Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here are your hosts. John Joseph Adams and David Barr

Kirtley.

Hi this is David. And this is Dave and this is John and welcome to episode 64 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is John Scalsy, author of novels such as Old Man's War, The Android's Dream, and Fuzzy Nation.

He also maintains an extremely popular blog at whatever. scullsie.com.

His latest novel, Redshirts, is told from the point of view of a group of doomed

ensigns in a Star Trek style universe.

Then stick around after the interview as we discuss the Star Trek franchise with guest geek

E.C. Meyers, who runs the Star Trek review site the View Screen

dot com. All right so let's get to our interview. All right so we're here with

John Scullsy. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be here.

So your new novel is called Redshirts.

So what's that about?

Redshirts is a concept that goes back to the original Star Trek series.

The idea is Kirk and Spock and Checkoff go down to a

planet on an away team and they take Ensign Jones, the security Ensign with them. And somebody's got to be killed, and who is it going to be?

Is it going to be Kirk? No. Is it going to be Spock? No. Is it a checkoff? He's going to get hurt, but they're not going to kill him. So it falls to

Enson Jones to die horribly for dramatic effect. When the original series first came out,

people started knowing statistically it was a really bad

idea to be going on these away teams with the captain and they started to call these people

red shirts and it's become a common enough phrase

in science fiction culture and in gait culture

...