My rating: 4 of 5 stars
You don’t need to be a Trekkie to be familiar with the “redshirt” phenomenon. During the three-year run of the original Star Trek tv series in the 1960’s, fans noticed a certain trend of crew members being briefly introduced and rapidly killed in bizarre ways whenever landing on some new planet. Whenever the anonymous characters beamed down with one or more of the main characters, you could practically hear the last grains of sand passing through their hourglasses. The writers seemed to have a passion for wiping out the crew around Kirk, Spock & Bones at a dramatic rate just to illustrate how perilous the missions were. In all, fans calculated that some 75% of the characters killed on the show were wearing red shirts, which is to say nothing of the other nameless crew members whose shirt color didn’t prevent them from suffering the same fate.
John Scalzi’s Hugo Award winning novel Redshirts sends up this phenomenon in an amusing fashion, following a fresh new recruit, Ensign Andrew Dahl, who has just arrived on the flagship Enterp-sorry, Intrepid. A number of other new faces have been assigned to the Intrepid, which needs all the bodies it can get, since the ship keeps losing people on every away mission the crew undertake. Along with his fellow recruits, Dahl begins to recognize that anyone selected to participate in an away mission had better not start any long books. In fact, any team members on a mission with certain Senior Officers are dead crewmen walking, and together the recruits begin to look for a way to stop this trend. After all, each of them has a backstory, but only barely, leading them to wonder if they are even the protagonist in their own story, or merely extras…
It’s a clever story, helped markedly by being a quick, well-paced read. The novel obviously works best if you are an avid Star Trek fan, but it isn’t reliant on the fact. I know the films and the original series pretty well, but am by no means a big Trek fan. A decent familiarity with sci-fi in general is adequate for most of the jokes here. I caught some great little tips of the hat and missed probably many more – it doesn’t matter – the story works mainly because it is not a spoof, but a very solid story that is funny on its own merits.
The dialogue is top shelf, which I have come to expect from Scalzi and the action is well written. The whole thing is breezily read and it all too easy to visualize as a living, breathing show. (I understand plans for a series are afoot.)
The book is advertised as “a novel with three codas” and these codas are really quite interesting. I have no intention of spoiling the story by explaining the inclusion of this “extra” material, but I they are very welcome additions and help to tie up the whole story.
Highly recommended.
