Redshirts by John Scalzi

Of all the classic geek genres out there Star Trek is one of those where my knowledge is very shaky. I’ve seen the newest movies and can barely remember watching Star Trek: Enterprise about ten years ago. That’s about it. But I’ve got a couple of friends who are really into Star Trek and I know general things about it, even if not many specifics.

So I know enough to get the general gist of the idea when I came across Redshirts by John Scalzi.

The idea is pretty inspired. When Andrew Dalh and friends arrive on the Universal Union’s flagship Intrepid they begin to notice something strange going on. Most noticeably all of the away missions with certain high-ranking officers involve one of the crew dying in some way. The officers themselves will always survive. Naturally this gets them all panicked as any away mission they go on is likely to end in their deaths.

A book based around what the redshirts in Star Trek experience is a good idea. But it could probably have been done better. The pacing in this novel seems slightly…off.

The main problem with it is that everyone else on the ship has already figured everything else out. They even have systems in place for dealing with it. So it becomes a case, not of our protagonists figuring stuff out on their own, but of them surviving long enough and getting angry enough to finally begin to ask questions. Then they’re basically told everything. By a quarter of the way in most of the symptoms of the problem are diagnosed and by halfway through they know everything. And then the story turns a bit meta.

You may be thinking that the pacing sounds good if they’re only realising what’s going on halfway through and then dealing with it. Usually you’d be right. But because the pacing is so fast it’s a relatively short novel. The main plot itself only lasts for 223 pages. And when everything’s been relieved 100 pages in that suggests poor pacing.

Admittedly I’ve been reading Brandon Sanderson books lately and they tend to be nicely long so it may just seem short to me. But 223 pages? That’s the same length as the first Harry Potter book (in the UK. In the US it’s 309). The book itself is 306 pages long. That’s because there were three coda’s tacked onto the end. And when you need three short stories to bring your novel up to length then it suggests that it is a bit short.

Ok, I’ve gone on for long enough about the pacing. This is mostly because there’s not a lot else I can really criticise about it. The writing itself is pretty good. The characters don’t get a lot of time to develop but they’re nicely rounded off and identifiable. The plot is a very strong until halfway through, gets very meta, changes setting and then seems to end it on a weird questioning note. But it’s still good. You won’t be seeing a sequel but that’s not necessary if your novel is strong enough on its own.

I suppose now is the time to talk about the codas. As previously mentioned there’s three of them, one set in the first person, one in the second and one in the third. Yeah….I don’t know what to say about that. It works? For those of you who don’t know what a coda is, which included me, I googled it and the definition is ‘the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure.’ And addition is right. These don’t add anything to the main plot. At all. They focus on three characters that are introduced after the scene change I mentioned earlier and who were barely around for long enough to get noticed. Characters which, I may add, had all their difficulties resolved in the main story. Ok, for the second one there might have been a few questions about what had happened to him but these were answered within the first two pages. It actually ended on more of a cliff-hanger than it began with. The three tenses thing seems a little gimmicky but each story works on its own so there’s not really much to say about it.

That’s about it really. It’s not a bad book but it’s not brilliant. I expect most people will buy it for the concept, which is pretty great, and then get bored with the rest. A shame but there you go. Apart from the pacing there’s not much wrong with it but you don’t really get that much as it stands. All in all I rate it a five out of ten and include the Amazon link here.