2007 Book Challenge 1: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars is available as a free online read in its entirety. It's a humorous science fiction story about a Hollywood agent who is assigned to figure out a way to introduce Earth to an alien race that looks like gelatinous blobs. The blobs in question are mild-mannered beings with great senses of humor.

It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.

I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.

I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.

By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.

Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.

The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.

Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.

My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)