More comfort reading time! This week I’m only going back to 2012 (or forward to the 2400’s) with John Scalzi’s Redshirts. (Courtesy of a free ebook from Tor Books this month. Thanks guys!)
It’s Ensign Andrew Dahl’s first posting, and as luck would have it a position just opened on the Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union. It’s the perfect start for what should be an exciting career, working in the Xenobiology laboratory, exploring the universe with the most famous captain in the fleet and…
Man, that crewman looked terrified when someone mentioned an away mission.
Hang on, why does everyone in the lab disappear when an officer walks in?
…I’m sorry, Ensign Black was was killed by what now?
Listen to me, Dahl. Stay off the bridge. Avoid the Narrative. The next time you’re going to get sucked in for sure. And then it’s all over for you.
I remember years ago watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with several friends and trying to imagine what their adventures would sound like to some office flunky responsible for reading the reports sent back to the Federation. Alien contact via pregnancy? Ghosts? A weird lifeform that takes over the entire ship before creating a new body for itself and melting through the hull? We could just see a whole team of administrators throwing up their hands with a despairing “All of our other ships are normal.”
Admit it, even if you’re a fan of the Star Trek universe, there are a lot of things that happened on the shows that were pretty silly, especially on the original series. The science is usually unsound, it doesn’t make any sense to have all the top ranking officers regularly go on dangerous away missions, and the fatality rate for the poor nameless flunkies – many of which didn’t even get a line of dialog – was ridiculously high.
In the Redshirts reality of the Universal Union, every member of the Intrepid has the exact same concerns about their own ship. Well, every member except the Captain and four top ranking officers, all of whom manage to survive every dangerous situation unscathed. (Well, except Kerensky, who tends to get shot, burned in a shuttle crash, possessed by alien parasites, and crushed under a rock pile on a fairly regular basis.)
It would be comforting to know that the command crew of the Intrepid is so lucky, if it wasn’t for the fact that the people around them tend to drop at the rate of one crew member a mission, and the deaths are quite varied and sometimes just weird.
“I mean that within five minutes of getting to my new post I heard three different stories of crew buying the farm on an away mission. Death by falling rock. Death by toxic atmosphere. Death by pulse gun vaporization.”
“Death by shuttle door malfunction,” Hanson said.
“Death by ice shark,” Dahl said.
“Death by what?” Duvall said, blinking. “What the hell is an ice shark?”
And it’s not like knowing that something odd is going on is going to help, as Ensign Dahl and his friends (the bad-boy Finn, the put-upon Hester, the freewheeling Duvall, and the easygoing Hanson) find out. I mean, say that you’re on what’s basically a military spaceship and everyone knows at least one person will die in every mission. What do you do with that information? Hide from the officers? Play hot-potato with the away team assignments and hope some clueless newbie gets volunteered first? Go boldly into the next deadly situation and hope you survive the inevitable alien attack? It’s actually a terrifying situation, made even worse by some surprisingly gory deaths and the fact that back-stabbing becomes a survival tactic on this ship.
It’s not just the body count that’s strange. Crew members find themselves remembering details that they would swear they hadn’t known before it was convenient for them to know it. An officer will deliver news and then pause, as if waiting for a musical sting to tell everyone that this is a dramatic moment. An impossible demand for the Xenobiology lab to science their way out of the latest crisis is solved with an equally impossible piece of equipment. It’s almost as if the whole ship was something out of…
…a TV show.
It’s a situation so out there that the characters couldn’t possibly believe it, except they do because it’s the only way that life on the Intrepid makes sense. Of course this makes them obsess about all the ways their lives could be thrown away in an instant in order to spice up the plot, or because one of the officers needs some character development.
“…I know I’m doomed, because if that son of a bitch has a crush on me, it makes it perfect if I get killed off. Because then he can be sad at the end of the episode.”
As you can imagine, things get meta in this book really fast. And then things get even stranger when Dahl and the other Ensigns come up with a plan to fix things. Which is…way more convoluted than you’re imagining. I’ve got several notes from reading this where I wrote “My brain hurts,” and I lost track of the times someone said “This timeline sucks” or “…it’s complicated”. It’s all a delightfully crazy mess, with time travel and possible alternate-universe (maybe?) shenanigans made even more fun by Scalzi absolutely nailing the nonplussed characters and snappy dialog to go along with the ridiculous events.
“Anatoly, come back in,” Duvall said through the window. “For God’s sake, you’re not wearing pants.”
If I have any complaint about the book at all, it’s that the ending comes with three codas, and I don’t know that they’re really necessary. I mean, they tie up some loose ends, give us some poignant moments, and ask a lot of important questions about whether we owe the same thing to the characters we create that we owe to ourselves. But I feel like this information could have been threaded in earlier; as it is the codas take the focus off of the main characters, and the extra scenes water down the ending slightly.
And the ending to the main story really does have the perfect note to finish up all the lunacy.