Sunday, May 12, 2019

Off the Bookshelf: DISPATCHER, by John Scalzi

An Audible Original

My only other experience with John Scalzi's work is the Star Trek parody REDSHIRTS.

This one takes place in a near-future Earth, where something has happened -- no one knows how or why or even has all the rules figured out -- and now nearly everyone who is murdered ... comes back. A few seconds after death, the body just vanishes, and the dead person is "reset" to several hours before death, in his or her own bed at home.

So now there are Dispatchers: people trained and working for the government, required by insurance companies and working with disaster crews and sometimes the shady side of society. Dispatchers essentially kill someone who has been horribly injured and is near death, to "reset" the victim and erase the damage. You can imagine how that puts a crimp in the activities of murderers and muggers and organized crime ...

This audiobook is narrated by Zachary Quinto (new Spock!). With just slight shifts of voice, he portrays all the characters in the story of a Dispatcher with a really tricky, possibly dangerous problem: a fellow Dispatcher has vanished, after a failed dispatch. Meaning the dead person didn't come back. Why? And where is the other Dispatcher, if he hasn't been killed?

I don't usually go in for dark, but ... whew! I recommend it, even with the rough language. Yeah, you'd cuss for a while after you got thrown down an elevator shaft, just to get you out of a building without being seen.

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