John Scalzi is as noted for his opinionated blog as for his excellent science fiction. Fans will find much to delight in this collection of Scalzi’s thoughtful, often provocative commentary on life, politics, writing, fandom, and more. The entries suffer from the predictable limitations of their original format. That is, there’s a repetition of tone and theme that make reading them in large chunks less than exciting. This is not to say that Scalzi’s collection lacks content or lively prose. Both abound, but as in life, one person’s viewpoint and way of expressing it are consistent. There’s a clear effort to vary more serious topics with humorous ones. For Scalzi fans, this book should be a feast of eloquent, beautifully articulated blog posts, even if they must necessarily be taken in small bites.

In a departure from what I generally review here at Alex Can Read, I had the opportunity to review Virtue Signaling and Other Heresies, a collection of essays from John Scalzi’s Whatever blog. It is political, thoughtful, funny and searing. Scalzi impresses me with his introspection and self-awareness.

If you’re like me, and find reflecting on the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath painful, you’ll also find that parts of Virtue Signaling are very painful to read. There are essays from before the election where Scalzi exclaims that a Donald Trump presidency Cannot and Will Not be. There are essays ranking the Republican nominees and essays making the case for Hillary Clinton. How wrong he was, and how painful it is to revisit that hope.

That being said, there are really thoughtful and provocative essays about male privilege, sexism, allyship and being a good parent and partner. Scalzi recognizes that he’s been dealt a really great hand in life and that he played his cards well. He also acknowledges that his understanding of the world and his privilege is imperfect and that he has room to improve. These essays are where the gold of this collection are mined.

It’s absolutely worth your time to read this collection of essays.

Thank you to Subterranean Press for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

The famous sci-fi writer has a blog, and these are some of his posts.
Humor and honesty. That’s what you want from a political commentator, if that’s what you can call John Scalzi in this book. He probably wouldn’t call himself that; he’s self-admittedly too lazy.
One other thing: logic. Unlike most of the internet and its shoot-from-the-hip tweets, these writings take time. They’re well thought out. They look at other sides of the argument and break down why he disagrees with it, or in the infrequent case agrees. Again, that’s pretty rare, and most welcome.

These compilations are basically the most popular posts from John Scalzi's website, Whatever.
I'm a huge fan of Scalzi's, ever since the release of his first book, Old Man's War. He's a great Science Fcition writer and I want everyone else to love him as much as I do.

But you can read these compilations ,even if you're not a Science Fiction fan, as most of the mare about current affairs, politics, pop culture, and social issues. Scalzi has a distinctly liberal bent to his beliefs. Although I don't think he classifies himself as such, he cares very deeply about many social issues, and has a a fair and thoughtful approach to them, not just knee-jerk reactions. His most famous essay is about poverty and how it affects people for the rest of their lives, and invited his readers to add to the discussion.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

I'm sure the reader can find some gems in this collection, too.

I wasn't familiar with Scalzi's blog nor had I read any of his science fiction novels. I knew of his presence via Twitter but simply hadn't ever check it out. This collection of essays from his blog ranging from 2013-2018 are an excellent place to start.

writing from a place where neither art nor entertainment are rarified things, but rather “separate conditions with substantial but not perfect overlap,” each of his essays from the lighthearted and charming to the political jeremiad and even the deeply personal are attempting to show ours is an imbricating experience of the world. That is, there is no divide between high and low art, there is no neutral experience or expression because everything overlaps. The task is articulate this and Scalzi succeeds.

[Disclaimer: I received an advance NetGalley copy for an honest review]

Whenever a major event happens in the news, particularly when it has to do with politics, the world of publishing, science fiction, or puffed-up whiny manboys who are alarmed that women are standing up straight and talking right out in public, I head to science fiction writer John Scalzi's 20-year-old, "Whatever," to see if he's written about it.

More often than not, he has. More often than not, his posts are smart, funny, sarcastic, and insightful.

"Virtue Signalling and Other Heresies" is the latest collection of blog posts to Whatever, covering the last five years with special attention to the mess in the White House since 2016. My beliefs on politics -- and feminism, and treating people with respect, and general ethical behavior -- line up with this so reading the posts again was cathartic and depressing and fun. Scalzi is not one to suffer fools or hide his opinions and he lets fly again here, although since the election some of them have been more in sorrow than in anger.

Partly because of that he chose to break the essays up so there wouldn't be one "hard slog" during the Trump years, running them mostly in alphabetical order instead. I understand this, but where on the site itself you expect to get a mishmash of subjects from day to day I thought it made the book as a whole more disjointed as the posts lurch back and forth.

But you'll get his thoughts on the election, and Trump, and Republicans and Democrats. Also his family, writing, the business of writing, why "Avengers: Infinity War" left him flat even though he thought it was amazingly done, why you shouldn't let your child name your cat, why using "they" as a singular pronoun is just fine, Muhammed Ali, and whatever else occurs to him.

"Virtue Signalling" is another wonderful dive back into John Scalzi's mind and that's always a fun place to visit.

These are all collected from Scalzi's blog, but it is convenient and fun to have the best from the last few years collected in one place--on the waves of #metoo in the Science Fiction community, the changes to publishing wrought by digital versions, convention codes of conduct, reboots of beloved franchises (and the screaming pushback), and the intersections of real life and speculative fiction.

Before he became your favorite science fiction author (and mine), John Scalzi wrote in several other modes. For twenty years, he blogged regularly at his site, Whatever (that puts him among the first bloggers, possibly even predating the term blog). Virtue Signaling is his latest collection of blog posts culled from Whatever, spanning the years 2013 to 2018.

