John Scalzi, RedshirtsThis book is only readable for people who have seen several series of the Star Trek Brand and still can remember them. If you are one of them you will certainly know that a typical Star-Trek crew consists of a fixed set of main characters and a diverse group of background characters, often without names, with short appearance and hardly more than one sentence of text. They are interchangeable. And these lowly crew members very often wear a red shirt. In the Star Trek Brand the color of the dress is a way to distinguish rank and working position of the characters. Those with the red shirts as the lowest ranks are the most expendable. That is why in many of the series it is a character in a red shirt who dies in dangerous situations when the heroes manage to get away alive in various thrilling ways. A redshirt on an away mission in the Star Trek Brand is prone to die.
This is what Scalzi was building his story plot on. Soldiers of a real future suddenly notice strange behaviours of themselves and their comrades. The crew of the UU's flagship starts to suffer heavy losses when they are on away missions. Their captain and the officers always come out fine, or at least alive, but the other crew members, those with the red shirt of their rank they very often die. And they die in the most stupid ways possible even though they are basically very intelligent persons. They usually know what they are doing and are good enough to having been chosen for the flagship crew. During the story some new members of the crew find out that the older crew members know about the fatality of away missions and try to avoid them at all costs. And they start to investigate this irrational situation. After several twists they come to the conclusion, that they are somehow influenced by the storys of an old TV SF-show from several centuries before. They manage to travel back in time to meet their actor counterparts and the producers of that show. They convince them of the horrible dangers that their stories pose to the future space farers. The producers promise to write one final show and then stop it altogether. The future men then manage to get back to their own time and everything is fine. But the author couldn't stop himselve to add a little extra meta twist.
The second part of the book consists of the reports of the actors and the producer who have been visited by their storys characters. And that's it.
The book is a little boring. It obvously is intended as a parody of the Star Trek Brand. But since the basic twist is given away in the cover text the unfolding of the plot is more ore less predictable which seriously reduces the fun. And in the end of the first part all inconsistencies of the story are painted over. The second part looks as if the author still had to fill in some pages and to add some human aspects. So Scalzi just wrote an adventure story with an slightly amusing meta background about what if Bones really came back to harrass DeForest Kelley?
It could have been a reflection of what reality really is. Of how we interact with the imagination. Books like Michael Ende's "Die unendliche Geschichte" or Glukhovsky's "Sumerki" are far better at exploring the reality of our phantasy.
So you might read this book when you are bored and know enough of Star Trek to care about the basic story twist. But you better just borrow it and give it back after you finished reading
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