★★★★☆ Fun free fluff

Constituent Service: A Third District Story

John Scalzi

Constituent Service: A Third District Story by John Scalzi is a bit of fluff. It is not Serious Literature and doesn't pretend to be. It's just a bit of fun to keep you company on your next long drive or constitutional. It's an audible.com original. At the time of writing it was available only in audiobook format, free with audible.com membership, and it's only two and a half hours long, and Scalzi is a known quantity, so really, this was a no-brainer for me.

And it was Good! Ashley is fresh out of school and takes a job as Community Liaison for The Third District, the City's only majority nonhuman district. The City, never named, is an Earth City, and the story takes place in some future time when, apparently, interstellar commerce is a thing and many aliens live on Earth. The world-building is sketchy, and that's OK, because it's not really the point. It is just an excuse to dream up office colleagues who have tentacles instead of hands, and to force our hero Ashley to confront life-threatening municipal sewer problems requiring creative solutions.

The truth is that the aliens are not very alien. Physically they are very different from the human form, but in fact their conversations and motivations will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office.

So, yeah, it was fun. I recommend it. Scalzi can be fun, and he made me laugh. Narrator Amber Benson does a good job with it. I particularly enjoyed her flat-toned reading of Lore (sp?), Ashley's only human office-mate. The subtitle suggests that we'll see (or hear) more stories about the Third District, and I'm up for it!

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