Book Review: Lock In

And now, as Rocky (of & Bullwinkle fame) would say, for something completely different. American novelist and blogger John Scalzi has taken a break from his long-running Old Man’s War series to pen a diverting stand-alone near-future sci-fi detective thriller.

My full review ran in the WFP yesterday. The five-syllable or less summary: it’s pretty good. The top spot for Scalzi novels I still assign to Old Man’s War itself, but that’s a pretty difficult one to dislodge, so that’s no sleight. After all, I put it in a category with Heinlein’s original Starship Troopers and Haldeman’s brilliant The Forever War, august but appropriate company, to be sure.

Book Review: Farnham’s Freehold

We have the potential, each of us individually and in our species and society as a whole, to do great good as well as great evil. Anyone can be a slave or a master if we allow the liberal values and civilized trappings we’ve painstakingly built up over human history to slip back just a little. It takes effort and slow, steady social improvement to overcome our worst natures. [And there’s] nothing natural or inevitable about one ethnic group being on top and another being on the bottom, as even a cursory study of the history of nations makes clear.

For a taste of Heinlein’s dark side, read on for a little about Farnham’s Freehold.