2012
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
This book is so fast and so fun, you could
easily read all of it in one longish day at the beach. Or in one late night (to
early morning) of uninterrupted indulgence. It’s a satisfying guilty pleasure,
like a special double episode of your favorite awkward but lovable cult sci-fi
TV series.
The book takes place in what is basically the Star Trek universe, except that Scalzi
can’t call anything by any of the Star
Trek names because of potential trademark violations. The setting is the
starship Intrepid, the flagship of
Space Fleet, the naval arm of the Universal Union of Planets. The Intrepid has a familiar line-up of
senior staff: a charismatic and sometimes overly emotive captain, a serious
science officer, a skilled medical chief, a resourceful chief engineer, and a
plucky lieutenant.
And the Intrepid
also has a large supply of miscellaneous, low-ranking, red-shirted crewmen,
whom it seems to knock off at an alarmingly fast pace.
Redshirts is told from the point of view of one of these
miscellaneous low-ranking crewmen, ensign Andrew Dahl, who has just been
assigned to the Intrepid straight out
of Space Fleet Academy. Dahl quickly figures out that things are weird aboard his
new ship.
For example, the ship’s inertial dampeners always
work perfectly—except when the ship is being fired upon, and then the entire
bridge crew has to jiggle around ridiculously while they perform evasive
maneuvers. And the science lab where Dahl works has a piece of equipment called
“the Box” that can perform scientific miracles, like synthesizing an antidote
to a hitherto unknown alien illness—but it only functions when one of the
senior staff members is in a crisis and there is an impossibly short time to
solve it.
But the strangest thing of all is how flaky the
crew is when it comes to away missions. On the Intrepid, away missions have an abnormally high mortality rate for
crewmen below the rank of lieutenant. Ensigns on away missions are often killed
in awful, unusual, and sometimes easily preventable ways, like by catching
grotesque diseases or being eaten by rare carnivorous alien creatures. So crew
members have developed an intense paranoia about it, and avoid the senior
officers like the plague when a mission is likely to be called.
Dahl, being unusually brave and curious for an
ensign, refuses to accept the status quo and sets it upon himself to figure out
what is going on. Which, of course, gets him into deep trouble.
It’s really funny to see the quirky aspects of
the Star Trek universe called out:
the silly lines, the implausible situations, the use of ensign death to
heighten dramatic tension. And the conversations between crew members are
hilarious—snappy, sarcastic, and brusque. Everyone is always nervous because
they never know when it might be their time to die a hideous death, so they tend
to be testy and irritated with each other. They don’t have time to mess around,
or to be caught standing around talking when a senior staff member comes by.
It is a good thing that Redshirts reads so quickly, because I don’t think the book’s central
conceit would survive being dragged out much longer than it is. As it was, I
did start getting worried about two-thirds through that Scalzi wouldn’t be able
to keep the humor and dramatic tension going all the way to the end. And I
think he could have easily dropped at least one of his three codas (preferably the
first one). As a funny but sensitive exposé of the Trek characters and plot contrivances we love, I don’t think it
hits the mark quite as well as Galaxy Quest.
But it’s still very good, and very fun.
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