Redshirts

Sahnan Haber

Redshirts by John Scalzi is a sci-fi novel set in the year 2462 that starts by throwing the reader into an action-packed prologue without any context. The prologue follows Ensign Tom Davis through a mission on an alien planet. The reader sees them as they enter a large cave which they find to be infested with the massive carnivorous Borgovian Land Worms. The prologue ends rather quickly with Ensign Davis being killed and eaten by the worms, however this sets up the rest of the book pretty
nicely.

Andrew Dahl and Maia Duvall, two Universal Union scientists, have been assigned to research on the Intrepid, the spaceship that Ensign Tom Davis meets his demise on during the prologue. After the two, and a couple other friends arrive on the Intrepid and stay there for a little while, they hear more and more about the horrible fates that many of the researchers meet while on away teams. In fact, on every single one of the away team missions, at least one of the low rank Ensigns faces a brutal death. Dahl notices many of his colleagues avoiding the commander in an effort to not be sent on an interplanetary research mission. The group makes another observation: one of the bridge crew members, Kerensky never dies on the missions, and neither do those who come with him, while on the other hand, those who go with the commander have a much higher risk of dying. Dahl and his friends end up locating Jenkins, a programmer who has a theory about the reason for these incidents. As the story goes on, and Dahl, with the group he has amassed, investigates the incidents, they discover many contradictions and paradoxes as the laws of physics and common sense in the book start to break down, eventually leading to a somewhat confusing conclusion.

Redshirts has a really interesting premise (that's hard to describe well without spoiling the book), the progression of the story is pretty interesting and it manages to make the brutal and absurd deaths of many of the researchers somehow funny. However, despite this book's great idea behind it and large potential, I had some problems with it. For one, unlike a good sci-fi novel, this book focuses very little on descriptions of the scenes, and even after reading the whole thing, I would barely be able to describe a single room in the Intrepid. These descriptions were a pretty big problem to me, because I find that one of the big advantages of sci-fi are its fantastical scenes and worlds. Another problem I had was with the ending. The end of the book is divided into 3 codas, each telling the conclusion from a different point of view. Originally, this seemed like a cool concept for the ending, but it became very clunky and hard to understand, and I feel like a more conventional conclusion or epilogue would have worked better for the book.

Overall, I thought Redshirts was a pretty good book. It has an interesting premise, but there were several spots in which I thought it could have been executed much better. I wasn’t too disappointed by the book, but it didn’t impress me much either. I would rate Redshirts by John Scalzi a 3.5/5 stars.