Redshirts, by John Scalzi, is a hoot.

Is there anyone on the web who doesn’t know what a redshirt is? Back in the day, when you didn’t need to suffix “Star Trek” with “The Original Series” to mean that ’60’s show with Kirk, Spock, and the gang, and our heroes sallied forth onto a planet’s surface, they always took along a crew member or two in red shirts. You only saw them once, because their sole purpose was to die horribly, amping up the dramatic tension. See, you’re paying a lot of money for Kirk, Spock, and the gang, and fans get invested in them, and so Rule #1 is that you don’t kill them off.

Well, not permanently, anyway.

And yet, there’s dangerous creatures! And dangerous aliens with bumpy foreheads! And people need to die! And hence, there are redshirts beaming down to the planet with our heroes.

John Scalzi has written a book about this, from the point of view of the redshirts. It doesn’t take place on the U.S.S. Enterprise; rather, it takes place on the U.U. Intrepid, flagship of the fleet of the Universal Union. Our hero, Ensign Dahl, is young, ambitious, and unless things go completely right, tomorrow’s dogmeat. What’s going on here? And why is the fatality rate for the Intrepid’s crew so much higher than for any other ship in the fleet? Why do the bridge crew sometimes pause dramatically, as though holding for a dramatic fade out? Why do some of the crewmen have backstories, while the others don’t? Who’s in charge, here?

Scalzi has written a delightful book that lovingly pokes fun at Star Trek while including a plot that’s wholly Star-Trekkian (if that’s a word), and that also makes us think about fate, free will, and taking charge of our own lives.

There’s some language, and a certain amount of what I guess I’d call sexual frankness, if that bothers you. And if you’ve never gone in for Star Trek, you might as well skip it. Otherwise, highly recommended.

(Actually, I’d like to register one tiny complaint. The window at the P.F. Chang’s at the Media Center Mall in Burbank most certainly does not look out at a parking garage.)

Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, is not the book I was looking for.

What it is, pretty clearly, is a reworking of the legends of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin in present day England (remembering always that the book was written in the mid-1980’s; “present day” has changed quite a lot since then). So we’ve got a Faerie Queen, and a man bound by her, and the plucky girl who is going to free him. (This isn’t a spoiler; we know she has to, because of narrative causality.)

In general, I really like Jones’ work. I’ve reviewed many of her books over the last couple of years, and haven’t found any out-and-out clunkers. Nor is Fire and Hemlock and out-and-out clunker. But I confess I found it slow to get started, occasionally tedious, and not particularly satisfying. The ending was particularly opaque to me. Which is to say, I know more or less what happens, but the logic of it eluded me completely.

I might be in a minority. The re-issue I read has an introduction by author Garth Nix, where he goes on and on about how this is his favorite of Jones’ books. He lists others that he likes (all of which I like as well), and he talks about how he re-reads this book every so often and how he always finds new stuff in it. I can well believe this.

I can well believe this, because this re-issue ends with an essay by Jones on just how she constructed the beast. And it turns out that Jones is not one of those authors who just starts with a neat opening scene, and then follows the characters to find out what happens. No, she’s the sort of author who constructs every little bit of the story to a carefully-defined plan. And it turns out that she’s not just building in Thomas and Tam, she’s building in the entire range of European folklore and adding several heaping dollops of T.S. Eliot. (Yes, I know I just mixed a metaphor. I did it on purpose, because turn-about is fair play.)

Now, I’m impressed by authors who can do such layered, detailed, multi-faceted work. But in this case, I think maybe she let love of her subject carry her a little way overboard. Or possibly I’m just a little too straightforward, I dunno.

Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone, by Dene Low, is a somewhat funny juvenile that reads like an odd cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Georgette Heyer. Petronella Arbuthnot, a young English lady of substance, is celebrating her sweet sixteenth in the opening years of the 20th century when her guardian, her Uncle Augustus, swallows a beetle from Tou-Eh-Mah-Mah Island and is immediately consumed with the desire to eat insects and other creepy crawlies of all kinds. Horrors are likely to ensue; Petronella is possessed of quite a large fortune that she cannot touch until she comes of age, and her rather Wodehousian aunts, Theophilia and Cordelia, would like nothing better than to take over the guardianship of Petronella and her money. As any reader of Wodehouse knows, being under the care of such aunts is a fate worse than death; but if they learn of Uncle Augustus’ new proclivities, it is a fate only too likely.

And then Dame Carruthers, famous British Actress, and Generalissimo Reyes-Cardoza, ambassador to England from the nascent state of Panama, are abducted right from Petronella’s birthday party, and the marquee tent falls down and nearly smothers everyone, and the game is on.

As I say, Low is clearly channeling Wodehouse and Heyer, a potent combination; but, although the book is entertaining enough (my kids all enjoyed hearing it) it’s rather a pale shadow of the originals. The Aunts are diverting but underused, and though she tries, Low doesn’t have Wodehouse’ hand with language. And then, Petronella is constantly going into raptures over her bosom friend Jane’s brother James’ handsome physique, which gets rather tiresome. By the time we finished the book I began to read these passages in a dreamy voice while the kids all giggled and waved me on.

Still, it’s light, reasonably entertaining, and despite Augustus’ fate not unreasonably disgusting.

The book is subtitled “The Entomological Tales of Augustus T. Percival,” which leads me to believe that sequels were projected; to date, though, there haven’t been any that I can find.