Redshirts

[sawyl]

A smart, funny read in the form of John Scalzi's Redshirts, a book that starts off as an extended Star Trek joke before moving off into a razor-sharp piece of meta-fictional cleverness complete with codas in the first, second, and third persons.

When Andrew Dahl is assigned to the starship Intripid, the Universal Union's flagship, he quickly realises that something isn't quite right. Maybe it's the great lengths his new colleagues in go to in order to avoid the senior officers. Perhaps it's the way the laws of physics sometimes break down or the astrogator's miraculous powers of physical recover or the crews' inconsistent behaviour when placed in stressful situations. Or possibly it's the shockingly high mortality rate among the junior crew, especially on away missions.

While trying to narrow down the nature of the anomaly, Dahl and his fellow new recruits stumble across Jenkins, a scientist with a really crazy hypothesis: what if the Intrepid and its universe was actually just the backdrop to a science fiction TV show? The proof? Using the iron-clade laws of television, cliche Jenkins is able to prove his theory by precisely predicting the small events of a major shipboard incident; something that more than convinces the new recruits that they need to do something to save their own lives, lest they be bumped off in increasingly horrific ways as is the time-honoured fate of the average redshirt.

Underneath the cleverness and the humour, Redshirts makes a number of serious points. By criticising the glib way that writers throw away the lives of their characters to make a cheap point, it mirrors the way that politicians sometimes come to see the distant & unknown masses as easy sacrifices to the greater good (as Stalin is supposed to have said, a single death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic). As Dahl and his fellow redshirts point out: they don't resent dying, but they do resent needless dying, simply because someone has been too lazy to think their way out of a situation.

Highly recommended.