Rach's Reading Club

I hope this is acceptable.

Redshirts by John Scalzi is a Science Fiction novel which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel as well as the Locus award for Best Science Fiction novel in 2013.

The title is a reference that Star Trek fans will get. It refers to how in most episodes of Star Trek there would usually be an extra in a red shirt who would usually get killed while the principle characters survived.

Anyway, in this novel, we meet some low ranking members of a Futuristic space force who notice that they are dying rather quickly. Eventually, they realize something truly bizarre. They are characters in a Star Trek like show, worse, they are minor characters in the show. Eventually, they leave the show and enter the real world of early 21st century Hollywood where the show is being produced. They meet the show's creators as well as the actors who play them on the show. They, naturally, try to convince these people that they deserve to live.

That may sound like the premise of a very silly geek joke, and to be sure it is a humorous book at times, but don't get the wrong idea. Scalzi makes us take the premise as seriously as the protagonists do and they take it very seriously, because their lives are on the line.

It actually gets very metaphysical. The one criticism that I have of this book is that it's a little unclear about how transitions between the world of the show and real world work. The characters seem to come up with rules for this universe, more or less arbitrarily.

Obviously, this book is mainly for Science Fiction fans, but it might also appeal to people who like reading about Hollywood and the lives of aspiring actors.