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Comment by NBJack | Hacker News Reader

Scalzi is definitely one of my favorites right now. While I actually don't like the Old Man's War universe that much, his one-off books and smaller series have been absolute delights. They become even better when he gets Wil Wheaton to narrate his audio releases (I still smile thinking of Redshirts).

Nice to see Scalzi use what influence he has to actually help someone else like this.

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I really like that he's not afraid to publish reasonably sized one-off novels. That is becoming so rare these days with so many other author wanting their first novel to be the first of a series of thousand page tomes absolutely chock full of wheel spinning and padding.

You can pick up something like Starter Villain and read it in an afternoon and thoroughly enjoy it. Other novels to check out include Androids Dream, Agent to the Stars, Redshirts, and Kaiju Preservation Society.

I read “Old Man’s War” a few weeks back, and it left me totally cold - while he’s of course attempting to reach a broad audience, it struck me as so tropeful it made me squirm. Space marines having knife-fights with giant bugs in a thunderdome was right up there. There was also a weird bit where all of a sudden all of the characters are asking each other how old they are over the course of a dozen pages, which felt like an editor had said to him “you aren’t making enough of the age thing” so he jammed in a bunch of references.

I dunno. Sure it’s for plenty of people, just not for me.

Old Man's War was published almost two decades ago and was Scalzi's first novel. It shouldn't be surprising that it took a lot of inspiration from Heinlein et. al.

His later works either lean way into tropes intentionally (Red Shirts, which I feel is more an exploration of form than a proper novel) or develop entirely new concepts, like the one way travel in the Interdependency series.

He also has a unique style. To me it appears intentional that he doesn't tend to write as realistic as possible depictions of possible futures, even allowing for the sci-fi elements. Rather, characters tend to act and speak like current day people thrust into a sci-fi scenario. Technology is highly advanced in some areas, but less so in others (which helps keep humans relevant). At times I found that took some getting used to, but it can also make the story more accessible, lends itself to humor, and can allow for exploration of how the kind of people we're familiar with would react in wildly different scenarios.

Basically, I can see how his style wouldn't be for everyone, but I enjoy his books.

I also read it recently, and didn't care for it much. But I was always more of a Asimov / Clarke fan than of Heinlein, so I wasn't super surprised.

I just tore through Starter Villian and accidentally laughed so hard at one point that I woke my sleeping spouse.

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