sad, fateful day.

1/2 of 5

Ray | March 6, 2007 11:29 AM

I'm sorry I have to comment because I am laughing myself to tears...
PLEASE STOP! Let me wallow in my horrible day. No funniness allowed! Bitte..BITTE!
I will not interrupt the thread again.

Adam Rakunas | March 6, 2007 11:29 AM

John Scalzi, the Campbell Award-winning author once heralded as the crossover artist that science fiction had been waiting for, has managed to the impossible with his new novel, The Lawn of Youth. Not only is the book banned in every library and bookstore across America (even San Francisco has held a "Scald Scalzi Day" where people brought copies of Lawn to Golden Gate Park to hurl them into cauldrons of boiling oil, all done on the city's dime), but it has alienated every stratum of science fiction fandom with its incomprehensible mixture of pop culture references, big explosions, hackneyed plot devices, and...

And the squid scenes. God help me, but my editor made me read those parts, just to see if they're as bad as everyone's said. No, they're not that bad. They're worse. Whatever has cracked Scalzi's brain to create scenes of anthropomorphic depravity (I mean...squid? What kind of freak writes cephalopod erotica?), it's enough to warrant a new entry in the DSM-V.

Writers have been known for displaying contempt for their audiences (for instance, Orson Scott Card's new collection of essays, Why You're Always Wrong, and David Brin's Why I'm Always Right), but Scalzi's raw loathing for his readers leaps out like one Central Park flasher after another. The worst part about this constant assault is that, somehow, the reader does not become inured. In fact, Scalzi's bile just seems more personal the farther the reader gets, like he's daring them to put down the book but knows the reader won't because then Scalzi will think the reader is a pussy (in fact, there is a chapter entitled "John Scalzi Thinks You're A Pussy," right before the tentacles come out in a mind-scarring passage that decency and federal hate crime law prohibits this publication from reprinting. Thank God).

Take, for instance, this scene where the supposed hero, diplomat/war veteran/celebrity chef Archimedes Singh (whose job, assigned from the kind of shadowy super-governmental agency that seems to exist just to give hacks like Scalzi an excuse to write, is to find a lawn covered by a species of alien grass that brings immortality and potency, a theme that pops up with uncomfortable regularity in Lawn) engages in clumsy foreplay with Marjorie Dew, a horticulturist with an unquenchable desire for sex (yeah, like we've all seen that before):

"You are out of your mind," said Marjorie, her eyes damp from the onions.

"That's what everyone said about me," said Archimedes, throwing the mirepoix in the sizzling pan. The oil spat at him, like it was trying to burn his cock. Just like everyone else, he thought, stirring the onions and wishing he'd gotten dressed before he'd started cooking. "It doesn't matter if it's my boss or my parents or those fucking losers on the Internet who keep saying I don't know my way around a kitchen, they all think I'm nuts." He banged the pan, his head reeling from the heady aromas of sauteed vegetables and Marjorie's sex, which stared at him as she perched on the counter.

She reached out and threw the pan aside, spattering the onions and oil against the wall. "I'll show you nuts," she said, and she mounted him.

"Fuck you fanboys," grunted Archimedes as he reached for the pepper mill. "I'm gonna get mine."

...and so on, for six hundred execrable pages. That this swill ever made it to print is yet another example of the decline of literacy in the Web 3.0 world. You'd have a more enlightened evening watching PooTube or Googling yourself. No matter how much you love books, The Lawn of Youth will make you curse the day you learned to read. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

ship | March 6, 2007 01:32 PM

Rolling Stone
August 2009

"Fear and Loathing in Ohio"
Christopher W. Shipley

We were somewhere outside Columbus when the drugs began to kick in...two bags of pot and a suitcase full of coke and crystal meth. I don't know how I ended up out here in the asshole of America, all I wanted was an interview with Scalzi so I could make the editors happy, and here I am in his cherry-red convertible caddy, doing ninety down I-70. He's wearing this stupid "Scalzi Produce" soccer shirt that some Australian fan sent him years ago, biting down on a cigarette as he leans over the steering wheel. His eyes are wild and he takes his eyes off the road for far too long when he looks at me.
"You don't understand the fucking Scalziverse, man, no one understands it!"
I've never seen someone smoke this much meth without his or her head exploding, yet this maniac is driving a car and raving about his latest book, "Old Man's War: Episode II", a piece of crap even by teenage crack whore standards, but Scalzi thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
"It's the mythology, man, the fucking mythology! That's what's so goddamned important about my books! Nobody gets it! They all want to be entertained!"
Between rants about cats and bacon I try to get a word in edgewise, but it's useless; that 8-ball we did back in his dilapidated house is making my brain mush and I can't formulate the questions I need to ask. His ex-wife gave me a short telephone interview back in LA before I flew out here, and she told me their marriage ended because of the mythology issue. "He was a talented writer, before he became obsessed with the mythology. Something happened after 'The Last Colony' was released. This whole storyline evolved with the twin children of Jane Sagan and John Perry, and John starts wearing a black, armored suit..."
I spent a week struggling through "OMW: Episode II" and I won’t suggest anyone else try it. As if we haven’t seen enough of this “Scalziverse” already: between the “Dream” franchise and the belabored “OMW” series, he now adds a new dimension of garbage with “Episode II”: a rebellion amidst the CDF galactic empire, an old race of “knights” resurrected by Liam Sagan-Perry and a space princess called Lee that Liam is lusting after. Haven’t we seen this before?
Scalzi’s ex-wife laments the loss of his talents, as do we all. She told me, “He was a visionary before this madness took control, and his vision of the world of tomorrow was incredible.” Well, if “Episode II” is the world of tomorrow, I’ll take the world of yesterday, thank you. Now, if only the goddamned bats would go away…

Jess Nevins | March 6, 2007 02:23 PM

"There comes a time when necrophilia begins to look not just bad but tacky, and John Scalzi, with Perry's Aliens, his annual humping-Heinlein exercise in techno-fetishism and military hagiography, has reached it. Many readers rightly questioned Scalzi's agenda with his Writing Outside a Garret Means You're a Poseur, and those concerns have, unfortunately, been justified in Scalzi's latest literary excretion.

"Bad enough readers are treated to yet another vampiric attempt suck the talent from Heinlein's corpse--c'mon, John, he's been dead for thirty years, there's no juice left in the body!--but the transformation of John Perry into a Jubal Harshaw-like character, complete with his new first name "Lazarus," can only convince the discerning reader that whatever meager charms Scalzi's initial books had have long since departed him.

"Libel laws forbid us from raising the issue of Athena Scalzi's contributions to Scalzi's work. We can only speculate that, that she writes her own novels, the fabulously successful 'Snow Days on Pluto' series, she probably has little time to contribute to Scalzi's novels, and so no hypothetical ghost-writing could be taking place.

"It's true that Perry's Aliens isn't as bad as Scalzi's last 'humor' book, Animals You Can Tape Bacon To, Part #37. But neither is a root canal as bad as a spinal tap.

"Scalzi makes much of the snow which cuts off his Xanadu-like compound from the rest of the world nine months of the year. We can only hope it will cut off his communication with his publisher twelve months of the year."

Ed | March 6, 2007 03:48 PM

Scalizi's new romance novel answers with a resounding "no" the question can a writer can creatively bounce back from a year of heroin and horse tranquilizer abuse. His surprising downward spiral started after the coup and unanimous reelection of President-For-All-Time Bush. Not long after the election he could be seen on street corners in small towns in Ohio with hypodermic needles dangling from both eyeballs holding a sign that read, "Will blow for smack."



It's admirable when someone has fallen so far makes a triumphant return to his chosen field. Last year Bill Clinton recovered finally from his eight years as president and returned to prostitution (his first true love, he admitted) and this year Rush Limbaugh also returned to fellating strangers in alleys. Scalzi though, is not so lucky.



