Book review: Red Shirts by John Scalzi

“A book review?!” you yell. “I didn’t even know you did that anymore!” That’s on me, I guess. I kept trying to read horror and dark fantasy, even though it was becoming increasingly clear that my not finishing anything had nothing to do with the skill of each writer I sampled, and more to do with me just being burnt out on the genres. So, I grabbed a sci-fi book and what do you know? Problem solved.

Sometime last year, Humble Bundle had a bunch of John Scalzi books, and although I said I was going to get them, I slept on it one too many times. But as luck would have it, the same bundle was put out again, so this time I got it.

I could have started reading them in order of release dates, or the order of awards won, but the one I wanted to read most of all was the book that I was sold on based on the title alone. I saw Red Shirts, and I said, “Yep, that’s definitely a book for me.” And I definitely, absolutely was right.

Thing is, I went into it blind intentionally. As a Star Trek fan, the title evokes a certain trope that carries enough expectation on its own. As for the rest, I wanted to be surprised, and I furthermore want you to be surprised. For this reason, I intend to be very vague. Also, this is going to be a real short review.

So Red Shirts in the opening chapter does exactly what you would expect if you know what a red shirt is. But very early on, it takes any other expectations and chucks them out of the nearest airlock. What follows is a fast paced romp over a number of classic sci-fi trappings, always twisting them is clever and/or amusing ways.

There are three chapters after the end of the story that I’m not quite sure how I feel about. On one hand, I agree with a lot of folks that not every question needs to be answered in fiction. Leave some of the guesswork to me after closing the cover. But for the folks who had questions about certain characters after a proper The End, these three chapters will have you covered, and as an added bonus, two of them tie up together in a pretty bow that will have some of you cooing “D’aawwwww!”

I give Red Shirts 5 stars, and I recommend you go in without even reading the blurb or even the foreword until after finishing the book. It just makes the surprises within that much nicer, in my opinion.