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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

One of the things I pride myself on is an ability to put a book down. Doesn’t matter how exciting it is, how gripping it is, when I need to stop reading it, I stop reading it, dagnabbit. It comes of years of riding on the New York City subway, which is historically where I’ve done a good chunk of my reading. Under those circumstances, you have to cease reading when you get to your stop, regardless of whether or not you’re in mid-chapter, mid-sentence, or mid-plot twist.

As result, I got pretty good at putting a book down, no matter how entranced I was by it. Heck, George Pelecanos is one of my favorite writers, and I put his most recent book down when I reached my stop and didn’t get back to it until the next time I happened to be on a train.

I say all this because I couldn’t put John Scalzi’s Redshirts down. Goodness knows, I tried. I got to my stop, and I had to get up and get out of the train so I could get to where I was going.

But that was delayed, because I had to find a bench at the subway stop and sit down and keep reading Redshirts.

Eventually, I got to the end of a chapter, and I did put it down and continue with my day, and then I dove back into it on the way home. On the way back, I could put it down by virtue of having finished it before reaching my stop. Small favors.

BE WARNED: THERE BE SPOILERS HERE! SERIOUSLY, LOTSA SPOILERS! DON’T KEEP READING IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS! YOU’LL BE SORRY!

My initial impression of Redshirts was that it did for Star Trek fiction what Galaxy Quest did for on-screen Star Trek. But Scalzi takes it one step further from what GQ (and The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space, and the Peter Jurasik/William H. Keith Jr. novel Diplomatic Act) did. People aren’t mistaking a TV show for “historical documents”—instead, the TV show is actually warping reality itself. Where the Thermians mistook Galaxy Quest for real events, The Chronicles of the Intrepid actually have an effect on future history. Every time there’s an episode of the TV show, it plays out in reality on the Intrepid in the far future, radically messing with events.

We, of course, don’t find this out until later, and it’s the unfolding of the narrative that provides most of the entertainment in Redshirts. Our main character is Andrew Dahl, an ensign newly assigned to the Intrepid, who soon realizes that things are really really weird on board the ship, that being sent down on an away mission is suicide unless you’re one of the bridge crew, and also that the bridge crew tend to heal remarkably quickly from injury. Plus, they do lots of silly things that don’t make sense given the technology available to them, like make personal reports to the bridge during a crisis instead of just instant-messaging one’s findings, plus there’s the “magic box” that seems to fix everything—mostly.

One particularly crazed crewmember named Jenkins (whom I mostly thought of as Lazlo from Real Genius) is the first to figure out that they’re playing out episodes of an old TV show, and he eventually manages to convince Dahl and several other of the “redshirts” on board that they’re going to die.

The metafiction pours on gleefully thick from that point, like hot fudge on a yummy sundae, as Dahl and his merry band of redshirts—joined by the ship’s pilot Kerensky, whose presence is necessary because his 21st-century analogue is a main character and therefore can get set access—travel back in time to the set of The Chronicles of the Intrepid to try to keep from getting killed.

As a long-time writer of Star Trek fiction (and current rewatcher of Star Trek: The Next Generation), I found Redshirts incredibly entertaining, because it plays with so many of the tropes of science fiction TV and shines a light on many of their absurdities. But it also comes with an awareness that those tropes are there for a reason (people make reports directly to the bridge because a conversation between two people is more interesting to watch than one person reading data off a screen). Those tropes have become so ingrained in our consciousness that the reader immediately recognizes them and enjoys the fun being poked at them. Hell, the title itself comes from a derogatory term used by fans to describe the security guards who always got killed on Star Trek landing parties. You could almost retitle the book TV Tropes: The Novel.

As a long-time fiction writer, the novel hits on one of the great subconscious fears of writing fiction: that the characters we torture and damage and maim and kill are actually real. Nick Weinstein, the head writer of The Chronicles of the Intrepid, gets this rather nastily shoved in his face.

What’s great about this book is the breakneck pace. That’s why I couldn’t put it down—Scalzi keeps the plot moving quickly and amusingly, thanks to crackling dialogue, funny situations, and tight prose.

The final bit of the novel gets a bit too bogged down in duplicate characters—a problem exacerbated by Scalzi having a bit too many characters as it is (and with too many similar names: Duvall and Dahl, Hanson and Hester)—but it’s still entertaining as all heck.

The only real problem with Redshirts isn’t a problem with the novel itself, exactly. The tale that ends on page 231 is excellent, and with a very nice little mess-with-your-head bit that would’ve been the perfect way to end the book.

Unfortunately, Redshirts is 314 pages long, with pages 232-314 taken up with three codas. I totally understand why Scalzi felt the need to write these three stories (and he eloquently explained his rationale on his “Whatever” blog), but ultimately I think they were a mistake, as they sour the experience a tad. For starters, the first coda is a series of blog posts by Weinstein which have the rather unfortunate distinction of reading pretty much exactly like Scalzi’s “Whatever” blog, and this is the first time that the metafiction feels like it’s bleeding over into self-indulgence. The second coda is in second person, which is difficult to do without sounding pretentious, and Scalzi doesn’t quite manage it. The only one that comes close to working is the final one, about an actress who played a redshirt whose onscreen death had long-ranging ramifications in the future real history.

These codas feel like they should have been an optional extra set of things on a web site somewhere (the literary equivalent of DVD extras). They don’t add enough to the book to justify forcing the reader to, in essence, outstay the joke’s welcome.

Which is too bad, because Redshirts is an excellent joke. The novel is funny, thought-provoking, funny, delightful, funny, and did I mention it’s funny? It’s a story that makes fun of space opera television in a way that—like Galaxy Quest before it—works both if you love Star Trek and Stargate and the rest, and if you hate them with the fiery passion of a thousand white-hot suns.

Besides, it inspired a hilarious Jonathan Coulton song. What’s not to love?


Keith R.A. DeCandido is the author of somewhere in the vicinity of 50 novels, the most recent of which is Goblin Precinct, the latest in his series of high-fantasy police procedurals. He’s also written dozens and dozens of novels, comic books, and short fiction based on Star Trek, Farscape, BattleTech, Doctor Who, Serenity, Andromeda, and StarCraft, so he knows his space opera. So there! Read his Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch here on Tor.com, and check out his web site for more niftiness.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Keith R.A. DeCandido

Author

Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about popular culture for this site since 2011, primarily but not exclusively writing about Star Trek and screen adaptations of superhero comics. He is also the author of more than 60 novels, more than 100 short stories, and around 50 comic books, both in a variety of licensed universes from Alien to Zorro, as well as in worlds of his own creation. Read his blog, follow him on Facebook, The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Blue Sky, and follow him on YouTube and Patreon.
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