Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas
by John Scalzi
Summary
Ensign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union flagship Intrepid and notices within a fortnight that something is wrong with the place. Away missions have a spectacular casualty rate, but only among low ranking crew. The senior officers get injured dramatically and recover by the following week. Experienced crew vanish into storage cupboards whenever a bridge officer walks the corridor looking for volunteers. And there is a box in the laboratory that produces the correct answer to any scientific problem, always six hours after it is asked, with no explanation of how.
Dahl and four other new arrivals work out what is happening to them, which is that they are extras in a badly written television programme being made several centuries earlier, and that the only way to stop dying is to travel back and have a word with the writers.
Scalzi writes it as an extended joke about the shape of episodic television, and it is genuinely funny for two hundred pages. Then come the three codas, told in first, second and third person, which follow people affected by the resolution and are unexpectedly moving, and which several readers report as the reason the book stayed with them.
The joke has a real edge under it. Once the crew work out that a writer's convenience is killing them, the question becomes what you owe a story you did not agree to be in, and the codas are where Scalzi collects on that.
There is also a running argument about the show's science officer, whose experiments always work at the last possible moment, that turns into the mechanism of the plot.
The prose is plain, dialogue heavy and stripped almost bare, which some readers find efficient and others find thin. It can be read in a single sitting.
Best for anyone who has watched Star Trek, and reasonably good even for those who have not, though about a third of the pleasure is recognition.
Historical Context & Significance
Redshirts won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Its full title is Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, and the win was contested by readers who considered a comic Star Trek pastiche too slight for the award, an argument that surfaces whenever the category goes to comedy.
The term comes from the original series, where the crew members in red shirts who beamed down with the leads were the ones who did not come back, and it had been a fan joke for decades before Scalzi built a novel on the implied labour conditions.
John Scalzi is among the most visible figures in modern science fiction, partly through the blog Whatever, which he has run since 1998, and he served as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.