THE PRESIDENT'S BRAIN IS MISSING (audiobook) by John Scalzi

 

Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019.

Originally published by Tor Books in 2011.
Read by P.J. Ochlan.
Duration: 47 minutes.
Unabridged.

When the President notices that he can't force his head to go underwater during his morning swim and he complains of being lightheaded, his aides take him off for a medical checkup. 

The author, John Scalzi

During the checkup, the President's doctor determines that the President does indeed have a major medical problem - his brain is missing but he continues to walk and talk like normal. His aides scramble to try to figure out what may have caused this and what they should do.

******

First things first in this hyper-political time: This audiobook is not a commentary on either President Trump or President Biden since the story was originally published during the first term of the Obama's presidency.

In a way, this is very much a piece of throwback science fiction, like a Twilight Zone story. It takes a weird premise and runs with it for a while.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE PRESIDENT'S BRAIN IS MISSING (audiobook) by John Scalzi.

REDSHIRTS: A NOVEL with THREE CODAS (Kindle) by John Scalzi

 

Winner of 2012 RT Reviewers Choice Award.
Winner of the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Winner of the 2013 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

Published in 2012 by Tor Books.

Redshirts is considered a modern classic and I absolutely jumped at the chance to download it for free thanks to Tor Publishing's e-mail newsletter and their monthly free e-book offer. I don't take every e-book they offer, but this is a book I've been considering for a while and you can't beat the price of free.

The title of the books tells you that there is a Star Trek tie-in with this novel. As every Star Trek fan knows, on the original series the joke is that the character wearing red shirts (except for Scotty and Uhura) are expendable characters that die in a number of weird and sometimes horrible ways. 

This book features a universe similar to that of Star Trek. The characters are based on the flagship of the Universal Union fleet - the Intrepid. The fate of the redshirts on the Intrepid is much like that of the redshirts on the Enterprise on Star Trek. 

And...that's all I can really say without going into spoilers and I really don't want to do that. Suffice it to say - if you are a Star Trek fan, you will enjoy this book.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. I would have made it 5 stars but the first of the three codas at the end was so padded with repetitive information that I literally skimmed several pages of it.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi.

HEAD ON: A NOVEL of the NEAR FUTURE (Lock In #2) by John Scalzi

Published in 2018 by Tor.

In Head On, a near-future sci-fi novel, a horrible disease called Haden's Syndrome has struck, leaving many people stuck in bodies that simply won't obey the commands of their brains. The response was a technological blitz that created an online world for these people (called Hedens) accessed by a technological interface. Later, these interfaces were used to control androids called "threeps" to walk around in the real world. They can actually feel what the android feels.

And, someone figured out how to turn this into a sporting event. Two teams of threeps carrying medieval weapons line up on a football field. On each team one person is "it". The other team is supposed to go after the threep who is it, bash or cut his/her head off, pick it up and get it to the end zone for a score. It has all of the violence with none of the real world consequences because the threep pilot cannot be hurt by this.

Until one of the threep pilots dies, that is.

Chris Shane is an FBI agent who uses a threep. He and his partner, the immensely crusty Leslie Vann, are on the case to figure out how the player died when there's another death. And, that's just the beginning...

This is my first John Scalzi novel and I am a bit irritated. The book I read (the UK edition) didn't even tell me that this book was the second book in a three book series - a fact that I didn't even know until I looked at this book on Amazon before writing this review.

The mystery is pretty good. A mystery in the middle of a science fiction novel is pretty unique. The threep aspect of the story was interesting but ended up making Chris Shane a lot like a small-time superhero. Threeps can't be hurt, they are strong, they can't be killed and they have instant online access. On top of that, Hadens have the power to travel very quickly by simply logging out of a threep in one location and logging into one in another location. Yes, he has his version of kryptonite (his real-life body is pretty defenseless), but it takes some of the suspense of it.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HEAD ON: A NOVEL of the NEAR FUTURE (Lock In #2) by John Scalzi.

METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization (audiobook) collection edited by John Scalzi

Up and down - the ups are solid, the downs are low, so low I nearly quit listening

Published in 2008 by Audible Studios.
Performed by Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, Alessandro Juliani, Stefan Rudnicki, John Scalzi

Duration: 9 hours, 7 minutes.
Unabridged

METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization is a collection of short stories about a fictional future world in which the United States government is much weaker and local governments have had to shoulder most of the responsibility for governing. We get to see 4 future settings in this anthology - Cascadia in the American Northwest, Detroit, New St. Louis and Scandinavia. While the U.S. government is much weaker, the role of technology has grown much stronger. There are virtual on-line worlds and cellphones are everywhere and even more plugged in than they are now. The five authors sat down and mapped out the ground rules of this future world and than separated to write their stories. John Scalzi edited the collection and was the last one to write a story. He specifically tailored his story to fill in the blanks left by the other four.

So far, so good but what about the individual stories?

What's good is pretty good, what's bad is real, real bad.

The first story is "In the Forests of the Night," by Jay Lake. It is bad. The worst of the bunch. The story concerns a messiah-like figure called Tyger Tyger who arrives at Cascadia, a city of anti-technology greens in the Cascades in the Washington/Oregon area. The messiah-figure concept was done poorly. The anti-capitalist, anti-technology, anti-religion angle was silly (for example, in one scene creationists storm the geology department of a university and kill all of the geologists).

I doubt that Lake actually understands the meaning of the political term "Libertarian" and he certainly overuses the phrase "reputation economics" - in fact the concept is bantered around in the book so often that you'd think this was a new idea. Nah - just overuse of a cool-sounding phrase. The government of Cascadia is so loose and yet so complicated that it reminded me of the peasant collective government in Monty Python and the Holy Grail described by Dennis the Peasant ("Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!").

Lake's premise that you can hide an entire city under the basalt and loam (two more overused words in this story - buy a thesaurus, man!) and keep all of the heat created by people just living hidden from heat-detecting satellites is so silly that I have to wonder why this wasn't sent back for a re-write. 1 star for this story.

The second story is set in Detroit. It is "Stochasti-City," by Tobias Bickell. I enjoyed this one. It explored the conditions of America in this world the authors created and the story was in and of itself interesting as well. 4 stars

"The Red in the Sky is Our Blood" by Elizabeth Bear is the third story. It is forgettable except that I noted that it was the victim of long soliloquies about the evils of globalization. 1 star.

"Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis" by John Scalzi is the fourth story, and in my opinion, the best of the bunch by far. It had the most important thing that any story has to have - good characters. As a bonus, the slacker is kinda likable and we do get to learn even more about the world these authors created because, as I already noted, he specifically tailored his story to fill in the blanks left by the other four. 5 stars.

"To Hide from Far Celenia" is the last story. Written by Karl Schroeder, it builds on the notion that people can and will retreat into a video game world. This is not news - people do that now with online games. There are already online economies. They'll do it even more with the addition of 3D video glasses that overlay the online world over the real one. The story just didn't really go anywhere and the author's comments on economics are a joke. Too many long monologues - at points it was like listening to a half-baked graduate dissertation on economics and computer technology. I only finished it because I had already invested so much time listening to the other stories. I have to give it 1 star.

So - 5 stories with scores of 1 + 4 + 1 + 5 + 1. That equals 12. 12/5 = 2.4

Total score: 2 out of 5 stars.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: METAtropolis.

Reviewed on January 27, 2010.