Scalzi, John: Redshirts
Redshirts (2012)
Written by: John Scalzi
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 320 (Hardcover)
Why I Read It: I've given up on trying to resist any of John Scalzi's novels, and this book was part of my massive 2012 pre-order at the start of the year. I was ready to read this sucker the moment it arrived on my doorstep, so read it I did.
The premise: ganked from publisher's website: Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is thrilled all the more to be assigned to the ship’s Xenobiology laboratory.
Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to pick up on the fact that (1) every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien forces, (2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations, and (3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.
Not surprisingly, a great deal of energy below decks is expended on avoiding, at all costs, being assigned to an Away Mission. Then Andrew stumbles on information that completely transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is…and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. There's a few twists and turns I want to comment on, to make sure I understand the end as it's meant to be understood, so if you haven't yet read the book, just skip to "My Rating" and everything will be hunky-dory. Everyone else, onward.
The book is very meta. At first, despite knowing the author was playing with the idea of "redshirts," which -- for those of you not aware -- was slang for any Star Trek extra back on the day that went on away missions and died. If you saw a red shirt on the team, and it wasn't one of the main characters, you knew that poor bastard had a horrible fate. Anyway, despite knowing that Scalzi was playing with this, I was a little concerned. Was he writing bad SF for the sake of comedy? Because honestly, not only do you have unconcerned naming: in the prologue and first chapter alone you have Davis, Dahl, and Duvall, and then you get Hester and Hanson, which tripped me up more than once because I'd get lost in who was speaking to who and who everyone was. The Dub U made made think of "Dubya" which was the nickname for George W. Bush, and that was just weird too.
And some sentences, outside of the soon discovered "Narrative," were just mind-blowing in a "this needs polished" way. Like this on page 24:
"The fungus relaxes people, not makes them attack anyone in the room, requiring them to defend themselves."
That should've been two sentences, at least, to avoid the wonky-sounding verb tenses. It made my brain hurt.
Also, the use of the word "phones" kept weirding me out. I know they're supposed to be some kind of futuristic smart phone, but it took me a long time to get used to it in a space opera setting.
But soon, I suspected most of this, maybe not ALL, like the above sentence, was intentional. I started guessing that these poor bastards were characters in a book. Not literally, as in the characters of a book that I was reading, but rather they were characters in a book someone else was writing (writing badly, no less), and that someone else was between me and the book I'm reading. Right. Like that makes any sense. But regardless, I knew they were suffering at the hands of a writer, so making it a television writer made all the sense in the world.
And the novel did have some giggle-worthy moments. Page 28:
Dahl kept him face very still. Q'eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of "I offer you the bread of life," but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into "Let us violate cakes together." Leaving aside the fact it would be highly unusual for a member of the rightward schism to voluntarily speak the third dialect, it being the native dialect of the founder of the leftward schism and therefore traditionally eschewed, mutual cake violating was not an accepted practice anywhere on Forshan.
And then once it's revealed they're on a television show, there's this geektastic exchange on page 137:
"What did you find out?" Dahl asked. He had already briefed his friends on his latest encounter with Jenkins.
"That I think Jenkins is right," Hanson said.
"That we're on a television show?" Duvall asked.
"No, that we're on a bad one," Hanson said. "As far as I can tell, the show we're on is pretty much a blatant rip-off of that show Jenkins told us about."
"Star Wars," Hester said.
"Star Trek," Hanson said. "There was a Star Wars, though. It was different."
"Whatever," Hester said. "So not only is this show we're on bad, it's plagiarized. And now my life is even more meaningless than it was before."
Then there's Redshirt's take on time travel, which I actually kind of love (page 144):
"You can't stay in the past," Jenkins said. "If you do, you'll dissolve."
"What?" Hester said.
"It has to do with conservation of mass and energy," Jenkins said. "All the atoms you're using now are being used in the past. If you stay in the past, then the atoms have to be in two places at the same time. This creates an imbalance and the atoms have to do decide where to be. And eventually they'll choose then then-present configuration because technically speaking, you're from the future, so you don't actually exist yet."
"What's 'eventually' here?" Dahl asked.
"About six days," Jenkins said.
"That's completely idiotic!"
There's also wonderful knocks on current culture (page 157):
Kerensky grabbed the phone and read the article sullenly. "This doesn't prove anything," he said. "We don't know how accurate any of this information is. For all we know, this" -- he scrolled up on the phone screen to find a label -- "this Wikipedia information database here is complied by complete idiots."
The end stupidly threw me for a loop. In fact, it's a good thing I didn't write this review up the day after reading, because it took a few days for it to sink in. At first, I thought Hanson was just some Gary Stu for an anonymous fanfic writer or something. Yes, this is my brain, making things more complicated than necessary. Because it took me a few days to realize that Hanson was actually the avatar for Scalzi himself. Not a main character, just a guide to a story about a group of people who are being written into life by a television writer.
So if anyone else was confused by Dahl's revelation that he's really the main character after all, and that he's a story within a story and he figures out that Hanson's role in everything is to tell him he's right (aka, sort of omniscient presence, aka the writer of said story), there you go. All has been revealed!
The three Codas have been getting mixed reviews. Frankly, I'm glad there was more. The very last page would've left me too flustered to simply end there. The codas did a nice job of calming me down from that final end. I don't have a lot to say about them either, though I really liked (and I think I'm in the minority here) how the book ended on a serious and rather introspective piece with Samantha. When she and Nick met at the end, I was doing a happy little shipper-giddy clap.
My Rating: Couldn't Put It Down
Literally. I read this in less than 24 hours without even realizing I was doing it. Which was a refreshing change from my previous books, all of which were taking a week or so to read, sometimes the book's fault, sometimes the fault of my own busy schedule. But this one, easy and breezy and a hell of a lot of fun. If you read Scalzi's blog (and I always recommend potential readers read Scalzi's blog, just so you know what you're getting into ahead of time), you know you're in for a fun time, and this certainly is. There were a lot of giggle-tastic moments, and I was entertained from beginning to end.
Cover Commentary: Pretty damn striking. It grabs the readers' attention, looks sufficiently SF enough once you note the font and the shirt design, and also, in its own way, let's you know not to take it too seriously. It's meant to be a funny book. The cover will also look DAMN GOOD as a mass market paperback. Though I have to say, I rather like the alternate covers they came up with during original cover art process. You can see them here. Fun as they are, they look a wee bit literary too, don't they? Maybe it's the font. But I love the first one, with the toy soldiers on a red planet. :)
Next up: The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi