Redshirts by John Scalzi
Jun. 9th, 2016 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroBeing stationed aboard the flagship of the Universal Union seems like a young ensign’s dream come true…until his first away mission when something eats his face. The latest generation of disposable redshirts aren’t taking this lying down.
Heavily reminiscent of Galaxy Quest, this takes a lighthearted look at original series Star Trek (with splashes of other, similar sci-fi included) as basically being the Enterprise with the serial numbers filed off—a fact that is wholly acknowledged within the narrative. This book is so delightfully meta, I’m not even sure where to start. The coda chapters even put another layer of meta on top of all of the existing meta, just to keep things interesting. (Though the hookup at the very end of coda 3 was one I had predicted from about halfway through the book.)
I think I’d also liken this to The Gamers or Order of the Stick, where the psychics-defying mechanics of the world are acknowledged and manipulated. The fact that they need one of the senior officers to make something that would be deadly actually work—and there’s no tension over that, we don’t even see them flying into a black hole to travel through time, it just goes perfectly according to plan—is fantastic. There’s a comedy goldmine in genre-aware characters within archetypal systems.
Also, they stole the guy’s pants. Twice.
I’ve generally found Scalzi’s work to be fast reads, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because I really like it? But it took me months of on-and-off reading to get through 350 pages of Raising Steam, and less than a week to blow through 300 pages of this.
Overall: Jethrien commented that in the same way some works aren’t “for” you, this one is very much “for” me. The references are my references. I think I’m rapidly becoming a flat-out Scalzi fan.
Heavily reminiscent of Galaxy Quest, this takes a lighthearted look at original series Star Trek (with splashes of other, similar sci-fi included) as basically being the Enterprise with the serial numbers filed off—a fact that is wholly acknowledged within the narrative. This book is so delightfully meta, I’m not even sure where to start. The coda chapters even put another layer of meta on top of all of the existing meta, just to keep things interesting. (Though the hookup at the very end of coda 3 was one I had predicted from about halfway through the book.)
I think I’d also liken this to The Gamers or Order of the Stick, where the psychics-defying mechanics of the world are acknowledged and manipulated. The fact that they need one of the senior officers to make something that would be deadly actually work—and there’s no tension over that, we don’t even see them flying into a black hole to travel through time, it just goes perfectly according to plan—is fantastic. There’s a comedy goldmine in genre-aware characters within archetypal systems.
Also, they stole the guy’s pants. Twice.
I’ve generally found Scalzi’s work to be fast reads, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because I really like it? But it took me months of on-and-off reading to get through 350 pages of Raising Steam, and less than a week to blow through 300 pages of this.
Overall: Jethrien commented that in the same way some works aren’t “for” you, this one is very much “for” me. The references are my references. I think I’m rapidly becoming a flat-out Scalzi fan.
