Second read through of Starter Villain, and caught a place where John Scalzi was subtly taking the piss out of Atlas Shrugged.

(Our protagonist discovered his recently-deceased uncle was a self-described 'villain' (think Bond, not supers), and a group of other billionaires are trying to recruit him after said uncle turned them down.

The American of the group is Thomas Hardin, whose grandfather had the company invest in an alloy 'stronger and lighter than steel'... but shattered when it got too cold, nearly bankrupting the company.

(An alloy 'stronger and lighter than steel' was a plot point in Atlas Shrugged, where the rich company owners are all apparently geniuses, rather than 'arrogant products of nepotism who think they are geniuses')

(Protagonist was a business journalist who lost his job because (waves hand at American journalism industry) so there is the element of 'this is a larger scale than the people I used to cover, but I am aware of the tricks'.)

ahaha

i appreciate that sort of easter egg in prose

I suspect I caught it because I'm uisng hte audio book for read number 2 rather than the prose one. Or maybe not.

(Also fits with the theme of 'these particular characters think they are the heroes of an Ayn Rand novel, or even the villains of a James Bond film but they are really not, they are just rich people who aren't used to the consequences of their actions'.

that's one way to engender realism

Yeah, it's a thematic match with Scalzi's last novel, Kaiju Protection Society, which opens with the protagonist being fired from a food delivery startup whose CEO literally started it with Daddy's money to be just annoying enough that Uber or DoorDash would buy the company.

Granted, the last decade has made 'billionaires are arrogant idiots' a highly realistic part of any novel set in modern times.

oh nice

I've bounced off scalzi a couple times but I might have to try these two

I like his blog!

He has a distinctive voice, which you do get in his blog as well. What did you bounce off of?

something I noticed in fuzzy nation and red shirts

everyone has the same detached ironic voice all humor and wryness and then there's a moment of high emotion that seems like it comes out of nowhere to me

pathos that falls flat

"Starter Villain" by Dessa: Theme to the novel Start...

this is fun

Yeah, one thing Scalzi does is commission songs for his books