- Scalzi, John.
Redshirts.
New York: Tor, 2012.
ISBN 978-0-7653-3479-4.
-
Ensign Andrew Dahl thought himself extremely fortunate when, just out
of the Academy, he was assigned to Universal Union flagship
Intrepid in the xenobiology lab. Intrepid has
a reputation for undertaking the most demanding missions of
exploration, diplomacy, and, when necessary, enforcement of
order among the multitude of planets in the Union, and it was
the ideal place for an ambitious junior officer to begin his career.
But almost immediately after reporting aboard, Dahl began to discover
there was something distinctly off about life aboard
the ship. Whenever one of the senior officers walked through the
corridors, crewmembers would part ahead of them, disappearing
into side passages or through hatches. When the science
officer visited a lab, experienced crew would vanish before
he appeared and return only after he departed. Crew
would invent clever stratagems to avoid being assigned to a
post on the bridge or to an away mission.
Seemingly, every away mission would result in the death of a
crew member, often in gruesome circumstances involving Longranian
ice sharks, Borgovian land worms, the Merovian plague, or
other horrors. But senior crew: the captain, science officer,
doctor, and chief engineer were never killed, although astrogator
Lieutenant Kerensky, a member of the bridge crew and regular on
away parties, is frequently grievously injured but invariably
makes a near-miraculous and complete recovery.
Dahl sees all of this for himself when he barely escapes with his life
from a rescue mission to a space station afflicted with killer
robots. Four junior crew die and Kerensky is injured once again. Upon
returning to the ship, Dahl and his colleagues vow to get to the
bottom of what is going on. They've heard the legends of, and one may
have even spotted, Jenkins, who disappeared into the bowels of the
ship after his wife, a fellow crew member, died meaninglessly by a
stray shot of an assassin trying to kill a Union ambassador on an away
mission.
Dahl undertakes to track down Jenkins, who is rumoured to have a
theory which explains everything that is happening. The theory turns
out to be as bizarre or more so than life on the Intrepid,
but Dahl and his fellow ensigns concede that it does
explain what they're experiencing and that applying it allows them to
make sense of events which are otherwise incomprehensible (I
love “the Box”).
But a theory, however explanatory, does not address the immediate
problem: how to avoid being devoured by Pornathic crabs or the Great
Badger of Tau Ceti on their next away mission. Dahl and his fellow
junior crew must figure out how to turn the nonsensical reality they
inhabit toward their own survival and do so without overtly engaging
in, you know, mutiny, which could, like death, be career limiting.
The story becomes so meta it will make you question the metaness of
meta itself.
This is a pure romp, often laugh-out-loud funny, having a
delightful time immersing itself in the lives of characters
in one of our most beloved and enduring science fiction
universes. We all know the bridge crew and department heads,
but what's it really like below decks, and how does it feel to
experience that sinking feeling when the first officer points
to you and says “You're with me!” when forming
an away team?
The novel has three codas written, respectively, in the first,
second, and third person. The last, even in this very funny book,
will moisten your eyes. Redshirts won the
Hugo
Award for Best Novel in 2013.
May 2015 