★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Redshirts
• Author: John Scalzi
• Year: 2012 (mine was library hardcover)
• Pages: 314
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-1699-8 (hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

In Redshirts, low-level crewmembers aboard the starship Intrepid start to notice just how expendable they are, and how certain top officers always seem to survive — though one of them gets fairly messed up fairly often. Once they realize what’s going on, the low-level crewmembers concoct a wild scheme to set things right.

Now, here’s the spoiler part... The crew members begin to (correctly) suspect they’re fictional characters on a television show. The “wild scheme” is to use a black hole as a time warp to find the writers of the show and convince them to make changes.

I didn’t realize while I was reading it, but Redshirts won the 2013 Best Novel Hugo award.

 

Commentary

This book was enjoyable and quick-paced, and Scalzi expertly (or at least handily) pokes fun at the silliest examples of science fiction television — where the science is bad, the plots unrealistic, and the characters’ deaths as meaningless as they are gratuitous. He uses enough tropes from these types of shows/films that the world of this novel indeed feels like it is one of those shows.

Weirdly, the book effectively ends on page 231, but then there are another 85 pages, divided into three sections that Scalzi calls “Codas”. I personally think the book would have been stronger if the codas didn’t exist, but I think I understood why he wrote them. The first is written as a series of blog entries by a screenwriter; the second is an oddly second-person account, exploring how one character dealt with the aftermath; the last is a weirdly present-tense exploration of how another character felt about it.

 

Points Off For...

My usual Scalzi complaints: lack of character descriptions and forward-backward time jumps.

 

Personal Indulgence

It’s probably not considered cool to mention one’s own work in a review of someone else’s, but I’m going to. I’m glad I read this after I wrote Compelled. Though the plots are different, the stories share the idea of a character beginning to suspect that she is being written by some Author somewhere. I think it’s possible I wouldn’t have written mine if I’d read this first — either because I figured the idea was already done (and in a Hugo-winning book, no less!) or because it might have felt like I was stealing the idea. Or, I might have written mine anyway, because I still think mine is unique, but it might have been a different story somehow if I read this one first.

 

Conclusion

While I can’t see how this won the Hugo, it IS an enjoyable book with a fairly unique story to tell. I’m glad Scalzi wrote it and I’m glad I read it.

 

 

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