Redshirts by John Scalzi
If you’re ever watched Star Trek you know that wearing a red shirt is a bad thing. Why? Because if you go on an away mission you will die a heinously awful (often pointlessly weird) death.
The crew of the Intrepid, the flagship of the Universal Union, is exploring the far reaches of space in galaxies far away and far into the future and they are noticing disturbing trends. Any non-officer who goes on an away mission often suffers a horrible death by strange means – malfunctioning repair robots turned into killers, exploding heads, even the hard to picture ice shark. No one seems to care. It’s the flagship and the death toll should be higher than the other ships in the fleet. But the crew of the Intrepid are scared for their lives. And when one shell-shocked crew member talks of the video archives of a long ago television program and how their statistics and circumstances mirror their own, the newest members of the crew start to listen.
Absurd, funny and mind-bending, this is a great escape for lovers of Star Trek, science fiction and just plain crazy plotlines.
