Redshirts

So John Scalzi is probably the biggest name in science fiction literature nowadays, which as far as I'm concerned is kind of depressing.

On the Fantasy side you've got Patrick Rothfuss who, for all his faults, has the best writing technique and craft of our generation. There's also JK Rowling (who may admittedly have abandoned fantasy in favour of bullshit now) and solid fighters like Scott Lynch and Stephen Deas bringing up the rear. The last decade of fantasy has been extremely good and while most of the above authors aren't perfect they are nevertheless artists and they do produce quality work.

In the meanwhile, the best thing the science fiction scene has been able to produce is John Scalzi, a nerdy hipster capitalist who quite frankly seems to be willing to write just about anything that he thinks might make him a quick buck. A charlatan whose cold and empty stories reflect the cold emptiness of his soul.

So with my cards now thrown down on the table, let's talk about Redshirts.


All you need to really know about Redshirts' story is right there in the title. It's about the dudes on an Enterprise-like ship that die when they go on away missions or have their consoles explode when the ship is under attack and all that. The big twist is that they start to catch on to this phenomenon and start avoiding away missions and all sorts of wacky hijinks ensue.

So let's divide my discussion between what I think were Scalzi's goals in writing this

1) Humour

I actually went to see Scalzi read the first chapter of the book at a library. It's quite funny and self-referential and has an amusing meta-narrative going in there. If this had been a short story consisting only of the first chapter, I would probably have sent it around to friends and recommended it. Unfortunately however, there's an entire book that comes after that.

Redshirts essentially only has one real joke. That joke is: "Ha ha, Star Trek did some pretty cliche things." That joke is funny once, maybe twice. But an entire book that does not make. The other attempts at humour that the book attempts range from stupid cracks about blowjobs and stealing someone's pants. It's honestly quite pathetic. Clearly, whatever edge Scalzi had that made the Andorid's Dream as funny as it was has apparently completely drowned in a sea of internet memes.

When I went to see Scalzi's talk, he said at the time that this book was 'low-hanging fruit' and that no one had ever done this before. But the thing is that someone already had. And it's right here.

And that 23 second one-off scene easily has more humour value than Scalzi's entire book.

2) Parody

So this is a Star Trek parody, except that it's sort of not. The line in the book is that the ship is based on a fictional bad knock-off of Star Trek that was apparently really awful but still good enough to have six seasons (so it was at least better than Enterprise I guess). So basically what Scalzi does is construct a strawman and then makes a parody of that.

When I finished the book, I tried to think of instances where an ensign was killed in Star Trek by some random space animal (which is the most frequent cause of death for the red shirts). I remember when Garak murdered a good five ensigns cause of a drug. I remember when Sisko destroyed a planet. I remember when Picard and the alien captain fought a weird translucent alien on Tanagra, but there weren't any ensigns down there with him. Ensigns die in Star Trek of course, but I think you'd need to go back to the original to find deaths by random animals.

So why didn't he try to make an actual Star Trek parody? I see two possibilities. Number one is that Scalzi wanted to avoid being to referential and Trekkie (which opens the other question of why this book is called 'Redshirts'). Number two is that Scalzi doesn't really like Star Trek that much and didn't want to bother to do his research. And then I guess the third option is he thinks having people killed by random animals is somehow funny.

In either case, his decision to make a parody aimed at a fictional strawman is cowardly. He's having a go at Star Trek, but it's not really Star Trek so who can fault him? That's the kind of stance that shields him from someone going and pointing out that this scene from TNG is more sophisticated and well-crafted than everything Scalzi has produced in his entire career (a scene that hinges on the use of a minor ensign character incidentally).

3) Metanarrative

Being self-referential isn't a bad thing. Atonement proved that. But the problem is that this is done in such a snarky and self-congratulatory way that I wanted to find Scalzi and punch him in the head for being such a goddamn tosser. A large chunk of the book is just a 'bad writer' in the book writing a blog and realizing that plotting and character arcs are important. This is basically just John Scalzi standing on his soapbox and preach his shallow bullshit about writing. It's a complete drain to read and I literally started to skip pages when it kept going on and on.

But the main function of meta is to serve as an excuse. Everything about the way the plotline works out is melodramatic bullshit, but it's supposed to be like that because the author is trying to make it bad and is actually just highlighting the relationship between author and reader and all that nonsense. But look, that worked in Atonement because the basic story in Atonement is really good and the revelation that it's all just a puppet show for our foolish indulgence thus hits hard. In Redshirts the only reaction is 'Yeah, we know you're in on the joke, you've been making that abundantly clear for the entire book.'

And quite frankly the "It's supposed to be bad" excuse only goes so far.

The last 100 or so pages of the book are dedicated to Scalzi essentially trying to write Atonement. He wants to make a legit-seeming dramatic story so that he can pull a 'and it's all JUST A STORY' twist at the end. But the problem is that Scalzi just isn't capable of writing something like that. He can be passably humourous at times, but in not one of his stories in all 5 of the books of his that I've read now have I ever cared about even one of his characters. All the last 100 pages do is serve to highlight the fact that Scalzi is not an artist.

I hope that science fiction gets away from Scalzi soon, but my fear is that since Scalzi is the kingpin of science fiction literature nowadays, the genre is going to be defined more and more by the people who enjoy him, while the people that love Asimov, Adams, Simmons (before he went crazy), Westerfeld (before he sold out) and Banks (sometimes) are going to be pushed out. This will leave us with a small market that only craves the latest stupid metanarrative with Joss Whedonesque hipster characters (Note to authors: Those guys only work with actors, not on paper). And that is a damn grim future indeed. There's more ...