shecurmudgeon

I really, really, want to like John Scalzi's fiction better than I do, but he kind of blows hot and cold for me.  I haven't read any of his classics like "Old Man's War" and I need to try them but what I like so much in his non-fiction & blog/twitter writing (his sarcasm, his liberal politics, his glee at sticking it to those who deserve it, his sticking up for the underdog) never seems to make it, wholesale, in all of its mischievous joy, onto the fiction page.  I read Redshirts because I'm a Trek nerd, but I felt like it should have been a 100 pages shorter in places and a lot more coherent, even as parts of it were rip-roaringly funny and the whole idea of it was marvelous fourth-wall-busting meta.

Fuzzy Nation, which has, in principle, a great antihero, a really well-rounded cast of supporting characters, no great romance for the antihero (a huge bonus for me), some really great bits of world-building (without pages and pages of exposition on tech), and some lovely aliens not to mention human-animal and human-xeno relatinoship-building, just didn't grab my attention.  I read it because I felt like I ought to, and that's not what I want from my sci-fi.  The environmental metaphor wasn't overblown, nor was the man's inhumanity to everything metaphor, but I just felt my attention wander.  All the things for a great read are there, they just didn't do it for me.  

Maybe I should start with Old Man's War and see if it puts me in the right mindset.

Read on my Nook HD+, downloaded from the Google Play shop. DRM-free.