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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
This should have been right up my alley but I just couldn't get through it. Might try again one day.
adventurous
funny
hopeful
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
A nice, fast-paced, lighthearted, funny book that doesn't take itself too seriously. It is a fun take on the 'characters realizing that they're in a work of fiction' trope. I thought the humor was well done, and not too over the top. The book did a good job parodying/satirizing various elements of Star Trek and similar shows:
- The 'Box' was hilarious. In a lot of Star Trek episodes, the science is hand-waivy and doesn't really make sense / is never fully explained. If a cast member gets sick, the captain will often give the science crew a sample of their disease so they can find a cure. When they inevitably find a cure, the audience has no idea how or why: the science is treated as a black box. So, in Redshirts, the scientists have a literal Box which serves this purpose.
- The Intrepid show felt more like The Original Series than The Next Generation, but there were some interesting mixes of both in the book. Kerensky felt like a mix between captain Kirk (TOS) and Commander Riker (TNG) - the horndog senior officer who sleeps with anything with a pulse.
- I liked Jenkins' character, but I was a bit disappointed that he wasn't the protagonist. I think I would have enjoyed more reading him figure out that they were all characters on a fictional TV show, rather than have our protagonist, Dahl, just be told this. Or at the very least, it would have been more satisfying if Dahl also figured it out independently and there was a scene between him and Jenkins where Jenkins says something like, "You already know the truth, you just have to admit it to yourself," and then Dahl tells Jenkins, "All of this is a TV show" and Jenkins confirms it. I didn't really like that the main character was just told the answer by a side character - I feel like it would have been a more interesting story if we discovered this along with the main character. It feels kind of like lazy writing to have Jenkins literally deliver a slide-show explaining the big secret to Dahl et al. Then again, I guess the irony is that the nature of this story gives Scalzi a sort-of get-out-of-jail free card for lazy writing: this whole book is a meta-commentary on lazy writing -- the characters constantly criticize the lazy writing of Neil, the head writer, and the first Coda also really drives home this point -- and so by making the story itself an example of this same lazy writing that Scalzi is criticizing, the story just becomes more meta. So, maybe this was intentional. And at the end of the book, Dahl does figure out that he is actually the protagonist of the book which contains the show. Maybe this is Scalzi's way of showing Dahl taking more agency in the story once the TV show Narrative is finally defeated.
- The ending conversation between Dahl and Jimmy Hanson was a interesting and thought-provoking. Dahl tells Hanson that he has figured out that they are all characters in a book, and Dahl is the protagonist. Every member of their friend group had an interesting backstory and fulfilled some purpose which forwarded the narrative. Everyone except for Hanson, that is, who doesn't have an interesting back story and didn't fulfill any purpose. He was just there, and so Dahl can't figure out why Hanson is included in the story. In response, Hanson confirms Dahl's suspicions, saying that this confirmation was his purpose. I interpreted this as Hanson being a stand-in for the writer, Scalzi. 'Jimmy' is a similar name to 'John,' after all. It seems like Hanson's role in the story was to observe everyone's actions, sort of like how an author observes the story from the outside. I also read an interesting fan theory which is that the book that this story takes place in is actually a fanfic about the Intrepid TV show within the story, written by Hanson: Hanson is a fan who is upset that his favorite TV show got canceled, and so writes a story to explain the cancelation in a satisfying way (the TV show needed to be canceled in order to save the lives of these characters). I thought this was a cool interpretation too. See Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/5qdugj/redshirts_andys_adventures_are_all_fanfiction_and/
- I actually liked the Codas. I've heard some criticism that the main story was good but the Codas were out of place. I actually think that they capped off the story in a satisfying way. The first Coda drives home the meta-criticism of lazy writing by showing the head writer, Neil, struggling to come to terms with his laziness/hackiness, finally admitting that he needs to try harder as a writer. It ends triumphantly, with him writing the best script he's ever written. The second coda revisits the Hester/Mark storyline, where Hester and Mark switched bodies in order to heal Mark from his car accident injuries. This was satisfying because it actually problematizes one of the lazy aspects of the main narrative. At first glance, the body-swapping plan makes sense as a way to save Mark's life. But when you think about it for 5 minutes, you realize that this solution may just open up more problems than it solves: how is Mark going to ever explain why he doesn't have any scars to his doctors for the rest of his life; how will Mark explain this to himself? This is the kind of thing - the real world implications of the story - that don't occur to lazy writers, and so when Neil initially wrote the script in the main narrative, of course these questions didn't occur to him, and so they didn't get answers. But once Neil accepts his prior laziness in the first Coda, and then resolves to do better, the second Coda is the perfect time for these questions to finally be posed. Then in the third Coda, we see Neil get a chance at a happy ending, when he meets Samantha. These three codas, taken together, recontextualize the book as really the story of a Neil, a writer trying to overcome his past writing mistakes and rise to the level of talent he knows he can reach.
Overall, Redshirts is nice to read something light like this every once and a while to break up more serious books. I'll probably pick up another Scalzi book in a few months - I enjoy his writing style.
adventurous
funny
Funny/crazy sci fi adventure. Even knowing what it was about I had no idea where it would go. Great tie ins. Cool idea. Def made me cry a couple times and laugh a lot. Kept me guessing and turning pages. Very unexpected ending.
Once I found out why things were happening, I laughed about it, but then I really lost interest & decided that I didn’t care to see how they fixed it.
The characters start tapping on the fourth wall pretty early, then banging on it, then the sledgehammers come out, and it ends by grinding the shattered pieces to dust. There's a point early on where the lampshades start to grow lampshades--it's an awkward transition, but does start to make sense fairly quickly. It's a touch experimental, or perhaps a "concept novel": the billing as a Trek parody is oversimplified, as really there's one key concept that gets examined, flogged, and meta-d. This all sounds negative but I really did enjoy the trip, including the codas (with some effective heartstring-pulling), it's just something where you have to trust the author or it doesn't work.
all dialogue, basically. supernatural's "the french mistake." interesting thoughts about meta and what makes a story interesting.
I'd say this is a must-read for any science fiction fan, but I'm afraid that some of the more subtle references will be lost on those who haven't watched Star Trek: The Original Series. This book made me really wish we had another Star Trek on the air right now, that's for sure. It's really funny, and does a good job of deconstructing the tropes that make the original Trek what it is. I listened to the audio, and while Wil Wheaton does an excellent job and is the only real choice for this one, some of the writing really grates when read aloud. Still, absolutely worth listening to, if you can ignore that. A very fun book. I'd love a sequel.
4 stars for the story, 0 for the will wheaton narration