Considering how much I enjoyed Old Man’s War, you’d figure I’d be a sucker for John Scalzi’s The Human Division.
What does “not strictly a novel” mean here? Well, The Human Division is probably best described as an “episodic narrative” — it’s a collection of individual episodes that each tell a complete story, arranged chronologically, so that if you read them all in sequence you get a larger narrative arc. The closest analogy would be a season of a television show, and indeed The Human Division is arranged into thirteen “episodes,” including a double-length “pilot episode,” entitled “The ‘B’ Team.”
However, I’ve only just now started reading/buying the “episodes”. The question is, can I catch up with the release schedule? Through two and half chapters, so far, so good, although I find it a touch heavy on the expository dialogue, enough to be uncomfortably noticeable. Also, the dialogue in Walk The Plank, was a little too clean for me. If you’re traumatized from a crash landing, injured from an animal bite, and infected with an explosive microbe, I don’t expect you to string together sentences that well.
But they’re well paced with Scalzi’s good old sense of humor, and intriguing from a sci-fi perspective. So I will forge on.