The first sign that something is really amiss is the title of the book, "Greasepaint on my Scrotum." The text of the book surprisingly, not only has no clowns, it also makes no mention of the male nut sack. Fans of slapstick teabagging will have to wait for some other book to fill their needs. What this book does have is suicidal teenagers (six before I stopped counting), potty mouthed senior citizens (picture four Alan Arkins from Little Miss Sunshine without the amazing dialogue), a talking dog and cat, a super hero-like character that is based on either Superman or Batman or he could be their autistic son and a half-naked Indian that seems to have been lifted straight out of the "Wayne's World 2" movie. He attempts to weave these myriad characters into a fast paced romantic comedy but the story never really gets off the ground. You do end up hoping the story resolves itself in the style of a Shakespearean tragedy. What can you say about a book written so badly that you wish everyone in it was dead?



The writing is atrocious. Picture Christopher Moore with all the punch lines blacked out, Elmore Leonard with no dialogue or Danielle Steel without using the letter 'E.' Here's an example of an exchange between the talking dog, Horass and one of the foul mouthed grandfathers:



"What have I got in my pocket?" asked Horass.

"You don't have a godd*mn motherf*cking pocket." said Bill.

"Go ahead, guess."

"You don't have a godd*mn motherf*cking pocket!" screamed Bill.

"Suppose I had a pocket. What would I keep in it?"

"You don't have a motherf*cking godd*mn pocket!" roared Bill.

On the balcony above Joanne leaned over to Samantha and said, "If I was dead would you love me more?"
"Yes," Samantha whispered into Joanne's fake ear.



I could go on but I don't want to crack open this embarrassing novel ever again. I would warn everyone to steer clear of this book in your favorite bookstore but it really is so bad that the chance that your bookstore will stock it for more than four hours the first day it hits the street are pretty slim. Landfills across America are going to fill up with this book in such huge numbers that thousands of years for now when archeologists dig up our dumps they will think a well known author named John Scalzi declared himself more popular than Allah. In reality, he just wrote the shittiest book of the early 21sty century.

Steve Buchheit | March 6, 2007 03:50 PM

It Was Free and We want Our Money Back
The AI's Fitful Night's Rest by John Scalzi

We here at Scathing Reviews got our grubby mitts on a ARC of His Holiness John Scalzi's latest ramblings in ink, The AI's Fitful Night's Rest, the long awaited sequel to his run away hit screed, The Android's Dream.

The second book of what Mr. Scalzi has threatened to be his magnum opus trilogy of five books, started with an alien being insulted to death by flatulence. After reading this pile of paper, I now have a new won sympathy for that maligned alien.

While the story continues the missions of our hero, Harry Creek, and his efforts to reunite a shattered AI personality, this really isn't anything more than a blatant stealing of Gibson's Neuromancer, poorly shoe-horned into John's existing universe. While it is nice to see some favorite characters from the author's previous works reappear, most are only making stage calls. I would say these old friends didn't advance the plot, but to see if that was true I would first have to find the plot, which John Scalzi seems to have forgotten to put into this book.

To say this bound paper stack was specifically targeted to brain-dead, prepubescent 6th graders would be an insult to the demographic that really expect more from the bathroom humor in this book. Although we feel that this is the market John was aiming for.

At this point in the review we typically spoil the plot and what few surprises the author may have cooked up in their twisted little minds by giving tantalizing clues and quoting important passages. We at SR feel the less said about the contents of this book the better, reversing a two-decade long established tradition. Alas, for this book there is not a plot to spoil, although the book already has a spoiled smell about it. Instead your humble reviewer decided it was better to sleep on the issues, and see if daylight would either shine light on the subject, or at least provide an imaginative antiseptic to the festering wounds this book left in my mind.

So, having retired to my bed, I fell into my own fitful sleep, disturbed by the numerous times I awoke to go dry-heave into the sink from the after effects of the stilted prose. And in those moments of rest I was visited by three ghosts. First up was Robert Heinlein who asked, "What Navy did this puke ship out with, Bolivia's Salt Water Fleet? It's nonsensical given his history that he could write about these subjects." Robert then put a goonie hat on his head and disappeared. Next, I was confronted by a jovial Philip K. Dick, munching on a tofurkey leg. He said, "My cup runs over, but you better stop this guy before he rips off my Man in the High Castle or I'll send him some of my dreams." He then opened his robe to show me two AI's trapped in child-like automata, he said one was named Colossus, the other was Wintermute. "Beware of them, for written on their brow are the words 'I/O Error.'" When asked what this meant, he said, "Figure it out for yourself," and then he disappeared. Then, the most fearsome of the apparitions appeared. Douglas Adams in a black robe towered over me and I feared him more than the others. Mr. Adams, who spoke not a word, let me know by complex hand signals and nose tweaking that he was so highly upset about the many jokes John had ripped off and the constant allusions to his works that he had temporarily forsaken his "radical atheism" to appear to me in this dream. I asked him what he thought of the latest book and Mr. Adams responded by saying something about it not being worth a pair of Dingo's kidneys and wouldn't I just look at this dead body, which was the ARC lying on a stripped bed. Mr. Adams was banished by the sudden appearance of Harlan Ellison who stormed out of my Anxiety Closet, grabbed the ARC, and continued to berate John Scalzi saying that this mound of putrescence masquerading as a book was exactly what he was talking about two years ago when he first entered John's dreams. He said this while consuming the pages of the ARC. When I finally was able to explain to this Dream Ellison that I wasn't John. Harlan then hit me up for some maple syrup, Grade C, to get the taste of John's book out of his mouth. Then he asked for directions to Darke County.

There is nothing redeemable about this novel, except for the price you'd get per pound of paper from a recycler. Without a doubt, because of this stinkeroo, Mr. Scalzi will be forced to continue abusing us with his writing through Publish America. It's questionable that even they will accept it, their publishing schedule already full with books of higher quality from Travis Tea and Seymour Knutts. Our only real hope is that John's large intestine, in an effort to save humanity and the world of tomorrow, leaps through his abdominal wall to throttle him before he can inflict us with any more of this black-hole-of-the-imagination style of scribbling.

In conclusion, the reviewer suggests that if the reader is given the option of poking their eyes out with hot pokers or poke through this poke of a book, a turn of phrase slightly higher in quality than what you would find in between the covers of this book, buy a red tipped white cane and learn to appreciate Helen Keller jokes. Could the reader do worse than subjecting themselves to The AI's Fitful Night's Rest? Only with the use of power tools and a nunnery of sadistic school teachers. The editorial staff here at SR sincerely hope that John Scalzi will find a day job and stop writing. We suggest something with a paper hat. What else can we say except that Tom Doherty must be spinning in his grave, and he isn't dead, yet. This book might change that, but only if he reads it.

The AI's Fitful Night's Rest by John Sclazi
No rating, we didn't want to soil our star system by doing so.

