Top Shelf: Red Shirts by John Scalzi
Reviewed by: Joe Turner, 2nd Floor Inventory Manager & BP Blog Superstar
Ah, June, the month when summer is upon us and we travel far and wide to visit beaches and lakes for a reminder, a taste, of what it means to know water. The month where, when lakes and beaches are not easily available, we loiter upon patios of cantinas and drink cervezas while trying to remember the days when the temperature wouldn’t fry an egg on the sidewalk. Regardless of where we go to escape the oppressive heat, we want a good, fun, and maybe even funny book to keep us company.
John Scalzi’s Redshirts is all three of these things and more. Former student of Nobel Prize winning author Saul Bellow, former classmate of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Auburn, winner of the Hugo Award for his collection of essays Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, and distantly related to John Wilkes Booth, Scalzi is one of the leading lights of the speculative fiction field and one of today’s funniest authors. (Yes, I know how to use Wikipedia to pad an essay.)
This book is a riff on the classic observation that, in the original Star Trek television show, any member of an away team wearing a red shirt was doomed to die. Spoofed by The Simpsons, Family Guy, and more, it’s a concept that has entered the popular consciousness and is known even by people who don’t watch Star Trek. And now, fresh from working on the television show Stargate: Universe, John Scalzi takes his turn at bat.
The setting is the Starship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union in the 25th century, and where young ensign Andrew Dahl is starting his tour of duty. He quickly comes to realize that everybody on the ship disappears whenever the captain, first officer, or lieutenant come around, because the last man standing around inevitably gets selected for an away team in which murderous aliens are involved, the officers ALWAYS survive, and lowly-ranked members of the crew ALWAYS die. Soon Dahl and some of the savvier members of the crew piece together what’s really going on and attempt to go on a quest that, for all intents and purposes, is to meet God and to talk him into getting his act together to save the lives of the crew.
Whip smart and hilarious, the book starts off as a send up of Star Trek, becomes a satire of Hollywood and the television industry, transforms into a meditation on the responsibilities at the heart of being a writer, and concludes as both a heartbreaking and heart wrenching tale about love lost and found.
I love John Scalzi, especially his comic works Redshirts and Agent To The Stars, both of which are some of the best satires of Hollywood since Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty. Those two books belong on your shelves next to more mainstream humorists such as Christopher Buckley and Nick Hornby. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.
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