Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Waiting On Wednesday [@torbooks @scalzi]

Waiting On Wednesday is hosted by Breaking the Spine

My pick for this week:



HEAD ON by John Scalzi

John Scalzi returns with Head On, the standalone follow-up to the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed Lock In. Chilling near-future SF with the thrills of a gritty cop procedural, Head On brings Scalzi's trademark snappy dialogue and technological speculation to the future world of sports.

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh and bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it.

Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field.

Is it an accident or murder? FBI Agents and Haden-related crime investigators, Chris Shane and Leslie Vann, are called in to uncover the truth―and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa, where fortunes are made or lost, and where players and owners do whatever it takes to win, on and off the field.


published April 17th by Tor Books

add to your Goodreads shelf // pre-order from Book Depo // or Amazon


Why?

Lock In (my review) was a fun read that I remember I liked but - because I read in in the end of 2014 - I don't remember that much else about it, so I look forward to rediscovering those characters and that world. (It's a 'standalone follow-up,' so not remember most of Lock In should be fine.)

I really enjoy reading near-future tales, especially when they mix in either real, factual science with the fictional, or science you can believe is real.

Hilketa sounds like a cross of the gladiators from Ancient Rome, video games . . . and (at least to me) Quidditch and I'm interested in how it came about but also kind of horrified at the description. It should make for an entertaining, possibly troubling and/or thought provoking read, though!

That's my pick for this week, what's yours? Tell me in the comments and/or link me to your own post!

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