Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This is a short, funny, inoffensive novel by one of the biggest bestsellers in SF today: it does everything it sets out to do, does that well, and has delighted the author's many fans in the year since it was published. It's light SF adventure, humorous division, of the "what if <insert standard media trope> was actually real, and a normal guy fell into that world?" type.

I intermittently read books like this - just days before it, I hit Tom Holt's Barking, which is a fantasy version of exactly the same thing - and I struggle to say anything interesting about them. I find myself dragged between the opposite poles of pointing out how silly and referential those books are - which is the point of the exercise, and I know that - and just pointing and saying "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like," which is deeply unhelpful.

Anyway: Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It's got a cat on the cover! Cats are important in the book as well, in what I don't actually think was a cynical play for the famously cat-loving SF audience.

Charlie Fitzer is the usual protagonist for novels like this: early thirties, with one career (business journalism) and one marriage (heterosexual, of course) in ruins behind him, living somewhere comfortable that might not be good for him (his childhood home in Barrington, Illinois, after the death of his father), stuck and sad-sack and beaten down by the world. He wants to buy the local pub, as a random next thing to do in his life, but it costs over three million dollars and his only major asset is one-quarter of the house he's living in and not consistently paying his bills for. So the local bank is friendly but not particularly encouraging.

But his uncle Jake Baldwin - only sibling of his mother, who died when he was five - his just died. Uncle Jake, as far as the world knows, owned a large collection of parking garages across the Midwest, and was considered to be a billionaire. (Charlie, since he is a Nice Guy - or maybe just dense - doesn't immediately think, "Hey, I'm possibly the only living relative of a dead billionaire, so there's probably a way I can pry at least some cash loose from his estate, and I might even be an, or even the, heir.")

Luckily, Charlie doesn't have to do anything to chase that estate - because he's not the kind of guy who ever would. Uncle Jake has actually already left something to Charlie, and it turns out to be bigger and messier than "to my darling nephew, I leave the Dyna-Top Parking Complex of Boise and all its revenues," which is what a slightly smarter Charlie might have anticipated.

Uncle Jake, as the title of this novel implies, was a supervillain. Volcano lair in the Caribbean, giant satellite-killing lasers, intelligent spy cats, private bank stuffed with trillions, fiendish plots worldwide - that whole deal. And Charlie - this is before he learns the supervillain thing; I'm condensing for simplicity - is asked to run his funeral in Barrington. Charlie does, and sees a large number of clearly minion-coded thugs arrive, not actually mourn the deceased, and make sure Jake is actually dead. Charlie has to stop one of them from stabbing the corpse, actually, in the first of several very important random events in the novel, all arising from Charlie's immediate reactions to unexpected, usually violent, situations.

(The moral of Starter Villain, if I may be so bold, is "Good Guys will do the right thing automatically, and will be rewarded for it." It's downright medieval when you think about it.)

So Charlie learns about the supervillain thing, is whisked off to the secret lair, gets a whirlwind tour of same and a quick precis of Uncle Jake's vast shadowy holdings and business interests, and then jets off to a conclave of supervillains at a fancy Italian resort. (This is a short, zippy novel full of quips - the plot has to happen at speed, and it does.)

Things escalate from there, as they must, but Charlie several times instinctively does the Right Thing when confronted with sudden violence or other surprises - the Right Thing as defined by Scalzi, of course, being generally nice and positive and pro-humanity, including caring for cats and being in favor of union organizing - which means he is victorious in the end, almost in spite of himself.

I won't spoil that ending, but I will note that I don't expect any direct sequels, which is mildly disappointing. Scalzi set up a world that he could have spun out for more than one book if he wanted to, and then basically blew it up, at least as far as Charlie goes. I also don't believe one element of the very last chapter for a second, but this is a book for cat-lovers, and they will eat that up.

So this is a fun book that does amusing things with a neat and not over-used premise; it's very good for this sort of thing. This sort of thing may seem pretty small to many readers, and it kinda is, but, at this point in my life, I don't discount the power of a funny, short book that hits exactly the goals it has for itself and entertains readers just the way it plans to.