Shocking geek confession: I’ve never seen Star Trek.

However, even though I haven’t ever watched a single full episode of the show that this book parodies, that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the fast-paced and wicked humor that runs rampant in this novel.  If you’ve ever watched an action movie and felt like the hero must have somehow acquired a suit of invulnerable plot armor, well, this is the book for you!

Be warned, however: there’s going to be some very meta themes.
I flew through this book, and the story felt very fast-paced – so fast paced, in fact, that I found myself finishing the story, reaching the end, with a good sixty or seventy pages left in the book.  What in the world?  Is this just an under-200-page story with a lot of padding?

No, as it turns out.  This is a story within a story, and then there’s another story wrapped around that one.  The characters of the first story are just that – characters – in the second story, and the third story is even more disconnected from those, another step out.

Like I said, meta.

Still, despite the unexpected shortness of the main story, I really enjoyed this parody, and I’d happily pick it up again.  It looks like John Scalzi has a lot of books out, so I will probably be reading more by this man – he can write!

Time to read: 3 hours.  Literally burned the whole thing in a single afternoon.