Redshirts

John Scalzi's Redshirts is a very clever play on the old joke about Star Trek's Redshirts - the security officers who always get killed off when a mission is sent down to a planet from the Enterprise. It's always been another name for "cannon fodder" among nerdfolks that I know. The premise of the novel is that a group of junior staff on the starship Intrepid start to realize that there seems to be an unusual rate of death on away missions, and start to piece together that they are extras in a badly written sci-fi show. It plays out the results of this realization from a number of perspectives, and ends up both clever and touching. It's a nice quick read, and worth picking up.