Head On

Head On by John Scalzi
Published: 2018
Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
Series: Lock In #2
Length: 07:36 (335 pages)

John Scalzi novels narrated by Wil Wheaton have become a sort of comfort food for me over the last few years, and that’s exactly the sort of thing I needed for the final months of this year.

I enjoyed Lock In, the novel previous to this, but it wasn’t my favourite of his. It caused a small stir when, shortly after it was published, he revealed in a blog post that he purposely avoided using any gendered pronouns for the protagonist as a little experiment to see which gender the reader would imagine, an experiment that didn’t really work as well with an audio narrator. It did allow him to produce two versions of the audiobook, though – one narrated by Wil Wheaton and one by Amber Benson (of Buffy fame), who is also available as a narration for his.

I enjoyed Head On more than the first. The concept is an interesting one. A large number of people, referred to as Hadens, contracted a disease that left them fully conscious but unable to move their bodies. They now use robotic avatars (threeps) to live their lives outside of their bodies. The main character, a Haden, was a new detective in the first book and has now settled into the job. He (or she) and his (or her) partner investigate an unexpected death during a match of Hilketa, a sport where the players need to decapitate a threep on the opposing team and carry their head through a goal. It’s obviously quite a violent sport, involving swords and hammers and…heads, but the player controlling the threep can’t be injured, so what caused the death?

I found I connected to the characters much more this time around, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it was because he’d already established the foundation for the Haden concept in the first book and was able to just run with it. I wonder if he’ll turn this into an ongoing series, the way detective writers love to do. I’d be interested to see where it goes.