Two reviews of The Last Colony today worth noting. The first is from SFReviews.Net, and it’s positive, with a couple of quibbles (be warned that one of those quibbles is a minor spoiler). However, I can personally say I love it for its opening paragraph:
Some writers are prolific. A better adjective for John Scalzi might be “possessed.” You’d think he’d have his hands full churning out novels at a machine-gun pace, editing magazines, maintaining two hugely popular blogs, and being SF’s favorite sitcom dad. Yet he soldiers on, evidently genetically engineered for perfect tirelessness. I suspect that instead of sleeping, he has something like an iPod charger that he inserts in a Cronenberg-like body socket, after which he emerges a couple of hours later fresh as a daisy, with another 100,000 words of writing raring to go.
Dear Lord, if only this were true.
Also for your consideration, this encomium from Pyr Books main man Lou Anders, who among other things says about the entire “Old Man” series:
The complexity & moral ambiguity of the novels build with each one, though they all retain his very readable and distinctive narrative voice. I also think that I like each novel better than the one before, though it may be that I simply like returning to the universe of the Colonial Defense Force and am carrying my previous joy forwards and compounding it with new joy. Joy squared. Joy to the third power.
Interestingly, both the T.M. Wagner and Lou Anders note that, as both of them read Whatever on a frequent basis, it’s difficult not to see some Mary Sue-ness in The Last Colony, given that in TLC John and Jane are married, have a smart, sarcastic daughter, and that I’ve acknowledged that Jane is to some extent modeled after my wife. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’m pretty sure John Perry isn’t my Mary Sue in the series — I think the character of Harry Wilson is a lot more like me personally — but at this late point I can’t really complain too hard about it. I did it to myself by, among other things, naming the main character “John,” even if he’s actually named for Jonathan Cain, keyboardist for Journey. Note to self: No more main characters named John, ever.