Obviously, I bought Starter Villain because of the adorable and dapper-looking cat on the front cover. And because the novel features talking spy cats. If you enjoy unserious sci-fi/supervillain stories – and cats – then you will enjoy this novel.

Starter Villain is about a young man named Charlie who inherits a supervillain business when his estranged uncle dies. Charlie also finds out that his two cats, Hera and Persephone, are a spy and a spy-in-training, respectively, and they are part of a network of cat spies bred by his uncle. His uncle’s cat spies have been trained to communicate with people via computers.

Charlie’s inheritance also includes a whole lot of money, an island volcano lair, a giant laser that can shoot satellites out of the sky, and a pod of surly dolphins that can also communicate with people.

His uncle’s enemies, a group of toxic white men who use their multinational corporations to influence world events in their favour, have become Charlie’s enemies. Scalzi uses Starter Villain to critique the world’s real-life villains: the small percentage of greedy, selfish individuals who have amassed the greatest percentage of the world’s wealth, and who sit on this wealth instead of using it to do good things to help the rest of us poor peons, such as fighting poverty and climate change. Instead, the billionaires of the world are using their money to build themselves luxurious underground bunkers so that when climate change has pretty much made the earth inhabitable for humans, they can ride it out while the rest of us fight for survival on the surface, Mad Max style. But I digress.

Charlie is a man with rather crappy luck, but he has a good moral compass and is not overly ambitious, which makes him the perfect hapless hero to go up against the asshole billionaire villains. Starter Villain does not treat its subject matter very earnestly. I have never read Scalzi’s work before, but I get the impression that he wants to entertain his readers rather than put them in a funk thinking about the injustices of the world. There is nothing wrong with that; levity is a much needed diversion from all the depressing and frustrating stuff that we have no control over. But I think that Scalzi tries just a little too hard to be funny. In any event, I was entertained by Starter Villain. The cats are definitely the best part and make the novel worth reading.