Farts and Sheep
The
Android's Dream
John Scalzi
Tor Books, October 2006
ISBN 0-76530-941-6
Review by Lynn Calvin
I had some real doubts about this book at some points. The first chapter is twenty-nine pages setting up a scene with a device in someone's anus and controlled scented farting at a member of an alien species that communicates by smell. The device is implanted in the obvious location, and the point is to deliberately enrage the alien. The man doing this is motivated by revenge, and blames his father's death on the alien. (You killed my father, prepare to die?) The alien and the human both end up dead after the alien attacks the man who has been mortally insulting him. While it has its moments, it's essentially an elaborate fart joke.
As part of reparations the aliens ask for a sheep. Not just any sheep, but one that is a specific species of electric blue sheep. The purpose of this comes out over the course of the novel and is connected to their internal politics and upcoming coronation. This request leads to various groups attempting to find an appropriate sheep and at least one group trying to kill off all of that type of sheep. The hero of the book, Harry Creek, is a veteran of a war with aliens, is now employed by the State Department in various capacities. A war hero, one of his functions is to give bad news to aliens, but he also is a computer and search expert, and otherwise carries out various functions.
Readers of Scalzi's first two science fiction books, The Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, which are fairly straightforward military SF, may find the farcical premises too much to put up with. It took me a while to get into the spirit of this book, since I was initially expecting more in the subgenre occupied by things like Haldeman's The Forever War. Instead it ends up being more like P.G. Wodehouse (although some of that may just be the sheep) and early Mack Reynolds. This is clearly as much or more a satire as action adventure. This is less surprising if you know that Scalzi also authored a book called Uncle John's Presents: Book of the Dumb (Bathroom Reader Series).
Part of what makes this work is that Scalzi, even when writing an ironic
comedy, manages to keep his eye on telling a story. The characters don't
know it's a satire so the deadpan humor also
allows the reader to enjoy the book as straightforward story.
Some tidbits from along the way are even funny as extractions (although considerably funnier in context). There is a character/computer program that is an electronic rendition of a friend of the hero's who died during the war, based on a "quantum scan" when he was eighteen. There's a science fiction writer, M. Robbin Dwellin, who founded a religion involving an "evolved lamb." There is a young woman whose genetic makeup is 18 percent sheep. Her origin story will probably make difficult for readers to ever take melodramatic plot devices of human-animal genetic tinkering for sexual purposes seriously again.
In the end all is resolved, with good triumphing and bad guys punished and some fairly pointed social commentary on things like government, civil service, religion, and war woven in without being heavy handed. Overall I'd recommend this book not only to those who liked Scalzi's previous work, but also to anyone who likes satire done with an utterly straight face.
