This is my third Scalzi novel. I had previously read Old Man’s War and Redshirts, which felt vastly different from each other. I liked both well enough, despite not being nearly trekkie enough to feel like reading Redshirts was really merited. With this third book, I felt like I could begin to form constellatins of Scalzi’s work in my mind, and obviously Starter Villain feels like it belongs in the Redshirts camp, as it is meant to be a more comedic novel.
Starter Villain is short novel about a down on his luck man who finds himself in the world of supervillains, for plot related reasons. That is the back of the book blurb, more or less, and for what its worth it is fine. A good enough read, it will get you through a road trip (I bought this in, Skopje, and it got me to Riga via the horrific overland route. Pro tip: never bus through Poland – that country is unending). This was a standard good enough page turner that you will forget a month or two after reading it.
But there are two interesting things about it.
I think if you read enough fiction you do get a bit of a read on some of the sentiments that exist in the world. This is sometimes reffered to as a Zeitgeist, a word I hate and begrudignly use because of some early 2000’s conotations it holds. Regardless, I really liked seeing what I think is a shift in the Zeitgeist reflected in this novel. There are a whole pile of antagonists in this novel, all of whom are ultra-rich ‘supervillains’. Not much that they do is all the supervillain-y. Mostly they seem to be doing the bog standard thing that the super rich in our very real world do – invest in things and blow large amounts of purely fictitious money that can’t actually be liquidated. This book is little more than a veiled mockery of the Elon Musks of the world, and I am here for it every day and twice on Sunday:
“I expected the members of Earth’s leading society of villains to be smarter,” I said.
“I don’t know why.”
“They’re smarter in movies and books.”
“They would have to be, wouldn’t they?” Morrison said. “In the real world, they can be what people like them usually are: 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.
Yes, that feels very right in 2025 (when I read this – I doubt it will be less accurate when this post goes up).
The other things I found interesting here is a bit of a linguistic nitpick, but please allow me to have them. I have always considered writing to be a vastly different medium than speech. It plays by and follows different rules. When we learn a second language, we end up with the misconception that our speech follows the stringent grammatical rule that our textbook explains. Our speech does nothing of the sort, and if you doubt this you can record the speech of any person at random and then transcribe it. It will look like a trainwreck compared to what the grammar book tells you is accurate. But there is a (for me very saddening) trend now-a-days to make our written texts follow the trends and fancies of spoken language. I engage in some of this myself. But here is a sentence that gave me a great amount of pause when I saw it in this book:
He seemed amazed at current events, which, fair.
I get that sentence. I can understand it, and I can hear it in the voice of those friends I have that are in their 20’s. But reading it damn near gave me an aneurysm. Scalzi got away with it only because he is an established author. Would anyone else throw down the same sentence and hand it to an editor, the editor would fucking shriek and throw themselves out of a window. Perhaps justly.
Failures in Polymathy 