How’s this for a first sentence that should cause deep, creeping dread in any author: my favorite thing about Lock In, by John Scalzi, is the cover.

That’s the greatest damning-with-faint-praise sort of sentence of all time, right?  But seriously: I love love love the cover to this book.  I’m not sure what it is about it that I like so much other than the fact that it stands out from everything else on the shelves so well, but… damn.

(EDIT:  Scalzi himself has popped up on Twitter to let me know that Peter Lutjen is the artist who did the cover; he was also responsible for the cover for Scalzi’s Redshirts.  He doesn’t appear to maintain his own site or I’d link to it, but he does a lot of work for Tor.  There’s a neat article about the production of the cover here.)

Weird detail: my copy (which I got in a signed edition through Subterranean press; the rest of you can’t even buy this until later this week MWA HA HA) says “A NOVEL OF THE NEAR FUTURE” across the bottom of the book.  There are images on Google that say “A NOVEL” in the same place, but I can’t find an image of the actual cover my book has anywhere– including on Scalzi’s own website.  Which is weird.

But anyway.  Scalzi is one of my favorite working authors, and his work is especially near and dear to my heart because I think when I’m writing at my best he and I sound a lot alike.  I’m a huge China Miéville fan, right?  I couldn’t write like Miéville if my life depended on it.  I love Alastair Reynolds’ work, but I couldn’t write Reynolds-style books either.  Scalzi, on the other hand, and for whatever reason, is a writer whose works I tend to thoroughly mentally dissect as I’m reading them, because I think he and I have similar senses of humor and we want to write the same style of books.  I finished Lock In overnight.  My last book before that, Scott Lynch’s Republic of Thieves, took a week.

I’d rather write books you can read overnight.  700-pagers aren’t my style.  I am a fan of the semicolon; John just wrote an entire book in which he ruthlessly removed all of them on purpose, partially because he thought he liked them too much.  (Yes, I did that on purpose.) We both tend to be dialogue-heavy as opposed to description-heavy.  Things like that.

(I should be clear: he’s way better at all of this stuff than me.  I’m not saying I’m as good as Scalzi, although I certainly aspire to be.  Just that if I had to pick a pro author and say “I”m gonna be that guy when I’m rich and famous!” it’d be him.)

Anyway.  Right: the book.  Lock In is a bit of a departure for Scalzi because it’s not a space opera, the genre that the majority of his books have fallen into.  It’s a near-future detective novel, taking place in a world where a disease called Haden’s Syndrome has imprisoned a certain percentage of the world’s citizens in their own bodies.  He’s taken that simple premise, extrapolated forward an extra twenty or thirty years to give society a chance to mature a bit, and then written a murder mystery.

Which is an awesome way to do a science fiction novel, because it lets him stretch into another genre (crime fiction) while still staying in his wheelhouse of sci-fi as he’s doing it.  This is not my favorite Scalzi book (that would be a tie between Old Man’s War and Redshirts, which is one of a very small number of books that actually made me cry while I was reading it) but it’s still a book that I think most of you should be reading.  The setting is deeply interesting, the characters are fun, and the mystery/procedural itself has enough twists and turns in it that it felt like a seasoned pro was writing it and not someone who was trying his first novel in the genre.  I gave it five stars on Goodreads.  You should give it a look.

(Yeah, I just talked about myself for 500 words and the book for 150.  That’s why it says “sorta” in the title up there.  Shuddup.)