Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Tor Books
Publishing date: June 5th, 2012
ISBN: 9780765316998
Synopsis:Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is thrilled all the more to be assigned to the ship’s Xenobiology laboratory. Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to pick up on the fact that:
(1) every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien forces
(2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations
(3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.
My Review:
As a moderate StarTrek-fan this book immediately tickled my fancy once I came across it while browsing John Saclzi’s bibliography. I found this story a little harder to get into at firsts, but once I got the hold of the characters I found the story easy to follow (Despite thinking that one of the male characters were female until the last part of the book for some unknown reason). The book is a humorous commentary on our science fiction TV-show trends, mainly of course: StarTrek, hence the title “Redshirts.” Redshirts is a rather familiar term, and it plays into the story as it plays with breaking the fourth wall, something I found very well done in this story. I found the characters to be likeable and entertaining, even though the story has an aura of lightheartedness and doesn’t take itself too seriously. While reading I did find myself laughing several times because of the humorous and moronic events the characters were facing.
Please be advised that the rest of this review contain spoilers.
Normally I am very critical of stories where they are attempting to break the fourth wall in literature, in TV shows and movies they can be entertaining but in books it tends to be less well done and with less entertainment value. The build up for this angle in Redshirts was well done. It builds on a slow and steady pace to ease you into the first proposed mystery and for you to be convinced of the “insane” truth proposed in the story.
The entertainment value in this book come from your own interest in science fiction, if you have little interest in science fiction many references will be lost form you. I am not huge science fiction buff, and I still enjoyed reading it, though some references might have flow straight past me. All in all I was greatly entertained while reading this book, and I know I will be visiting more books by Scalzi in the future.
About the author:
John Michael Scalzi II is an American science fiction author and former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is best known for his Old Man’s War series, three novels of which have been nominated for the Hugo Award, and for his blog Whatever, where he has written on a number of topics since 1998. Lock In is a science fiction police procedural novel.
His 2012 book Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Scalzi decided to write Redshirts after noticing that while many short satirical works dealt with the idea of “‘redshirts’—the unnamed, low-ranking characters of Star Trek who always died on away missions,” there was a dearth of novels exploring the concept
Website | @scalzi