I recently read Redshirts by John Scalzi. Though it won the Hugo award in 2013, I just got around to reading it now. It made me love John Scalzi’s writing.
<<<SPOILERS>>>
The characters are inside a science fiction narrative that is not very well written, though the book itself is very well written, with compelling and witty characters. In the story, the fictional characters are real people living out a narrative that intrudes on their “real world”
The story is a spoof of Star Trek-like tv shows. The story is set on a starship, the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union. This is a thinly veiled copy of the United Federation of Planets Starship Enterprise.
I loved the self awareness of the characters in the story. The entire point is that the characters realize they are characters in a narrative. I enjoy self referential stories. It reminded me of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Recursion and self reference are the main theme of that book.
This book pokes fun at bad science fiction writing. It particularly singles out the use of “Plot armor”. I.e. main characters survive episode after episode, but minor characters die off regularly to create a sense of danger. The title of this book references this phenomenon. On Star Trek, the security officers wearing red shirts were often the first to die. This was mainly because, as security officers, they were in the way of danger. Consequently, a newly-introduce character who died in one episode came to be called a “red shirt“.
This is why Game of Thrones was so shocking when G.R.R. Martin killed off Ned Stark at the end of the first book and at the end of the first season on TV. Most readers thought he was a main character. The fact that he was killed came as a shock to readers and viewers alike.
Plot Synopsis
There are multiple layers to the story in Redshirts. First is the characters figuring out what is wrong. Once they figure out what is happening, they have to solve the problem. This requires going up one level in the narrative. Again, this reminds me of the Little Harmonic Labyrinth of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
The smart and sarcastic Ensign Andrew Dahl is one of the titular red shirts. Dahl is assigned to a lab where the crew disappears every time one of the Bridge Crew arrives, usually Science Officer Q’eeng.
Dahl and his fellow Redshirts meet Jenkins, who went into hiding years before. He lets them in on the fact that something is wrong with the Bridge Crew.
The Narrative
The Bridge Crew acts differently in moments of High Drama. Their actions often create that drama, though they are unaware of it. High Drama occurs when the Bridge Crew shows up in the “Narrative”. There are lots of coincidences involving the main redshirts. You get the sense they are growing plot armor.
“Every battle is designed for maximum drama,” says Jenkins. “This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically.”
Dahl senses it when the lab uses The Box to discover a solution to a problem in the nick of time. Again High Drama resolves the crisis with no scientific explanation (Deus Ex Machina). The Redshirts have multiple adventures, usually with High Drama when bridge crew are involved. Again, each situation is resolved with unscientific neatness. In the process, many other Redshirts die.
The main characters discover the “Effect” and figure out a way to fix it. They have to go back in time (also a Star Trek trope) and find the writers of the show they are living in and convince them to write better. This is meta. It’s not just time travel to fix the past, but convincing the writers that wrote them to save their lives. Add to the fact that a writer is writing this and it becomes more meta. See Little Harmonic Labyrinth.
The characters meet the actors that play their characters in the series. They use this information to help the show’s producer and convince him to improve the writing.
There are three Codas at the end of the book that emphasize the point. They aren’t central to the story, but if you like the theme of it, the Codas are pretty cool.
