Once he's gotten past the tricky part of building a near-future world and putting a dead body in it without getting bogged down in the details of either, the rest is all cake and hand grenades.

It begins with a neat and effective free fall into the near-future world in which the story is set, laying out in dry, almost academic terms the history of Haden's Syndrome, a global, meningitis-like pandemic that, in addition to killing lots of people, also left a certain percentage of them completely paralyzed. So it's a good thing that John Scalzi seems to have missed that memo. Thus, the conundrum: Right from page one, the author either has to short the action or short the world. And in science fiction, all but the best (or trickiest) authors have to front-load their stories with exposition and world-building that roots you in a place, but not necessarily in the action. By nature, your garden-variety procedural has to start with a bang that drops you not into the world, but into the middle of a mystery. If there isn't a bullet hole in someone or something before the story starts, there'd better be one put there within the first couple of pages.īut crossing those streams - creating a science fiction procedural - is almost always a bad idea. I have no love for utopias, shiny spaceships where nothing is ever broken, or Teflon detectives who don't come with baggage. In both cases, I like my books grimy and lived-in. When I'm reading for fun and not sitting up in my ivory tower reviewing books for NPR, I generally gravitate toward two kinds of stories: science fiction and procedurals. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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