A short novel with an interesting base idea, but the story just a conversation-format description of a strangly changed world and a strange profession in it.

The base idea is interesting: all the murdered victims survive, they wake up in their home, in their bed, with a little headache, with a modestly improved health. At least almost all of them – every thousandth victim will be really dead. This thing changed in the actual world a while ago, and some guys, the dispatchers are specialized to kill dying people purposefully, because this way they could survive almost all the time.

Our main character is a dispatcher, who assists on a dangerous operation in a hospital at the beginning of the story. The operating doctor hates these guys, which shows an illogical point of the world at once: if these guys help the victims to survive, why many of the others hate them so much?

After the operation a police investigator woman asks him to help her to find his colleague, another dispatcher, who disappeared a day before. The story is about the two of them, talking to each other on many places around the city. Tony tells the policewoman how dispatching people happen in illegal cases: the format is mainly discussions, but their topic is more or less a description of the job. They are talking to each other and talking to other guys, trying to find who or why would rob Tony’s colleague.

The world is not developed enough – they are talking about the religious or scientific consequences of this change, but even their society does not really understand it. Nor will the reader. Another problem is that the story does not touch any of our world’s real problems or challenges. It’s not even a love story: Tony and the policewoman are flirting with each other, but nothing serious happens between them. And at last, it’s not funny, unusually from Scalzi – it could entertain the reader for a while, at least it’s short, but it’s not on the level expected from him.

If you like your crime novels with a bit of SF thrown in, look no further than this intriguing novella by veteran writer John Scalzi.

To write a detective story with a premise that might seem to be the beginning of the end for the average mystery takes a lot of guts. Scalzi is the perfect writer to take that challenge. His premise? What if, when people are murdered, they don’t stay dead? In Scalzi’s world, murder victims vanish and reappear at home, naked. Their bodies are reset, and their fatal injuries are healed.

In the story, “dispatcher” is a job description. They are people kept on hand to kill (or dispatch) a person with the express purpose of saving that person’s life. They sit in on operations in case the procedure goes south, they get called into emergency rooms if there’s a serious car accident, and then there’s the ‘remediation’ calls. If you’re curious about what that means, buy the book. I don’t like spoilers.

So what happens when a dispatcher is missing?

Tony Valdez, a dispatcher himself, is about to find out. A friend of his in the same line of work, James Albert, turns up missing. Detective Nona Langdon of the Chicago Police questions Valdez, and then forces him to help her begin her investigation. Encounters with an angry wife terrified for her missing husband, a man whose family is somewhere in the gray area between legitimate business and crime syndicate, and a grieving widower all lead to the truth behind Dispatcher James Albert’s disappearance.

John Scalzi is a master storyteller with a knack for dialogue and the clever observations of his characters. Scalzi’s world is real. The difference between it and the real world are revealed in small bites, but at a pace that means the reader is never in the dark for long, and the answers to questions come up even before the reader has a chance to think of them.

Well-written with beautiful characterization and witty dialogue makes this an easy recommendation to make.

A great story, fun and intriguing, as usual in Scalzi's books. I want to read more stories located in this scenario.

Review in english: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-dispatcher-john-scalzi-english.html
Review in spanish: http://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-dispatcher-john-scalzi.html

Imagine a world where people only die of natural causes and suicides. Murder victims wake up at home in their beds. Dispatchers hang out at hospitals in case an operation goes south so they can "dispatch" the patient back to life. Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher. When one of his colleagues goes missing, the cops start asking him about side jobs and the darker aspect of his line of work. This was a pretty interesting short. It was a very quick read.

A quick and interesting read, I would be interested in finding out more about this world.

I love the premise of this novella. Murder victims vanish from the place of their death and reappear in their homes, reverting back to the state they were in a day before they were murdered. That makes it awfully difficult to kill people anymore, at least permanently. This has wider implications than just homicide victims; war is kind of hard to conduct if you can't kill your enemies. Furthermore, this revolutionizes medical care. If a person is dying, you can kill them first and effectively reset them to a point before the accident occurred or surgery began.

