Head On

Head On is a science fiction police procedural by the American writer John Scalzi, published on 17 April 2018 and a standalone sequel to Lock In.

The book is set after Haden's Syndrome, an illness that left a proportion of the people who caught it alive and conscious but unable to move their bodies. Most of those affected interact with the world through robot bodies called Threeps, and the adaptation has produced its own culture, including a sport: Hilketa is played by teams of Hadens and is a combination of football and gladiatorial fighting, in which one player is chosen at random to be decapitated and the team that carries the head through the goalposts wins. When a player dies in a way the sport cannot explain, the case comes to Chris Shane, an agent with the FBI who is himself a Haden, and to a partner who is not. Scalzi uses the game and the investigation to work through what the legal position of a Haden actually is.

The earlier novel, Lock In, introduced the same setting and the same investigator, and this one stands on its own.