Big, Dumb Objects

Schlock Mercenary #16

by Howard Tayler

Cans full of sky, balloons full of star, and rogue artificial planets full of death: They're not dumb, but poking them to see how they work just might be.

Genres: Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Space Opera, Humor, Aliens, Webcomic

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Howard spent most of his happy childhood in Florida where he was on the swim team in grade school, and in a rock band in high school. He graduated in 1985 and moved to Utah to attend Brigham Young University.

After two years there, he served two years as a missionary for the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), after which he returned to school at BYU and decided to move to Provo permanently after graduating and getting married.

He currently works full-time as a cartoonist, writing, drawing, and coloring Schlock Mercenary , as well as doing comics for assorted corporate clients.

He is married to author and editor Sandra Tayler.

See the author page on Schlock Mercenary website

Reviews

[Natalie Waddell-Rutter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read Schlock Mercenary, I am reminded of how much I love the series. Taylor gets just the right blend of humor, action and plot development for my taste. The storyline addresses some big ideas centered around immortality. How do you keep a civilization alive forever? How do you create enough resources for the civilization (and probably the people) to live forever? How does it change society when people can't die? Interspersed between those deep thoughts are jokes on accidentally "volunteering" for an unwanted job and zombies and all of Schlock's antics. The artwork has significantly improved since the beginning of the series. My favorite bits are the interstitial notes about the galactic society that always comment on our current society. There's also a bonus story that is only found in the book (present in all the books). Everything else is found on the website linked above.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has all the usual qualities of Schlock Mercenary: good humor, strong worldbuilding, fun characters. The plot is perhaps the most complex yet, and at times I found it a bit confusing. It would probably help if I had re-read the previous book before reading this. But there were also a lot of POV switches, which felt a little fragmenting. Still, overall, great fun for fans of the series.

[Shannan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one started off slow, but picked itself up real quick in Act 3. Some of the new characters I didn’t care for as much, while I’m growing to love some of the other ones more. Tagon’s death really shook me because he’s always had this aura of invincibility about him, even if he’s kinda dumb sometimes. That said, I’m super excited to see how they go about resurrecting him in the next book! It’ll be fun, I can feel it already.

Other thoughts: I found the Wing Marshall’s death immensely satisfying and Schlock’s crisis of conscious kind of adorable and overdue. Sometimes his rampant, murderous sociopathy bothers me, so it was nice to see him feel guilty about it for awhile. He’s getting so grown up!