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Head On: A Novel of the Near Future (The Lock In Series Book 2) Kindle Edition
| John Scalzi (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
"As much as Scalzi has the scientific creativity of a Michael Crichton, he also has the procedural chops of a Stephen J. Canell to craft a whodunit with buddy-cop charm and suspects aplenty—most of them in someone else's body." —USA Today
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 game: 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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication dateApril 17, 2018
- File size3098 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Head On
"New and fresh....Scalzi's smirking, impish voice is a nice touch." ―NPR
"Particularly relevant....A fun, breezy thriller, one that showcases a world that carries with it some extremely astute commentary on some of the real problems that we face in our own. " ―The Verge
"The Lock In universe is as fascinating as ever....Complex, expansive....Pretty damn cool." ―RT Book Reviews, 4 stars
"Head On doesn’t care if you’ve read Lock In or not, but it does care if you enjoy a mystery wrapped up inside a science fiction novel....This might even be one of the best introductions to Scalzi out there." ―Culturess
"[Scalzi's] prose flows like a river, smoothly carrying us through the story; his characters are beautifully crafted; and his future world is impeccably designed, at the same time wildly imaginative and wholly plausible." ―Booklist, starred review
"This taut mystery, filled with memorable characters in a well-constructed world, will keep readers on the edges of their seats." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Readers will definitely show up for the witty banter and smartass takedowns….Very clever, wonderfully satisfying fun." ―Kirkus
"A snappy, cannily-driven police procedural in which Scalzi highlights and skewers contemporary issues and hypocrisies." ―The Seattle Review of Books
"Scalzi is in good form again here with his usual rich blend of smart, rapid-fire dialogue and well-paced bursts of hard-hitting action." ―Toronto Star
Praise for Lock In
"This is the kind of thriller that Michael Crichton, Lincoln Child, and James Rollins do so well. Add John Scalzi to that list." ―Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kraken Project and Impact
"As much as Scalzi has the scientific creativity of a Michael Crichton, he also has the procedural chops of a Stephen J. Canell to craft a whodunit with buddy-cop charm and suspects aplenty―most of them in someone else's body." ―USA Today
“Satisfying.” ―NPR
“Scalzi takes his work to an entirely new level.” ―Cory Doctorow
“A smart, thoughtful near-future thriller…. This powerful novel will intrigue and entertain both fans and newcomers.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review
“John Scalzi may be the most entertaining writer in SF today.” ―Toronto Star
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B072LD8JG9
- Publisher : Tor Books (April 17, 2018)
- Publication date : April 17, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 3098 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 328 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #81,580 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #433 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #624 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #1,791 in Science Fiction Adventure
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

John Scalzi writes books, which, considering where you're reading this, makes perfect sense. He's best known for writing science fiction, including the New York Times bestseller "Redshirts," which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. He also writes non-fiction, on subjects ranging from personal finance to astronomy to film, was the Creative Consultant for the Stargate: Universe television series. He enjoys pie, as should all right thinking people. You can get to his blog by typing the word "Whatever" into Google. No, seriously, try it.
Customer reviews
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On the one hand, the snappy, witty dialogue and eschewing of exposition-heavy scenes makes for a book that is easy to pickup and put down. This is a novel that's great to read to pass time or to relax with, and the speculative fiction is well-grounded in a way where it all seems like part of a believable near-future.
On the other hand, I literally just finished this book and am already forgetting the plot. The problem is that as fun and easy as Scalzi's works are to read, they're not memorable because he often offers little to no sensory information. And I'm not talking about him not painting big, vivid portraits come to life; he doesn't ever describe any of the people, what the threeps look like, what nearly anything looks like. This means that probably 80% of the book is dialogue, and the rest is just the conjunctions that bridge the dialogue. There's almost no meat to the story fpr you to reallg digest and appreciate, despite how entertaining the dialogue might be.
