This was geared toward fans of the Star Trek television series mainly, of which I count myself as one, specifically disavowing in the acknowledgements any reference to the author's own experience working on the SF television series Stargate: Universe. The first third of the book starts out introducing the characters and the setting in a way familiar from almost any science fiction adventure story, but halfway through it shifts its focus on the unlikely way in which the crew of the Intrepid carry out their missions as though pawns in the hands of a second-rate writer. It's all portrayed using the techniques of realistic fiction, with only the triple codas making a slight excursion into the area of experimental storytelling.

It was a pleasant and quick read, in a style very reminiscent of the other book of his that I read (Old Man's War). Here again I did notice a tendency to make the lengthy stretches of dialogue a little bit "on the nose," as though the author were afraid that someone would have trouble getting the metafictional premise of characters placing demands on their author. By now, you would think this was no longer that revolutionary an idea, and in the first Coda he cites a few famous precursors (though not Pirandello and not Flann O'Brien). In the end, the tale he tells turns out to be a slighter matter than I had been expecting.

This was the first of my reads through this year's Hugo Award nominated novels.