I haven't met a Scalzi novel I didn't like, but this novella stands out as an especially good one. It's a cool concept and Scalzi explores it in a fascinating way.

Scalzi on excellent form with this one. His premise is one of the most bizarre I've come across - people dying at another's hand are immediately re-incarnated at home, in their own beds. How this has come about, no-one knows, but Scalzi has applied the rules of literary verisimilitude perfectly in imaging the kinds of institutions and events which might occur given his premise. Not many writers could persuade the reader to suspend their disbelief enough to swallow this concept, but Scalzi, a worthy successor to Asimov, Heinlein, and Russell, is just the man for the job! Highly recommended.

C'è un mondo in cui è impossibile morire ammazzati.

Ogni vittima di omicidio - con l'eccezione, forse, di una su un milione - si materializza, fresca come una rosa e nuda come un verme, nella propria casa.

Non si sa perché questo succeda. Si sa solo che succede, e che si aprono moltissime possibilità - oltre alla necessità di una figura professionale che provveda omicidi programmati per salvare la vita a vittime di incidenti stradali, o di operazioni chirurgiche ad alto rischio.

Tony Valdez è uno di loro, ma quando un suo collega scompare e la polizia chiede il suo aiuto, porta alla luce tutto un mondo sotterranei fatto di grigi commerci - e insospettati atti di pietà.

Come sempre per John Scalzi l'idea è affascinante e la scrittura brillante; questa novella dà comunque un'impressione di incompiuto, come se fosse un romanzo (noir) in bozzolo, ma non avesse avuto lo spazio di sviluppare appieno le sue potenzialità.

Una lettura comunque rapida e piacevole.

The Dispatcher is a new novella by John Scalzi. Seemingly unrelated to his other works, it sets out a mystery in a world where anyone deliberately killed will return to life.

The world that Scalzi’s built is, in some ways, familiar. There are hospitals, doctors, nurses. There are police struggling to enforce the law, and criminals working just as hard to evade it. The central conceit though, is this – that people removed from life by violence don’t, typically, die. They find themselves back in their homes, without their clothes – but definitely still alive. Nobody seems to know why this is now happening – but it’s a fact. A fact which has led to social change, and the creation of the Dispatcher – people whose job it is to eliminate people before they die naturally, in order to allow them to return to life. Dispatchers are a people approached with caution, somewhere between social pariah’s, a priesthood, and average government employees, struggling with paperwork. It’s this change, the sense that death isn’t always forever, that defines the narrative – and it’s also an inventive core to spin that narrative around.

Our protagonist is Tony Valdez, who works as a Dispatcher. Valdez is cynical, ground down by life, and perhaps ever so slightly crooked. Having said that, he’s perceptive and clearly intelligent, and a rather keen eyed investigator. There’s a Sam Spade feel about Tony, as he reluctantly allows himself to be dragged into looking for a missing person; it’s less that his armour is no longer shiny, and more that he never had any to start with. That said, he seems to be a straightforward individual, neither hero nor monster – but projecting himself as a working man, simply trying to make enough to put food on the table. Of course he also kills people for a living. It’s interesting to see a man work to remain reformed, to keep out of the sort of unfortunate deals which he would absolutely deny having taken part in before. It helps that he’s also a man with fairly firm ideas of friendship – where that doesn’t conflict with his understandable desire not to be killed himself. Tony isn’t charming, but he is resourceful, smart and edgily witty – and rather interesting to follow around.

He’s backed up by a supporting cast with similarly noir undertones. There’s the Detective who strongarms him into helping with her investigation – unwilling to accept obvious explanations, always pushing and digging into vague answers. She’s a good foil for the laconic Valdez, and adds a sharp wit of her own to the story. The banter between the Dispatcher and the Detective ranges from philosophical, to dark, to laugh-out-loud funny, often over the course of a few sentences.

There’s other figures here as well – from organised criminals to decrepit millionaires. A couple are pitch perfect, their shrouded motivations wrapped in a familiar-seeming humanity. There’s a sense of ambiguity that pervades the cast, and it’s one that pays off over the course of the text.

