The Book I Just Red

A while back, I wrote about my enjoyment of John Scalzi's novella The Dispatcher, which I caught in audiobook format during a vacation. It made me want to add another of his books to my reading stack, and when I got to researching his standalone tales, one leapt to the front as perfect for me was Redshirts.

Life on the starship Intrepid isn't what Ensign Andrew Dahl had hoped for. Yes, he's serving aboard the flagship of the Universal Union, and his job in the xenobiology lab will put him at the forefront of new alien life the ship encounters in its interstellar travels. The problem? An unusually high percentage of low-ranking crew members get killed whenever they're assigned to planetary missions. Indeed, Dahl is part of a large crop of new crew recently added to replenish the ship's waning complement. And he and his friends may be next to die.

Yes, if you didn't get it from the title alone, this is a parody of Star Trek. A loving one, to be sure, and not exclusively a comedy. But it's a quite playful and quite fun story, full of wonderful meta jokes to make a Star Trek fan grin from ear to ear. I loved it from the prologue, and that feeling never really faded.

The story does take some twists and turns, though, forcing you to recalibrate your expectations along the way. Some readers might even be put off a bit by how downright weird it gets, though I for one think that John Scalzi is just making the most of Star Trek-inspired premise. Trek fans who can't take a joke might find it hard to read as well, I suppose, though I think anyone willing to pick up a fiction book called Redshirts is probably going to appreciate the humor. (I hear Wil Wheaton reads the audiobook version, so consider that a seal of approval.)

Redshirts was not actually the original published title of the book -- not the full one, anyway. It was called Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas. As that title promises, you reach "The End" with still more than a quarter of the book to go. And it's actually these three codas that turn this lightweight lark into a more dramatic tale with emotional heft. It's where Scalzi demonstrates he's not here just to crack jokes and point out the soup stains on Star Trek's figurative tie. And it adds a lot to the experience.

I really enjoyed the book, and give it an A-. The Hugo Awards agreed with me, giving it the Best Novel honor in 2013. To this reader, Redshirts showed some range after The Dispatcher, and made me want to seek out still more of John Scalzi's work in the future.