Hogwallop | March 6, 2007 03:55 PM

In one of John Scalzi’s earlier works, a character is farted to death. After reading Scalzi’s latest, I know how the poor bastard feels.
Scalzi’s newest effort, You Suckers Will Buy It Regardless, reads less like he typed it and more like he passed gas in the general direction of the monitor, relying on some sort of sensor to parse his airborne fecal matter into something resembling a book.
Silent but deadly, indeed.
Here’s how bad it is: the title is actually the least insulting part of the book.
My first reaction to reading this steaming pile of wasted atoms was to double-check the author credit and make sure it didn’t actually read “By Athena Scalzi, John’s 10-year-old daughter.” Actually, what I was looking for was “By Athena Scalzi, John’s 10-year-old daughter, after she was abducted by aliens and had her brain replaced with a Honey Bun.” Because this “book” certainly reads like it was written by a 10-year-old girl whose central nervous system is controlled by a glazed pastry.
You doubt it can be that bad? Consider: In successive chapters, we’re introduced to a unicorn, a princess and a unicorn princess. None of whom, of course, possess even the slightest ability to speak in anything other than prose so dry that next to it, sawdust poses a drowning hazard.
Scalzi is not practicing writing here; he’s committing it. His writing is inept, the plot is absolutely absurd, the characters could be called parodies _ except parodies are, as a general rule, humorous _ and I don’t even like the font. It looks like Times New Roman threw up on a page.
And don’t get me started on the author picture. C’mon John. Lighting a cigar with a burning copy of one of Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars books? Classy, fella.
This may seem like less of a book review and more of an unfounded personal attack. Which is true, except it’s very well-founded. If you don’t believe me, I will allow you to judge for yourself with the following excerpt:

The unicorn, the princess and the unicorn princess all looked at me expectantly, like they were expecting me to say something. So I did.
“Hi. I’m Eric Hendrix,” I said, smirking internally at my skillful defusing of the awkward situation. After all, I am 817 years old. This isn’t my first trip around the sun.
“Janis Baez,” said the princess. “I’m the illegitimate child of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand.”
“Great,” I thought to myself. “A libertarian.”
“Joan Joplin,” said the unicorn princess.
“And I’m Jimi Clapton,” the unicorn added. “Now why are we on this spaceship? And why am I green? And what the heck is this thing in my head? It keeps saying that I’ve got an appointment with a large bug re: the eating of my intestines.”
“Oh, that,” I said, wondering how the unicorn princess would be in the sack. “It’s a thing that gives you information. And it controls your gun. Neato, huh?”

I would continue quoting from the book, but quite frankly, I’m already reflexively reaching for my revolver. Which is what Scalzi’s editor should have done when he was presented with this sucking chest wound of a book. There’s not a jury in the world that would have convicted the man that stopped this crime against humanity.
Instead, this is the legacy that we leave the world of tomorrow. I weep for the poor child that, when faced with a choice between this work and Battlefield Earth, picks up this one. At least the Scientologists offer massages.

Ghafla | March 6, 2007 04:21 PM

Something is seriously wrong with John Scalzi.

I've been a little concerned about him since reading The Android's Dream, and its sequel, A Vision in Wool showed even more worrying signs that his genial exterior hides a deeply warped soul. He has removed all doubt of his illness, however, with his is most recent book, the third and (please, God) final book in the trilogy, I Like to Fuck Sheep.

Some might argue that his isolated life in rural Ohio has driven him mad. While the insanity is self-evident (e.g. the transparently made-up family he attempts to foist on the readers of his weblog; does he really expect us to believe that a bald dweeb like him can attract a wife as smart, capable, and attractive as "Krissy," or that any real kid is as precocious as "Athena?"), I cannot help but think that a mind this warped and twisted can only be born, not made.

This is a demented brick of a book, 773 pages of highly readable prose that describing the most repulsive acts humanly imaginable in loving detail. The plot, such as it is, centers around the efforts of its Mary Sue protagonist, Jack Scalia, to amass, and subsequently violate, an enormous collection of sheep and human-sheep hybrids. If you want a thrilling plot full of interplanetary intrigue, or likable, well-drawn characters, look elsewhere; if you ever wanted an excruciatingly detailed description of how to have intercourse with a barnyard animal in zero gravity, well, then you're covered.

Keeping with Scalzi's desire to have each book stand on its own, it is completely unnecessary to read the previous books in the series in order to "appreciate" the current one. In fact, given the unrelenting repulsiveness of Dream-protagonist Robin Baker's cameo, it might be better that you not have any prior affection for the character.

At this point in a review, it might be traditional to quote a segment of the book, so as to give you, gentle reader, a flavor for it. As the family-friendly nature of this publication barely allows me to print the title of this abomination, much less any of its text, I would instead suggest imagining burying oneself in fresh sheep dung and attempting to masturbate. In addition to reenacting one if its early scenes, the resulting experience is likely to be far more pleasant than reading this novel.

Amy | March 6, 2007 06:28 PM

I woke up at 4am with the beginnings of a review whirling around in my head.

"John Scalzi has managed to do it again. I just finished his latest piece of tripe and promptly vomited. At least this time, I managed to have better aim -- his work now sits exactly where it belongs: a pile of puke in a pile of puke."

It went on from there, but just as I started to fall asleep again, I realized I could compact the whole thing to 17 syllables. So, here is my review:

His puke is sitting
in a pile of my puke --
Right where it belongs.

joe schreiber | March 6, 2007 07:02 PM

Considering the staggering commercial and critical success of Spike Jonze’s adaptation of THE ANDROID'S DREAM, last year’s Academy Awards darling and more recently championed by everyone from David Eggars to Saul Bellow, anyone can be forgiven for trying to write like John Scalzi…except perhaps Mr. Scalzi himself.

Sadly, FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION, Scalzi’s game new effort to match that previous novel’s energy and panache might well have been scrawled out by one of his army of imitators, rather than the man himself. As always, Scalzi may be forgiven for thinking of himself as the cleverest man in the room, but his only partially coherent narrative describing succession of increasingly miniaturized nesting “small worlds” (Scalzi never shies away from using the Disneyworld theme here), leaves the reader in a kind of stunned, tongue-swollen torpor, as if he’d just devoured an entire bag of heavily salted generic snacks followed up with a bag of sand.

In Scalzi’s worldview, the Intelligent Designers, a freewheeling crew of germplasm graffiti artists and x-ray crystallographers, have miniaturized our failing world into a series of matryoska-doll landscapes of itself, at the center of which the greatest thinkers of our time have been imprisoned as talking babies. Among them is Little Stephen “Look Who’s” Hawking, the reconstructed miniature of the famous astrophysicist, who "stands a scant eighteen inches tall, perfectly infantilized as a polystyrene simulacrum of his namesake, right down to a tiny motorized chair" and smells "vaguely of the synthetic Swedish colostrum marketed as Brest."

By his third act Scalzi has dispatched his usual bevy of “wacky” bureaucrats and sarcastic robots to liberate the trapped geniuses but by this time the reader is, if not thoroughly confused, at least interminably exhausted. Like being seduced or tickled by an incompetent lover, Scalzi’s newest effort leaves one with the manhandled sensation of one who overcompensates with lack of finesse by lustily barking enthusiasm.

James | March 6, 2007 07:55 PM

Scalzi's latest book, The Logic of Conscience, is a train wreck of mixed metaphors and extemporaneous philosophy. The author obviously has delusions of his latest work achieving the quasi-sacred status of a science fiction epic.

The thinly plotted story focuses on Candace Gilbert, a young astronomer who is tragically injured during the routine maintenance of a radio telescope. Mangled beyond the repair of even futuristic surgical techniques, she has her consciousness downloaded into a teaching robot (laudably called an Academibot) that is charged with teaching introductory Astronomy to Freshmen College students. Rather than being grateful for a second chance at life, she sinks into a dark depression in which she questions the meaning of existence.

This is a typical fish-out-of-water story, but Scalzi completely mishandles the potentially bittersweet plot with cheap bathroom humor and melodramatic writing. What was intended to be a deep exploration of the mechanics of thought is a juvenile foray into the repressed sexuality of a female mind trapped in a silicon body. This novel is the geeky fourteen year old male's dream of masturbatory fodder--science wrapped in a thin veneer of smut. Candace builds elaborate fantasy worlds for herself in the midst of depression that combine the surrealism of a Salvador Dali painting with the perversion of erotic vampire fiction.

The author attempts to imitate the past grand masters of science fiction by using prose that is not only deriviative, but reeks of narcissism and hubris. Character development is mainly narrative, comprised of a series of internal monologues and poorly contrived interactions with college Freshmen. Moments that could have lent a moment of brevity are instead driven home with the ham fisted technique of an author who barely writes about an eighth grade level.