The plot – well, no spoilers. But in a world where no-one dies of violence, Valdez is looking into the disappearance of a fellow Dispatcher, an old friend. The central mystery is rather clever – I was unwilling to stop turning pages, being dragged long on Tony’s investigation. There’s false leads, and red herrings, and some shockingly tense and emotional moments, with an ingenious central mystery under a stylistic layer of sci-fi noir. It’s rather fun, and if that sounds like your sort of thing, I’d recommend it. I’m certainly hoping to see more of Valdez and his world in the future.

I pounced to request this as soon as I saw it. John Scalzi reliably writes solid, entertaining stories, and I usually enjoy his central idea. I didn't actually read the blurb on this one, so it took me a little while to get settled into exactly what was going on -- I think I actually preferred it that way, because it made the opening of the story a little more confusing but in the way where you can start to work it out if you're interested.

I don't love the main character; while I like seeing grey areas in fiction, I felt like his character wasn't explored enough for me to understand why he worked within grey areas and how he felt about it. With a little more of that context, I'd probably have enjoyed the whole story more -- I tend to connect to characters before clever ideas, however clever the ideas are. Still, I found the story enjoyable, and though the idea is weird and you don't know how it could possibly work, it's a fun intellectual exercise to posit these constraints and then write a mystery story within them. Don't worry too much about the how and why of the Dispatchers and what they do, because that aspect isn't what the story is interested in.

My only quibble would be that some of the dialogue wasn't really signposted well enough. Without knowing the characters extremely well, it's hard to tell which is speaking, and there were long stretches here where it was just a back and forth of dialogue. Sometimes it worked, but not always.

Definitely enjoyable, pretty much as I'd expect from Scalzi.

[Link live from 30th April 2017.]

With The Dispatcher, Scalzi has created an intriguing future and a passable detective story. The world build is enough to orient but not disorient while still leaving things to be discovered. The main character is likable with rough edges. The story itself is more on the sparse side to the point I almost wanted this to be longer. However, the sparseness mixed with Scalzi's restraint have created a tight story where not much seems out of place. The pacing feels very deliberate to the point of drawing out the investigation enough to make this novella feel complete without feeling to long or too short. In the end I almost wanted more because of the spartan plotting and stingy-on-the-details narration. There was just enough detail to figure out who might be involved in the mystery, but even so, the story develops in very carefully plotted stages. An intriguing world of which there could be more.

The Dispatcher is a tightly constructed urban fantasy mystery novella, set in a world with only one difference to our own. When someone dies, their body disappears, and they re-materialize back at their house alive and well. Most of the time. This sets up a fantastically unique murder mystery, with a character and setting that I really hope he returns to. Some elements of this reminded me a little of Altered Carbon. This could be a long running series, and I would definitely read it all.

Usually I’m not into urban fantasy at all, but this one is quite different. Most people hear Urban Fantasy and think “Oh, that’s like werewolves and vampires and magic and stuff right?” which is an easy assumption to make since so much of it is. It’s important to remember that this isn’t necessarily true though, and it most definitely isn’t the case with The Dispatcher. “Urban Fantasy” means only two things: 1. The story is set in a contemporary time 2. The impossible happens. That’s all. Everything else is just how the writer wants to use those restrictions to tell a good story. Something which Scalzi has done a terrific job of here.

I listened to the audiobook version of this last year when it was free on Audible, and more recently read the physical book published by Subterranean press. In addition to the story, there are several illustrations of important scenes, and the quality of the artwork is gorgeous. There is a sort of hyper-realism to the illustrations that’s difficult to describe, but it works very well.

Entertaining intellectual game

The story of "The Dispatcher" is built on the premise that people who get murdered will come back to live in the state they had some 6-12 hours before. So someone may die from natural causes or from suicide but not from getting killed.
The job of a dispatcher is to kill people that otherwise would die, so that they can have a fresh start.
The story will not give you any insight into why those people are not dead. Instead it shows you, how this makes killing people to a legal job, but also how dispatchers can make some money in not so legal ways. Finally it tells us how even on this premise it is possible to kill someone.
There are some pretty surprising ideas, John Scalzi delivers in telling his tale. All this is presented in the form of a mystery, the dispatcher has to solve. That is told fresh and entertaining. But the novella more or less omits the psychological and philosophical aspects of the premise. Its focus is mainly on the "How ...".
So if you like this sort of intellectual game in an entertainig presentation, than this is the right book for you.
4/5 stars
* I got an e-arc for review from the publisher via netgalley *

I received a copy of this from Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

I always enjoy anything by John Scalzi - can count on an interesting story, well written, and fun to read. [book:The Dispatcher|26082188] was a little different from his other books - not as flip and funny, more overtly dark.

