The Dispatcher

A fun novella with an interesting ‘superpower' concept. Death is over, as long as death is done by means of murder. If you are intentionally killed by someone else you reappear where you were a few hours before, back in the same state that you were at that time. With that in mind a new type of agent is created to ‘dispatch' those on the brink of dying and so therefore allow them to reappear and survive.

An intriguing concept that is played through with a detective noir style in this story, where one of these agents tries to find out what has gone wrong with an attempted dispatch which did not work. The whole thing works really well in it novella format and I can see Scalzi has written at least one sequel that I will have to investigate. The writing is fun and engaging, the murky world is interesting and the characters well written. The reasoning behind this deathlessness is never really fully explained, but that lack of explanation is played with in the text itself. It is an interesting concept, if a bit silly, but taking the whole thing on faith leaves an interesting noir drama with a twist.