{"id":22366,"date":"2023-10-30T17:11:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-30T21:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=22366"},"modified":"2023-10-30T17:11:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T21:11:29","slug":"starter-villain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/starter-villain\/","title":{"rendered":"Starter Villain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;Your uncle is in parking garages because they fund his more important work&#8230; Which is to seek out, fund and create the sort of technologies and services that bring disruptive change to existing industrial and social paradigms, and offer them, on a confidential basis, to interested businesses and governments.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Starter Villain<\/strong> by John Scalzi, published in 2023<\/p>\n<p>Charlie&#8217;s uncle Jake, who he last saw when he was five and last heard from at his wedding, has died. A woman who used to work for Jake comes to see him, with an offer. If he will represent the family at the funeral then Jake&#8217;s estate will buy Charlie&#8217;s house for him plus give him a bunch of money. At the funeral, Charlie finds out Jake had some competitors, in the parking business, who disliked him &#8212; from the message they sent on their flowers.<\/p>\n<p>This novel is about a moral person thrust into an immoral, and dangerous, situation.<\/p>\n<p>The tone is delightfully humourous.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve read all 17 of Scalzi\u2019s novels. I previously reviewed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/agent-to-the-stars\/\"><strong>Agent to the Stars<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;Your uncle is in parking garages because they fund his more important work&#8230; Which is to seek out, fund and create the sort of technologies and services that bring disruptive change to existing industrial and social paradigms, and offer them, on a confidential basis, to interested businesses and governments.&#8221; Starter Villain by John Scalzi, [&hellip;]<\/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-22366","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\/22366","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=22366"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22369,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22366\/revisions\/22369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}