The core idea was fascinating - that murdered people come back to life (really back to their "real life," not some sort of zombie thing), although those who die from other causes - suicide, accident, disease - do not. Even in a short novella like this one, the ramifications are large, as are ethical questions.

I enjoyed reading it - it was a good story. But it also made me think, and that's always a plus.

What can I say about Scalzi? This guys is hilarious but at the same time he nails it over and over. Amazing read, funny and clever.

I didn't realize this was a novella when I requested it from NetGalley, and I usually don't choose novellas, but I'm glad I did this time because The Dispatcher is such a singular mystery.

Set in the near future, a paradigm shift alters expectations about the finality death. People still die, but in 999 out of 1,000 cases, people who are killed intentionally --come back to life.

There is no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, and those who die from suicide, illness, old age, or accident will remain dead, but anyone who is deliberately killed has a 99.9% chance of coming back to life. This requires some new rules, regulations, and uh, career paths.

Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher, and usually his work involves observing dangerous operations where the risk of death is high. If the operation goes wrong and the patient is on the verge of death, the dispatcher steps in and dispatches the individual as painlessly as possible. So...killing the patient before a natural death occurs means that the patient will awake in his or her own bed at home, naked, but very much alive.

There are, of course, some ethical dilemmas involved, and dispatchers have been known to venture into grey areas. Yep, it is really difficult to determine the ways a "miracle" can be exploited.

When Tony's colleague Jimmy Albert disappears, Tony works with Chicago PD's Nona Langdon to discover what happened to the missing dispatcher.!

Originally released only in audio format, it is now available as an e-book.

Short and absorbing!

NetGalley/Subterranean Press

It isn't as easy anymore as it was previously to kill someone: All of a sudden, murdered people don't die any more but just vanish and reappear naked at home. This phenomenon established a whole new profession: Dispatchers kill people, when a surgery just went completely wrong. In this novella, dispatcher Tony Valdez helps ... to find his mysteriously vanished colleague in a race of time.

The story concentrates around the thought experiment of reappearing people but focusing only on the detective story. Which is very one-sided, because we don't really get to know how the mainline religions react on it, what economics or politics have to say about this idea, and also not about scientific elaborations. It is just the shallow, unexplained phenomenon, and doesn't provide a well-defined setting. From this, I derive that it isn't Science Fiction - it feels more like a detective noir in a kind of urban fairy tale. Other authors would have pushed this thingy into a short story, but Scalzi expanded it first to a two hours audio play. In the upcoming novella publication, this audio orientation comes through badly, as you have to read endless dialogue alternations without any orientation who said what. In fact, there isn't much narration, it is mostly dialogue. I can't say how the audio play was, but as a reader, this didn't work out for me at all. It was ok, but I can't say that I liked it.

I recommend it for fans of short popcorn mysteries. At the given price tag it is obvious that I further filter the recommendation to Scalzi fans. Anybody else might just want to skip this waste of time.

My first Scalzi. First experienced on audible. And now it's a book, with a great cover too. Very enjoyable introduction to the author.. Liked the premise of homicides coming back to life for no apparent reason and it being managed professionally by the main character and those like him. Liked the mystery within. Looked up the author and turns out sadly he mostly does series (where the money is), my preferences are for stand alones and this one was a lot of fun. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

I couldnt help but hear Tony Valdez's voice in my head as Zachary Quinto (possible side effect of having listened to the Audiobook)

I did enjoy the different "Feel" of the printed version to the audiobook. I loved both, but the written form felt heavier/darker. 10/10 would recommend to friends, family and strangers.