★★★★☆ Murder and cats

Head On

John Scalzi

The title of John Scalzi's Head On is what they call "antiphrasis" in rhetoric, or "flipping it" in Baltimore (at least, according to The Wire). Head On is about a sport called "Hilketa" (that's Basque for "murder"), in which players knock each other's heads off and attempt to throw them through a goal. But fear not! The players are Hadens using threeps (that is, telepresence robots, as you know if you've read Lock In), and they only knock the heads off of threeps. This, of course, is harmless to the Haden piloting the threep. So, as sports go, it is more violent than, say rugby or NASCAR, but less harmful to the players.

Until it isn't. In the course of a game, player Duane Chapman loses his head (literally) three times, then dies -- for real. Chris Shane, our favorite Haden FBI agent and World Champion Destroyer of Threeps, happens to be at the game when Chapman dies. Soon he and his partner Leslie Vann are investigating the death, and suspicious deaths are piling up in their To-Do lists.

And yes, there is a cat! Chris borrows the Philadelphia FBI office threep. He continues his record of careful threep stewardship by rushing into a burning building to save a cat, running out of battery power and burning up -- not him, but the Philly FBI threep -- a $50,000 value, and the Philly director is not happy. The cat, however, escapes. In fact, the cat turns out to be a material witness, providing a post hoc justification for Chris's rash and expensive heroism. Except for getting temporarily freaked out, the cat ends up unharmed. No animals were harmed in the writing of this book, not even fictional ones.

So, yes, there's a cat, and there are cat jokes. This is very on-brand for Scalzi -- see, for instance, the cover of , or his Love, Death and Robots story Three Robots.

So, yeah, it's a science fiction murder mystery and police procedural, and it's a bunch of fun. You do need to read Lock In first.

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