Initially, the Nidu might have their casus belli in the form of a diplomatic insult. The opening chapter reveals how an Earth diplomat named Dirk Moeller manages to provoke a Nidu into a fatal stroke by insulting him with the Nidu language of odors. (Where the odors emanate from, and how, is a hilarious riff best left for direct readerly interaction.) But even this minor crisis fades into insignificance with other simultaneous developments.

The time of succession has come on the Nidu homeworld, and for their power-transfer ceremony they need a special, genetically engineered Earth sheep known as the "Android's Dream." (Any Nidu clan that gets the sheep first and shows up at the ceremonies will assume leadership.) But all the stocks of said transgenic animal, our government soon discovers, have been mysteriously wiped out. It appears that there are several conspiracies afoot by different cabals (including the Church of the Evolved Lamb) to foment a break between Earth and the Nidu.

One government official intent on maintaining peace is Ben Javna. He recruits his old friend Harris Creek—an ex-soldier, computer whiz and general Competent Guy—to track down a surviving Android Dream to placate the Nidu. Creek sets out, aided by the world's only true artificial intelligence: Brian. But what Creek soon discovers throws a spanner into the works.

The last source of living Android Dream genes is an average woman named Robin Baker (the ovine genes are hiding unexpressed in her junk DNA, due to her strange heritage). And once the Nidu, led by the vicious Narf-win-Getag, get a whiff of Robin's existence, her life will be over. That is, if the hit man named Rod Acuna and his alien pal Takk, hired by a government quisling, don't get her and Creek first.

A comic conflation of SF and caper novel

Let's get a slightly misleading impression out of the way first. Despite its title harking back to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), John Scalzi's new book is not particularly Phildickian, except at the most glancing point of intersection, where both authors occasionally push satirical absurdity to new limits. (From Scalzi: "Quaker Oats [had become] the largest mainstream information and technology service in the world. ... A guy in breeches [was] the universal symbol of high technology ...") There are no epistemological, eschatological, drug-fueled weirdnesses here.

Quite the opposite.

Like Heinlein, a role model for his earlier military-SF books (Old Man's War [2005] and The Ghost Brigades [2006]), Scalzi has the knack of writing a sleek, intelligent naturalism with just the right number of infodumps, a technique and style that grant his futures a deep believability. Scalzi's alien-infested doormat Earth of whatever year feels as if we've just stepped out on our front porch and found it there—it's that acceptable and tangible.

No, the other SF ancestors of Scalzi's newest book are masters like Keith Laumer, Christopher Anvil, Eric Frank Russell and Gordon Dickson—humorists who contemplated mankind's role as underdog or newcomer among self-serving alien races who were often goofy, nasty, aesthetically repellent or some combination of all three traits. Think of Harris Creek as Jame Retief updated for 2006, and you won't be far astray. And I have to affirm most heartily that Scalzi has the craft and chops to pull off his homage, upgrading and reimagining what might have seemed a tired subgenre to full-strength comedic relevance and un-put-downability.

Part of the success of this laugh-out-loud, cleverly plotted tale stems from Scalzi's other ficto-genetic strain: that of the Donald Westlake/Elmore Leonard/Carl Hiassen-style caper novel. Scalzi fills his book with lowlife thugs, venal politicians and quirky boyfriend-girlfriend banter, eternally appealing since the days of Damon Runyon. (I see Robin as totally Sandra Bullock, and Harris as Russell Crowe. And believe me, I'm handing out some serious praise here for Scalzi's cinematic vividness.) But he doesn't neglect real SF-ideational conceits either. It's rather as if Christopher Moore rewrote Heinlein's Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958).

But marvelously rewarding as this book is, I'm still not satisfied with Scalzi. I demand that he contact Hollywood and secure the job of writing the next Men in Black movie. He's the guy to put Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones through some real adventures!