Humans have migrated into space and lost contact with Earth. They live now in an Empire they call The Interdependancy. There is no faster than light travel, the laws of physics forbid it. There is the Flow. The Flow isn’t well understood, but it has pathways, and those paths allow ships to travel between planets in months rather than years or centuries. The Empire is called The Interdependency because it is deliberately designed so that each colony depends on the others to survive. Each colony […]
I Will Never Feel Bad About Loving a Mary Sue Again
Last night I had my first John Scalzi dream, borrowing from Lock In, Redshirts, and Old Man’s War. My consciousness has just been downloaded into a body, and I am standing on a cliff overlooking a harbor. There’s another person sitting in a machine gun nest in front of me telling me that “he” is on the boat just docking (I’ve also been watching Shetland, so we’re all speaking with Scottish accents and the landscape is bleak and beautiful). Because I am a John Scalzi hero, […]
Stop Waiting and Do Something
On the spaceship Intrepid, low level crew members die at an alarming rate. The premise is right there on the cover: They were expendable…until they started comparing notes. Whether you have watched the original Star Trek series or not, most people know that the guy in the red shirt was going to die. In Redshirts, Scalzi explores what would happen if, rather than actors who went home at the end of a day of shooting, the characters were just going about their lives until everyone started […]
“End of All Things” as a title isn’t being overly dramatic
This is review number lucky 13 and marks halfway through my half cannonball. I’m on better track this year than last! The End of All Things is the sixth book in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe and direct sequel to The Human Division. THD is a set of thirteen standalone short stories (originally released serially in e-format and then collected in dead tree format) with a narrative thread tying the stories together. TEoAT, while not advertised as such, feels similar only instead of short stories they […]