Book Club with John Scalzi on “Starter Villain”

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Once a quarter Mary Robinette Kowal hosts a book club for her Patreon members at the Classes and Bookclub level.The Fall Book Club will be with author John Scalzi about his latest novel Starter Villain.

The Book Club will take place on December 19th at 8 PM EST. It will last an hour with time for audience questions at the end. While you are not required to have read Starter Villain before attending, please keep in mind, there will be spoilers.

Structure (all times in Eastern):

8:00 pm Chat for 5 minutes as people get settled.

8:05 pm Begin recording as Mary Robinette and author talk back and forth (Everyone else will be muted.)

8:20 pm end the spoiler-free chat and move onto any spoilers! (this is also when we’ll end the video for what will be available to youtube)

8:45ish Open the floor for questions from the chat

9:00ish Stop recording near the hour and guest probably departs

9:05ish Any follow-up questions and social time

If you still need to purchase the book, here is a link for it on bookshop.org

About the Book: Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.

Charlie’s life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn’t all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they’re coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It’s up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world…be a cat.

About the author: JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular SF authors of his generation. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony, Fuzzy Nation, Redshirts (which won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel), The Last Emperox, and 2022’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. Material from his blog, Whatever, has earned him two other Hugo Awards. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter.

*For those of you who don’t know, Bookshop.org is a great way to support local bookstores but also shop online! You can select a bookstore that’s ‘yours’ to buy from or if you don’t select a store the profits go into a pool that supports all the stores!