This novel would succeed better as a warning to other authors about what happens when ideas are taken too seriously by a mind not capable of embracing the complexity of their truth. The truth of existence is not found through the exploration of fart humor. Do yourselves a favor and leave this book on the shelf.

David | March 6, 2007 09:27 PM

[B]Old Woman's TekWar[/B]
[I]"William Shatner"[/I] & [I]"John Scalzi"[/I]
Tor Books (June, 2009) 198 pp.

The ghost-writing duo of Athena and Krissy Scalzi have teamed up with William Shatner's ghost-writers to produce this latest entry in two interminable series -- "Shatner"'s [i]Tek War[/i] and "Scalzi"'s [i]Old Man's War[/i]. Fans of these series will need no explanation, while others will want no reminders.

Last year's revelation that all of Scalzi's work to date had actually been written by his daughter and wife, caused consternation in SF circles for those who had not realized that "John Scalzi" was simply a front for the talented duo. Athena admitted, before an audience at a science-fiction convention last October, that she was also the true author of Scalzi's weblog, [i]The Whatever[/i]. The team simply use John as the public face for their writing, and disclosed that he actually had very little to do with the books or the web site, "apart from silly ideas like that bacon cat", as Krissy put it.

Questioned about why they decided to join with another team for this latest effort, Athene rolled her eyes and pointed to her mother, while Krissy said, "We originally hoped for "John Norman", but it's always been a recurring nightmare of mine to write a book with Shatner. I hoped to get a chance to hit him, too.". The team admitted that putting Scalzi and Shatner together got them both out of the team's hair in order to do the serious writing "while the boys played computer games", according to Athena.

When the project was announced, critics questioned the benefits of bringing the two "universes" of Tek War and John Perry together, but the Scalzis insist that the result speaks for itself: none whatsoever. The team say that they were strongly inspired by Sylvester Stallone's example, to produce another book in both series.

I attempted to contact the book's editor, Patrick Neilsen Hayden at Tor books, but could only reach his wife, Theresa. Queried about the company's strategy in publishing yet another book in the series, she replied, "Patrick and John have so much fun dressing up like Klingons when they get together, and we thought they'd earned a treat. Besides, it's the only way to get Patrick out of his office long enough to sweep out the slush.

Whether that strategy will pay off remains to be seen, but early Amazon rankings are surprisingly high. Much of this is attributed to the crossover attraction for the audiences of both series. "They'll read anything", comments Krissy. "If it worked once, it'll work again", confided Athena.

I asked about how they reconciled the very different literary styles of the two series. "Style!", said Krissy, "That's a good one!" "Could I have some of whatever you're drinking?" asked Athena, but her mother firmly vetoed the idea. They explained that the whole team worked from an outline, which Athena wrote in crayon. "They did 100 pages or so, and we did 100 pages, then we shuffled them together. I drew a bunny rabbit on the cover, and we sent the whole thing off to Patrick. He liked the bunny. Daddy wanted a kitten, but we know our market."

Early readers have awarded guarded praise for the joint effort, which one reader said, "combines the non-stop action of Plato's [i]Dialogues[/i] with the thoughtful introspection of John Ringo's Posleen." And while I agree with that assessment, I doubt that the book will truly appeal to fans of either. It may find its own unique audience, but perhaps its most lasting legacy may be found in Krissy Scalzi's trenchant observation, "Hey, the advance check cleared."

Fedge | March 6, 2007 10:18 PM

It was funny the first time. Yet, John Scalzi has found a way to convince TOR to release his new novel that can only be summed up as “The first chapter of The Androids Dream, only 300 pages long.”

John Scalzi’s “aliens that speak in odors” idea first popped up in his “not meant for mass consumption” novel Agent to the Stars. It worked then. It was new and it wasn’t the driving force behind the story. Then, in The Androids Dream, another alien race has the similar way of communicating. This leads to an assassination, with the assassin using a device in his rectum and farts his enemy to death. Again, this was only a fraction of the story. Both of these novels have great characters and are great reads. Not because of the flatulence, but because they were written before John ran out of ideas.

Now all we are left with is The Putrid Crater. A heart-warming tale of an alien race that finds their fecal matter to be a thing of worship. This species is also looking to the stars for the first signs of intelligent life. While sending out a “sniff rover” to every plant they come across, the Clowiuin aliens happen upon a red planet that has no intelligent life and broken rolling objects. The aliens quickly learn that they belong to a blue planet that happens to be in the neighborhood. Before the aliens decide to make them selves know to the “half-haired” creatures, they watch.

They notice that the humans don’t save their poo. As a matter of fact they evacuate it from their homes as soon as it arrives. Fortunately for the humans, the Clowiuin’s are a race of tolerance, and they want to teach the humans how to properly deal with the holy goods. All I am going to say is that when humans get married they save a piece of cake for their first anniversary. Well, in The Putrid Crater, the humans adopt a new wedding tradition that is similar only in that they save something for a year, what that something is and what they do with it I will spare you from.

This book covers about every way a person could misuse human excrement. After the first three chapters I realized that John Scalzi has given up on coming up with anything new. I hope I am wrong, but it seems that gone are the days of books like Old Man’s War and The Androids Dream. Now all we have to look forward to are retellings of Beavis and Butt-head stories set in an already explored Sci-Fi universe.

Bob Hussey | March 6, 2007 11:27 PM

No Gold at the End of Puberty’s Rainbow

It was with high expectations that this reviewer received an advanced copy of Puberty’s Rainbow, the new novel from Hugo award-winning author John Scalzi. Recently named an SFWA Grand Master, Scalzi is one of the premier writers of contemporary science fiction and reluctant founder of the ‘New Comprehensible’ movement, a response to the so-called ‘Hard SF’ that dominated the genre for much of the 90’s. Scalzi’s classic, Old Man’s War, is currently being made into a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
So given Scalzi’s credentials, imagine my shock and dismay at reading through the first few pages of his new book and realizing I was holding a work of young adult fiction, and a romance to boot.
Puberty’s Rainbow follows the adolescent adventures of Jason Gregorian, a 17-year old boy genius with a head for astrophysics and a stunted leg. The girl of his dreams is Jessica, a sophomore cheerleader who’s ecstatic that her ‘Daddy’ recently gave her a Visa platinum card for her birthday and endlessly frets over the interior colors for the new BMW she has on order. The story meanders back and forth between Jason’s preparation for his school’s annual Science Fair and his futile efforts to bed the shopaholic Jessica. Without revealing the story’s climax, I can only tell you that I was shocked, not at the ending itself, but that I was able to force myself to read that far.
Unfortunately, Scalzi’s gift for character development seems to have left him. Jason is a sniveling little twerp, angry at the world for his unusually large brain, his problem skin and withered limb. The bum leg initially elicited my sympathies but as the story unfolded and Jason’s complaints grow more annoying and hackneyed, I found myself hoping someone would come along and shove the little whiner down a flight of stairs. Despite the monumental discovery he makes at the end (okay, here’s the spoiler: he figures out how to fold space), I’m sure humanity would have willingly forsaken it in exchange for having never met this kid.
Jessica is your typical overindulged mall-rat, shallow, superficial and obsessed with her appearance. I wasn’t sure why Mr. Scalzi had Jessica constantly refreshing her hair spray throughout the story. At first I thought it was an attempt at humor but then I began to think that perhaps he, like me, secretly hoped someone would come by with a lighter and set this cheerleader aflame, mid-spray. Alas, here too, Scalzi failed me as Jessica survives the book unscathed and manages to assemble an entirely new wardrobe.
The only redeeming character is Molly, a plain girl with poor credit who vies for Jason’s affections while emerging as his chief rival for the school’s Science prize. Though at times I found myself drawn to the unpretentious Molly, her feelings for Jason are completely baffling. I actually found myself rooting for her to join up with the carnival that inexplicably passes through town near the end of the story.
As far as the writing itself, someone must have mixed a cephalotropic drug in with Scalzi’s Viagra. Nothing else can explain his new-found loquacity. Gone are the sparse style, realistic dialogue and subtle humor that characterized earlier works such as Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony. Puberty’s Rainbow is replete with such eye-gouging sentences as the following: Incredibly, momentously, Jason’s love for Jessica actually grew, despite the surprisingly mocking tone she used when talking about his leg brace.
Later, when Jason is on the verge of connecting black holes and string theory, we are witness to this offense: Though the answer was there before him, he just needed to divide again by ‘y,’ Jason felt that his success was depressingly, remarkably unsatisfying without Jessica there to share it.
Have mercy.
One might wonder what drove an accomplished man of letters like Scalzi to pen such a work. Might J.K. Rowling’s recent mega-seller, A Hogwart’s Wedding, have anything to do with it? With the huge success of his earlier works, did he begin to have delusions of writing the Great American (Young Adult Romance) Novel? Certainly better men than Scalzi have succumbed to greed and hubris. Of course, we’ll never entirely know his motives, though I’m sure the $4 million advance he reportedly received from Subterranean Press to write this and his upcoming novel (due in May 2011) was probably impossible to refuse.
For those of you with hamster cages in need of fresh lining, please, by all means, add Puberty’s Rainbow to your shopping cart. For the rest of us, let’s hope that Mr. Scalzi’s latest effort is merely a minor detour in an otherwise illustrious career and that his doctors will modify his prescriptions accordingly before allowing him back near his word processor.

