Review:
Redshirts, by John Scalzi
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
June 2012 |
| ISBN: |
1-4299-6360-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
317 |
The next few reviews deserve a small apology in advance. Normally, I try
to write reviews within a few weeks, or at most a month, after reading a
book, while it's still fresh in my mind. This is particularly important
since I read a lot and sometimes don't have a good memory for specific
detail. But this summer has made it completely impossible to keep to any
sort of regular writing schedule. As a result, this book, and the
subjects of the next few reviews that follow, are books that I read four
months ago and am reviewing from memory. Hopefully, I'll still get the
details right.
Ensign Andrew Dahl is one of the newest crew members of the Universal
Union Capital Ship
Intrepid. It's his first posting, just out of
the Academy. He's one of five new ensigns, expecting a normal tour of
duty (albeit with the pride of being on a capital ship of the fleet). But
very shortly after arriving on the ship, Andrew and and the other new
ensigns discover that something is very... strange. The casualty rate on
the ship is surprisingly high (as foreshadowed in a prologue). The other
crew members avoid the bridge crew, and particularly away missions, with
startling effectiveness (and desperation). And things regularly happen on
the ship that, for lack of a better description, simply make no sense.
Redshirts starts off as a very obvious
Star Trek parody. So
obvious, in fact, that it's eyeroll-inducing. The prologue reads exactly
like a section of a
Star Trek episode written by a third-rate hack,
leavened with some of the humor that readers of Scalzi's blog have come to
expect. But it's obvious that Scalzi is doing this intentionally, and it
doesn't take long before the subject of the book shifts. It's a
Star Trek parody that functions much more like a
Star Trek
parody than any universe should, to the degree that it becomes obvious to
the characters. And the characters, despite being straight from central
casting, are clearly not expecting their universe to act that way and find
this extremely strange.
By far the best part of this book is the second quarter: the characters
have been introduced, they're starting to figure out what's going on, and
they have to do so while dodging away-team duty (or trying to survive it)
and participating in the ridiculous plot contrivances that keep occurring.
Scalzi mixes a feeling of serious consequences with wry humor and handles
the mix deftly. I was both laughing and eagerly reading to see what comes
next.
The last half of the book, though, has problems. How many problems the
reader perceives will, I think, depend on how hard one thinks about the
situation Scalzi has set up, or how much one has thought about similar
constructs in the past. But I'm afraid the setup does not survive serious
scrutiny in ways that, for me at least, seriously damaged my ability to
engage with the story.
I'm going to avoid saying explicitly where Scalzi goes with this plot,
since it is a spoiler (although it's commonly mentioned in discussions of
this book on the Internet). But it happens to be an idea that some
friends of mine and I pounded on for years in some of our role-playing
scenarios, poking at the corners and implications, and subsequently gave
up on because it doesn't work for storytelling. The idea is compelling,
and on first glance seems like a great story seed. But it's too large.
The problem with really big ideas with huge implications is that they can
change the nature of a story so much that there's no longer any point of
commonality for the reader and the entire nature of story falls apart.
And I think that's what happens here.
Scalzi handles the deeper implications of the concept by, essentially,
ignoring them. He focuses on one narrow set of implications for one
specific set of people, largely skips over any discussion of anything
larger, and tries a pivot from wry humor (and a bit of slapstick) into
serious emotional depth. For me, in part because I'm so familiar with the
concept, none of this really worked. The implications of the discovery
that drives this story are so much broader and so much more significant
than the characters seem to admit that it threw me right out of the story.
The ethical implications are absolutely paralyzing, to the point that I
don't think you can write a coherent story about them, but ignoring them
doesn't work either. It's the kind of discovery that requires action of
some kind beyond the attempt by the characters to go back to what they
consider a normal life, even if I have a hard time imagining what that
action could be.
To be fair, he does try to salvage this in the first epilogue, which is
all about the implications of his idea and its effects. But it's still
too small. That epilogue just barely touches on the implications on a
single person, but if one thinks a bit longer, one starts coming up with
more and more implications for all of society, for how we talk about
story, for how we raise children, for nearly every form of creativity.
Implications that involve nasty concepts like slavery and mind control and
murder and the nature of consent in ways that are very difficult to avoid.
I think Scalzi's attempts at serious emotional connection, including in
the other two attached epilogues (which are perspective-shifting close
focuses on some of the characters), also suffer from his world setup, but
in a different way. The characters are simply too bland to sustain the
level of emotional connection he's striving for. They're bland for a very
specific reason that is entirely justified by the story that Scalzi is
handling, and the implications of that for the primary protagonist were, I
thought, one of the best-handled moments of the book. But they're still
bland, which undermines the attempted pivot.
All that being said, this is not a bad book. Parts of it, particularly
the second quarter, are excellent. And even when I wasn't engaging with
the characters, Scalzi's writing on a paragraph level is snappy and often
quite funny. The first epilogue in particular is hilarious, even if I
think it was too limited in the scope of implications that it considers
and a bit too meta in where it goes with those implications. And the
story is a fun romp, with drama and humor and tension and a fairly
satisfying ending. Everyone's a bit too bland and earnest when Scalzi
isn't being funny, but he's funny enough that I didn't mind that much.
Despite the relatively low rating, I actually recommend this book. If you
don't dive into the metaphysical implications, it's a lot of fun, and if
you've thought a lot about this particular set of metaphysical
implications, it's somewhat satisfying to argue with (and to internally
point out all of the hard questions that Scalzi is skipping over). It's
particularly fun if you've watched a lot of
Star Trek, since Scalzi
gets some of the absurdities note-perfect. But be aware that the
character reactions to Scalzi's concept don't hold up to much scrutiny.
Rating: 7 out of 10
& another week of perl (5.18) related bugs has gone by:
I've only helped
"politically" here and there with this over the years, and I'm
happy to see it live. Your thanks for this should go to the blog
editors---Francesca Ciceri and Ana Guerrero Lopez---and to DSA for
making it real. A proper delegation for the editors is pending and
I'm confident the next DPL will pick it up.
It was a surprisingly busy week. The commit notification service CIA was 
FreedomBox 0.1
Ian Sullivan posted a release announcement today regarding the first
I have published 