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.