Miniatures

Kirkus Reviews was right: “Somewhat repetitive in theme, often verging on the silly, but on the whole, quite amusing.”

Love death and Robots on Netflix :)

«110011000101, you serviced the online ordering needs of a plurality of humanity, so you may know more about humans and their needs than any other AI out there. So let me ask you this. We're all agreed that we don't want to wipe out humanity. But for the sake of diversity, how many humans do we need?»

I'm a little dissapointed. Yes, Scalzi can be very funny, you would know specially if you have read some of his novels, but I felt like he was trying too hard. I think Scalzi mostly fails, at least in this anthology, when “funny” is the main character. But, hey, what do I know?

Most are just okay. My favorite, and the one that practically made me laughed my ass off, was “Your Smart Appliances Talk About You Behind Your Back”. An honorable mention for “The AI are Absolutely Positively Without a Doubt Not Here to End Humanity, Honest”.

Contents:

- “Alien Animal Encounters” → 3/5

- “Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate History Search Results” → 3/5

- “Pluto Tells All” → 3/5

- “Denise Jones, Super Booker” → 2/5

- “When the Yogurt Took Over” → 3/5

- “The Other Large Thing” → 3/5

- “The State of Super Villainy” → 3/5

- “New Directives for Employee-Manxtse Interactions” → 4/5

- “To Sue the World” (set in the same universe as “Redshirts”) → 4/5

- “How I Keep Myself Amused on Long Flights: A Twitter Tale” → 2/5

- “How I Keep Myself Amused on Long Flights, Part II: The Gremlining” → 2/5

- “Life on Earth: Human-Alien Relations” → 3/5

- “Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth” → 3/5

- “Your Smart Appliances Talk About You Behind Your Back “  → 5/5

- “The AI are Absolutely Positively Without a Doubt Not Here to End Humanity, Honest” → 4/5

- “Important Holidays on Gronghu” → 3/5

- “Cute Adorable Extortionists” → 2/5

- “Penelope” → 3/5

Final score: 3.05

A light-hearted collection of short stories, one of which is sure to make you LOL.

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. It's hard to rate a short story collection, but this one is somewhat uneven.

Some of these are really funny. I especially enjoyed all the stories about everyday alien contact - so insane and always slightly gross. The story about Thumbbringer was my favorite, and I also liked the Redshirts story a lot. I haven't read Redshirts yet, and that story definitely moved it up my TBR list.

But the first few stories had some humor that I didn't like. I do know this collection goes back to the early 90s, so it's not a big deal; everybody's social conscience evolves over time. Actually, there is a clever and (imo) respectful joke about trans people in one of the alien stories (the most recently written one) - it had to do with human interaction with gender-changing aliens, and that this alien species would appreciate a human's announcement of their own gender transition on the alien's official gender-changing day, although the human would need to be careful of overenthusiastic alien camaraderie. I liked that because it was portrayed as just another ordinary experience humans might have with these aliens. I mostly hide away reading only very socially conscious fiction, so it's nice to see something like that in mainstream sci-fi.

For other reasons, I didn't like the lemonade story at all - this is not nice of me, but it felt like Dave Barry, and a real-world setting felt out of place in this collection. On the other hand, I thought the one non-comedic piece at the end, a poem about Odysseus' wife Penelope, was very good, even though it was completely different from everything else.

If you like John Scalzi's humor, or silly sci-fi humor in general, you will probably enjoy this. I listened to the audio version, and I really enjoyed the author's brief introductions. It's always great to hear authors talking about their own work. All of the narrators were very good also.

I am glad I read some of [a:John Scalzi 4763 John Scalzi https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1407277112p2/4763.jpg]'s other titles first.