The details of the primary story aren’t particularly interesting, nor are they supposed to be. His reasoning was simple: as the least important character, his job was to die. We’ve seen gestures toward this recently before, most hilariously in Galaxy Quest‘s “Guy” (brilliantly played by Sam Rockwell), who - more so than the other characters in the show - was aware of the metafictional plotting and arc for every story. Normally living in the wings, emerging only to die and thus establish the relative immortality of the primary actors, these figures are given centre stage in this work. Redshirts is “about” (please forgive the quotation marks) the eponymous redshirts, the nameless characters on television shows.

The artistry of his particular game is alternately blunt and deft, but as an experimental work, it is on the whole quite satisfying. But the title gives it all away: what author, for example, would pen a novel specifically about a funny-but-ultimately-forgettable phenomenon common to a few species of televised galactic adventures? No: Scalzi, aware that you are already aware (and why else would you be looking at the book unless you knew of the reference) is playing a shell game with you. “Isn’t the reference to ‘redshirt’ about Star Trek? About disposable extras whose sole purpose on the show is to die horribly, establishing dramatic tension and the threat of that episode’s enemy?” Well, yes, you’d be correct.

Redshirts is a novel about a science-fiction screenwriter named Nick Weinstein, the Senior Writer for a terrible science fiction episodic drama titled The Chronicles of the Intrepid. This is a novel that will reward a thorough knowledge of generic science fiction convention, but it isn’t quite as narrow as all that. Which Scalzi might not disapprove of, really: he seems perfectly willing to dive into a whitecapped surf of metafictional and meta-media references. I started with the above-mentioned references because if I were to use the “hey that sounds like” examples used in the novel - by the way, they are actually used in the novel itself - then it would sound like I was cribbing notes. Because it’s difficult to know exactly where to start when talking about this very funny and very self-aware novel. What do you get when you mix a Charlie Kaufman movie, Galaxy Quest, and a David Foster Wallace story? Well…maybe not John Scalzi’s Redshirts, but I needed some kind of opening to get myself started.

You can find her review over at her blog. I suppose they are both loosely postmodern, but any comparisons should end there. Rather humbling in comparison to my initial offering.

She went with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I’m not sure I could have picked a more different opening book than Alice did. As you might have read, my partner Alice and I are doing a “ 52 books in 52 weeks” challenge.

Red shirts by john scalzi