My friend Norm forwarded me one of those Amazon “If you bought this, you’ll like this” marketing e-mails this morning, on which it said: “We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Old Man’s War by John Scalzi also purchased books by Chris Roberson. For this reason, you might like to know that Chris Roberson’s Here, There & Everywhere is now available in paperback.” Norm noted it’s the first time he’d been marketed to for reading me. There’s a first time for everything, is there not.

Well, naturally, I wanted to know more about this Chris Roberson fellow, so I Googled him and found his site, on which he has a blog. And what’s on the top of his blog entry queue? This entry, about little ol’ me. Yeah, it’s a small world, after all.

Honestly, how many more signs from God and/or Amazon do you need? I went ahead and ordered my copy.

Blogger Douglas Hoffman read Old Man’s War and liked it, so he gave it to his wife to read. Her reaction:

She zipped through it in two days, called it entertaining, and set it aside. A day later, she came in to the office and declared that she’d been thinking things over in the shower that morning and had decided that Old Man’s War was derivative, war-mongering, simplistic, and morally bankrupt, and that all extant copies of it should be burned.

Yow!

Hoffman enumerates his wife’s reasons for despising the book, which I invite you to read, because I think they’re interesting, and if I weren’t actually the guy who wrote the book (and therefore have inside information), I could certainly see how the complaints seem perfectly reasonable. I respond at length there (without snark, even!), so I won’t get into it here, but naturally, I don’t think the book is as bad as all that. But go over and read. It’s a really interesting perspective on the book. Note that the discussion has some mild spoilers, so if you don’t want to know certain plot details, you might want to skip.