Reviews

Lock In by John Scalzi

Lock In, by John Scalzi breaks a couple of big rules, but gets away with it quite handily.

It’s near-future science fiction in which a plague has created a whole new class of people whose minds are in fine shape, but who have no ability to move their bodies. They’re “locked in,” and as the prologue (okay, THREE rules) tells us, the fact that some very high-profile people get locked in results in hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency research, several breakthroughs, and a cool system whereby these folks can function like normal people — they teleoperate robot chassis, and yes, this causes some societal upheaval.

But that’s the prologue, and I’ve left lots of stuff out. The story itself is part mystery, part sci-fi police procedural, and part technothriller, and covers a lot of ground in some very efficient words. It’s fast-paced, and I found it really engaging from the beginning all the way to the end.

The book felt kind of thin on descriptions. It’s not quite white-room, but it depends heavily on the fact that the readers can be depended upon to fill in a lot of blanks with their own experiences — something readers are going to do anyway, really. It’s near-future SF, so it’s not much of a problem, and Scalzi gets away with this on the strength of the book’s pacing. Rich descriptions would have broken the pace, and besides, he describes the important stuff.

The big issue for me was that the main character did not have a compelling arc beyond getting the mystery solved and keeping his new job. I gave this a pass for a couple of reasons: first, the story is more of an Idea and Event story than a Character story. Second, the main character is a Lock In, and the fairly shallow character arc makes him seem normal compared to the people around him. Sure, he wants the same sorts of things that you and I want, but he’s not a cop on the edge, or a rookie with a dark secret, or any of the other plot-shortcut tropes.

So I guess it’s not a big issue. It only came up when I got to the end and realized that although the end was satisfying, the main character’s journey wasn’t really about him at all.

The book has already been picked up for a TV series, and I think that it’s kind of perfect for that. There are plenty more stories to be told in the Lock In universe, and they’re good, thoughtful stories that a competent screenwriter can wrap up in 43 minutes, or can wrap a season of 43-minute episodes around.

Faith

The Dedication’s Choir

The Ogden, Utah Temple re-dedication ceremony was broadcast church-wide, but only recommend-holding Latter-Day Saints were admitted. The ceremony itself took place in a relatively small chapel, so the choir and organ were of much humbler aspect than might be expected by those whose familiarity with Mormon music is limited to the Tabernacle Choir.

They only had twenty choir members. That’s right around the bare minimum required for individual voices to not stand out, but even so it takes a lot of training to get that clean, choral sound out of such a small group.

They nailed it. The ceremony itself was wonderful, and very spiritual, but the high points for me were the choir numbers. As the camera panned across them I watched their mouths, and sure enough, they were taking great care to all shape their sounds the same way. Sure, they were all in tune, but that’s the most very basic level of choir performance. None of the syllables stuck out. None of the individual voices protruded at all. They were, in a word, tight.

Anyway, it was a lovely ceremony, and I’m quite impressed by the preparation that went into the music.

Journal

Ten Years: Ask Me Anything

On Tuesday the 23rd I’ll be doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in r/fantasy over on Reddit. Why? Because I’ve been self-employed for ten years now.

2004, September 20th, a Monday… that was my last day at Novell. Tuesday the 21st was my first day cartooning full-time.

And here we are in 2014. I think that the right day for celebrating a decade of Schlock Mercenary as my day job is the 21st, because while quitting was satisfying, I’d rather celebrate the beginning of the next thing than the ending of the previous thing. That said, here’s what I wrote ten years ago on September 20th:

In the face of this new-found freedom, I’m going to spend the next 90 days pretending to be a full-time cartoonist. It may be little more than a sabbatical, or perhaps a pilgrimage-at-the-drawing-table. Then again, it may be a pretense that dictates the shape of reality. I’m not unemployed. I’m SELF-employed. Pretend that with me, please.

The game of pretend has turned out pretty well thus far. I look forward to the perpetuation of the pretense for another decade and beyond…

 

Writer, Illustrator, Consumer