Well, this is an odd one. New arrivals on a flagship of the Universal Union space fleet, the Intrepid, quickly work out that the appalling death toll amongst the lesser ranks on away missions are only the tip of a weird nightmareberg where the laws of reality and physics, not to mention story logic, regularly bend and twist themselves into horrible shapes all in service to what appears to be some hackish sense of drama. Dun-dun-dunnn! They're trapped as disposable extras on a really bad science fiction show! They don't wanna die horribly and uselessly and stupidly service to driving moments of unearned suspense and pathos!

The prologue is terrific, it must be said, poor Ensign Davis, but after that, instead of laying on the satire and the surreality as one might expect, Scalzi appears to rather clumsily start writing a science fiction novel where a cast of likeable characters discover something wrong with the universe, set out to find out what it is and despite the craziness and seeming impossibility, devise a plan to fix it by deducing the suspended reality rules of logic and using them to their advantage. Classic science fiction, but at first clumsy and even clunky as our characters examine clunks of satirical Star Trek tropes from the point of view of a science fiction universe where the logic has been thought out a bit better. So, not quite the sparkling knowing romp you might expect, especially if you're thinking about, say, Terry Pratchett's Guards Guards! a novel about disposable extras from a different genre. Instructive, the differences, as the science fiction characters rebel against a power that is not only deterministic, but gracelessly deterministic, in an effort to make their own choices, while the fantasy characters learn how to adapt to what is yet another form of magic with its own laws and loopholes.

But the story of Redshirts ends after two hundred pages, leaving us with three codas set in the real world, and what are we to make of these? Individually they are quite nice, minor characters from the main narrative dealing with the fallout from the actions of minor characters from a TV series. I wasn't quite sure Scalzi actually succeeded in synthesizing a theme out of all this in the end, and yet the ending felt satisfactory so...

Then I started writing this review and realised that I'd enjoyed this book more than I thought, despite what I perceived as clumsiness in the first chapters. Scalzi didn't set out to simply take the piss out of Star Trek. He set out to lay bare the differences between good and bad storytelling, the cheap hacky tricks of The Chronicles Of The Intrepid, versus stories where the world and the logic have a minimum of integrity, however lowbrow, and an author who stays true to that integrity and how, this being the case, at the end there can be moments of love and loss and hope and uncertainty that are, in fact, earned. It doesn't matter if it's a silly science fiction show, or a light but clever science fiction novel, or stories about loosely connected people living their lives in LA: fidelity to your creation makes for better fiction that generates actual emotions on the page and in the reader.