John Scalzi's satirical 2012 science fiction novel Redshirts is the sort of book whose premise has a tendency to obscure its depth. The plot of Redshirts concerns the experiences of the low-ranking crew members of a far-future starship who realize that they tend to die on away missions with alarming regularity, and as a result begin formulating a plan that will ensure their continued survival as their Captain boldly leads them into one disastrous mission after another.
That is, Redshirts is a parody of the tropes of many of the more iconic works of sci-fi television, with even its title being a reference to the tendency of shows like Star Trek to kill off low-ranking crew members of the Enterprise before the first commercial break. As a result, while this idea is certainly based on an amusing premise, it may at first seem odd that an author would produce an entire novel's worth of content from this concept. After all, can you really sustain a fully fleshed out plot line for more than 300 pages on nothing but the question of whether or not the crew of the Enterprise got nervous when they realized they'd been assigned to an away mission alongside Kirk and Spock?
The answer is, surprisingly, yes, and this is in part because the humor on which Redshirts is built is only half of what this story has to offer. Behind this novel about the people whose lives serialized television science fiction is apt to ignore is a far more complicated narrative about free will, agency, and the question of what constitutes good writing. While Redshirts is certainly a satire of science fiction television, it's also a book that has the humility to turn its own satire in on itself. There is an honesty that permeates Scalzi's novel, and from that honesty a warmth and kindness that informs even his more biting streaks of humor.
Redshirts (Plot Summary)
The primary character of Redshirts is Andrew Dahl, a newly recruited Ensign of the "Universal Union" who is assigned to the Intrepid--the galaxy-famous starship whose Captain, Chief Science Officer, and lead "Astrogator" seem to make mind-bending discoveries on practically a weekly basis.
Initially honored at having received a coveted position on this ship's science team, Dahl quickly learns that the lower-ranking crew members of the Intrepid have a bizarre set of beliefs and superstitions regarding their superior officers. Week after week -- for years on end now -- the crew of the Intrepid have noted that any time a low-ranking officer like themselves (i.e. a "redshirt") is asked to accompany one of the senior officers on an away mission, that low-ranking officer will usually die before the mission is over. So often has this happened that they've even uncovered a formula of sorts that seems to govern this effect -- a bizarrely morbid algorithm dictating how many crew members must die on an away mission based on how many senior officers are present.
Initially skeptical, Dahl and the other newcomers to the Intrepid's crew (Ensigns Duvall, Hanson, Finn, and Hester) soon have their minds changed when they witness firsthand the unfathomable "accidents" that the crew of the Intrepid regularly endure -- accidents that aren't merely frightening, but also seem to overtly defy the laws of probability. Soon, everyone begins formulating a plan to take back control of their lives from the invisible reality-bending force that seems to now govern their fates.
Main Review (Some Spoilers Follow)
Calling Redshirts "metatextual" is a bit of an understatement. As the plot develops and Dahl and the other low-ranking crew-members of the Intrepid embark on a voyage through the very conventions of their own genre, the book breaks its own fourth wall so many times that by the end it's clear that this novel isn't simply a satire poking fun at science fiction television, but also a much more complicated meditation on the ways in which an over-reliance on shock-value plot twists hinders the sorts of narratives which writers in any medium can meaningfully tell. One of the most enjoyable parts of Redshirts is Scalzi's exploration of the true consequences of many of the more common storytelling mechanisms of SF television, with his story often using humor as a tool to interrogate the consequences of these narratives, and the assumptions inherent within them.
One example of this comes shortly after Dahl has assumed his post in the Intrepid's famed science lab. In this scene, Captain Abernathy and Science Officer Q'eeng arrive in the lab carrying a vial filled with a deadly plague. Upon greeting Dahl, Abernathy and Q'eeng immediately lapse into a lengthy expository monologue reminiscent of a hastily written episode of Star Trek, saying to Dahl that "as he knows," the Intrepid is currently in orbit around the world of Merovia whose entire civilization is actively being decimated by a deadly plague. Having sent an away mission to the planet's surface to retrieve a sample of this plague, Abernathy and Q'eeng now wish for Dahl to single-handedly synthesize an antidote and save this world from certain doom.
