Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

 

Even before he tried to get any novels published, Scalzi wrote very much like Scalzi. This is probably more like *The Android's Dream* (though I wonder at least a little if the aliens in that book that communicated at least somewhat olfactorily were maybe repurposing at least some of the thought that went into the aliens in this book--no snark if so) in tone than his more recent novels, it's less breezy and there's probably more going on below the surface here than there is in, say, *Starter Villain*, but the story still moves quickly and the authorial voice is immensely readable. There are a few things that are somewhere in the range between well-foreshadowed and bleeding-obvious (and even at least one thing that seemed kinda obvious, it was still interesting to see how it worked out). The characters are mostly believable., the dialogue feels like people speaking, the prose is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Glad I grabbed this from the library when I saw it.