Redshirts – John Scalzi

I haven’t accessed wordpress in so long I forgot my password. Actually that’s not indicative of anything; I’m always losing passwords. But this is the third time for wordpress so it has some sort of achievement award status in my life.

It’s not like I haven’t been reading any terrible books. But since the last review, I had picked up Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten on the strength of goodreads reviews. You know the usual. Strong female lead. Engaging plot. Great writing. And the result was inevitable.

After 16 pages of self pity I put down the book and thought, why do I do this to myself? Why? Seriously, why? The moment I see the words urban fantasy + strong female protagonist, I should know by now that it means self-absorbed little shit of a main character. I do know, I guess I just hope it will be a different kind of little shit, maybe one that is self-aware as well.

And by self-aware, I don’t mean doing shitty things and being aware of them like that gives you a free pass to be a shit. And I would also like these shits to be a little less liked by other characters, because people in real life don’t particularly like little shits, as far as I know.

So I stopped. Classes started, thankfully, so I didn’t have time to think about crappy books.

But now classes are over. And Redshirts fell into my hands. It was actually not too bad. It’s about the redshirts on a spaceship who start noticing that whenever they go on missions with the captain or the science officer or the other dude with a rank, they die in disproportionate numbers. An ode to every single sci fi series except Firefly (because Firefly was above all that. Also they couldn’t afford a larger crew anyway. They couldn’t even afford the actual crew).

SPOILERS

A bunch of redshirts figure out what’s going on (they’re in a TV series) and attempt to fix it (by going back in time).

Now, by that sentence you’d probably think ‘Oh’. Like, Oh, WTF. Which was my reaction when I discovered their plan.

The logic behind the plan: They are in the year 24somethingsomething. They discover that the reason redshirts keep dying on away missions is because they are on a TV show. The TV show is being written in 2012. They decide that they have to go back to 2012 and tell the writers to stop killing of people.

I enjoyed the novel right up to the point where they decided to go back in time as a solution. Then it didn’t make sense. If there was an actual show with actual actors being filmed, then why did this spaceship reality even exist at all?

I thought it would be like some kind of futuristic Mojoverse, where people are tortured for good entertainment. But (in my mind) they aren’t even directly connected to the TV series’ universe.

The logic is that the UU (Scalzi’s version of United Federation of Planets) has a fleet of starships, and it just so happened that some TV writers in 2012 happened to write about one of those starships, thus sucking the universe into an alternate reality. Or perhaps the writers in 2012 created this UU reality by writing about it. Despite the fact that it shouldn’t be affected at all because the entire thing, including people dying, was filmed onset. So what is the point of this alternate reality?

The hand wave is the alternate reality theory. Who knows why they exist? Keep this in mind when you hesitate before crossing the street next time. If you don’t cross, and had you instead chosen to cross, would you have been run over by that impatient asshat in a Vios?

Would you have gone safely across the street to your office, meeting by chance an old acquaintance whom you would have missed by the seconds you took not crossing at first, exchanging numbers, meeting up with her the week later, complaining about your job, she offers to hook you up with her editor, and you are in the job of your dreams four months later.

But you didn’t cross, so that is in an alternate reality. And every time you make a decision, a new branch of reality breaks off from that point. There are a trillion trillion yous, and they are all different.

Anyway. I had a problem with this books solution because I couldn’t understand the mechanics behind the alternate realities. Not the books fault, but may not be some people’s cup of tea.

I haven’t mentioned any characters individually because they’re all basically one person. There’s Dahl and Duvall, and Hester and Hanson. But it doesn’t matter because the snappy dialogue could have come from any of them. There are no physical descriptions anyway, which is still okay. But they aren’t any character differentiation either, so it’s basically Andy Dahl (POV character) talking to himself.

I liked the codas at the end though.

If you want some creepy alternate-reality madness, try Ubik by Philip K Dick. I wanted so badly to throw that book into a wall of metal traps, and I think that feeling should be shared.