Recently I started reading John Scalzi’s blog, and eventually worked my way all the way back through the archives. That inspired me to try his actual books, which I’ve also been enjoying. Just last week I polished off Agent to the Stars and Old Man’s War, two of his earlier works.

They’re very different books in many ways, but they share some virtues: they’re extremely readable, they’re entertaining, they have admirably direct plots, and they both have something for you to think about (specifically, they’re both concerned with the nature and preservation of human identity, among other things). They’re in the highest tradition of genre fiction. And Scalzi makes it look easy.