Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi
By: John Scalzi / Narrated By: Khristine Hvam, Peter Ganim, Luke Daniels, John Scalzi, Greg Cope White, Fred Berman
Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
We started out trashing it, but then we started laughing as we remembered story after story. Go figure…!
Our little audiobook club did a few shorties as the weekly pick, and John Scalzi’s Miniatures was one of those Short Listens.
I’ve got some Scalzi in my Library but have yet to listen to any of them (I KNOW! Even Redshirts!!! So sue me…), but I’ve an inkling how his sense of humor goes from hearing him interviewed in MULtiple podcasts. Still, I was pretty underwhelmed after listening to this audiobook: The rather slapdash, slapstick humor, almost akin to here we are and aliens are farting sorta thing.
When it came time to review it amongst ourselves, all three of us were all: Meh about it, thought the pieces were really toooo short to convey much depth of humor, much intelligent humor.
But then we started getting to the stories we DID like, and that’s when we started laughing. For me, my favorite was the sentient creature called Sanchez who wants only to be served; I had to listen to it twice to really get what was going on (I’m slow that way). My mom mentioned the story where If Appliances Could Talk (What would they say about their lives and the people who own them?)—also pretty funny (The self-cleaning litter box thinks the toilet/bidet has NOTHING to complain about).
As a matter of fact, all the stories mentioned in the Publisher’s Summary (Didn’t read it before listening to this, so huzzah! Read it after and darned if it didn’t hit the nail on the head… THIS time…!) were hits with us. A man pushing a class action lawsuit cuz things keep overheating in space wants compensation, dang it! Maybe an entire planet will do. Pluto is plenty peeved that it’s no longer a planet, and the way he got the news was just cold-blooded. Travel back in time to live the maaaany ways Hitler coooould have died and how that did (or did NOT) change History. And a story where, yeh, they’re SAYing they won’t destroy humanity, but lookeeee: Turns out only 7 humans are needed if you crunch the numbers.
The fact that this Shortie of an audiobook has a gazillion and six topnotch narrators only made it that much more pleasing. Each little story got its own special spin, and that adds a LOT when you’re getting testy about things being more like snippets than a real story (Tho’ to be fair, the Publisher’s Summary flat-out blares that none of the stories are more than 2,300 words). Only Scalzi going on about Scalzi (What earned publication! What won an award! And, oh that was before I wrote THIS mega-hit and was after I won THAT mega-award!) gets a trifle tedious.
But only a trifle.
For the most part, this was a surprisingly delightful collection of humorous blurbs; doesn’t quite make 4-stars—at tiiiiimes the humor went for the easy joke—but was a pleasant way to spend not quite 3 hours.
And when ya start off blasting an audiobook but then go on to chuckle loudly?
Well, that’s something to be marveled at!
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