“The Shattering Peace” by John Scalzi

This was a disappointment, I’m sorry to say.

To start, my general feelings on Scalzi: I loved the Old Man’s War series for the most part, and a lot of his earlier stuff. I enjoyed Kaiju Preservation Society for what it was (which is exactly what Scalzi intended it to be - he called it the book version of a “pop song.”). Starter Villain didn’t really work for me - I was just bored with his style, and I decided I wasn’t going to read anything more from him. But I loved the OMW series well enough that when I saw this I decided to give it a read.

Mild spoilers for the OMW series below.

It’s set about a decade after The End of All Things. Our main character is Gretchen, whom you might remember (I admit I did not) as Zoë’s best friend on the Roanoke colony. Gretchen is part of the Colonial Union diplomatic core, working at the Obin desk (having gotten to know the Obin pretty well hanging out with Zoë on Roanoke).

The treaty between the Colonial Union, Earth, and the Conclave is holding, more or less, but the strain is building. As Gretchen learns early on in the book, those three groups decided to make a joint colony to show they could all live together. It was going ok, not great. Not much mingling, but no violence either. Then things get complicated when the colony just … disappears. It had been built on an asteroid, and it’s just gone. Not moved, not destroyed, just gone. Signs point to the involvement of the Consu, the enigmatic hyper advanced race that’s been lurking on the edges of the entire series doing their own thing.

So why was this disappointing? Three reasons.

First is a matter of taste. John Scalzi is always going to be John Scalzi, and that means tons of banter with everyone in every conversation trying to show they’re the cleverest person in the room. I enjoyed it in his earlier books, felt it reached its apex in Kaiju Preservation Society, and was bored with it in Starter Villain. It was toned down a bit here compared to those two books, which are meant to be silly and fun, but it was still a LOT. I didn’t enjoy it, but your mileage may vary.

Next is the matter of the Consu. As a device within the story, they do not benefit from closer examination. They’re kind of like the Borg or the Q from Star Trek: nigh-omnipotent, enigmatic, more than a little terrifying. Or, to be more precise, like the Borg and the Q when they first appeared. Every Star Trek fan knows what happened over the course of TNG, DS9, and Voyager: we learned more and more about them, and the more we learned, the less unknowable and terrifying they became. Learning more about them made them mundane. That’s exactly what happened with the Consu in this book. We learned a great deal about them, and in the course of that, what made them such a powerful force in the story was drastically weakened.

Last is the status of the OMW universe in general. As I mentioned in my summary, the treaty is getting creaky. There is lots of concern over whether it will hold; there are many factions, in all three signatories to the treaty, who want it broken. The colony disappearing is a major shock to the treaty, and the repercussions of this event might well shatter it. Hell, the book is titled The Shattering Peace.

None of that is addressed.

I assume Scalzi is working on book #8 in the series, because this leaves a LOT of questions unanswered. Which is fine in the context of a bigger ongoing series, but I honestly thought OMW was done with The End of All Things. But there’s no hint of that; an epilogue setting up book #8 would have improved things greatly. Something that didn’t leave me blinking and going, “That’s it? But what about [all this important stuff?]”

If #8 does come out, I’m going to wait to read it until I get some reviews. Overall, I’m going back to being done with Scalzi. All respect to him as both an author and a decent human being, but he’s just not working for me anymore.