And Now, Another Exclusive Sneak Preview of The Last Colony You’ll Remember For the Rest of Your Days!!!
Posted on July 27, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 13 Comments
Can you contain the excitement? No? Well, fine. Here’s a bucket.
And now, your exclusive sneak preview:
It was raining werewolves.
Cryptic, yet inscrutable! Just the way you like your exclusive sneak previews.
Don’t worry, I’m not giving away all the best lines.
A werewolf shower would be a welcome change from the weather we’ve been having in the Bay Area. Unless the werewolves were, like, really antisocial.
I’m reminded of
“a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd”
Ah-hah! Scalzi is clearly posting this (only superficially) unintelligible excerpt from The Last Colony in order to warn prospective readers that his forthcoming SF novel will attempt to rival the myriad mind-fucking marvels of a certain master of speculative fiction. Think about it: “Raining” = a multitude of tricky something or others descending upon, even deluging, various unsuspecting readers. “Werewolves” = wolves–which, in sophisticated SFinal terms, can in turn only = Gene Wolfe. Scalzi is obviously warning his casual readers that The Last Colony will be an earnest, if calculatedly commercial, homage to Wolfe’s infuriating Fifth Head of Cerberus. This is all quite elementary if you think about it long enough. (In the right pub.)
On the other hand, should it turn out that our darlin’ Scalzi is simply hinting here about some hairy, so-called “alien,” up-to-no-good humanoids parachuting down on yet another tediously familiar planet in his next novel, I can’t promise I’ll be able to resist the chronic temptation to demand that the I.R.S. audit his freelance finances annually and in painful perpetuity.
:D
If this line is the second line of the novel, and just happens to follow the line: “It was a dark and stormy night.” I would be unnaccountably amused. And I would immediately pre-order a copy of the book.
Potentially stupid question, John: is The Last Colony set in the OMW universe, or is it a stand-alone book?
WizarDru:
It’ll be the last book (for a while, at least) in the OMW universe.
Oh, man. Doesn’t, like, every Penthouse forum letter start off with a line like this. Yawn.
(seriously, i can’t wait to see how this line pans out)
Whoa, dude. Eatin’ brownies and watchin’ Magnolia. Heavy…
So instead of smelling like armpit (vis-a-vis the last Exclusive Excerpt), I guess this planet will smell like wet dog?
WizarDru: Until the dumptruck full of money comes to the Scalzi compound, and Krissy chains him to a radiator until he creates the “new last” book.
Just 50,000 more posts like that and we’ll have the whole book!!
Just 50,000 more posts like that and we’ll have the whole book!!
It’s just a ploy to justify having his protagonist visit a planet whose principal export is pointy silver umbrellas.