Redshirts

The Universal Union's flagship Intrepid is the most prestigious posting for the young officers of 'Dub U', and the most dangerous. Every mission seems to result in the death of at least one junior crewmember, and the old hands all duck out when the senior staff come looking for someone to add to the away team. Could a ship really be this unlucky? Could the amazingly handsome Lieutenant Karensky really survive so much punishment? And why is it that backstory seems to pop into people's heads as if it had always been there?

John Scalzi's Redshirts kicks off as a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for Star Trek, with a clear division between the scenes which are just the junior crew chatting and those where the senior crew drag the focus back onto them (mostly in the form of a change in the occurence of swearing and sexual references from 'lots' to 'none'). It then pushes into its own territory as Ensign Andy Dahl tries to escape the predestined fate of all short-arc supporting characters via a rogue mission to exploit the bad time travel mechanics of the Narrative and stop the deaths at their source: the basic cable show The Chronicles of the Intrepid.

Redshirts is not a new idea - within the text itself Scalzi openly refers to half a dozen implementations of the 'characters talk to their creator' concept, and people have been making jokes about red shirts for as long as I've been alive - but the central characters are lively and entertaining, and the bafflement of the various officers as the Narrative spotlight comes and goes is entertaining, as well as really rather creepy.

Once the main narrative is exhausted, Scalzi does go off the boil a little, however, and apparently needing some extra pages to make contract adds three codas, each one following one of the 'real world' characters. They're not bad in themselves, but they feel extraneous (which is, I suppose, why they're codas), and more like the author playing around with alternative approaches to his concept than like they are truly related to the main story.