The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi

Posted by: Redhead on: April 29, 2017

• In: John Scalzi
• 10 Comments

The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi

published in print in 2017, audible version in 2016

where I got it: received advanced reading copy from the publisher (Thanks Subterranean!)

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.Wow was this a fun little novella!

 

The story is nearly all dialog, and while I was reading I kept thinking to myself “All this banter and chatter, this would make a fantastic audio book!”.  I hopped online, wondering if there were any reviews up yet of this novella to learn that I live under a rock.

 

Last year, Scalzi wrote The Dispatcher as an audio only novella, to be exclusively offered on Audible.com for a certain length of time. And Zachary Quinto narrates it!  As a huge thank you to his fans and everyone who loves audible, the download was free for a short window.  So, I am apparently the last person to know that Scalzi wrote a very fun little  novella called The Dispatcher.  I’m ok with this.

 

I recently reviewed Mira Grant’s Last Girls, and my experience with Scalzi has been similar to my experience reading Grant/McGuire: I’m mostly meh on their novel length works, but I usually enjoy their short fiction.

 

The Dispatcher is just over 120 pages, but feels much shorter since it is nearly all dialog. The gist of the story is that people aren’t really dying anymore.  Sure, you can die from old age, or from driving drunk and wrapping your car around a tree, but if someone else intentionally kills you, you’ll wake up a few hours later at home, as good as new.

 

No one quite understands how or why this is happening, but 999 times out a thousand, it works. What about people who are on the edge of death? They’ve been brought to  the emergency room after a terrible car accident, or they had a surgery that had horrible complications?  This is where professional dispatchers come in. If you’re about to die, a dispatcher shoots you in the head, intentionally causing your death.  About five minutes later, you wake up good as new, at home. About five minutes after that, the dispatcher cashes their check from your health insurance company.  It sounds ridiculous, but it works, and it makes for an increasingly fun little story.

Yeah, so murder doesn’t really work anymore. Neither does soldiers shooting other soldiers, or a police officer shooting a bank robber. At first, I thought the premise was absolutely absurd, but it actually works really well, and I really got into this story, even laughing out loud a few times. (I laughed out loud while reading a story about a guy who gets paid to shoot people in the head. What the hell is wrong with me??)

 

The story revolves around Tony Valdez, who is a dispatcher, and Nona Langdon, who is a detective with the Chicago Police department. They become reluctant partners when a dispatcher acquaintance of Tony’s goes missing. And by partners, I mean Langdon guilts and harrasses Valdez into telling her everything she wants to know about what he and his buddies used to get up, and the dark side of dispatching.  Yes, there is a black market for shooting people in the head.  There’s also a bunch of idiot rich kids who impale each other with swords, knowing their buddy/victim won’t die from the injury.   crazy, right?

 

The Dispatcher feels different from other Scalzi short fiction and novels I’ve read – It’s urban fantasy, it’s hilarious, and it gets dark.  Like, really dark. And laugh out loud funny, multiple times.  But I like darker stuff, so that worked perfect for me. I liked the gallows humor, the crazy things people do because they know they can’t die, and the ways people find to kill other people when the usual won’t cut it anymore.  Novella length is also just the right length for this particular story.  Characters are introduced, a mystery presents itself, the world is explored on a small scale, and the mystery gets solved.  I’m a big fan of the writing philosophy of “tell the reader just less than you think they’ll want to know”, and 130 pages is just the right amount of space to tell me just less than I want to know.

 

This near future version of Chicago is a fun place to play and explore, I hope Scalzi returns to it with future novellas and/or short stories.  There are endless stories he could tell in a world where it’s very difficult to kill someone else.

 

If you listen to the audible version, you get to hear Zachary Quinto’s voice for 2 hours. That’s a win.

 

If you read the Subterranean Press version, you get to hear whatever voice you want in your head, and you get to enjoy Vincent Chong’s illustrations. Also a win.

 

Tags: can't die, Chicago, novella, urban fantasy