Tag Archives: John Scalzi

The Time Traveler’s Passport: Six Stories

Posted on November 3, 2025 by smellincoffee

When checking Amazon for the Old Man’s War series, I noticed a new short story series created by Amazon. I’ve read their FORWARD and WARMER collections before and figured this might be fun. Unfortunately, this skewed more toward the level … Continue reading →

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When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Posted on July 31, 2025 by smellincoffee

John Scalzi meets Randall Monroe in a comic SF novel with an insane premise: the Moon has been replaced by a giant orb of cheese. Or, to use NASA’s language, it has “assumed an organic matrix”. How? Who knows?! It’s … Continue reading →

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Audiobook Number Crunching

Posted on May 20, 2025 by smellincoffee

Audiobooks have become a regular part of my reading life in recent years, prompted by one of those free trials that resulted in me discovering how a strong narrator can transform a book. Since then I’ve been and on/off again … Continue reading →

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Metatropolis

Posted on October 30, 2023 by smellincoffee

Metatropolis collects five short stories from a “shared future”, all in or about the future of the city. That vision is not one of growth, however, but of retraction and collapse. Expect nothing like the Sprawl here. I was drawn … Continue reading →

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Murder by Other Means

Posted on October 5, 2023 by smellincoffee

Tony Valdez is a dispatcher. In a world where people who die of natural causes stay dead, but people who are killed by others magically appear back in bed, his job is to intercede when people are dying from accidents … Continue reading →

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The Dispatcher

Posted on October 2, 2023 by smellincoffee

Imagine Zachary Quinto, known as nuSpock or “that quiet guy in Margin Call who tells Jeremy Irons the bad news”, doing an impression of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Got it? Okay, good, because that was my favorite part of this novella. … Continue reading →

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Starter Villain

Posted on September 28, 2023 by smellincoffee

Charlie is a sacked journalist struggling to get by with a substitute teacher’s salary, and dreams of maybe owning the neighborhood pub one day if he can ever get approval for a loan that uses his father’s house as the … Continue reading →

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The Kaiju Preservation Society

Posted on August 9, 2022 by smellincoffee

The Kaiju Preservation Society© 2021 John Scalzi268 pages I don’t know what a kaiju is, but John Scalzi’s name is on the cover so, I’m sold. At least, that’s…what I thought. Turns out John Scalzi isn’t always at his John … Continue reading →

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Recalled to life

Posted on August 8, 2022 by smellincoffee

Er. hi. Been a while. Today marks my partial return to work, as I’ve been readjusting to life the last few weeks. I’ve been reading steadily, but have not been home (lots of housesitting), and typing reviews on my laptop … Continue reading →

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The Ghost Brigades

Posted on June 25, 2022 by smellincoffee

The Ghost Brigades(c) 2006 John Scalzi384 pages John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War introduced readers to a harsh future, in which humanity competes for space in a crowded galaxy, fighting tooth and nail against a variety of alien baddies. Out of … Continue reading →

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