Like the first book, Head On follows the adventures of FBI investigator Chris Shane (and partner Leslie Vann), as they investigate a crime in a near-future sci-fi setting. That setting: a world in which a percentage of the world population -- "Hadens" -- suffer from a disease that locks their active minds inside their immobile bodies. Hadens are able to interact with the outside world using robot bodies ("threeps"), which itself changes society in interesting ways. Head On centers around a sport played using threeps, and a suspicious on-field death that sparks an investigation.
The world of Lock In remains just as compelling to me in Head On. John Scalzi is really good at conjuring a deep "what if?" scenario and then exploring its ramifications in detail. He's even better about never losing sight of a story being told, and letting that control his novel rather than the flights of world-building fancy.
That said, I didn't find Head On to be as engaging as the book before it. The mystery here seems considerably more complicated -- which might be a plus for mystery readers who don't mind a touch of science fiction (as opposed to science fiction readers looking for a touch of mystery). But there are tons of minor characters here, and not all of them seem fully developed to me, with clear personalities or motivations. In the final chunk of the book, as revelations of the crime were coming to light, I found myself asking -- more than once -- "wait, who is this person again?" Not a great feeling as you're trying to unravel a mystery.
The main characters remain just as fun, though. It would be great to watch the episodic TV adventures of Chris Shane and Leslie Vann (though it would be too expensive to produce). And with this book, I had a new perspective on those characters. Where I read Lock In, I listened to the audiobook of Head On. This version was narrated by Wil Wheaton... and that itself proved interesting.
Very late in the book (as in, with mere minutes to go), I learned that there is an entirely different edition of the audiobook narrated instead by Amber Benson. "That's interesting," I thought. "I don't think I've ever heard of an audiobook written in the first person but narrated by a reader of a different gender." That thought led me to a discovery that challenged my assumptions of the book.
Chris Shane is never identified by gender in either Lock In or Head On. John Scalzi did this deliberately, and indeed claims not to know himself if the character is male, female, nonbinary, or fluid. When constructing the world of these books, it occurred to him that because "Hadens" interact with the world using robot bodies, gender might seem an especially superfluous notion to many of them. Situations would be far more common in which others could not automatically assume a Haden's gender, and many of them might embrace (or simply not care about) the ambiguity. So Scalzi opted for a first person narrative from Chris' perspective, and left it to the reader to decide.
Clearly I brought my own biases to book one, Lock In. I'd read it myself, with no audiobook clues, and had reached the conclusion that Chris was male. John Scalzi says his wife is convinced that Chris is female. For any given reader, either or neither might be true -- and I find it fascinating that this detail is part of the stories. Had I enjoyed Head On more, I could very well imagine getting the other version of the audiobook to hear Amber Benson read it and see how that altered my perception of the narrative.
But while I liked Head On, I didn't like it well enough for that. I'd give it a B-. It's probably worth a read, certainly so if you've read Lock In. But now I find myself suddenly looking forward to a book three someday, one that I might approach with a more open mind and more of a blank slate about who I think the main character is.
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