Starter Villain

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Starter Villain

By: John Scalzi

Narrated by: Wil Wheaton

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About this listen

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, hyperintelligent 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.

Adventure

Fantasy

Science Fiction

Superhero

Funny

Feel-Good

Witty

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No real complaints, it's fun, and it builds to a very satisfying climax. The premise makes it hard to avoid comparisons with the rather better Hench by Natalie Walschots, however - Scalzi's best stories feel fresher than this. I couldn't help feeling it was a bit self-indulgent, too. Scalzi delights in trolling the blue-tick anti-woke mob who suck up to corporate slimeballs like Elon Musk, but he's done it better with other stories, like the excellent Kaiju Preservation Society. Here, it felt a bit obvious. Performance-wise, it's the same as every Will Wheaton reading. I'm happy to listen to him, he does a decent job and is a good reader for this kind of stuff but the character differentiation is iffy and accents are a crapshoot.