Storyline: 2/5 
 Characters: 2/5 
 Writing Style: 2/5 
 World: 1/5 
 This would have been a lot more bearable had the experience taken only 43 minutes - you know, the average length of an episode of Star Trek. 
 Why?! Why write this? You can't simply ignore the existence of Galaxy Quest, and any spoof post-1999 has to use that as the baseline. If you are going to make a parody of science fiction television, then it has to be better than that movie. Period. I just don't understand what Scalzi was up to. With braggadocian nerve he wrote a deliberately bad science fiction story to mock bad science fiction. The levity and exhortation the codas were supposed to provide didn't work for me either. They disrupted what little advantage the book had dickered and offered too little that fit the tale. I begrudge my time being wasted, and do hate to see someone as talented as Scalzi continue to publish books that minimally satisfy contractual obligations when he could be pushing the genre with new classics.