Miscellaneous Steve | March 7, 2007 01:02 AM

In the Valley of the Joyless

The Littlest War by John Scalzi

Perhaps stung by criticism of his one-inch-tall Covandu in reviews of his novel Old Man's War, John Scalzi attempts to elucidate these diminutive creations in his new novel, The Littlest War.

Set in the Old Man's War universe, this annoying new novel tells the tale of Colonial Defense Forces soldier Nigel St. Hubbins, who deserts the CDF and escapes to the planet Covand where he attempts to assuage his conscience over the millions of Covandu who have died beneath his boots during his years of military service. It is a situation rife for yet another Gulliver's Travels rehash. Thankfully, Scalzi avoids this form of cheap drivel. Unfortunately, the cheap drivel he does offer up is even worse. Think less Gulliver and more Jolly Green Giant. At one point in the novel, after his CDF uniform has frayed to rags, St. Hubbins denudes an entire Covandian forest to make himself a leafy-green tunic.

St. Hubbins is an unconvincing character whose utter joy at killing slowly wanes as his fellow soldiers die one-by-one in contrived combat situations (told in highly maudlin flashbacks) that leave the reader wondering if perhaps there isn't a drinking game lurking somewhere in the repetitive, teen-slasher-film-like scenes of the deaths of the members of St. Hubbins unit. The reader certainly ceases to care about these green-skinned red-shirts early on and perhaps a shot of single malt each time one of the cardboard cannon fodder meets his or her predictable end would make the remainder of the novel more interesting. It can't be any worse drunk than it is sober.

In between the flashback carnage are scenes of genuine boredom as St. Hubbins attempts to find redemption through acts of kindness. He builds hospitals out of twigs and papier-mâché; he hikes for literally minutes between cities, carrying much-needed food and water to stricken urban locales. In what is easily the novel's least-convincing scene, St. Hubbins carries a young Covandu with a twisted leg, obligatorily named Tim, to a distant university research hospital where he receives experimental gene therapy and, miraculously, is healed and walks again. And, yes, Tim does riff on the Famous Line.

There is perhaps little point in presenting an excerpt from the novel, but here it is anyway:

Winter had turned particularly bitter with the new year and my dried, crumbling tunic afforded me little protection. Goosebumps like frozen peas broke out across my skin. The muffler the Covandu had spent all summer knitting for me would not quite wrap around my neck. My conscience was as dry and brittle and green as my clothes--as ill-fitting as the gift the Covandu had spent so much time and effort creating. My BrainPal laughed at me.

In an ending that is perhaps meant to be ironic, perhaps touching and perhaps simply the point at which Scalzi really stopped caring, St. Hubbins is gunned down by Whaidians as he attempts to defend his miniscule charges from the alien invasion. In the "heart-wrenching" final scene, St. Hubbins' bullet-riddled body crumples to the ground and squashes thousands of innocent Covandu to jelly.

His final, Kurtz-like utterance, "Ho, ho, ho..." fails utterly to elicit the emotional resonance Scazli was surely going for.

Perhaps Scalzi takes his position as vanguard for the New Comprehensible a bit too seriously in offering up this icon of advertising kitsch as the entryway into his OMW universe. On the other hand, he may simply be burned out and the bag of frozen peas he stumbled across during a depression-driven 1 a.m. refrigerator raid was the first inkling of "inspiration" he could glom onto as the deadline loomed ever closer. Whatever the case, one wishes that he had found the cold pizza instead, or perhaps the Chinese takeout left over from the night before. Anything, really, that would spare the book-buying public this work of Joyless Green Garbage.

David Kirkpatrick | March 7, 2007 02:16 AM

Title: A Bear in the Woods: 30 years of Squatlogging, 1979-2009
Author: John Scalzi
Publisher: U.S.News & World Report, L.P.
Date of Publication: August, 2009
Page Count: 363
ISBN: 978-1-59606-063-0

The world-wide book-buying public has been anxiously awaiting the latest from Scalzi, and unfortunately, it's here. Twenty-five journalists were privileged to have been given an advance copy of 'ABITW'; my copy arrived two days before publication and I finished it within five hours of snatching it from the UPS delivery man's hands. Now I have the thankless task of reviewing what everyone is expecting to be yet another masterpiece from the writer who, in only five short years finally knocked Stephen King from his lofty perch atop the literary world. It is my sorry duty to report that the title is entirely accurate, describing perfectly the contents of the book, and also describing perfectly the prose contained on the pages of the book.

The less said about the contents, the better, in my opinion. Each chapter represents a year in Scalzi's life, and each chapter has approximately 365 paragraphs. Thankfully, most are only a sentence or two in duration, but some stretch on and on and on. For these interminable entries, it becomes something akin to driving by a hideous car wreck - you know you should look away because you might see something you'll want to forever purge from your memory, but at the same time you can't bring yourself to turn your head because you might miss something more hideous than you can imagine. Some of Scalzi's entries invoke that same feeling, especially when his discussion goes into loving detail concerning textures, colors, and coatings. The August 21st, 2007, entry will be forever seared in my brain; the early in-depth descriptions, immediately followed by an overflow due to pipe blockage and subsequently compounded by the involvement of two cats, the dog who will eat anything, and the surprised, disgusted, and prone-to-fainting-in-the-worst-possible-place mother-in-law will haunt me until my dying day. If I'm particularly unlucky, I'll still remember it after I'm dead.

In retrospect, warning signs were obvious that this would be a book that should never have been written. The title was taken from a 2005 entry in Scalzi's world-famous blog 'The Whatever' about writers who could publish anything, no matter how bad, but everyone assumed the title was meant as an in-joke. Would that it were so! More flags should have gone up when Scalzi's ubiquitous editor, Hayden at Tor Books, refused to purchase 'ABITW' for Tor, and subsequently would not discuss the book when queried. After a fierce bidding war, U.S.News & World Report L.P., the company responsible for the newspaper of the same name, won the rights to the book, apparently sight-unseen, as it was reported at the time that Scalzi refused to provide a synopsis or plot outline of any kind. The payment that Scalzi received for the rights to 'ABITW' is rumored to be the largest ever offered, more than doubling the previous record set by Stephen King's blockbuster 'Bloody Carrie', the sequel to both 'Carrie' and 'Salem's Lot'.