However, rather than acknowledging the sheer magnitude of the task they've entrusted to a single low-ranking crew member who only arrived on board their ship days earlier, Abernathy and Q'eeng instead are far more concerned with the health of one particular Lieutenant under their command (the Intrepid's astrogator Lieutenant Kerensky). The danger which Kerensky faces from the plague even seems to prompt Abernathy to forget about the civilization which he has been tasked with saving mid-sentence. The passage reads:
"We sent a covert two-man away team to collect samples, but in doing so they became infected themselves," Q'eeng said. "The Merovian Plague has already claimed the life of Ensign Lee.""Damn plague liquefied the flesh right off her bones," Abernathy said, grimly."The other Intrepid crew member infected is Lieutenant Kerensky," Q'eeng said. At this both Abernathy and Q'eeng looked at Dahl intensely, as if to stress the sheer, abject horror of this Lieutenant Kerensky being infected."Oh, no," Dahl ventured. "Not Kerensky."Abernathy nodded. "So you understand the importance of that little vial you have in your hands," he said. "Use it to find the counter-bacterial. If you can do it, you'll save Kerensky.""And the Merovians," Dahl said."Yes, them too," Abernathy said. "You have six hours."Dahl blinked. "Six hours?"Abernathy angered at this. "Is there a problem, mister? he asked."It's not a lot of time," Dahl said."Damn it, man!" Abernathy said. "This is Kerensky we're talking about!" (p.39-40)
The joke here -- that Abernathy expects everyone on the ship to be more concerned for this Lieutenant Kerensky's well-being than that of an entire planet full of people -- brings up a larger theme that Redshirts repeatedly explores via its humor. As Dahl, Duvall, Hanson, Finn, and Hester adjust to their new lives on the Intrepid, they eventually come to the grim and inexplicable realization that they are in fact characters in a badly written science fiction television show airing on basic cable. Week after week, the crew of the Intrepid die in increasingly bizarre and contrived accidents, and eventually it becomes clear to everyone that the writers of this show care far more for the continued existence of their main characters than anyone else. Consequently, these writers use the continued survival of their main cast to obscure the true consequences of the stories they tell each week.
The satire that sits at the heart of Redshirts could easily have turned this story into an amusing but cold narrative -- a comedy that ridicules the works of other authors while hiding behind the false superiority which this humor gives it over this material. However, one of the qualities of Scalzi's satire that makes it so enjoyable is a warmth that permeates even his wackier scenes and ideas. Critical to this story is the fact that the core "cast" of the Intrepid are not in fact antagonists to the novel's main characters, but rather are shown to be just as frightened and disturbed by the events occurring around them as everyone else. In one scene, Dahl finds himself stuck in a hotel room with a very drunk Lieutenant Kerensky while on shore leave, and the slurred conversation the two have reveals the previously aloof and self-absorbed Kerensky to in fact be far more sympathetic than he outwardly appears.
In the end, this scene shows Kerensky to be genuinely frightened by the number of horrific accidents he's lived through, and to be incapable of explaining why he seems to quickly recover from injuries that kill his friends and coworkers on practically a monthly (or even weekly) basis.
"It's a good thing you heal so fast, considering how often you get hurt," Dahl ventured"I know!" Kerensky said, suddenly and forcefully. "Thank you! No one else notices! I mean, what the hell is up with that? I'm not stupid, or clumsy, or anything. But every time I go on an Away Mission I get all fucked up. Do you know how many times I've been, like, shot?""Three times in the last three years," Dahl said."Yes!" Kerensky said. "Plus all the other shit that happens to me. You know what it is. Fucking Captain and Q'eeng have a voodoo doll of me, or something." He sat there, brooding, and then showed every sign of being about to drift into sleep. (p.78)
In this way, throughout Scalzi's narrative the author not only finds opportunities to poke fun at his subject-matter, but also to defy his own reader's expectations of his narrative by regularly taking characters who are otherwise depicted as shallow and self-absorbed, and finding in their experiences an unexpectedly human level of depth.
Thoughts on the Ending
This quality becomes especially significant in the book's latter half when Dahl, Duvall, and Hester decide that the best way to avoid their eventual deaths-by-away-mission is to steal one of the Intrepid's shuttlecraft and fly it into a black hole, thereby (naturally) traveling back in time to the modern era of 2010 in which the TV show currently dictating their fates is being produced. There, they arrange to meet with the lead writer of the "Chronicles of the Intrepid," hoping to find a way to ensure their show's cancelation before its writers can kill them off.
