RECOMMENDED   

Television shows, if you think about it, are pretty weird to live in. At least once a week something unusual happens, that manages to involve somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour, and during the summer you just go through the motions all over again. Which is fine enough if you are the main character, but what if you were just a background extra? John Scalzi’s “Redshirts” takes one of the longest running in-references in sci-fi fandom and spins it into a remarkably sharp, fast-paced novel. Taking its title from the phenomenon on “Star Trek” where the extras wearing red shirts would always be the one to die in episodes, the book follows Andy Dahl, ex-seminary student brought on board the spaceship Intrepid as a translator. It’s a prime assignment: the Intrepid is the flagship of the fleet. It’s also a dangerous assignment, as the Intrepid also has the highest mortality rate among low-ranking crew members of any vessels in the Universal Union—including the military ships. Soon Dahl and his coworkers are ensnared in a bizarre cosmic conspiracy that places them at the mercy of both determinism and hack screenwriting. It’s a meta commentary on sci-fi television that manages to debunk not only its source material but its own debunking. Possibly the most radical inversion Scalzi plays with is the idea of people stuck in a space-faring utopian drama who are sincerely annoyed with their job. Dahl and company are irritable, irritating, make poor decisions about who they sleep with, lose their tempers and have genuine contempt for their “superiors”—think “Office Space in Outer Space.” Halfway through, the book makes its most meta jump, but rather than go off the rails into oblique self-commentary and auto-critique, “Redshirts” stays consistent with its own internal logic—however insane that logic may be. Despite the ensuing hilarity, Scalzi keeps the dramatic tension up, and manages to use sharp media satire to make some remarkably poignant comments on free will, death, and love—in between pants-less kidnappings and Borgovian Land Worm attacks. (Greg Baldino)

“Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas”
By John Scalzi
Tor Books, 320 pages, $24.99