Scalzi's writing is well-known for its frequent digressions into 'body humor', as his legions of fans have proclaimed it. From one sentence mentions in 'Old Man's War' and 'The Ghost Brigades', Scalzi progressed to a chapter-long fart joke with 'The Android's Dream'. Subsequent books featured other interludes, the most famous (or infamous) of which involved a cat, two pounds of bacon, a poo-flinging monkey, three constantly-sneezing sheep with out-of-control sinus infections, and a shampoo bottle full of smegma. To young adults raised on the adventures of Captain Underpants, Scalzi is a cultural hero. 'A Bear in the Woods' might appeal to these readers, but I expect that the rest of the reading public will react with horror and disgust rather than laughter. However, Scalzi himself will be laughing all the way to the bank, as pre-orders on 'ABITW' have been astronomical. The film rights that were sold to Fox are likely to be worthless; only the unfortunately deceased Adam Sandler might have been able to film this book.

To summarize, this book is about Scalzi's 'dumps', but in writing it, he's also 'dumped' all over the pages, 'dumped' all over his expectant and faithful readers, and left us all 'down in the dumps'. Truly a shitty book in every possible way a book could be shitty.

deCadmus | March 7, 2007 03:47 AM

John Scalzi shouldn’t drink. That much is made clear -- by Scalzi himself, no less -- in the introduction to his latest book, I Can’t Believe You’re Still Buying This Shit: Scalzi on Scalzi.

In its forward, Scalzi tells the tale of how this regrettable volume came to be: the bar bet he should never have agreed to and couldn’t have won, his brief bout with remorse, his subsequent acceptance of the situation, and -- in the course of fulfilling his side of the Faustian bargain -- the twisted exhilaration of exhuming his previously aborted work. All of it. To be precise, one thousand seven hundred fifty-two pages of it.

In his seminal screed, You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop, Scalzi admits “throwing away” his first six efforts to write the first chapter of The Ghost Brigades. Of these, two were burned by his wife. A third was torn into small pieces and eaten by his agent. The remaining three -- together with elaborate and self-aggrandizing commentary and footnotes -- comprise chapters four, five and six of Scalzi on Scalzi. More’s the pity John’s agent vomited so soon.

We’re treated, too, to never before seen drafts of the as-yet-unpublished, Old Man’s Peace:

“I did three things on my eighty-fifth birthday. I resigned my commission in the Colonial Defense Forces. I surrendered my New Body, receiving my Old Body in return. And I wet myself. It sucks to be old. Again.”

The rest reads as so much Vogon poetry.

I note that Scalzi on Scalzi is offered only in an exclusive, limited edition from publisher Subterranean Press. I admit to finding the volume’s dust-jacket -- hand-colored by Scalzi’s delightful daughter -- to be entirely charming. Further, I appreciate the unusual inscription penned by the author’s wife, which reads, “For God’s sake, don’t encourage him!” Mostly, though, I’m grateful there will ever only be 100 copies of this fetid pile of rancid prose loosed on the world. For if ever there were a book that should not be judged by its cover, this is it.

Chris Green | March 7, 2007 05:36 AM

From the pen of prolific science fiction author, John Scalzi, leaks his latest novel 'Old Man’s Peace' (Tor Books, ¥1,500). Incontinence and old-old age has finally caught up with Scalzi’s hard man of advertising, John Perry. The former writer, soldier and pro-wrestler now lives, in diapers, at the Home for Retired Rejuvenated Geriatrics on the colony planet of Pee Wee-5. (The original retirement colonies of Pee Wee 1 through 4, having been lost due to clerical errors and Alzheimer’s disease.)

While dull, the less than exotic background is still more interesting than the next hundred pages, as Perry delves into the memoirs of his life. If you can survive the interminable flashbacks into Perry’s conquests – and not just the military ones - then you may be able to stomach the rest of the book. Long winded passages are dedicated to his grand children, his stamp collection and bitter tirades against his resurrected gender redefined ex-husband John Sagan.

“Blast you Sagan. You can take my pension, you can take my bladder control but you can’t take my WWF champion belt”, wheezed Perry, menacing Sagan with his hydro-powered cane. “And I want my false leg back too.”
“If you weren’t so damned old, you’d realize this is the only way to defeat the Rraey!” Sagan shouted back, “No one takes the Ghost Brigade’s table at Denny’s without a fight.”

The end climax as the two are reunited, is as lifeless as the love scene that follows. Let this be a warning to all of Scalzi’s fans: 'Old Man’s Peace' is a limp read. You are better off buying the more intellectually stimulating 'Ten Reasons Why I Love Shopping' by Paris Hilton (see last week’s article). Or better yet using 'Old Man’s Peace' as litter tray filling, as this columnist has done. Mr Peebles, the office gerbil, has given a far more honest and copious critique of Mr Scalzi’s work than is possible here.

Alexandre Lemieux | March 7, 2007 08:18 AM

Wow, 33 entries already. Well, here's mine. I haven't read any of the other submissions yet, in case some points are similar.

--

I received John Scalzi's latest book three days ago and hacked my way through it. I write "hack" because you got to feel the need to see the last page to get through this book. I first read a book byScalzi three years ago. Since then, I've become a fan of his work. I met him last year when he was the guest of honor of the New Comprehensible convention in Washington.Scalzi's latest book, "The Elven Smell", is his first shot at writing fantasy, but honestly, he should have stayed away from the genre. Some people likeScalzi's books because he writes complex stories with living characters. If this is what you enjoy in his books, stay away from "The Elven Smell." One's ability to adapt fart jokes to science-fiction does not mean he is able to repeat the feat in fantasy, especially not with elves. The Elven Smell is the largest ofScalzi's fiction books with well over 600 pages. 600 pages you have to painfully get through. His humor is becoming more and more grotesque as youdig into the book. There are many inside jokes most readers would not understand if they have not been following John Scalzi's blog, The Whatever, for a long while. For example main character's pet is a cat named Bacon.
The Elven Smell is the story of Mirdor, an elf from a decadent realm. But Mirdor is not as every other elves, as he can _smell_ magic. When a dark plague hit the citizens of the realm, the young elf seems to be the only one who can save his people. Disgusting scenes quickly become repetitive as people die all around the hero. Scalzi often fall for the genre's clichés, his characters are victims and not in control of their destiny. A few elements are unbelievable. For example, traveling between the major cities happen so fast you are wondering what kind of horses the elves have. Or maybe the realm is very, very small, but the descriptions Scalzi makes tend to paint it as a big place. This is just one example but there are many others that make you want to put the book down, pages after pages.
By the time you reached the sixth chapter, you have a good idea about how the books might end and, sadly, you won't go Oh! because of any big twist near the ending. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I was very disappointed. The book seems to have been rushed to the press, just in time to be eligible for this year's Hugo, maybe hoping his army of fans would be able to influence the vote. I don't think this is a good strategy, but it worked last year for his book "Mr. Thomas was an Alien".

Muneraven | March 7, 2007 12:07 PM

This is not a contest entry, it's a fannish post to give you a break from all those imaginary bad reviews. I stuck it in here because I didn't know where one properly goes all fannish on John Scalzi. :-)

I finished reading "Old Man's War" last week and not only could I not put it down, I was also forced to have a deeply profound self revelation: I've been saying for years that I do not like military-ish science fiction. Books with soldiers in space have gotten nothing but disinterested looks from me for years. Outgrew that genre in 5th grade, I told myself.

I'm such a liar. I liked Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey books and I really enjoyed "Old Man's War" too. Well crap. Another self perpetuated myth down the drain. Hell I even went to Heinlein panels at a con this past weekend and put some of his books on my must-read-again list.

You know, it was just that I didn't like BAD soldiers in space books. Thanks for writing a terrific one. I really enjoyed it and plan to pick up more of your books.

