The space-faring Yherajk have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish. So getting humanity's trust is a challenge. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal. Enter Thomas Stein, who knows something about closing deals. He's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents. But although Stein may have just concluded the biggest deal of his career, it's quite another thing to negotiate for an entire alien race. To earn his percentage this time, he's going to need all the smarts, skills, and wits he can muster.
Listened to this rather than read it, and Will Wheaton did a fine job. Plot, characterization... fun. And funny. Listened on a car ride, and and it turns out to be harder than you might think not laugh really loudly of a sudden. Thank goodness for sane drivers and insane authors.
The ebook was deeply discounted, and I had enjoyed Scalzi's writing before, so I got it. It was cute and funny, a quick distraction, and I enjoyed it.
While allot of fun, this book was a bit cartoonish and some parts were not believable.
Great fun. This is Scalzi's first novel, and wasn't actually published until after other books. That would usually be a very bad sign, but in this case, the book is still very much worth reading. A highly unattractive (by our standards) alien race studies our radio and TV broadcasts, and concludes that showing up at the UN is a bad idea. Instead, they hire a Hollywood agent handle their introduction to humans.
