Redshirts

Redshirts is a piece of fluff. Its premise verges on silly. At first it put me in mind of the movie Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen. After the initial silliness, it actually gets pretty entertaining, quite an enjoyable read. In the book, there is even a reference to movies such as Will Ferrell's Stranger Than Fiction, which has a somewhat similar premise.

The book starts as kind of a spoof of Star Trek. SPOILER ALERT The title refers to the unfortunate habit of cast extras, wearing uniforms with red shirts, getting killed on away missions. In the book, the characters are junior officers on a spaceship with an extremely high fatality rate among junior officers and crewmen who get killed on away missions, while the captain, science officer, and a handful of other senior officers always survive. Our protagonist and his friends finally become convinced that their lives are controlled by the script of a second rate but popular basic cable television show of the early 21st century. They commandeer a shuttle, use a black hole to go back in time to 2010 to try to convince the producer and writer of the TV show to stop killing them off. Ridiculous, right? But it's well written and a fun, fast read.

I've only read one other by John Scalzi. He clearly is an adept writer; His books win awards. I'm sure I'll read more of his stuff. I wasn't particularly thrilled with the ending of Redshirts - I thought it was just a little too glib. After the ending there are three codas, each kind of an epilog from the point of view of a different individual. Each coda has a different writing style. They make up for the flip ending.