Is My Shirt Red...Crap

I love Star Trek.  I love every incarnation of it, series, movies, books, parodies, all of it.  I spent many a happy Saturday night lying on the floor with my whole family, munching on popcorn, cheese and crackers and Daddy's all whip cream sundae's  To this day every time the opening theme of any of them come on and I am taken to a happy family place.  All this being said, I also am very aware of some of the shortcomings of the franchise, especially the older versions.  One of the biggest phenomena if you will is the Redshirt.  The redshirt was a minor (usually you did not even know their name) character that was put with an away team, or on a mission, or even just at a strategic bridge station...only to be killed in some manner.  This brings us to an entertaining little book aptly called Redshirts by John Scalzi who along with being an author, was also a creative consultant on one of my favorite shows Stargate Universe (man I miss that show).

Quick synopsis along with SPOILER ALERTS!
Ensign Andy Dahl has the great honor of being assigned to the Intrepid, the flag ship of the illustrious Universal Union (also known as Dub U).  He is joined by a group of other new recruits and is assigned to xenobiology to do whatever it is xenobiologists do.  Dahl notices strange things right off the bat, like when a main bridge Lt. Kerensky comes down with a mysterious flesh eating plague that killed off the other member of his away team (what was his name again) and the crew only has six hours to find a cure before the Lt.

succumbs to this dreaded mysterious plague.  The crew in xenobiology show Dahl "the Box" which is exactly what it sounds like.  They put the sample in the box, hit a button and in 5 hour and 50 minutes a "cure" pops up on there pads, the only problem is that is it missing one crucial component.  Dahl is then told to run to the bridge and present there findings to the main science officer.  Dahl questions why they can't just send it to his pad since that would be faster and less confusing, but the team is adamant, the cure will only work if Dahl presents it in person and then the science officer can give them the last piece of the puzzle. Dahl does as he is told, and oddly enough the cure works, not only does it work, but it works so well that Lt. Kerensky has no lingering effects and is ready for the next mission in less than a week.  Already on alert for strange things, Dahl and some of his fellow recruits are sent on an away mission with the miraculously healed Lt. Kerensky and find themselves in ludicrously contrived situations.  The recruits also find themselves acting in ways that are contrary to survival, and find random facts popping into their heads.  Eventually all of this strangeness leads the friends to Jenkins, a recluse who lives in the walls of the ship after his wife was killed on an away mission shortly after joining the Intrepid. He informs the friends that he has figured out that they are characters connected to a badly written Science Fiction show from the past. He shows them some pieces of data that suggest that Intrepid is a badly written rip off of  a show called Star Trek and that when they find themselves in these crazy situations that is when the Narrative takes over.  When the show is not running everybody is free to attempt to live normal lives.  Part of this Narrative is that the main bridge crew never die, but on every mission at least one of the "newbies" always bites the dust, usually in a very pointless and horrific manner.  Another part of the

Narrative is the ridiculous time limits put on certain things, as a way to raise the tension.  The friends decide to travel back in time to when the show is being produced and try and convince them to quit killing of minor characters in non-sensical ways, or better yet, quit making the show all together.  They kidnap Lt. Kerensky to ensure the success of the mission and land in the year 2012.  After a bit of wrangling they manage to get a meeting with the shows producer.  The weird thing is all of the crew have doppelganger actors who look just like them.  They finally convince the cast and crew of the show of what is happening and they agree to wrap up the show without any unnecessary deaths and then end it.  They also discover that the son of the producer (who played one of the extras on the show) is in a coma.  The friends decide to switch the actor for the crewman and in some sort of mumbo jumbo, heal the actor who has become the crew member in the future and allow the crew member turned actor to finish his life (I know it dose not make a whole lot of sense in he book either).  The friends return to their own time and hopefully become the masters of their own lives again.  Dahl is still troubled and talks to one of his friends who was the only one who did not seem to have a role to play in this story.  Dahl surmises that the story was never about the main bridge crew, but about him and his friends stopping the show.  There are a couple of what the author calls codas that are written from the viewpoint of the people in 2012 after learning about the crew members wrapping things up in a nice big red bow.

I found that I liked the first half of the book much better then the second half.  The minor crew members finding out that they were merely pawns in some badly written TV show and then the things they would do to try and circumvent it were both intriguing and hilarious.  I loved when the author showed the duel thought process in the characters that were about to die, and I liked how ludicrous some of the situations these poor people were placed into (ice sharks! I'm pretty sure the SyFy channel has made this movie :-) )  The rituals

and rules the crew came up with to try and survive this randomly present Narrative were well done and showed a desperateness to stay alive along with a dose of humor.  Once the crew got to 2012 things got a little less entertaining.  There were some great parts right when they arrived, meeting there alternate selves, trying to navigate "the past" and all that good stuff.  After they got to the bigwig meeting, everything just got weird.  They never tried to explain the connection between the TV show and how or why it affected supposedly real people from the future (which is fine, not everything needs to be explained.), but then they would throw random stuff in an almost afterthought manner into the mix.  The way they healed the producers son, and some of the coda stuff, just felt unnecessary and in a different vein than the rest of the book.  Overall I enjoyed it.  I was looking for something a little bit different, and something with some humor, and this book provided both of these things for the most part.  I would suggest this book for anybody who has watched any sort of SciFi show on a regular basis.  I give this book 7 out of 10 tricorders.
What shows did you watch with your family growing up?  Do you still get nostalgic chills when you here "Space the final frontier..."?  Are any of you even remotely shocked to find I am a Star Trek fanatic?