This advertisement is for Starter Villain, a new science fiction adventure from Hugo Award–winning author John Scalzi.

Meet the new boss.

JK this cat doesn’t work for Tor. At least, we’re pretty sure, with remote work it’s hard to tell who is and isn’t a cat. The person posting this could be a cat. You’d literally never know.

But we do know you should check out Starter Villain by John Scalzi, because it does have hyper intelligent cats working for a villainous organization.

WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT

When divorced substitute teacher Charlie’s long-lost uncle Jake dies, he’s not expecting much. Certainly not to inherit a supervillain business, complete with an island volcano lair, giant laser death rays, lava pits, and hyper-intelligent talking spy cats.

But it gets worse.

Because his uncle wasn’t just a supervillain. He was a supervillain who was in the middle of trying to take down the other supervillains. Somewhere along the way he decided that the rich, soulless predators back by multinational corporations and venture capital were a bad idea. And they needed to be stopped.

And now they’re after Charlie.

That’s the seductive power of the spreadsheet: it’s a tool for asking what if? With just a little training, anyone can use a spreadsheet to build a model of some real-world phenomenon, from an ecosystem to a convenience store, from a lemonade stand to a retirement savings plan. Then, by tapping new numbers into those neat little boxes, you can change the model: what if I pay a little less here? What if I save a little more there? What if this number goes up? What if it goes down? Change a box and all the numbers dance in their gridwork of faint gray lines,  and the future is revealed, with a terrible and false precision. Terrible and false because the model is a model, it’s not the world, and each of those sharp figures and formulae obscures a fuzzy, squishy set of assumptions, guesses and elisions. The model can suggest, it can guide – but it cannot predict. This is what made spreadsheets so science fictional. As we lose ourselves in a futuristic parable, it’s easy to forget the “parable” part and start to think we’re experiencing the future. To forget that sf writers have no more insight into what the future holds than any of us, and thank goodness, because if the future could be predicted, there’d be no reason to do anything or try anything. The future is up for grabs. That’s the point of science fiction: not to predict the future, but to inspire it, or ward it off. To work out our present-day anxieties and aspirations on the page, to provide a virtual fly-through of the emotional experience of this technological arrangement or that.

The seductive, science fictional power of the spreadsheet

Discussing the prior business owner's decisions:

“He was worth three trillion dollars,” I said. “He could have splashed out.”

Williams shook his head. “That wasn’t his style. He always kept costs down. I had to fight him to get upgrades sometimes. We were using computers that had Windows 7 on them until just last year.”

“He wasn’t worried about computer security?”

“That’s what I asked him,” Williams said. “He grudgingly upgraded.”

- from Starter Villain by John Scalzi

You can't firebomb your way out of every problem.

John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society

John Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society Is A Delightful Literary Treat

I had a great time reading Scalzi's The Kaiju Preservation Society and you will too! It is a delightful ice cream sundae of a novel, perfect for relaxing in the evening or enjoying during a warm summer's day off from obligations. Treat yourself!

As part of my recent reading kick, I’ve absolutely blasted through a few John Scalzi books. Most of them are things I’ve read before, some to their completion and some only partially because I got distracted by life in 2020 and never picked them back up, but I’ve read some of his newer stuff as well. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Scalzi’s books is that they’re dependably enjoyable.…

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Authors Convinced Fanfic is Illegal/Requires Permission

Terry Goodkind: “Copyright law dictates that in order for me to protect my copyright, when I find such things, I must go out and hire lawyers to threaten these people to make them stop, and to sue them if they don’t.”

John Scalzi: “Let's remember one fundamental thing about fanfic: Almost all of it is entirely illegal to begin with. It's the wild and wanton misappropriation of copyrighted material”

Diana Gabaldon: “OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.”

Robin Hobb: “Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen.”

Anne Rice: “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.”

Anne McCaffrey: “there can be no adventure/stories set on Pern at all!!!!! That's infringing on my copyright and can bear heavy penalties…indiscriminate usage of our characters, worlds, and concepts on a 'public' media like electronic mail constitute copyright infringement AND, which many fans disregard, is ACTIONABLE!”

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: “No. Absolutely not. It is also against federal law.”

Lynn Flewelling: “Whether you are writing about Seregil or Fox Mulder or Sherlock Holmes, if you do not have legal permission from the author, their estate, or publisher, then you are violating US copyright law. It is creative piracy. Doesn't matter how many disclaimers you put on, or if you're being paid. It. Is. Illegal.”

Someone Else, elaborated in the notes

Starter Villain

p54, yep, this is the good part

Still worth reading 10 years later.

...I just preordered this book on sight even though I had no damn idea what it was about. (And now that I do know, I'm glad I did.) :)

"Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. "Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. "But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a standup, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital. "It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good. "In a dog-eat-dog world... be a cat."

(via @scalzi's cover reveal at Twitter)

Yesterday, John Scalzi's latest book, Starter Villain, dropped.

I got to narrate the audiobook! I'm so proud of the work we did together, I made a video to announce it.

We're very pleased to announce that CHIVALRY has received the LOCUS Award for BEST ILLUSTRATED AND ART BOOK for 2023.

It is very humbling to be in the company of such fantastic artists as Kinuko Craft, Shaun Tan, and Omar Rayyan. We cannot even begin to express our deep gratitude.

Also, congratulations to Charles Vess on his award for Best Artist, Rob Wilkins for his work on TERRY PRATCHETT: A LIFE WITH FOOTNOTES AN OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY, John Scalzi for THE KAIJU APPRECIATION SOCIETY, and all the other winners and very deserving nominees, to the staff of LOCUS, and to all those who took the time to make their votes count.

