Halfway through this book, I was thinking that I could do something funny in this review with Will Farrell's character from the movie Stranger Than Fiction. But then it had to go and actually reference Stranger Than Fiction and ruin my plans. 
 Thanks for nothing, Scalzi! 
 Anyhow, in the distant future the starship Intrepid explores 
 the galaxy with a crew led by a bold captain and his logical science officer. A group of newly assigned crew members quickly notice that odd and bizarre things happen when they get around the captain and his senior staff. Routine missions become dangerous. The basic laws of physics seem to break down. Common sense is forgotten. And god help you if you're one of the unlucky bastards who ends up on an away team with them because you're probably coming back to the ship in a body bag. Assuming there's enough left of your corpse to bring back at all. 
 Scalzi took what could be a one-joke premise from the old gag about the extras wearing red on Star Trek being disposable and having a very short shelf life, and he turned that concept into a funny and interesting examination on the nature of fiction and free will. I don't want to say too much about the plot because the twists and turns are part of the fun, but I liked how the book went off in a couple of surprising directions. 
 While I had fun with it, Scalzi's style is becoming a bit odd to me, and that was enough to take it from four stars to three. He skips almost any kind of descriptive writing to focus almost exclusively on dialogue driven plot. For example, there isn't a single word about what the ship or the characters look like. Skimping on the exposition in the interest of rushing through the main part of the story makes it compulsively readable, but it also makes it feel a bit thin. So while I was completely into the story of the crew fighting against their fate, a few more details about what that looked like would have been welcome. 
 One other minor nitpick. (view spoiler)[ If television hasn't existed for centuries, how are all of the crew instantly aware of things like commercial breaks and the tricks routinely used to heighten the drama? I guess in light of the conversation near the end before the codas, you could make a case that this is part of the even larger narrative, but it was strange. (hide spoiler)] 
 Despite some of my problems with it, Scalzi still writes with heart and humor, and sci-fi could use a lot more of that.