John Scalzi - Starter Villain (2023)

 

The story here features a substitute teacher inheriting a secret base on a remote volcanic island from his uncle, who happened to be a supervillain in the vein of all those guys who gave James Bond such a hard time. He also inherits his uncle's role and is thus inducted into a world of sentient cats who communicate by typing on a keyboard, with a team of trained dolphins as minions. It's a nice idea which works well for the first third of the novel, even suggesting Scalzi might have a career as the Terry Pratchett of science-fiction, with none of the smirking which rendered Douglas Adams so unreadably pleased with itself. This initial promise seems bolstered when we realise that these aren't exactly Bond villains in the traditional sense but real villains more in line with Martin Shkreli or Bernie Madoff, but without being caught. Then by the time we get to the Bellagio Gathering, a clandestine conference of billionaires and industrialists, it falls apart during chapter after chapter of global economics and the loopholes therein discussed in the form of long, long conversations.

This was the point at which I could no longer ignore just how much of Starter Villain reads somewhat like a script with one eye firmly on the screen adaptation. This was a significant disappointment because I like Jon Scalzi, or at least I liked Old Man's War, and I once asked him whether he would contribute to a short story anthology. The anthology never happened but I was impressed that he took the trouble to respond with a short but chatty email by way of polite refusal. The problem is that Starter Villain reads like a lot of contemporary science-fiction or fantasy in that it reads as though written for people who don't read but identify as nerds because they think it's cute and makes them more like Velma in Scooby-Doo. Tee hee. It's mostly page after page of dialogue and the references are all Millennial friendly and therefore awesome. Here we have Tolkien, The Princess Bride, and:

Dobrev smiled. 'You ever see the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark?'

'Yes.'

'It's like that.'

I didn't see Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the Indiana Jones movies and have no particular interest in doing so, so this reads like Comicon-pleasing gibberish to me. It's not quite so painful as Randy Henderson's Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free - also published by Tor, curiously enough - which drops a Star Wars zinger on nearly every other page in lieu of the author developing actual writing skills, but then nothing is quite so painful as Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free, and this is massively disappointing. Also, it refers to a cis woman on page 138, which I find tiresome.