Lock In #2 by John Scalzi
We leave Warhammer and Black Library behind this week and review ‘A Novel of the Near Future’ by John Scalzi. Book 2 in the Lock In series.
From the book:
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.
Published in 2018 this book is the second in a series following a global pandemic which has caused people to suffer a locked-in syndrome called ‘Haden’; and FBI agents who suffer from the illness. It really is a detective story set in the near future with a science-fiction basis.
I don’t read many detective novels and can never work out the culprit early… and I failed here again! But the main reason for reading this was the background and the set-up from the Locked-In syndrome.
It is a fun book and good read, but it definitely has problems with the science and also the set-up of the game being played – Hilketa. Scalzi doesn’t seem to have done any research on the numbers of players, fans, and value of any sport in the world as Hilketa is said to be successful whilst having none of the numbers of existing sports… This won’t be an issue for many readers, but I like my ‘near future’ science fiction to be closer to reality.
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— Declan & Eeyore