So as a pallette cleanser between bigger embarkments, this book is great. Otherwise, a month from now, I won't remember nearly a thing about this book.
John Scalzi is a good writer. There's really not any dispute about it. However, his last two books have been a bit formulaic. I suppose if you get to the point where you're writing and you know you'll get 'x' number of orders, it's easy to not take chances with your characters, plot or development. It seems as though that's exactly what John Scalzi did here.
HEAD ON is a standalone sequel to 2014's LOCK IN. Just before I wrote that last sentence I reread my review of that book. It turns out I feel the same way about HEAD ON as I did about LOCK IN.
There's a violent new sport in town played by Haden's controlling threeps called Hilketa. Hilketa is a team sport, the object of which is to score more goals than your opponent. Sounds pretty normal and boring, right? I mean, we've seen it before. Well, to score a goal a player must rip the head off of an opponent and carry it through a set of goal posts. Okay, that's a lot more interesting than the run of the mill goal scoring game, as long as you're into that whole ripping off the the head thing. Anyway, this "sport" gives the Haden population something of their own they can do. The sport's popularity is on the rise, and the league is looking not only to expand within the U.S., it's looking to start leagues overseas.
The book starts out at a preseason game that is being used as a showcase for wealthy investors who the league is trying to convince to become owners of new franchises in the U.S. All is going swimmingly well. The crowd is loving the game, and the wealthy investors are being courted by league officials. Then the worst possible thing that could happen did happen: a player by the name of Duane Chapman dies on the field during the game. And thus we have the event that starts this novel rolling.
FBI agents Chris Shane, a Haden and the main character of the previous novel, and his partner Leslie Vann are assigned to the case. The obvious question is whether the death is murder or simply an accident.
What, you actually thought this was an accident? It wouldn't be much of a novel if it wasn't a murder, now would it?
There are some interesting things and ideas in play here, and that's not really unusual for a Scalzi novel. Scalzi is using the idea of the marginalization of minorities here. Threep technology is advancing such that "normal" humans will be able to ride in threep just like Hadens can, thus giving them the ability to take over the sport that was meant to be played by Hadens. There is a technology that allows fans of the sport to read the biometric data of any of the players they want during a match, as long as they pay an extra fee (Here we get two ideas for the price of one, where a consumer can pay an extra fee to get content that other consumers cannot - think premium cable channels - as well as the spectators can see what is going on with their favorite players in gory detail - think (and maybe it's a bit of a stretch) bloodthirsty spectators watching battles in ancient Rome. All good stuff.
The rest of it? Well, it becomes a police procedural detailing a murder investigation. There's infidelity, jealousy, doping, drug dealing, conspiracies, and twists. Scalzi uses the ideas and world that he built in LOCK IN to help move the story along, which of course you would expect him to do. But it feels like he thought "How can I use the LOCK IN universe stuff in another novel? Right, I'll do a murder mystery!"
There's really nothing wrong with that. But he's not really exploring anything that hasn't been explored before by him or anyone else. The technology may be a bit different, but the ideas are not. And given today's society, the ideas aren't even that old.
Within the last day or two of me writing this review, Scalzi said on Twitter that he writes for the money. And that's okay. He has to feed his family, pay for his daughter's college tuition, and make sure the cats are happy. And if the best way to do that is to write what he does, good for him. A lot of people can't do that. But he's done better than this, with novels like OLD MAN'S WAR and REDSHIRTS. I'd like to see him get back to that level of quality.
Then again he's popular. Who am I to judge, since I like him too?
Top reviews from other countries
Wenn keine Menschen in ferngesteuerten Körpern vorkämen, wäre das ganze ein stinknormaler Krimi - und nicht mal ein besonders guter.
Für Fans, nicht für Gelegenheits-Scalzi-Leser.
This book is standalone so you don't have to have read Lock In first, but why wouldn't you?
From the description, I was worried it would be a retake on what Sword Art Online did, but Scalzi goes into a whole other direction.








