Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

Companion novels are a tricky business. If you want to write a second book that goes over most of the same terrain as a previous book, you really need something new you're trying to say, some way in which reading the second book will irrevocably change your experience of the first. Otherwise, it's an exercise, it might even be fun, but it's not necessarily going to stand up to the weight being placed upon it.

Unfortunately, that's about how I feel about Zoe's Tale. It was fun to read - I think John Scalzi's pretty much incapable of writing something that isn't enjoyable. It slipped by quite unobjectionably, and there's nothing specifically wrong with it, but that is damning with faint praise. It's not really very different from the first book that covers the same territory, The Last Colony. It covers the same time period, but more importantly, it doesn't really reframe very much from the previous book.

When I read The Last Colony, it was long after it had been published, and I knew that Zoe's Tale was out there as a companion novel. Given the events that happened in the first book, I expected the vast majority of this to take place during that time period where Zoe's off-world and the narrative stays with her parents. So I waited for that to come. And waited. And waited. And sure enough, it's there, but it's really such a thin segment of the book overall that I was let down. Interesting things happen, yes, but I was expecting and hoping the bulk of the book would take place in that time we hadn't seen.

And yes, we get more of an explanation for what the other creatures living on Roanoke are, and why they suddenly disappear from the narrative, but even with more of an explanation as to why, I'm not a lot happier than I was the first time. I get what happened - but wouldn't it be more interesting if we kept exploring that difficult relationship that started in death? Rather than having it fade into the background? Why they go away is not the more interesting answer.

Other than that, the book is entertainingly about life on the colony from the teenage perspective, and there's nothing really wrong here, just not really enough right. It's fun to read. It's not taxing. We see how the teenagers discover that the planet is not the one they thought they were going to, and dealing with the loss of electronics that ensues. Zoe's an entertaining precociously smart teenager, and she falls in love, and she rebels against being just what she is, as the living embodiment of the aspirations of an entire other alien species, who made a treaty with Earth to have representatives with her more or less constantly.

That's all good stuff, and I can't help but think that if it happened around new events that weren't quite so familiar, accompanied by Zoe figuring out both who she is and the limits and possibilities of what she is, this would be stronger. As it is, it's fun, it fills in some blanks, but it doesn't make me reframe how I see the original book, which I think is the greatest weakness. Zoe and her parents are just too close, have too good a relationship, to really allow for vastly different interpretations of what went down.