Redshirts: When Star Trek Lower Decks Meets Kevin Can F*** Himself

Last year Amazon released the criminally underrated Kevin Can F*** Himself. It's the story of a perfect sitcom housewife. In one moment she is standing in the brightly-lit living-room, performing to the fourth wall and setting up her manchild husband's punchlines, the next she is in her dingy, cockroach infested kitchen, shaking with anger while she fetches him a sandwich. The show moves between the two worlds, as Alison realises how trapped she is and fights to escape her husband's control. It's a beautiful metaphor for an abusive marriage, with a fantastic queer love story and it deserves more attention, but I digress. 

Redshirts by John Scalzi is Kevin Can F*** Himself meets Star Trek: Lower Decks. Five new Ensigns arrive on a suspiciously Starship Enterprise-y ship. They all have interesting and trope-filled backgrounds - a former monk, a sexy but tough medic, a billionaire's son trying to make it alone, and a rogueish minor drug dealer. They are ready to leave their pasts behind and take on any new adventure the ship can throw at them. 

Which turns out to be a truly unhealthy amount of adventure. 

Almost immediately it becomes clear that something is not right. The crew flee from the senior officers, even setting up tracking systems to avoid them better. Being found means being ordered onto away missions, and going on away missions means dying horribly. Even science doesn't work as usual - when our hero Dahl is instructed to find a cure for plague within six hours, his tired workmates tell him to 'put the sample in the magic box' where it will spew out just enough data to allow the senior officers to magically figure out a cure at the last second.

Eventually they work out that their ship has somehow come under the control of a bad science fiction TV show, which is moulding their lives (and physics) to its whims. The new crew are 'ascended extras', just interesting enough to have an episode devoted to their deaths for dramatic purposes. They are initially scepical, until the first of them meets their grisly fate. 

What follows is an extremely playful and meta game of cat-and-mouse with the Star Trek universe. The team (plus 'star of the show' Kerensky, aka the junior officer who is badly hurt on a weekly basis for audience sympathy) works together to 'avoid the narrative' and free the ship from the show's clutches. 

It's a love letter to TV Sci-Fi. It pokes fun at the tropes, needles the bad writing, and acknowledges the great writing. They zip through black holes to time travel (which would 'spaghettifi' them if they didn't have a main character with them to change the laws of physics), they play with parallel universes, writing theory, questions of free will and god, and just when you think you've had your fill of meta, the book gives you a little extra meta like an after-dinner mint. It's not quite as funny as it thinks it is, but it's pretty damn close.

The book throws tons of characters at you. It's a short book but there are the five main characters, plus another five senior officers, and various other colleagues. Later in the book a whole new set of characters are introduced. That's a lot to take in and could have been avoided with something like a jokey DVD booklet 'character introduction' to the senior officers at the start. 

Under normal circumstances I would also critisise the lack of diversity and female roles, but considering they are under the control of an early 2010s TV show, the lack of diversity could be a feature rather than a bug.  

Due to the large cast, we mainly know characters by their tropes, and barely get physical descriptions of most of them. This blandness doesn't change our investment in the story - tropes work for a reason, and I was genuinely frightened at the first solid threat to lives of the main characters. The sense of being trapped in a Hunger Games-like charnel house for junior crew members is palpable, and even the funniest of the deaths (particularly the one in the opener) is treated as a tragic, pointless loss. 

My main quibble is that the codas were too long for what they were, and felt like they were only included to bulk out an otherwise short novel. The main story ends perfectly - with a bang and a joke. I think someone like Terry Pratchett (who I thought of often during this book) could have cut those codas down to two pages and kept the same impact.

But these are small, niggling criticisms of a big, fun, bonkers book. Go, read it, and hopefully you'll live long and prosper.