Wanna Be Cannon Fodder on "Star Trek"? Wear Redshirts
John Scalzi - Redshirts Congratulations, Ensign Dahl: your first posting is on board the Universal Union capital ship Intrepid. Andy Dahl's orders seem like a dream come true: for a raw graduate of the academy class of 2456 to be assigned to duty on the Dub U Navy's flagship is an honor, indeed. Well, it seems like an honor... but that's before Ensign Dahl begins to notice some of the strange goings-on in the corridors of the Intrepid. Mainly, he notices that every time Captain Abernathy, Science Office Q'eeng, and the other bridge officers go on an away mission, someone gets killed (usually horribly). Only it's always an unknown ensign wearing a red shirt; never one of the stars... err, ranking officers. That probably explains why every time Abernathy, Q'eeng or another officer - including Lt. Kerensky - approaches, the veteran hands on board suddenly realize they have urgent business elsewhere. If you're a newcomer to the Intrepid, it looks as though you have approximately the same life expectancy as your average fruit fly. Then Dahl and his other newbie friends learn about the crewman hiding in the transport tunnels; the guy with the weird (but completely believable) theory: the Intrepid is living the life of a 450-year-old television show. That's why another newcomer seems to die on every away mission, and it's up to Ensign Dahl and his fellow Redshirts to put a stop to the situation. Veteran scifi writer John Scalzi (Old Man's War, Metatropolis) picks up on the hoariest trope in the whole "Star Trek" arsenal, the Redshirts. You know redshirts, right? the extras who accompany Kirk, Spock and McCoy on every away mission, apparently for the sole purpose of being messily killed by an alien beast/plague/mind virus? The ones who invariably wear red tunics to distinguish them from the bridge officers in green? Yeah, those redshirts. Scalzi's comic sendup of the excessive danger of wearing a red shirt in the startrekkian universe don't stop with endangered extras, though. He also points out the abandonment of the laws of physics whenever needed, the inevitable damage to decks six through twelve (because they have sets) in every battle, and the unsolvable dilemma with a deadline every time THE NARRATIVE takes over; all of which he blames on lazy writing. For Redshirts, Scalzi's writing isn't that lazy; though it sometimes seems a bit forced. Though he manages to invent a method for Dalh, et al., to free themselves from the clutches of hack writers, the resolution of the plot means that he only has about 100,000 words. To expand the text, Scalzi tosses in three "codas," all featuring characters who aren't (at least in this time and space) on board the Intrepid. Because of his peculiar (though not particularly hard to disbelieve) causational link between Dahl's 25th-Century time-space line and that of the 21st-century lazy writers, it's difficult to tell whether the characters in the Codas are the same as those in the novella. Maybe that's a good thing. And maybe not. Overall, give John Scalzi his due for an inventive plot in which a future world turns on current (or perhaps recent) pop culture; and give him his due for the surprisingly sentimental manner in which he closes the character loop. For the rest of the action, though, not so much. all content copyright © 2001 to present by scmrak
|
By the same author
|