Title: Redshirts
Rating: 4 Stars
Here let me start with my usual caveat that science fiction isn’t really my genre but every now and then a book enters my consciousness and I decide to give it a shot. I think that re-watching Galaxy Quest was the spur that encouraged me to give Redshirts a shot. According to my Goodreads book list, I’ve apparently read this before. This must be a mistake because I don’t remember a thing about it and it’s not really that old that I might have forgotten about it. Even so, I kind of knew what it was about. I remember enjoying Galaxy Quest in the theater when it came out but for some reason it just didn’t do as much for me this time. I was hoping for better luck with Redshirts.
By now, everyone must understand the joke behind Scalzi’s title (or maybe the joke is now so old that it’s faded away into trivia). In the original Star Trek series, whenever Kirk, Spock, McCoy, or Scotty went on a mission to explore some distant and probably dangerous world, they took along a security detail identifiable by their red shirts. Since these were nondescript bit players, they were always the first ones killed off.
In Redshirts, the protagonist is Andrew Dahl, a recent crew member of the flagship Intrepid. It is exploring the universe in the 25th century. Like a certain series that it’s taking the piss out of, there are a couple key senior officers with names of Abernathy, Q’eeng, West, Kerensky, and Hartnell. Regularly, one of these senior officers has to investigate a foreign planet on an away mission. When they do so, they bring junior members along on the mission (like Dahl). Inevitably, one to many of the junior members are killed in often spectacular, bizarre, and often illogical ways. None of the senior officers are ever killed, although Kerensky is often horribly injured but is quickly healed.
The crew, aware of this tendency, takes great lengths to avoid these senior officers to stay away from the away missions. There’s other unexplained events on the ship. There’s a mysterious box that can solve any problem in any dramatically short period of time. Whenever damage occurs on a ship (and it often happens since they’re regularly under attack) only a certain set of decks are ever affected. No matter where an attack takes place on Intrepid, the bridge is always slightly damaged.
All of this is quite mysterious. Dahl meets up with Jenkins, a crew member that has now gone rogue, now wearing great dreadlocks and living in the ship’s tunnels. It is Jenkins’ belief that they live in a time line that was somehow first initiated by a mediocre sci-fi show started in the 21st century. The weird deaths and universe non sequiturs that the crew experiences is the result of slipshod writing done for the show.
Dahl and a couple of his equally low status friends hatch a desperate plan to time travel to the 21st century to try to get the show to stop killing off so many people. They succeed in the time travel and must meet with the writers, producer, and stars of the show. As might be expected, things get very meta.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Some of this might because it does take the piss out of a genre that I’m not a huge fan of, but clearly Scalzi does so out of love. He highlights the ridiculous animals that attack the crew (an ice shark? Is that a shark that lives in ice or a shark made out of ice?), the silly rules of physics that they must abide by in their world (you can time travel, but only for six days after which point your atoms will melt away), and the heavy melodrama that the senior crew often demonstrates.
The meta is quite clever. I have no idea if it holds up under any system of logic, but that’s kind of besides the point. It was enjoyable. In fact, not to get too high brow, but as I read it, it reminded me a bit of that classic meta novel At Swim-Two-Birds, which is a too bizarre to explain novel about characters in novels that are writing novels in which their characters rise up against them. It’s written under the Irish pen name of Flann O’Brien. Among other things it includes Irish folklore characters like Finn Mac Cool. One of the characters in Redshirts is called Finn. I really would like to believe that Scalzi threw that in as a tip of the cap to one of the all time great meta novels.
It was oh so close to five stars. Only two somewhat minor things marred it slightly. One is the three codas. They each briefly describe the aftermath of the visit from the 25th century characters upon the 21st century characters. They were well written and actually quite touching. However, they just had a bit too much of a television film closure feeling to them. I didn’t really need to have all of that spelled out for me.
Secondly is that I wish that it’d been just a tad more ambitious on the meta front. It was on the verge of something at the end. The timeline has been saved and it appears that there will be no more unnecessary deaths going forward. However, Dahl comes to a realization. In the story that he’s just lived, it’s been him, not the senior officers, that has been the protagonist. In this specific timeline, he was the main character while they were the bit players. He wonders, is it possible that he himself is the focus of another narrative from another time and is he just living it?
I know that it would have hopelessly complicated things, but I think it would have been awesome if at this point somehow Scalzi himself introduced himself as a character within the work. That would have brought the meta narrative all of the way to the God figure himself, the author.
dorkenstein 