The Internet has been going crazy the last few weeks for the latest John Scalzi book Redshirts. Set in a fictional Star Trek universe, the book explores the the flipside of the TV show and shows what life is like when you’re wearing the deadly red shirt. While many other reviewers have found it side-splittingly hilarious, I found it decent with a few chuckles and the best part was the last of the three codas. Let’s see what happens when you’re given a red shirt.

Andrew Dahl and Maia Duvall are two new ensigns on the spaceship Intrepid, the top spaceship in the galaxy. They meetup with a couple other new ensigns, Finn and Hester, who had some trouble on their previous assignments. As they settle onto their new ship, they all start hearing rumors and then witnessing the trouble that goes along with being on an away mission. If you are on an away mission, especially with one of the main officers (Captain Abernathy, Science Officer Q’eeng or Lieutenant Kerensky) then you have a very good chance of dying in strange and often painful ways.

In addition, Lieutenant Kerensky gets injured, or poisoned or catches a strange alien disease, a lot and there is a magic box in the medical area that can fix any problem just in time. You just pop in a sample of the disease, set the timer and just in time, the exact answer you need to fix Lieutenant Kerensky is there. But there is a ghost in the machine named Jenkins. He’s hiding somewhere in the ship and has setup an alert system that allows certain crew members to know when one of the officers is coming and allow them to hide, rather than be recruited to an away team. Jenkins has a wild idea that the reason so many strange and nonsense things are happening only on the Intrepid is that they got pulled into a Narrative. In other words, they are supporting characters in a TV show about the ship and its officers. Now Dahl, Duvall and team must try to cancel the show before the slaughter of red shirts continue.

Overall, the book is very entertaining. Scalzi has taken a common Star Trek joke and weaved a story about being stuck within a story. This type of story isn’t new and has been done very well elsewhere (such as Grant Morrison’s wonderful Animal Man run), but Scalzi does sell it very well. There are many Star Trek (and other, similar shows) jokes around and we do get some nice scenarios with the characters meeting their actor counterparts. But it’s all just decent. I don’t have any complaints about it, but I didn’t find it so wonderful that I had to scream its name from the rooftops.

However, the last coda was amazing. In the three codas we follow several of the characters as they react to the events in the book. The last coda deals with an extra who was killed off in the show and when the crew came back in time, found out the backstory of her character. The effects of her knowledge cause her to reevaluate her life and this chapter is easily the best in the book.

So, while I liked the book, but didn’t love it. It was much better than Scalzi’s last book, the legal snoozer Fuzzy Nation(my review). Mildly recommended.