Remember last week when Tor.com offered up the prologue and the first two chapters of Redshirts for you to read, if you registered for their site? Those were some good times, yes? Well, now the times are even better, my friends, because Tor.com has added two additional chapters to the excerpt, bringing you all the way up to Chapter Four. Yours for the reading. Here’s the link.

Remember you have to register at Tor.com to see the excerpt. Don’t worry, they won’t use your sign-up information to help their roving band of Evil Robot Lobotomists to track you down and do terrible things to your cerebellum. That’s an iron-clad promise from me to you.

Also, just for fun, here’s a review of Redshirts from multiply Hugo-nominated writer Steven Silver, who says “Scalzi has taken the trope of the redshirt… and has more fun with it than any author since Douglas Adams asked his audience to empathize with a doomed whale in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.” Can’t complain about that.

Over at FilmCritic.com I do a mind experiment and point out that some of the most famous “bad guys” in science fiction film — the aliens of the Alien film series, as an example — aren’t necessarily evil, and indeed are doing things that are in fact totally understandable, if you look at it from their perspective. I give three (actually, four) examples for you to consider. Check them out, and as always feel free to leave your thoughts and comments in the thread over there.