I expected to enjoy 'Starter Villain' because, hey, it's a John Scalzi novel. And I absolutely enjoyed it, but it still caught me on the hop for reasons that don't tend to come up very often.

For a while, it's fluff; fun fluff, sure, but fluff nonetheless. It felt overly convenient and stuck with a particular brand of snark that washed over all the characters in utterly consistent fashion. It felt like a cartoon action movie and so it naturally followed cartoon action movie logic. I was good with it, because it was honest about it, but I didn't take it seriously. It's all wild ideas and there's joy in that but not a heck of a lot of realism.

And so it goes, until I suddenly realised that Scalzi was quietly tightening it all up and grounding it in something far more realistic. All that cartoon action stuff was there for a reason and I started to grin for reasons other than how goddamn funny it all was. I'd laughed aloud a few times, so my better half paid attention and I read a bunch of priceless lines and sections to her. However, by the end, I was grinning because of the way Scalzi was trawling it all in. He sets up the story to be huge, unbelievably out of control huge, but then, initially without us realising it, starts to bring it home by gradually tying up every wildly loose end and wrapping them all up in a nice neat bow.

The basic idea is outrageous. Charlie Fitzer used to be a financial reporter but journalism is tough nowadays and many journalists got made redundant, so now he's a substitute teacher who wants to get a bank loan to buy his local pub. There's no real chance of it happening but he's clutching at straws anyway, because he's clearly lost his way in life. And then Mathilda Morrison shows up and his life changes just like that. He's already noticed that his rich uncle, Jake Baldwin, had died, but it didn't register as important because he hasn't encountered him since he was five-years-old. It's important now because Morrison wants him to represent the family at his funeral.

And here's where things get weird. There's a good turnout but not a single person there actually liked Jake Baldwin and they're all there to confirm that he's actually dead. You know, by stabbing his corpse, injecting it with air or taking a photo with a thermographic camera. The usual. It's not your usual funeral and it only gets weird when Charlie gets home just in time to watch it blow up, a mysterious intruder along with it. Morrison promptly rings him to tell him to follow his cat and he suddenly finds himself walking into a house he's never seen so that his cat can communicate with him by typing on a special keyboard.

You see, Rich Uncle Jake was a supervillain and, given how helpful Charlie was and how dedicated he was to stop weird Slavic mourners stab his corpse, he's leaving his supervillain business to him. Central American underground volcanic lair included. And three trillion dollars or whatever crazy asset value exists in the financial stratosphere where numbers cease to have real meaning. Jake isn't risking too much, because he had Charlie's cat Hera keep an eye on him all these years, long enough to know exactly who he is. Of course, Morrison is his right hand, icily efficient and utterly without compunction.

It's a great setup and the only obvious flaw, beyond the wild leaps we have to make to accept that anyone's mysterious rich uncle leaves them a supervillain business, is the fact that Charlie takes it so well. Everyone talks with the exact same level of snarky equanimity and Charlie is somehow not particularly phased by these paradigm shifts in his understanding of how the world works. Maybe that's why his uncle was so happy about him taking over.

Scalzi has a lot of fun with how this unfolds. I won't talk through everything, but the volcanic lair, an island called Saint Genevieve, not far from Grenada, comes with outstandingly rude dolphins, who finally introduce a new tone to the dialogue, and a superpowered laser that can knock out a satellite with a single click on a phone app. The CIA agent who promptly arrives out of nowhere is very happy indeed to discuss his imminent death as a paid service. Everything in the supervillainy world is moving to paid services. It's how Uncle Jake got so obscenely rich.

It would probably take a year for Charlie to scratch the surface of everything his uncle runs. Think about Raymond Reddington on 'The Blacklist' and how he'd pluck another industry he owns out of thin air if it had pertinence to a particular story. Now imagine that he's dead, he's your uncle and you've just inherited everything he owned. How long do you think it would take you to get fully up to speed? Well, Charlie has to leave for Italy next week because he's been invited to the Bellagio Gathering and Lombardy Convocation at the Grand Bellagio Hotel and nobody can say no to that. It's where we learn that Ian Fleming based S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and Ernst Stavro Blofeld on these guys, right down to their omnipresent super-intelligent cats.

I had an absolute blast with this book, because it's the ultimate powertrip. Charlie doesn't enjoy suddenly having three trillion dollars because he can't comprehend three trillion dollars, even as a former financial journalist, and he's a terrible rich person, as we soon find out. However, he does enjoy saying no to the most ruthless and powerful monsters on the planet and especially hanging up on their Zoom calls. After all, when you're a supervillain, it's kind of expected. And he has Hera and Morrison to keep him appraised of the consequences.

I can imagine a lot of readers finding their own favourite power trip moments. The Pitch and Pitch at the Bellagio Gathering is bound to make a lot of people happy, given that it's a ruthless way to deal with venture capitalists. Others will connect to the sentient cloned dolphins forming a union. For me, it was the little details, like the jab at Spotify which made me burst out laughing aloud. It arrives when Morrison explains the services and subscriptions model of modern supervillainy and Charlie suggests that "So, we're like Spotify, but evil." Morrisons telling response is "We're much less evil than Spotify. We actually pay a living wage to the people whose work we're selling." I like that. It's the sort of line worth writing a novel around to allow it to reach print.

It's hard to imagine anyone not having fun with this book. However, stick it out through the wildly convenient stuff because everything happens the way it does for a reason and Scalzi utterly nails the landing to explain why. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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