What I Am Reading: "Will Save The Galaxy for Food" by Yahtzee Croshaw
I read this book as a nice palate-cleanser after my glut of French history. Yahtzee Croshaw hosts the Zero Punctuation video game review series, which I watch as popcorn or as my last tenuous link to the world of video gaming (besides my triennial KOTOR replay). Disclaimer: being a male gamer, Yahtzee can be retrograde sometimes, occasionally crossing over into intentional offensiveness (in a cheeky way, for what it’s worth). I do respect his video game criticism though, and the expansive knowledge of gaming history he brings to bear on the subject.
As such, I have read the novels he produces, all of which have been fun and well-written. This one is a satire of old-school Buck Rogers space opera and Burroughs sword-and-planet stories. In this story, swashbuckling space pilots have been rendered obsolete by teleportation, and must scrape together a by living ferrying tourists while longing for the golden age. The parallel to the closing of the American frontier and the glamorization of the cowboy is explicitly made, and the story even goes on to have a little to say about cultural memory and historical simulacra. The narrator, one of these pilots, gets caught up in an adventure involving a crimelord, a pseudonymous author reviled by pilots for cashing in on their stories, and a utopian community. It is very fast-paced, hurtling from one situation to the next. It also has some fun gimmicks, such as swears being outlawed and replaced by mathematical terms. I enjoyed it, as a book centered around a genre I am familiar with (moreso through cultural osmosis than directly).