redshirts certainly feels very different from those Philip K. Maybe because of the pastiche aspect or of the mostly comic turn.

It still remains a purely intellectual perspective, with no psychological involvement towards those characters. The book is well-written and, once again, enjoyable at some level, with alternative writing styles used in different parts (or coda) of the novel. Ensues games with the paradoxes of space travel and doubles. And redshirts is about those characters reflecting about how unlikely their fate is (or rather the fate of the characters before them) and rebelling against the series writer. Although this is somewhat of a spoiler (!), the title refers to the characters wearing red shirts in Star Trek, who have a statistically significant tendency to die on the next mission. Enjoyable at a higher conceptual level, but not as a story. I mean, The Hugo Award?! While I definitely liked the Old Man Wars saga, this novel is more like a light writing experiment and a byproduct of writing a TV series. What amazes most me is that Scalzi’s redshirts got the 2013 Hugo Award. “What you’re trying to do is impose causality on random events, just like everyone else here has been doing.” Along with the not final volume of Patrick Rothfuss’ masterpiece, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, which will just be out by then! It is only a side story within the same universe, as pointed out by Dan…) Maybe I should have waited this extra minute… Or picked the other Scalzi’s on the shelf, Lock In that just came out! (I already ordered that one for my incomiing lecture in Gainesville. “For the first nine years of its existence, aside from being appointed the flagship, there was nothing particularly special about it, from a statistical point of view.”Ī book I grabbed at the last minute in a bookstore, downtown Birmingham.

The red shirts book