But as you go deeper into the novel, he retains the bite from the parody and slowly transforms it into an entirely different kind of book. In this case, he begins the book as something that feels like a parody of Star Trek. One of the traits that I love about his writing is that it is often secretly subversive. “The failure mode of clever is ‘asshole.’” This book is clever. Scalzi has a saying about people trying to be funny on the internet. It’s a comedy that plays with the tropes of science fiction while also strictly adhering to them. This is a very different book from the one I fell in love with and yet true to all of Scalzi’s strengths. Who am I kidding? I pester him for the manuscript as soon as he turns things in. I have read everything he’s written at this point and while I love a lot of my other author friends, he’s one of the few whose books I leap on the moment they come out. So now he exists in two forms in my head. He had me crying within the first ten pages. I was hesitant, because it was military SF, which is not usually my jam. Redshirts is way in the future of this story. You want to read their work and you are also terrified to read it, because what if it sucks? The novel that everyone was talking about was Old Man’s War, which is not this book. There’s a thing that happens when all of your friends are writers. What I do remember was thinking, “I need to read one of his books.” I honestly don’t remember what we talked about, because we talked for hours over a huge range of subjects. What struck me was that he was clever and funny, but that he also used that humor to make points about real things that were important. He was nominated for it, but I’d never heard of him or anything he’d written. I met John Scalzi at a writers’ conference when he was already well known for his blog, Whatever, but before he had won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

Redshirts by john scalzi