Redshirts

I was totally going to do a critical reading of John Scalzi’s book Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, but I ended up racing through the book. That tends to happen when I read Scalzi novels. But I did write a little after the prologue. It was a little meandering, honestly. I’ll just copy the relevant bit:

And here John Scalzi uses the prologue to tell the tragic story of Ensign Tom Davis, a victim to narrative.

Yep. And not the last, either. It’s not long before Ensign Andy Dahl, novel protagonist, realizes that something is tragically wrong on the starship Intrepid, and tries to escape his inevitably brutal fate.

That’d be enough for a good Star Trek parody novel, but it goes deeper than expected. And I was woefully unprepared for the three codas, “First Person”, “Second Person”, and “Third Person” (written in their respective narrative forms). They rather blew me away.

Comments

halkeye: The codas were very much the best part. I actually wasn’t a big fan of the main story.