Redshirts

This book was a lot of fun. I had no idea what it was about and from the cover and title thought it was going to be hard core military scifi. I couldn't have been more wrong!

In the book it's explained that the term 'redshirt' applies to the new character on a show who's going to be killed off fairly quickly so don't bother investing too much time in getting to like them. The term was coined from "Star Trek" where the guys wearing redshirts were usually the bit part players who would get eaten by the alien or slimed by the giant hairy spider thingy lurking in the cave.

Well, to get back to the book, Andrew Dahl has been posted to the Universal Union flagship Intrepid along with a group of other newbies. The ship's job is to roam the Universe looking for new habitable planets. Dahl is a xenobiologist and excited at discovering new lifeforms. He's surprised to learn that the Intrepid has a mortality rate far exceeding any other exploratory ship in the fleet and he can't help but notice that it's always the newbie that dies in some horrible manner on dangerous missions. The senior officers leading the expeditions never die and if they get hurt seem to recover remarkably quickly. He suspects something odd is at play here!

This is a clever, quirky book with a lot of humour, one that even non-SciFi readers might enjoy!