John Scalzi’s Hugo-nominated novel Starter Villain is a surprisingly light-hearted look at the section of the population with the kind of power and money that can make changes on a global scale and not bother with pesky little things like rules. And we see all of this through the eyes of former business journalist and current high-school substitute teacher Charlie Fitzer. Charlie’s just been handed the reins of his estranged uncle Jake’s business, a company that ostensibly owns parking garages but which is actually a lot more complicated.
“Your uncle is in parking garages because they fund his more important work,” Morrison said. “Which is to seek out, fund and create the sort of technologies and services that bring disruptive change to existing industrial and social paradigms, and offer them, on a confidential basis, to interested businesses and governments.
“That’s a great mission statement,” I said. “But it doesn’t say what he actually did.”
“He was a villain…“
Charlie’s life at the start of the book is a portrait of a man on a downward slide. Failed marriage, to go along with a failed career. He currently has a dead-end job, and he can’t get a loan to finance something better. He’s mourning the death of his father and fielding demands from his half-siblings to just sell the house already, something which he doesn’t have to do as long as he keeps paying the taxes and utilities. Which are already falling behind.
An offer to handle his Uncle Jake’s funeral arrangements promises an influx of some much-needed cash. What it actually results in is flower arrangements with really nasty notes, a funeral home full of scary-looking guys all determined to make sure Uncle Jake is in fact dead (this time), and Charlie’s life getting considerably worse.
I was in the act of crossing the street when my house went and exploded itself all over it.
Charlie might have ended the very strange day of his uncle’s funeral either dead, or in a cell being interrogated by any one of several organizations that are convinced he deliberately blew up his house along with an FBI agent who was inside it at the time. Fortunately, Uncle Jake has been keeping tabs on his nephew for years now, and has taken measures to keep him safe. One of those measures is Uncle Jake’s right-hand woman Mathilda Morrison. The other measure is Uncle Jake’s covert army of genetically modified superintelligent cats. Ever wonder why it’s such a trope for the villain of the story to have a cat? Scalzi has a theoretical origin for that here, and it’s exactly as delightful as it sounds.
Morrison and Charlie’s former pet Hera aren’t just there to keep him alive. Uncle Jake has left Charlie his business empire, to do with exactly as he sees fit, and every person in his employ is tasked to, yes, keep him alive, but also bring him up to speed on what exactly that empire does.
I don’t know if Cozy Secret Agent fiction is a thing, but that’s a little bit what the first half of the book feels like. It’s all opulent safe houses and private jets and a secret lair in a freaking volcano (complete with a detailed history of who first built the thing and why, the many times it’s changed hands, and how Uncle Jake was able to buy it on the cheap). And then there are the details about what Uncle Jake’s business does, and how it stays off the radar of the world governments while also having world governments as the biggest clients. The secret is providing services, not technologies. You don’t sell a death laser that can take out a satellite, you rent it. And ideally you rent to everyone, and you make sure everyone knows their opponent is renting the same thing. Play your cards right and you can reduce world powers to the level of two drunks in a road rage incident, both with one foot on the pavement and shouting “Oh yeah? Come over here and say that!”
“It’s mutual assured destruction, with a subscription fee.”
Naturally you’re going to have to deal with the corruption that follows the amount of money required to make these kinds of deals. Scalzi has made it clear what he thinks about billionaires and the like: wealthy scions of business who think their wealth automatically makes them smarter and better than everyone (even if they inherited most of their money), who think laws are for the little people, and who will make all kinds of horrible decisions to hang onto their current wealth or get even a little bit more. Hera the cat has to fill Charlie in multiple times on things his Uncle’s business is capable of to fix a problem.
“What happened to the bomber?”
Nothing to the bomber, he was just a foot solder following orders. His immediate boss died in his sleep.
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
He was standing naked on a very small platform on top of a radio tower when he fell asleep.
“That’s…rather worse.”
Obviously there’s a high body count in this book, and no one can feel really safe. (Well, almost no one. I’ll give this to you for free: nothing bad happens to the cats.) The death of Uncle Jake means that a coalition of fellow billionaires known as the Lombardy Convocation is going to try once again to get access to Uncle Jake’s connections and funding. They’d prefer to have Charlie join the Convocation willingly, but they’ll have him, willing or not. Charlie is forced to learn on his feet and try to figure out who his friends and enemies are and how he can keep from being conned, bullied, outmaneuvered, and possibly slaughtered. Things get very strange, very fast.
“I’m here on an island in the Caribbean, being told I need to talk to the dolphins in the middle of a labor action about some whales that might have torpedoes, armed by a secret society of villains who want access to a storeroom full of objects probably looted from the victims of the friggin’ Nazis and who are maybe willing to blow up my volcano lair to get it.”
“I admit it sounds ridiculous when you put it that way,” Morrison said after a moment.
Scalzi never lets things get too ridiculous, effortlessly skating the line between supervillain tropes and people taking a very serious situation very seriously in order to not get murdered. What this book is is just fun. It’s all the clever maneuvering of trying to figure out who knows what, with some brilliant long-game strategies. But it’s also things that would actually happen if this was real life, like people on a Zoom call forgetting to unmute their audio, or a group of supervillains arguing about how they’re supposed to use the high-tech handprint security lock. Charlie is constantly caught by surprise at exactly what a supervillain is capable of, and the information is usually delivered in a hilarious deadpan tone along with Scalzi’s signature snappy back-and-forth dialog and turns of phrase. The reader is constantly left guessing about who to trust, since you have no way of knowing who’s the smartest in the room, or who only thinks they are because they’re willing to murder everyone else in the room in order to get what they want because: supervillain.
And in case I didn’t make it clear, there are genetically modified superintelligent cats. What’s not to love?