Scalzi is at heart a humorist — his novel The Android's Dream opens with a chapter-long fart joke — though the difficulties of marketing humorous science fiction have often caused publishers to downplay that. But Redshirts, which is being advertised as a Star Trek parody, may signal that Scalzi has achieved a profile sufficient enough to be beyond such worries. Redshirts concerns low-ranking crew members aboard an interstellar starship who start to notice a disturbing pattern — folks like themselves never seem to make it home safe from alien worlds, whereas high-ranking officers always seem strangely untouched by the danger.