As such, it is a mixed bag thematically, although political commentary and related social issues are clearly at the fore, considering the big change in political climate that took place in 2016. In addition, Scalzi (once a film critic) discusses movies (all science fiction I believe), plus music, online etiquette, his family, and such.

So why, you might immediately ask, should I buy a collection of blog posts that are available for free online at said blog? The immediate answer, in a technical realm, is that you won't have to sift through many posts that don't qualify for collection -- photos, status updates, entries by guest writers, etc. (I checked a couple of months at random, and only two or three of twenty-plus monthly posts made it into the collection).

And there is also the notion that having it all at your fingertips, whether in print or as an E-book, depending on what you prefer, gives it a familiar feel that encourages reading posts in their entirety and reading the collection in its entirety -- online posts, as we all know whether we admit it or not, are too easy to skim, overlook, or just plain give up on after a while.

But the biggest thing is seeing it all side by side in the context Scalzi intends. There is a continuum of both style and substance, regardless of subject matter (and regardless of the seemingly random but actually quite deliberate organization of posts in mostly alphabetical order), that comes across in reading these essays as a collection. Scalzi has an approach to critical thinking that is consistent and indelible, and to my mind, wholly appealing. In short, he's one heckuva writer, even when he's creating something other than the best contemporary (often comic) science fiction available anywhere.

As a corollary to that, if you are indeed a fan of his science fiction, you may have noticed that while he can expertly tell a straight-ahead story that stands on its own, he always has, if you want to dig for it, a clear subtext. As in the best science fiction of any era, that subtext says more about contemporary conditions than it does about a speculative future. Scalzi is a master at such subtext. Reading Virtue Signaling elevates the themes from sub to center stage.

That suggests another question. What if you're not a fan of Scalzi's science fiction? Not a trivial question, as there is a schism in the science fiction community in which Scalzi is a central figure. I won't get into the whole thing here (look it up if you must), but Scalzi represents one side of the story, at times as a leader, at times as a target. Since much of his political and social commentary on Whatever and therefore in this book is unmistakably emblematic of his side, those coming from the opposite perspective will likely fail to appreciate it.

To which I have this to add, to quote a passage from Virtue Signaling: "you have to learn the skills that allow you to robustly defend your point of view and to abandon that point of view when it is not tenable, and come to a new understanding through the process." I would recommend that all readers apply this process to Scalzi's ideas, regardless of a reader's ideological point of origin. Not necessarily to have minds changed, but to at least put ideas to the test and see if they withstand challenge.

Sadly, this is not likely to happen with Scalzi's detractors, and his fans will no doubt function as the proverbial choir. But as a member of that choir, I appreciate Scalzi's intellectual honesty in offering up his opinions, challenging himself to demonstrate that they are indeed tenable, always with the caveat that they are his opinions and not anything he would impose on anyone else.

Precisely what the book jacket says, this is a collection of blog posts by author John Scalzi. I've read and enjoyed one or two of Mr. Scalzi's fiction novels and so selected this nonfiction working ARC thinking it might be similarly pleasing. This did not, at least in my experience, prove to be the case. Scalzi's essays a not particularly thought out and heavily rooted in his (self professed) white male privilege. Fans of Scalizi (particularly those who are fans enough to engage on more than the new-book-I-will-buy-and-read-it level) might really enjoy this work, but casual or non-fans should probably give it a miss and focus instead on his fiction.

This is another volume of selected essays originally published on Scalzi's blog Whatever. Specifically, these are essays from the last 5 years in which he discusses politics and various socially and culturally significant events, plus a few other essays reflecting on family and friends. I happen to largely agree with Scalzi on political and social issues, so I found this book highly enjoyable and entertaining. If you don't like the political and social views he regularly expresses on his blog and on Twitter, then you won't enjoy this, a book in which he does nothing but express those views.

I found this volume to be generally cathartic and highly relevant. In the midst of so much chaos and vitriol in the news and on social media, it's nice to read a bunch of sane essays.

I did dislike the organization of this book. The essays are presented in alphabetical order, which was slightly disorienting when I would have expected them to be either grouped by topic or presented in chronological order. My disorientation stems from the fact that the commentaries on the 2016 election are effectively out of order. At the same time, I completely understand Scalzi's choice not to organize by topic, because yes, the Trump section would have been a pretty depressing slog.

From science fiction and other worlds, John Scalzi takes us next door and down the street. In this book, we see Scalzi’s talents on display through brief and vivid entries.

These are timely topics, handled with wit and the right amount of acerbic insight. Above all, the entries are well-written.

I have to admit, before I begin, that I am definitely biased in writing this review; no, I do not know Mr. Scalzi personally, but I have followed him on Twitter ever since I first read Old Man's War, and I know that his and my political views are very much in line (stances on cats, however, are a sticking point).

Virtue Signaling and Other Heresies collects Mr. Scalzi's blog posts from one of the most turbulent periods of ideological clashes in American history since the Civil Rights era (and definitely the most unstable in this reviewer's lifetime); as such, it's difficult to digest reading as a start-to-finish book.

Where this shines is as a collection of well-penned reactions, both immediate and meditated-upon, to changes in the American social and political climate (everything from the minor to the cataclysmic) which dig into the psyche of the type of American who might resist the current Presidential administration as well as those who defend it vehemently; Scalzi is not shy about voicing his disapproval of those who use power and visibility to embolden bigotry and hatred, and writes candidly about the responsibility to use his status as a well-respected White male in a well-regarded profession to champion victims of that bigotry.