Redshirts (Scalzi)
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
I heard about this book when it came out, and those whom I trust with book recommendations found it to be hysterical, without telling me too much about it. I assumed it was going to be a Star Trek parody told from the view of the "red shirts", the folks who seem to get kidded off the most. (I say seem because people have done statistical analysis on episodes of Star Trek to see which color uniform has the highest death rate, and it apparently isn't red. But let's go with the raw numbes and the series that existed before the trope was named ...)
While I expected a little deconstruction and trope awareness, it went a little further to invoke "Star Trek" as a TV show, and then have the characters figure out that they were also on a TV show, and a bad one at that. And then they decide, using the tropes from the show, to do something about it. They had to use the show's trope lest actual physics take over and kill them all "off-screen".
The prologues started with an away team consisting of the senior officers and a couple of redshirts, pinned down on rock piles in a cave, with alien creatures tunneling beneath them. One crew member has already died, and the other is the point-of-view character, and also the son of an admiral (or whatever), who is a friend of Captain Abernathy. I thought that this was going to be his story about just how crazy everything is. But he doesn't make it out of the prologue, and I didn't bother scanning back for his name to write this. The senior officers lament his death, and I'm wondering how much of a bloodbath this is going to be.
Not much of one, as it turns out. And there's a reason that was just a prologue and not Chapter one.
The novel then starts at a space station with new crew members waiting to board the Intrepid: Ensigns Dahl, Duvall, Hanson, Hester, and Finn. The Intrepid is the flagship of the Universal Union, which is called the "Dub U" for short, which is better than "Double U", "U U", or the mathematical "U2" or "U-squared". (None of those are mentioned. I'm rambling.)
Things are odd and work in ways that they shouldn't, defying logic and physics, back conforming to established storytelling tropes, or, as it's come to be called, the "Narrative", which rules over all.
The Narrative is deadly to minor characters while saving the stars of the ship. People around them seem to die more often, while astrogator Anatoly Kerensky seems to suffer life-debilitating injuries every week, but manages to pull through, ready to go on another away mission within a week's time.
Though all this, the ensigns encounter Officer Jenkins, who has managed to stay off everyone's radar every since his wife passed away. He's the one who has figured out what's going on, and warns the newcomers. The problem is that they can't avoid their horrible fates. They can only foist it onto others for so long before the Narrative catches up with them and ends their story arc.
It wasn't what I expected, but I enjoyed what I got. Interesting to note is that the story ends about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the ebook, and is followed by three separate scenes, told in first-, second- and third-person, respectively, featuring minor 21st-century characters, showing how the story in the future affected them in the present. Saying more about them just leads to more spoilers than I've mentioned.
This wasn't Galaxy Quest level Star Trek, but it was up there.
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