Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!

Redshirts (2012)
Author: John Scalzi
Pages: 316 pages (Kindle)
Publisher: Tor

Why I nominated this for book club: I struggled for a theme for April’s book club, and eventually settled on comedy sci fi because jokes on April Fool’s are meant to be funny? It’s a stretch. But I like laughing, so here we go. I chose this one in particular because I’d already listened to the audio, knew the story, and wanted a good excuse to go back and read a print version.

Premise:

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is thrilled all the more to be assigned to the ship’s Xenobiology laboratory.

Life couldn’t be better…until Andrew begins to pick up on the fact that (1) every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien forces, (2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations, and (3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.

Not surprisingly, a great deal of energy below decks is expended on avoiding, at all costs, being assigned to an Away Mission. Then Andrew stumbles on information that completely transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is…and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.

Redshirts is the winner of the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

This book club discussion does assume you have read and finished the book. If you want to avoid spoilers, please finish reading before continuing!

Discussion: As previously mentioned, I’ve now been through this book twice, once as an audiobook, having Wil Wheaton read it to me, and once on my Kindle, and I think I actually like it better in print for one very specific reason. This book is great, right? This book is HILARIOUS and meta and interesting and sometimes a little brain wrinkling, but John Scalzi has a fatal flaw as an author, and that fatal flaw is dialog tags. “Dahl said.” “Hanson said.” “Duvall said.” After every single sentence of dialog. You can flow over it a little better when you’re just reading it, but when you’ve got someone reading it to you, it gets a bit more tedious.

But now that we’ve got the negative thing out of the way, we can talk about the things I love, because there are a few of them. Scalzi’s abilities at writing humor were evident in Old Man’s War but clearly made to shine here. I still remember my shriek of outrage at the end of chapter 23 on my first time through the book:

And that’s just what he did, until the day six months later when a systems failure caused the Intrepid to plow into a small asteroid, vaporizing the ship and killing everyone on board instantly. (page 223)

Only to die laughing on the very next page:

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR No, no, I’m just fucking with you. They all lived happily ever after. Seriously. (page 224)

But he also knows how to toy with my emotions and make me cry:

“But I’m going to let you in on a secret. I think this is going to work. Don’t ask me why — hell, don’t ask me why about any of this situation — I just think it will. If it does, I have only one thing I want from you. That you do something. Stop drifting. Stop trying things until you get bored with them. Stop waiting for that one thing. It’s stupid. You’re wasting time. You almost wasted all of your time. You were lucky I was around, but I get a feeling this isn’t something we’ll get to do twice.” (page 285)

This of course is from the second of the three codas, which I loved to pieces, and is Hester talking to the producer’s son, who played him on TV. We don’t get to see if the message lands, though we’re lead to believe it probably does, but I like the way Scalzi found a way to show how the interactions with the Intrepid crew members changed the lives of the real people that played them.

The most interesting part of the book to me was the realization that they’re in a narrative, all of the narrative tropes, and how they fixed their problems. The Box in the science lab was amazing, because it does always work that way. The fact that Kerensky kept healing from his injuries faster than he should. The fact that the captain showed moments of “huh, that IS weird” before being gripped by the narrative again.

In conclusion: This book is hilarious and I’m glad it exists. Good for people who grew up on a steady diet of Star Trek or just those that are cognizant of what happens to the extras when the important narrative is happening.