The main cast are appropriately pompous and yet identifiable by turn. The characters are likable enough for the reader to want to know what happens next or how the next unlikely death is avoided by even-more-unlikely means. It is to Scalzi’s credit that there’s usually enough going on to accept or avoid the plot’s limitations and weaknesses. This runs the risk of being a one-trick pony. Most of the story is about how Dahl and his other newly-assigned friends survive, and avoid being put on an Away Mission. He soon realises that being assigned to an away team is not a privilege but a means of making up the numbers, with the chances of coming back increasingly unlikely. Working in the Xenobiology Department, he soon realises that the ship has a fast turnover of crew, often in bizarre and quite imaginative ways. Andrew Dahl is a newly assigned crew member to the Universal Union Capital Ship Ensign. Here Scalzi follows it through to a logical literary development. The plot develops that old adage that was part of the Star Trek mythos: cast members that you have never seen before, usually wearing a red shirt as part of the security detail, were often killed off in the first few minutes of an episode for the sake of tension and plot development, whilst Kirk, Spock and co (the main cast members) looked on. The plot’s pretty straightforward initially: an alternative version of Star Trek, without enough specifics to be sued over.

It is perhaps one of the signs of a well-developed genre that it is, from time to time, able to laugh at itself, to accept the clichés and the impossibilities, to look at what it does and accept with wry humour that all is not as deeply serious and pretentious as it would like to be.Īnd with that in mind, Redshirts is one of those books not to be taken too seriously. Published by Gollancz UK, November 2012 (Review copy received.)Īh, humour.

Redshirts by john scalzi