This advertisement is for Starter Villain, a new science fiction adventure from Hugo Award–winning author John Scalzi.

In a dog-eat-dog world…be a cat.

When Charlie inherits his uncle’s villain business, one of the most surprising things about it is the cats. The sentient, super-intelligent, computer-using cats.

And let’s not even get started on the dolphins.

WHAT IT'S ABOUT

When divorced substitute teacher Charlie’s long-lost uncle Jake dies, he’s not expecting much. Certainly not to inherit a supervillain business, complete with an island volcano lair, giant laser death rays, lava pits, and hyper-intelligent talking spy cats.

But it gets worse.

Because his uncle wasn’t just a supervillain. He was a supervillain who was in the middle of trying to take down the other supervillains. Somewhere along the way he decided that the rich, soulless predators back by multinational corporations and venture capital were a bad idea. And they needed to be stopped.

And now they’re after Charlie.

Book Review 53 – The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

This is the last novel I read exclusively and entirely because it was nominated for a Hugo, and is also the first thing of Scalzi’s I’ve ever touched. Not that I haven’t been, like, peripherally aware of him for a while, but until now I’ve never really felt compelled by any of the pitches I’ve heard for his stuff. Having now read this – yeah, I stand by that. It’s not a bad book, but it’s just very much brainless dumb popcorn fun. Also he’s got a few writing quirks I kind of despise.

The story is about exactly what it says on the tin – a former grad student who dropped out to join a startup and then got fired and ended up doing food delivery during COVID runs into an old acquaintance and is offered a mysterious but high paying job ‘lifting things’. The job turns out to be with the eponymous Kaiju Preservation Society – an NGO with bases on an alternate earth, studying the nuclear-powered leviathans that are somehow its natural apex predators and protecting them from poachers. From there the plot plays out as you’d expect – crash course training and being introduced to the world, making friends, near-misses studying the Kaiju, an asshole billionaire whose revealed to be the villain, breaking the rules and disobeying orders with those friends to save a Kaiju from the billionaire before she goes nuclear and wipes out half of Newfoundland, and so on. Like I said, brainless popcorn. The pacing would actually work very well adapted to a movie, I think – certainly the whole thing would do better with some visuals.

This is a very simple novel, clearly designed to be a comfort read rather than something you wrestle with. Everyone is exactly who they appear to be when they’re introduced, there’s no moral complexity or clever mysteries, the plot plays out beat for beat as you would expect it to. Cozy fantasy for people who like giant monsters and action scenes, I guess?

The tone is very jokey, in a very 2010s nerd culture kind of way? This is a book written about people who name the bases on the world full of 12-story kaiju after classic Godzilla movies, and for people who would do the same. Just about every sympathetic major character is a massive nerd of some variety, and this is very clearly a reason you’re supposed to relate to and like them. And the lampshading – the book knows its worldbuilding makes no sense, and it takes pains to point this out to you as you read it so you can laugh at it, again and again. Hell, it lampshades how much its lampshading, complete with a definition of the term that feels like it was read right off of TV Tropes. Others may find this endearing, for me it just grated intensely.

Lastly - so this isn’t a book about COVID, but it’s very clearly a pandemic novel. The non-Kaiju World parts will probably be a fascinating cultural artifact for undergrads a couple decades down the line. It’s got the housing crisis, the gig economy, ZIRP corporate phantasmagoria, COVID lockdowns, and all that’s before all the cultural references. Anyway, it wins a decent amount of goodwill from me by remembering the existence of all the people for whom ‘lockdown’ wasn’t really a thin because ‘essential worker’ was a shockingly broad category. Still, it’s all just backdrop that stuck out too me, not really the book’s actual subject.

Anyway yeah, I’m probably being a bit harsh – this was nominated for a Hugo? Really? - but the book’s fine. Inoffensive. Would make a great Disney movie.

Discussing some billionaires:

They're "[a] bunch of dudes born into money who used that money to take advantage of other people to make even more money. It works great until they start believing that being rich makes them smart, and then they get in trouble."

- from Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Videogames I wish were real #86

An open world survival game set in a desolate world where the only food and resources left grow on colossal kaiju beasts (imagine Godzilla with a forest on its back. Also, I know what you must be thinking: wait, if it's a desolate world what do kaijus eat? Well, they get their energy from the sun and sometimes if they get a craving they eat other kaijus). After a kaiju dies, the resources they were sustaining quickly degrade, so the best bet is to harvest resources from live kaijus. The best way to do this is to climb the kaijus, since their skin is thick enough not to notice a thing. No two climbs will ever present the same challenges, since there are many types of kaijus, and you never know what might happen: it could start raining, or some of the creatures living on the kaiju might see you as easy prey and attack you, or the kaiju could decide to run, sit, sleep, or even fight or fuck another kaiju. Once you manage to climb on top of the kaiju, you'll need to gather resources: wood, fruit, plants, flowers, mushrooms... instead of forests, some kaijus might have rocky formations full of metals and minerals on their backs, or other types of biomes. The only animals that are still alive on this world also live on the kaijus, so if you feel like hunting, you can also take out your bow and arrow or your handheld weapon and get some fresh meat or hides. Once you're done gathering resources, you can take out your glider and fly off to safety... although, in a world populated by kaijus that love to fight each other, safety is always relative.

Similar media that actually exists: The Wandering Village (a game suggested by @thebazilly), The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (the book that partially inspired this post)