And yet, even in this zany reality-bending plot point, Scalzi manages to find narrative moments of unexpected depth. In one scene Dahl enters a contemporary Hollywood bar frequented by part-time actors, and finds himself confronted by the faces of numerous dead crew members from the Intrepid -- each actor who had played these characters "in the real world" naturally appearing identical to their fictional counterparts.
Initially set up as a quick one-off gag, the exchange that Dahl has with these actors actually becomes subtly moving as he essentially says goodbye to friends whose deaths he hasn't yet come to terms with. Likewise, when the group confronts the "hack writer" behind the contrived plot lines and outlandish coincidences that comprise The Chronicles of the Intrepid, they find not a stereotypically jaded Hollywood screenwriter caring little for the craft he has built his career on, but instead a man who is facing very real tragedy in his own life--a tragedy that Scalzi is unafraid to address with the emotional weight it deserves.
That Scalzi has the courage to place the humor of this novel alongside genuinely meaningful moments only highlights his core thesis statement with this book--that the primary issue with The Chronicles of the Intrepid is not its fictional writer's tendency to create outrageous plot lines that disregard science or internal consistency, but instead a simple unwillingness to allow the characters of this show to interact with their stories on their own terms, and to effect meaningful change in their own lives.
Ultimately, Scalzi demonstrates this failing in his fictional Chronicles of the Intrepid by finding in his own novel an emotional weight that would be easy to overlook, and seriously exploring the consequences of his own outwardly wacky storyline even when another writer might be tempted to write everything off as "just a joke."
Issues
There are two ways in which I feel Redshirts falls short as a novel. One has to do with the fact that despite the quick dialogue and frequently hilarious banter which Scalzi's characters engage in (banter which often feels like it was written more to be read out loud by a full cast of actors rather than a single reader), most of Scalzi's core protagonists still lack distinctly recognizable voices and personalities. As a result, these characters quickly start blurring together as the story advances, and by the end of the novel it's very easy to forget who is who. This isn't actually a terribly huge failing, but personally it did become a problem for me in the book's latter chapters when I ended up sifting through lengthy passages about the experiences of people I had no real memory of being introduced to.
The other failing is much more severe, and has to do with the ways in which Scalzi tends to depict the female character's in his story. Of the several women in Scalzi's narrative who have central roles in the plot, all but one (a side-character appearing early on) are ultimately tasked with providing critical emotional support to the male characters before vanishing from the narrative (this act being their primary contribution to the novel's storyline). In at least one case (that of the character of Duvall) this seems to have been part of Scalzi's satire. The primary subplot of Duvall's narrative arc in this novel concerns her realization that she has become the central romantic interest for Kerensky, and her subsequent efforts to resist the tragic fate that the writer's of The Chronicles of the Intrepid will surely assign her when she is killed off so as to provide Kerensky with some sort of "emotional journey" to overcome.
Unfortunately, this cleverly intertextual critique of these sorts of sexist plot lines is absent for the other female characters in the novel, many of whom seem to fall prey to the very same tropes that Duvall's subplot sought to subvert. Specifically, in the case of two characters who appear very late in the text--a present day author named Denise Hogan who offers some wisdom to the distraught writer of The Chronicles of the Intrepid after he's learned that his characters are real people, and an actress named Samantha Martinez who previously had played the deceased wife of one of the Intrepid's crew members (and accepts a letter from this woman's husband that Dahl delivers to her when traveling back in time)--Redshirts has a disconcerting tendency to relegate its primary female characters to secondary roles defined mostly by the emotional support they give the male protagonists.
This is particularly noticeable in the latter two examples, since despite the otherwise fascinatingly surreal scenes in which these characters appear, their actions also strain believability, and lead the reader to immediately question why they would accept as facts the otherworldly proclamations of the total strangers whom they encounter. It's perhaps worth noting that this failing was not present in Scalzi's later novel, 2014's Lock In (a story which in some ways directly addressed this same issue of gender stereotyping when it featured a gender-ambiguous character as its main protagonist).
Conclusion
Ultimately, Redshirts manages to establish itself as a unique and amusing book that finds in its comedic premise a surprisingly nuanced story about the relationship between narrative structure and free will. Like all good satire, Redshirts is biting when it needs to be, but Scalzi is also careful not to allow the sharpness of his humor to turn into cruelty. Instead, in this novel about the stories that are ignored when we don't examine fiction seriously enough, Scalzi has the courage to treat even his own comedy with the emotional realism it deserves.
The result is that Redshirts is not only funny, but also (in its own uniquely quirky way) profound.