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jackAs mentioned in the non-spoiler post, I agreed the reader needed to be introduced to the premise, but the prologue just felt like it was "OK, now the protagonist has an internal monologue about why startrek is bad, ha ha, hilarious" but not actually funny (whereas the later book was funny in places).
The time-travel bugged me. They make a point that the history as perceived by the characters in a TV show set in the future doesn't include that TV show. In StarTrek, they can't do the thing they did in SpaceBalls and find an old episode of StarTrek which tells them what's going to happen.
So why, when they go back in time, DO they see that show being produced?
Having the characters admit they were in a book by Scalzi was interesting. I was waiting to see if that would happen, and the protagonist makes a good observation that even given his genre-awareness of figuring out that he's living in a star-trek rip-off, he's STILL too lucky in always surviving (by being close to the right main characters, etc). But they don't make the obvious connection that, if they care about being killed off for the sake of making an exciting story, all the other people who died died because they were necessary for Scalzi's plot.
The deliberately self-referential webcomic 1/0 explored this question, the characters tentatively exploring the questions of what happens if they themselves made simple fictional works: would those characters have equal standing? They tentatively concluded that even if they equated fictional characters with real world people, only ones with actual characters would matter, throw-away characters wouldn't matter.
1/0 is great for this sort of thing. It's the only fiction I've seen where the characters argue with the author and live their lives permanently knowing they're in a webcomic and it actually makes sense, and the characters sometimes win, rather than just being pretentious.
The time-travel bugged me. They make a point that the history as perceived by the characters in a TV show set in the future doesn't include that TV show. In StarTrek, they can't do the thing they did in SpaceBalls and find an old episode of StarTrek which tells them what's going to happen.
So why, when they go back in time, DO they see that show being produced?
Having the characters admit they were in a book by Scalzi was interesting. I was waiting to see if that would happen, and the protagonist makes a good observation that even given his genre-awareness of figuring out that he's living in a star-trek rip-off, he's STILL too lucky in always surviving (by being close to the right main characters, etc). But they don't make the obvious connection that, if they care about being killed off for the sake of making an exciting story, all the other people who died died because they were necessary for Scalzi's plot.
The deliberately self-referential webcomic 1/0 explored this question, the characters tentatively exploring the questions of what happens if they themselves made simple fictional works: would those characters have equal standing? They tentatively concluded that even if they equated fictional characters with real world people, only ones with actual characters would matter, throw-away characters wouldn't matter.
1/0 is great for this sort of thing. It's the only fiction I've seen where the characters argue with the author and live their lives permanently knowing they're in a webcomic and it actually makes sense, and the characters sometimes win, rather than just being pretentious.