There's a rule that a great parody of a genre is also a great representative of that genre. Look at Galaxy Quest, which is probably the greatest Star Trek movie. In Redshirts, Scalzi spins out a novel based on the lives of those people who always get shot in bad scifi shows, but doesn't quite bring it home.

In the distant future, Dahl is excited to be posted to the UU flagship The Intrepid. When he gets on board, he discovers a horrifying secret. People die on Away Team missions all the time, the bridge crew doesn't seem to care, the ordinary crew hides, and science on the ship works via a magic box. Dahl and his friends try to survive possession by a mysterious force that makes them spit exposition and then die for the benefit of the mostly invulnerable bridge crew, working out the rules of The Narrative.

See, the Intrepid isn't real. Or maybe it is, there is some philosophical confusion on this point. What is clear is that once a week the shows air, The Narrative takes over, and someone dies. To prevent this from happening, the crew decides on a desperate plan to go to Burbank in 2011 (based on a season 4 episode with time travel), and convince the people making the show to stop killing them. There's some hi-jinks in Hollywood, they get their meeting with the producer and writer, and make a deal to save the producer's son (in a coma from a motorcycle crash, and also briefly an extra on the show) using future medicine and the power of The Narrative. Everybody lives happily ever after.

And then there are three codas, from there different people in our present trying to deal with the knowledge that they are creating and connecting to "real" fictional characters through a TV show. This could be really deep and philosophical, but I think it actually just apes the forms of deepness. "Like, wouldn't it be cool if... we were all in a story, maaaan?"

So about that great-parodies-are-great-examples thing. I'm not a real big fan of Star Trek, but what I love about it is that it put three major temperaments (Kirk-sanguine, McCoy-choleric, Spock-melancholic) in contact with the cosmos: with dangerous situations and major unknowns, and showed that all approaches were necessary, but that sanguine optimism and enthusiasm would carry the day. And while Scalzi is as usual a breezy and fun writer, I couldn't tell you a single damn thing about the personalities of the characters. Perhaps the point is that they're extras with a little extra background so their death impacts more, but that undercuts the theory that the Intrepid is also real. Characters without personality are not good writing.

So yeah, this is flashy meta story, but for all the ideas that it should be commentary, it doesn't say much.


****
From June 15, 2012

The Intrepid is the flagship of an interstellar human union, it's five year mission to boldly go where no man has yada yada before. But it has a problem, crew members die with alarming regularity, and the bridge officers don't know why or seem to care. 5 newcomers have to band together to figure out why their lives are expended so meaninglessly, and how they can avoid death, and well, I won't ruin the twist.

It's a neat idea, and Scalzi knows how to move action along and keep the dialog snappy, but there's something formless and extruded about the end product. Star Trek is easy to parody, but surprisingly hard to parody well, and this novel is defined more by narrative tics than by personality or world-building.

Put this one firmly in the category of beach reading, at least if your beach time tends more towards Maui Wowie than margaritas.