Hugo 24: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Like his earlier Kaiju Preservation Society, this is another in John Scalzi’s pandemic/post-pandemic phase of light overtly fun novels. Neither book is really a comedy as such but they play with amusing ideas and the use pastiche of popular culture to assemble their plots. Unlike, KPS there is a stronger element of satire in Starter Villain both in specific events and in the overall arc of the central character as a comment on living in the 2020s.

I found KPS to be a quick, entertaining but essentially disposable read that felt at odds with being a finalist for a Hugo Award. Unlike Scalzi’s Hugo-winning Redshirts, it really didn’t bring anything along that made the book particularly noteworthy. A book can succeed in being what it is supposed to be without being particularly exceptional.

Starter Villain is an improvement on KPS in this regard. The first third made me think that the story perhaps might go to some interesting places. In this section, Charlie Fitzer a middle-class but financially insecure man finds himself at the centre of increasingly strange events after his estranged uncle dies. Of course, we know from the title and the promotional material that the underlying reason is that his uncle was actually a criminal mastermind of Bond-villain-level proportions. Still, this sense of a man who is in imminent danger of homelessness finding themselves caught up in a bizarre funeral and getting advice from his cat has a delightful weirdness to it.

OK, obviously I like stories with talking cats. Still, I think this is where we can see Scalzi pulling a lot of punches. Fitzer isn’t quite a Scalzi stand-in character per-se but they share enough in common for him to be a version of Scalzi who hadn’t had the same breaks in terms of personal and financial success, which again is an interesting idea that he is playing with. The character finds themselves in a dire situation due to a marriage break-up and the loss of his job as a journalist. His plan to escape from this downward spiral is an unrealistic plan to borrow money to buy a local neighbourhood bar. The obvious downward spiral Fitzer is trapped in is well set up but the sense of a man sliding into deluded desperation is never really left to stew for very long. This is a shame because desperate-man-starts-recieving-messages-from-his-cats his a great premise and I wished we’d stayed longer in the space where there was some ambiguity as to whether Fitzer was actually on a path of paranoid delusion.

The second two-thirds is the more overt pastiche of Bond-villain antics. Fitzer discovers he is the heir to his uncle’s criminal (sort of) enterprise and is drawn into a conflct with other Blofeld-like villains. There are fun elements like a labour dispute with his pod of genetically enhanced dolphins but otherwise this is mainly just a bunch of twists and turns and explosions. That’s all good fun but it is a bit like going to a restaurant and ordering spagehti bolognese. Sure, I love to eat spagehti bolognese but I can cook it myself at home and the same is true about a shaggy dog (cat?) story with random explosions and intentionally silly plot twists.

Anyway, everything ends happily for Fitzer and he gets to own his own home and buy that bar he always wanted to and essentially shift to a stable middle-class life but, and here is where the novel is more overtly in social-commentray/satire, only with the intervention of a SPECTRE sized international criminal conspiracy. The American Dream in the 2020s is achievable but you need the backing of people with their own secret volcano base. It’s too gently presented to be a biting comment on the impossibility of financial security without inherited wealth, luck and possibly criminal behaviour but it does help elevate the novel beyond just having a laugh at Bond-villain cliches.

So a spag-bol of a novel but the portions not big enough to fill you up and a bit under-seasoned and lacking any real bite. It has (sort of) talking cats in it and therefore I am obliged to approve of it. Could Scalzi have written a better version of this same book? Well…I don’t know, he knows better what his audience wants and maybe he has tailored this one exactly right in terms of what this book is supposed to be. I’d have personally liked a version of this same book that was more cruel to Fitzer’s circumstance, played longer with the possibility that he was escaping into a delusion/breakdown (and perhaps get that possibility ambiguous at the end), had more biting jokes and broader comedy. I’m glad there wasn’t a romance sub-plot with Mathilda (his deceased uncle’s second in command) but that also meant there was very little in the main two-thirds of the book of Fitzer developing personal relationships with anybody really.

Finally, and this is possibly a monkey’s paw-like request, it really could have been snarkier. Yes, yes, Scalzi gets stereotyped for only writing in a snarky tone based on his social media/blogging personality but in this case, he is literally writing a Bond-pastiche romp, more snark would not be out of place.

Like KPS, I don’t think this one merits a Hugo Award but I’ll probably be kinder to it in my voting than I was with KPS. Fun in lots of ways but essentially disposable.