The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars An Interesting, Entertaining, Unconvincing Novella Written originally as an audiobook for audible in 2016, John Scalzi's "The Dispatcher" (2016) is an entertaining hardboiled urban fantasy mystery. In the not too distant future, it suddenly became the case that people who are murdered appear back in their homes naked and as whole and healthy as they were some hours before their deaths. Nobody knows the cause of this phenomenon (a miracle from God or a coincidence?), and Scalzi isn't explaining. There are complications (also unexplained). Anyone who dies from suicide or natural causes etc. is not "reset," or restored to life, and there is a small chance (1 in a 1000) that a murder victim will not resurrect. People have gotten used to this state of affairs, with some saying it proves the existence of god and others saying the opposite. Scalzi takes his fantastic conceit and extrapolates some interesting things from it. Trained and psychologically vetted Dispatchers like Tony Valdez (the first person narrator) are sent to hospitals to sit in on risky surgeries and be ready for accident victims, etc., so that if a patient is in danger of dying or of being permanently disabled, the Dispatcher will "murder" them (dispatch them with a nitrogen capsule delivered to the brain and detonated) to save the person's life. That is the legal way to use Dispatchers. There are also gray area ways, like when movie companies slip a Dispatcher $40 grand to kill a stunt man who received a crippling injury shooting a film, thereby ensuring the guy resets to full health and can continue working without any law suits, and then lie that the stunt man had received a mortal injury requiring him to be killed. There are more dubious private gigs, as with fight clubs in Chicago's south side where poor black guys without any futures earn $50 for maiming each other with hammers and saws etc., after which all participants are shot by moonlighting Dispatchers. And a dueling fad is sweeping universities, with students hacking at each other with bastard swords and paying Dispatchers to "clean up" accidents by killing the wounded. And rich people like to bring a Dispatcher along when they go skydiving and so on, just in case. The story opens with the divorced dispatcher Tony sitting in on an old man's tricky surgery at a Chicago hospital. There Tony is questioned by police Detective Langdon, who's investigating the suspicious disappearance of Tony's friend and fellow Dispatcher Jimmy. Langdon (a tough, intelligent black woman) gets Tony to cooperate with her investigation, and soon he's talking with Jimmy's hostile wife, an unethical former Dispatcher colleague, an elderly wealthy member of the Chicago elite, and a member of the leading Chicago crime family (now supposedly gone legit). Soon enough Tony is way more involved in the case than he wanted to be. As the mystery is explored Scalzi introduces some serious elements vis-à-vis race, class, and euthanasia or the right to die, Tony and Langdon make an appealing odd-couple team, and Zachary Quinto reads the audiobook with aplomb, but after finishing "The Dispatcher," questions and unconvincing things started hoving into view. First, if murder victims have been reappearing fine and dandy back in their homes for about ten years and dispatchers have been in business for at least eight (Tony is an eight-year veteran and among the first trained for the job), how the heck would a veteran police detective like Langdon be so ignorant about so many aspects of the trade (like private side gigs)? It smacks of Scalzi finding a not very convincing way to fill the reader in on everything. Second, if, as Tony explains, he is not really murdering people when he dispatches them but rather enabling them to improve their chances to live good lives when they return from the death he gives them, and if he is just doing his job in conjunction with his Agency, insurance companies, and hospitals, etc., then it would seem that he's not in fact murdering the people he dispatches, which would mean that they should not reappear after he kills them. If people who commit suicide (to, for instance, avoid dying slowly from humiliating terminal illnesses that require grueling treatments) don't reappear after death, why would Tony's clients? For that matter, when you think about it the entire premise is a bit strange: why do only murder victims reappear hale and whole after being killed? Perhaps Scalzi plans to explore this in future Tony Valdez stories, but in this novella the lack of explanation and the specific limitations of the "miracle" make things feel contrived. In conclusion, the writing is readable, the concept interesting, and the audiobook entertaining, but based on reading this novella and Scalzi's Old Man's War, I won't be in a hurry to try more of his work. View all my reviews
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