Head On ★★★★☆

• Format: 328 pages
• Published: April 17, 2018 by Tor Books
• ASIN: B072LD8JG9
• Language: English

John Scalzi returns with Head On, the standalone follow-up to the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed Lock In. Chilling near-future SF with the thrills of a gritty cop procedural, Head On brings Scalzi's trademark snappy dialogue and technological speculation to the future world of sports.Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth—and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.

Notable Highlights

There’s that old saying: Fast, cheap, and good, you get to pick two. The two you just picked are fast and good. Cheap has just left the building.”

Real pain, for real athletes. But they know how many people would deny that pain is real. So they play through, more than they might otherwise, more than non-Haden athletes might, to make the point. For some or all of these reasons, Chapman went back onto the field. Seasoned observers of the game could see right away that there was something going on with Chapman. ESPN commentator Rochelle Webb pointed out how he started to hang back on the Bays’ next offensive drive.

“Your pinky promises sit on a throne of lies,” Tony said.

But of course not meaning harm isn’t the same as not doing harm.

“It’s a cat,” I said. “If Donut wants to spend time with you he’ll show up in your room and sit on your important things.”

I recognized the smile as the one Mom used as an alternative to murdering someone.

“You had certain expectations and understandings with your husband, Mrs. Chapman. About intimacy. About who you both spent your time with and how that time was spent. If your husband went against that, then he was unfaithful to you. Whether it counts as ‘sex’ is immaterial to that.”

You pay for persistence. And every Haden knows you’re paying for it, too. In a community where everything is possible and anything imagined can be made real enough, persistence on a very large scale of detail is one of the few possible displays of actual wealth in a virtual world.

This novel took me rather longer than usual to write, for a number of reasons but one big one being simply that 2017 was a raging trash fire of a year, filled with horrible people trying to do horrible things and often succeeding. It’s harder to bear down creatively when the world is burning.

“I don’t have pictures,” Pedro said. “But, yeah, I’m sure. Ma’am, I don’t want to be sexist, but the only reason a man sells out his friend is if he’s screwing his wife.”

These are supplemental highlights made by other readers.