The Android's Dream

I definitely consider myself a fan of Scalzi's style, and this wonderful tale is a great example of why I feel this way from the first words to the last, I thoroughly enjoyed the story, the characters, scientific concepts employed, and all the rest. If you're up for a fantastic story, a few laughs and an overall great read, then buy your copy now!

A little strange but definitely kept me interested the whole way. I can see a movie being made from this and as I read I can picture who would play each character. If your a fan of Space fiction and Wil Wheaton you should like this book. I definitely recommend it.

Entertaining novel. Only one plot problem that I didn't think he explained properly. Clearly one of the best sci fi writers of our day. Won't grab you like the Old Man's War series, but a good read if you like Scalzi...and I do.

Scalzi has that rare ability to be eminently readable - his prose flows. Other authors may put words on paper, but the manner in which Scalzi does it makes his books easy, fun and engrossing to read. Butcher's Dresden Files books are similar - but his other ones - the Codex Alera series - aren't. Maybe it's the humor angle ...?

This book starts very well and had me laughing out loud which doesn't happen often. The description of Aliens is not overloaded leaving your imagination to fill in a few bits. Well paced and worth reading.

This book by Scalzi continues to show his brilliance in writing dialogue. It's like that witty friend of yours, just not so hung up on its own irony that your not sure you want to hang out with it anymore. I laughed so hard one time that my kidney came out of my nose.

I found the Android's Dream playful, suspenseful, & witty! Imagine an alien race who desires a specific sheep for it's coronation ritual & a human woman being the last one who has this DNA. Great story!

Fresh, new, incredible funny and really well written. After finishing this book it is possible that you will look up charters of the Church of the evolved lamb near your neighborhood, have a completly different take on gas produced by the human body and a better understanding of intergalactic poltics. The Android's dream is one of the best sci fi books ever written it reminds you of the best the genre has to offer and still feels completly different from what you have read before. I think this will become a classic and a few years from now people will recomed it as we recomend Dune or The Neuromancer to new readers today.

Just like with the "Old Soldiers" series, Scalzi has another winner here. Enough plot twists to keep you guessing until right up to the end and great character development. Scalzi is undoubtedly a great new light in the SciFi realm.

This is an all too rare and successful attempt at science fiction humor with sci-fi in-jokes and action. It works for me as satire of politics, religions, and civil servants in extremis with interstellar war as an afterthought. The artificial intelligence characters are the real stars.

This book is not deep, but is an entertaining story and would have rated 3 stars from me, except for an issue beyond the control of the author. There are problems with the publisher's formatting of the text. Not enough to called serious, and seemingly trivial, but enough of a problem to destroy any enjoyment I may have derived from reading Scalzi's story. To potential readers of this book, if the two problems I describe below will not bother you, then please enjoy Scalzi's story.

First: The font is forced one size larger than the Kindle's standard sizes. I often switch between a novel and a technical manual on the Kindle - this font sabotage by the publisher creates the unnecessary step adjusting font sizes when switching (ever tried to read a technical manual all in fine print?). This is not the only novel to suffer from this issue. Publishers refuse to learn that ebooks live in an environment very different from physical books. It reminds me of the bad old days when software publishers believed their software was the only important software installed, therefore re-writing the system configuration and/or crashing other software was acceptable to them (thankfully, most of these software publishers are now out of business). Remember publishers, this is my Kindle, not yours - you do not have my permission to mess around with MY Kindle.

Second, and more seriously: Poor proofreading. The Kindle version contains errors not found in the hardcover version. Every error appears trivial, except they occur so often and are so blatant as to throw me out of the story flow. Compounding this, is that these errors are inconsistent, making it impossible to adapt.

This book WILL WIN both awards. It features an excellent storyline, Heinlein-esque characters, and more laugh out loud humor than anything I've read in several years. Treat yourself to this one and wonder, as I do, how I'm going to wait for the next Scalzi book.

Scalzi is a throwback to a simpler time in science fiction where the universe is populated with a 1000 alien species, most of them described in a few broad strokes, and the less said about how the hyperdrive works the better. That the book works, (much as the tv show "House" works, despite being entirely forumlaic... "what, only 40 mins past the hour, this can't be the real cure...") because they are fun, with a frenetic energy and a goofball, unpredictable sense of humor.

The writing is plain, and the the plot picaresque: a series of unlikely, escalating confrontations between the forces of the good guys and those of the bad guys, takes our hero from a dead-end job to an interstellar coronation ceremony, by way of a space cruise ship populated entirely by veterans of a battle he just happened to have fought at and won a Medal of Honor... get the picture?

Adding insult, the protagonist is not only a military savant with hands registered as deadly weapons, but he is also a brilliant computer programmer who has cracked the problem of artificial intelligence and is aided in his quest by an all knowing AI computer friend.

I read it with reasonable enjoyment, but even I have to caveat that review by saying I only read sci fi -- so that that with a grain of salt.