Reviews and Comments

This is an interesting experiment: Scalzi tells the story of The Last Colony again, this time from Zoe's perspective. It reads a bit like the second half of a Director's Cut: scenes and thoughts that explain some parts of the first book, but ultimately didn't make the final edit.

Scalzi doesn't stop there, though: as he explains in the acknowledgments, he needed the book to stand on its own feet, so he also tells a story that is separate from the proceedings of the last book, and since it's about a teenager, he wraps it in a coming-of-age tale about finding yourself and standing up for what you've found.

This book may not have as satisfying a plot as the last one, but it seems very personal and can be quite touching. In the way it builds on The Last Colony it manages to add both to that book and to the characters and the universe at large.

To get this out of the way: I have had this book in my bathroom for more than eight years. I might read a page or two every once in a while, and then forget about it for several weeks. To be quite honest, it's a miracle it still looks as good as it does.

The reason I wanted to read it in the first place was that I always found John Cleese moderately funny, but thought he was a pompous ass, and I hoped to learn more about him to more clearly see him in one way or the other. The fact that somebody wanted the book to find a new reader the one time I was in the same place seemed like a stroke of luck.

Unfortunately, though, I'm not sure Jonathan Margolis has a much clearer picture than I. It looks like he quite liked Cleese when he began writing the book, but the more he learned about him, the more difficult he found it to hold on to that feeling. While he sets out with a sympathetic look at Cleese's awkward beginnings, and an almost admiring view of his rise to fame, he suddenly gets shy and reluctant writing about his financial adventures. It seems that Cleese himself never felt quite comfortable being a rich man, so he developed a studiously cheeky humour that sets out to make himself more relatable, but – at least in my view – rather makes him look like a pompous ass.

The moment I realised that my opinion of him had come full circle, I decided that eight years might be long enough to make up my mind. I will simply have to live with an unfinished idea of John Cleese, and maybe that's just fine. At least I can still laugh about the Monty Python films.

It's always strange to read a classic decades after it has become a classic, especially when it comes to Science Fiction or any other form that is heavily dependent on the time it was written.

I've read this book at least five times before, three times in the brilliant German translation by Benjamin Schwarz, and twice in the English original (one of those times in a weird censored American book club edition), and there was never any doubt for me that it was one of the greatest books ever written.

But that was in the 90s, and I hadn't read it in the thirty years since. Getting back to it now was an interesting experience. I knew everything that would happen, but not the precise order and descriptions of it happening. Many of the book's parts felt a bit bland, and there were very few situations that made me laugh out loud. I soon realised why that was: for one thing, the expectation of finally re-reading one of my favourite books after such a long time had created a level of anticipation that the actual book couldn't possibly match. And on the other hand, many of the tropes presented have become an integral part of our culture over the years.

A large part of the reading experience, therefore, was reassuring myself that this was the origin of all those ideas, that the answer to life, the universe and everything (among many other things) was a masterstroke of an immeasurably creative and intelligent mind, and it is not in any way the book's or its author's fault that so many lesser people have riffed off on it in the meantime.

And yes, it still is that brilliant, it just isn't surprising anymore.

Typically for a Bradbury short story collection, this is a mixture of great, good and mediocre stories. All have in common that they are expertly written, managing to build up tension from the very beginning. The "illustrated man" framing device is a little disappointing as there is no real plot to it, just another mini story that fits into the collection as much as any of the stories can be said to fit into it.

Some of the stories (The Long Rain, in particular, but also lesser ones like The Rocket) are transformative; others (The Other Foot, The Fire Balloons) have a message, and yet others (The Highway, The Rocket Man) are typical New Age fare – but even the most bland show a master storyteller at work who always has something to say, even if it is just a moral commentary.

The idea behind Boss Fight Books was always to look at a game from the personal perspective of the author. Some of the books achieve that more successfully, some less. This is one of the successful books.

It's written in part by a scared little boy who tries to escape from an abusive family by immersing in the world of Galaga, in part by his cynical grown-up version who makes up facts to appear interesting, and in part by a serious author who has thoroughly researched the game and presents it along with insights into his life.

The book is organised as 255 "stages", most of them less than a page long, that each tell a bit of that story but are ordered seemingly randomly. It appears as a feverish race between the three personas, as the lines between them blur, but are always just barely pulled straight again through a cold listing of facts between the more personal and the made-up parts (which Kimball is always honest about, eventually).

It's hard not to get drawn into this narrative, as if William S. Burroughs had decided to write about video games in his cut-up technique. How successful it is largely depends on the reader's willingness to accept the mixture of uncomfortably personal details and lighthearted tidbits – but then, why else would anyone read a book in this series?

Again, this one is quite different from the first two books: everything encountered before falls together (or at least gets a cameo) to create a monumental story that encompasses even the parts of the universe not yet explored. There are a few threads that don't seem to go very far and are mainly used to shed more light on the situation as a whole, but that is hardly noticeable among the many other events that do form a part of the larger puzzle.

Politically, Scalzi doesn't want to take a clear stance for or against the Colonial Union and what it stands for, and instead has his characters discuss both sides thoroughly and with contantly shifting sympathies. The reader will have to follow along whatever arguments seem to make the most sense.

Originally, this was meant to be the last story in the Colonial Defense Forces universe, but at the time of writing this short review, there are already three further novels and a couple of short stories, so that idea seems to have been abandoned.