Redshirts

Having just finished the audio book version of Redshirts, I'm not sure this book is up to the standard I would expect for a Hugo winner. It was entertaining and humorous. I enjoy Scalzi's writing, but in my opinion this isn't up to his standard he set with Old Man's War. The premise of characters becoming aware that they were on a tv show (Star Trek in all but name), was played for laughs in the first half of the book. Then the tone shifts and we are made to feel sorry for the characters with a lot of meta analysis of sci fi writing thrown in. An easy read and entertaining, but I felt like it could have been so much more. Once Scalzi opened up the can of worms that writing fiction literally creates that reality somewhere should have led him to a place where he examined all fiction ever written and possibly moved the time travel story through multiple dimensions and genres.