Evan Goer | March 7, 2007 12:15 PM

John Scalzi is the worst writer of his generation.

This is not to say that Scalzi generates the most execrable prose imaginable, as measured against the absolute scale of the slush pile. Scalzi can, after a fashion, string English words together into sentences, and occasionally into paragraphs. Still, when you think of the dregs of the slush -- the manuscripts that arrive in ALL CAPS WITH NO PUNCTUATION along with a note from a social worker, "Thank you for taking a look at this, I think this is all very therapeutic for my client," -- you are not far off the mark. This sort of work and Scalzi's recent Perry Uber Alles are spiritual cousins, except the latter has managed to acquire a PVA glue binding.

After the disastrous reception of 2008's The Will, The Triumph, one might expect Scalzi to reconsider his decision to take his universe in a different direction. Perhaps a reboot? It was all a dream? As we can see from the opening lines of Perry Uber Alles, the answer is, sadly, no:

It is a dark time; the evil John Perry rules with a titanium fist.

And it's basically downhill from there. Consider this scene with Zara, Zoe's cybernetically-enhanced clone-daughter:

"I won't let you go on this mission," Colonel Sampson said, gripping her by the arm. "It's too dangerous."

"You don't understand," Zara snapped. "The remnants of the Colonial forces are faltering. Perry's legions of Impal-o-bots are loose, slaughtering at will. If there's one chance to stop my insane undead adoptive clone-grandfather, I'm taking it." She turned and looked out at the stars. "I'm coming for you, God-Emperor John Perry! And Hell's coming with me!!"

Clearly a few Daddy issues there. The rest of the novel consists of fifty-page philosophical diatribes interspersed with energetic sex scenes between Zara and her Rraey husband, Gar-Gar. (Thanks to flashback and dream sequences, these scenes persist well after Gar-Gar's exsanguination in Chapter 13 -- perhaps the only high point of the novel).

Finally, even Scalzi's interest flags. To his credit, he ends the story in the only way possible:

And then without any warning, an asteroid crashed into the planet, killing everybody.

THE END

But wait, there's more!

EPILOGUE

All seemed quiet. But then, a black mailed fist punched up through the rubble.

John Perry... lives!

Rather than being disappointed by this ending, I have to confess that a tiny part of me felt relieved, even happy. After all, anyone who would unleash legions of Impal-o-bots on this particular universe can't be all bad.

Perhaps in the end, that is John Scalzi's point.

Vardibidian | March 7, 2007 12:29 PM

Book Report: The Faerie Queene's Warre

Actually, I quite liked it.

I mean, no, it’s not a great book by any means, but let’s be clear: most of the crap this book has taken has nothing to do with the merits of the book itself. It’s about John Scalzi, and it’s about the State of the Genre, and it’s about the situation in the world, but it’s not about the book. It’s Dylan going electric. Well, it’s Miles and Bitches Brew, with the people he left behind feeling, rightly, that their one-time hero had just called them fans of a dead art form. But Miles, we liked the earlier, funnier jazz! Well, screw you, said Mr. Davis, he did, and screw you says Mr. Scalzi, and I understand that most of the reviews are just saying ‘no, screw you.’ Which is fine, but has nothing to do with the book.

Look, he always said that when he sat down to get a novel published, he looked at what was selling, and picked military sf as the most congenial bit of what was popular. Mr. Scalzi isn’t responsible for the fact that military sf stopped selling, and the same reasoning that made him write Old Man’s War naturally made him stop writing in a dead subgenre. Why is it dead? Honestly, I think we have to thank (or blame) Secretary Jolie. While we were in a military ferment over the supposed Clash of Civilizations, military sf had just the right mix of escapism and topicality, particularly when treated light-heartedly. Now that the Jolie Plan has defused world tensions, it’s less appealing. Sure, some of us still like it. Some of us still listen to our Charlie Parker records. On vinyl. What does that have to do with a working writer?

No, if you are going to trash this book, you ought to do it on the merits of the book itself, not on the perceived (or actual) insult to his former fanbase. And how is the book itself? Well, as I said, I quite liked it. Yes, the scansion isn’t perfect. The rhymes are … fair. There are a handful of cute ones, and a handful of truly clunky ones. The characters are bland, but then they are always pretty bland in this sort of thing. And for people who like plot, well, the plot is the same plot it always is in this sort of thing. So, you know, if you don’t like Spencerian epic, then you are not going to like this sort of thing, and that’s all there is to it.

What does it have? Well, it has the merits of the form. A certain serenity. A kind of pastoral peacefulness. An attention to rococo detail. Is that dull? Sure, compared to people getting shot by aliens, it’s dull. Heck, compared to almost anything, it’s dull. That’s the point. We have entered into a dull age, and the hyperactive century of science fiction has given way to a more contemplative form. For that you can blame—what? Peace? Prosperity? The disappearance of the climate change threat? The systematic introduction of mood-altering drugs into our water supply? However you want to slice it, the fact remains that when you visit a text supply location to register for your required literature allotment, there may be one or two h’rng’habacks of military sf, but there will be a whole glarkfull of Spencerian poetry. Because that’s what the R’peuphids want, and that’s how the market works.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Christian | March 7, 2007 01:18 PM

HarperCollins Children’s Books
Att: Susan Foster, Editor
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019

Dear Ms. Foster -

My husband I are good Christians, and we are appalled at the filthy trash coming out of your publishing company, especially the so called "Children's Book" division. Your recently published author John Scalzi is a sinner, and shouldn't be allowed to write anything, much less children's books.

Our daughter Savannah came home from school with a book entitled:

"Ghlaghghee And Gwedif's Colonoscopy Adventure"

At first this seemingly innocent children's book appears to be educational, and covers the delicate subject of colo-rectal health. Little did we know our daughter would be seeing pictures of some blobby alien sticking a tentacle up into a cat's behind!

It was OBSCENE to show what was obviously a HOMOSEXUAL alien defiling a household pet, and I am now worried that my daughter will become GAY. We are seeking counseling from our pastor to ensure that your sickening book hasn't ruined my daughter for life!

Sincerely Yours,

Mrs. Polly Hasternack
Farmsville, Oklahoma

Kip W | March 7, 2007 01:55 PM

Review: Ewe Turn, by John Scalzi

With the "esteemed" New York Times stating flatly that his early work was better and the Springfield Republican asking rhetorically, "Why are we reading this bald man? He can't even grow hair!" I had to read it myself to make up my own mind.

And I have to say:

It.

Is.

Great!

This is the most fantastic book ever written. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to buy two copies to send to every friend you have. I'm buying six!

Amazon Rating: Five Stars

Username: JonahGoldberg

John Bull | March 7, 2007 03:17 PM

John Scalzi’s latest release “Deus ex machina” the long awaited and inevitable sequel to “The Androids Dream” is a true feat to behold. There are few authors who are able to wedge so much derogatory cyber sex, rehashed material, and un-imaginative garbage between two book ends. Much as the parable of the little boy and the ocean deprived starfish, if I can save just one person from reading this book it will have been worth the electrons it takes to make this ensuing article.

Scalzi’s decision to simultaneously release the book on both paper and The Times Smart Paper™ has done nothing to detract from the refuse that is this novella. His apparent rise to Sci-Fi fame will undoubtedly end with this farce of a tale the same way Orson Scott Card petered with “Xenocide”. The story begins with the continual dare I say perpetual existence of Brian Javna as the semi godlike computer intelligence in the Nidu (a cookie cutter lizard race) uber-network. Brian’s story is apparently an attempt to show the dangers of an all powerful machine in a connected universe. Instead his tragedy reads more like Monty Python’s Life of Brian. All this story needs is a sappy and catchy song at the end of the book that plays like a greeting card.

