Redshirts

A time travel story with lots of goofy moden day self-referential humor to keep the reader distracted.

If you don't like spoilers, stop reading now.

To save the characters still alive on the ship, they travel back in time to the exact moment in time they are being written about. There is no objecitve reason to do so, and even worse, when they return from the past, they return to the exact point in the narrative that they left from, which nearly gets them all killed (and should have).

None of that is logical, inevitable, or even sensible. The intrepid time travelers (see what I did there?) could have gone back in time to before the show was even started and saved all of the dead crew members, including the unfortunate Finn, thus restoring the friendship with the lead character.

Even more important, they ccould have saved Jenkin's wife, removing his pain, his grief, his descent into madness, and resurrected a real love instead of the resolution that was written.

Then they could have returned to their present before any of this nonsense was happening, and all lived to enjoy their lives.

I'm sure this book was fun to write, but I am again appalled by the Hugo award committee's choice.