{4.5\/5} “The reason Hilketa is so popular is that the players score points through simulated decapitation, and go after each other with melee weapons. It’s team gladiatorial combat, on a football field, with a nerdy scoring system. It’s all the violence every other team sport wishes it could have, but can’t, because people would actually die.”<\/p>\n
Head On<\/strong> by John Scalzi, published in 2018<\/p>\n Duane Chapman dies while playing the game of Hilketa. Chris Shane was there because his parents are rich and the league was trying to get them to invest. But he’s an FBI agent, and now he’s investigating the death. He finds the league commissioner — who ordered Chapman’s feed cut during the game — dead in his shower.<\/p>\n This book takes place in the same universe as Lock In<\/strong><\/a>. It’s a separate story with the same main character.<\/p>\n It has the feel of a Robert J. Sawyer mystery — in other words, it’s a great mystery with some terrific science fictional ideas.<\/p>\n I’ve read 11 books by Scalzi. I previously reviewed Fuzzy Nation<\/strong><\/a>. Three of his short stories were adapted for TV in Love, Death & Robots<\/strong><\/a>. He’s also one of the people whose blog<\/a> I read on a regular basis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {4.5\/5} “The reason Hilketa is so popular is that the players score points through simulated decapitation, and go after each other with melee weapons. It’s team gladiatorial combat, on a football field, with a nerdy scoring system. It’s all the violence every other team sport wishes it could have, but can’t, because people would actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8],"class_list":["post-14429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14429"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14431,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14429\/revisions\/14431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}