Excerpt from “Deus ex machina” :

“Brian’s first attempt to interface with the Common Confederation’s core framework was less like the integration he was expecting and more like fucking with your clothes on. Not that Brian had any clothes, but that’s what it felt like. By adding more queries to the register Brian was able to take stock of what he had found. It was huge, phenomenally huge, and spread out to far more worlds than any CC census ever indicated. Brian was tempted to tell The N.E.L. about the list but decided to wait until he had a better understanding of what exactly lay behind the layers of security setup on the framework.”

Anne C. | March 7, 2007 06:11 PM

"Deep Six this Deep Disappointment"
- Reviewie McReviewerson

I suppose I should blame myself for setting my expectations too high. John Scalzi's first published novel, Old Man's War, was good enough to give his readers a glimpse into his seemingly brilliant future as a writer. What heights would this newcomer accomplish? The Campbell Award he won in 2006 seemed to say -- "Just wait!"

We waited. TOR published several more of his books courtesy of a multi-book contract. Critical acclaim and a growing fan base appeared to support his early fans' expectations. To be honest, this reviewer felt the works had an uneven quality that were tell-tale signs of a writer stretched to his limits. Skeptical readers may disagree, but the indications were there.

It would be self-aggrandizing for this reviewer to claim to be the innocent's voice from the crowd that reveals the Emperor to be buck-naked, but the analogy is apt. John Scalzi's latest book, _Zoe's Farm_, (TOR, 2009) is the final book in TOR's contract, and even if the public has not realized the well is dry, this reviewer is quite sure Patrick Nielsen Hayden has. TOR has not yet signed another contract with Mr. Scalzi.

The plot is simple. After the dramatic conclusion of _The Last Colony_, Zoe Boutin and Sameer Desai elope and head off to Eyeskewb, a frozen colony planet. (It seems Scalzi opens National Geographic Magazine to a random page to find the planet-wide ecology of his latest setting.) In his blog, Whatever, he admits to eliminating Sameer Desai from TLC (Sept. 20, 2006). If only he had held with his original design. Zoe dies in childbirth early in the book so that Sameer, resurrected from the oblivion of discarded characters, dominates the remainder of the book's one-note setting with singular blandness. The prose reads like a stripped down version of _The Bridges of Madison County_. The following is an excerpt:

"Sameer visited his dead wife's grave every day. It was the only place he felt at peace. The icy winds blew over the clear ice lid, keeping it clear of snow so he might see her dear frozen face always."

Had this reviewer actually paid for this book, rather than receiving an ARC, it might have been found burning merrily in the grate. It certainly would have provided more entertainment there. Unfortunately, in order to write this review in good concience, it was required that the entire book be read.

It would have been preferable to find this book to be amusingly bad. The fart jokes of _Android's Dream_ were juvenile, but at least it was an attempt at humor. If only the book were derivative in some way, allowing for some mental stimulation in finding the not-so-cleverly-hidden "tributes." _Zoe's Farm_ provided no such entertainment. It is mind-numbingly boring. The plot resembles the endless snow fields that surround the igloo homestead within the book. Its hero deserves to be interred in a block of ice next to his wife and still-born child.

This reviewer has been reading John Scalzi since early in his career. His writing seemed so promising. It may be this history that makes this latest book to be so disappointing. He raised our hopes for a New Comprehensible science fiction. He talked a good talk. Pity he couldn't walk a good walk as well. His latest book is the ultimate betrayal for an early fan. _Zoe's Farm_ takes the definition of banal to a new low and its author has been revealed as disappointly ordinary.

In a nutshell: Buy this book for only two reasons: as an example of how *not* to write, or as an over-the-counter sleep aid.

Shawn Powers | March 7, 2007 10:18 PM

Award winning author, John Scalzi teams up with publicist and guy-pal Robert Eggleton for the latest in his assortment of not so subtle ego trips wrapped a limited edition, signed hardcover. This time, unfortunately, “hardcover” is merely card stock, as John self-publishes this title in the ol' Xerox and stapler fashion. Once you read the first few pages, you'll understand why even the vanity press publishers wouldn't touch this one.



While the title, Scalzi on Scalzi may carry the hint of a sordid sex scene or two, that disturbing image is quickly extinguished and replaced with the unfortunate realization that a disturbing sex scene would actually be more enjoyable to read than the 13 chapters of narcissistic prattling that makes this “book” what it is.



Any endearing feelings you might have for this, the author of Old Man's War, and it's subsequent books, will quickly turn to a slight taste of vomit in the back of your throat. John, who writes this autobiography in 3rd person, quite quickly makes you hate not only him, but pretty much every character he's ever written. He yammers on and on about his characters, as if we are all too stupid to understand John Perry struggled with the moral implications of war. Scalzi relishes on the Heinlein comparisons so much in fact, that after chapter 2, he begins referring to himself as “Little Heiny.” Sadly, he doesn't see the play on words, and truly makes a big “Heiny” out of himself. Do us all a favor, John, and use some of that coveted sci-fi war prose to craftily lobotomize yourself. We'd all appreciate the improvement it would make to your writing, and people might actually pay to read about it.



Back to the review though, the unending litany on the success of his first book would bore a comatose sloth to suicide. Ironically, John never mentions his decision in 2008 to pledge all the royalty checks he receives from Tor to support the lesbian koala plight. Not so proud of that one, eh John? This reviewer, however, will go so far as to say that gender confused marsupials are more interesting than the entirety of the first 5 chapters. It's chapter 6, however, that stands out as the most absurd bit of garbage ever to be called writing. For 35, count 'em, 35 pages, John describes the things to which he's taped bacon. Here's a bit from the Scazi Xerox Press I received:

Little Heiny is well known for his incredulous taping of bacon to a cat. Few of his fans actually realize the number of bacon tapings that actually took place in that short stretch of genius in 2005. He taped bacon to a car. He taped bacon to a horse. He taped bacon to a mailman. He taped bacon to a pig. Yes. A. Pig. He taped bacon to an Audi. He taped bacon to the ceiling. He taped bac...

You get the idea. The only reason a person should read this drivel, is if they truly want to see how bad a has-been author can really get. Even at that, I suggest stopping after the first few pages, because trust me – it never gets better, and it couldn't be worse.



Let's hope the koalas aren't depending on your sales with this book, John, because whether you tape bacon to it or not -- it stinks.

Shawn Powers | March 7, 2007 10:21 PM

Hmm... hopefully not judged on HTML presentation...

Scott Baker | March 7, 2007 11:08 PM

Award-winning author John Scalzi's new book 'The' was released last week amid a great deal fanfare and public spectacle. Despite promising first-week sales, however, it appears Scalzi's fans have finally thrown in the towel and called it quits on the author. Millions of readers flocked to book-stores across the world last week to pickup 'The'. And, according to a recent study concluded by the New York Times, 98% of those same fans returned to the same book stores this week and demanded a refund. Thirty-seven of his ex-fans went so far as to file lawsuits against the once-popular Mr. Scalzi, stating they needed monetary compensation to help replace the wasted hours spent reading 'The'. Finally, two other Scalzians even personally offered to give the publisher money if the house would pull the book off the shelves immediately.

Scalzi's latest book chronicles the life and trials of an avocado named Slick who shares a refrigerator shelf with a gallon of spoiled milk named Stink-o and set of misplaced car-keys aptly named Jingles. Slick, Stink-o, and Jingles spend 388 pages discussing life, dodging late-night snackers, and attempting to escape their chilly prison.

The character name-cliches are only a small sampling of the awful literature that lies within the pages of 'The'. There are plot twists where no action is occuring in the story-line, unknown characters that appear and disappear with no explanations as to who they are or what they're doing, seventeem different characters named Roy, and even an interlude in the middle of the book that is nothing but a plagerism from 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.'

Has John Scalzi lost his mind?

Most of his readers think so. 'The' is by far the most God-awful book ever printed, ranking even worse than Tobias Buckell's