★ Redshirts completely sucks. I cannot say it any more plainly than that. Though it has a neat conceit (right there in the title), it is lazily, utterly derivative, ridiculously boring, and every character within it is not only infuriatingly sarcastic and crassly sexual, but they are also completely the same, indistinguishable from each other.

I quit reading after about 100 pages, because it just so monumentally uninteresting. I cannot for one moment fathom how author John Scalzi won the Hugo Award, unless the voters were so eager to suck up to Scalzi, now head of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America), that they just voted blind.

I’ll tell you why it is so bad, and why I am so annoyed that it is so bad.

About a year ago I started seeing ads for this book everywhere. The gimmick is that Redshirts always die in Star Trek, and what’s up with that? The book aims to follow these redshirts as they figure things out, and try to do something about it. I could see all that from the ads, but the concept failed to appeal. Then I saw more ads. I read some of Scalzi‘s other books, the Old Man’s War series in particular, which started good and just got pathetic by the end (Zoe’s Tale). Eventually, browbeaten by ads and great reviews, I decided to go for it.

Fail.

Characters

First off, all the characters are just plain annoying. They are smug, self-satisfied bastards, and I hated having to be around them. They are redshirts on a ship, quickly form a tightly-knit unit (just like in Old Man’s War, which itself rips off Joe Haldeman‘s much better The Forever War, amongst other antecedents), and quickly become obnoxious. They are a clique of kids who think they are cool, and prove it by constantly judging everything around them while being too-cool-for-school cynical inside their own heads.

If redshirts are this insincere, let them all die! Part of the beauty of Star Trek was how sincere everything about it was. The characters really cared about what they were doing. To throw some douchebags in who just sneer at everything makes me feel ill. I suppose this is just Scalzi‘s natural voice, or his way of being funny, but it is cheap cheap cheap. Yes I get that this is the gag, put ‘regular’ folks on the Enterprise and watch them get weirded out by the idiosyncracies, but it’s really just annoying when you spend the whole book with them.

But whatever, they are dying in large numbers on this particular ship. Everyone knows, and they hide from going on away missions. They even have the odds worked out- if you go on an away mission with the Spock-like, at least one redshirt WILL die. If you go with the hapless equivalent of Lieutenant Barclay, one WILL die. Etc..

But wtf, they still go on away missions!

This is just another ridiculous side to the cynical view of these characters. They are so ‘not bothered’ that they will go to their deaths rather than make a fuss or decline to go. Why? Why?

Oh yeah, because that’s the plot. But that is just weak.

That’s to say nothing of how crass the characters are. Scalzi is clearly trying for some of the sexual liberation of Heinlein or Haldeman, but what he comes up with is just sophomoric, a child’s approximation of what it thinks adults might say. Go pin bacon to your cat, Scalzi. Real people do not say “oh, you’re right, I owe you a blowjob” to each other, like it is this great an charming witticism. It is not. If real people do say this, they are not people I want to read a book about.

PLUS, the characters are all utterly interchangeable. There are some guys (girls? does it matter?) with very similar J-names. At the beginning they all meet in a mess of dire ‘flirty’ dialogue, offering blowjobs to each other, scrutinizing each other for any sign of sincerity, probably so they can pounce on it. Phew, happily they are all sarcastic sycophants anyway, so no worry there. Do not worry that from then on, though there are 5 or 6 of them in total, there may as well be only two. One to be the voice character, and one to be a mirror.

Scalzi did this same thing in Old Man’s War, a bunch of annoying punning characters get together and pound and be sarcastic. At least there though he had a conceit that could carry a novel.

This doesn’t.

Plot?

There is no plot. At least not in the first 100 pages, and after that I quit. For 100 pages the redshirts offer each blowjobs (ha ha, they don’t really mean it, it’s a witticism!), going on away missions even though they know someone will die, bitching out the senior officers, and half-heartedly trying to figure out why people are dying.

Excuse me, I think it’s the only thing they’d be doing. I’d say, “Get me the F off this ship! I will not die on an away mission!” Because why not, what’s at stake? They’ll relegated to another ship? Erm, yes please.

So it takes 100 pages for them to start getting to the core of it, which turns out to be this annoying meta-conceit: their ship is being written by an SF screenwriter deep in the past, and he is lazy and likes to kill redshirts. But 100 pages to get to that? It could have been done in 20.

So what was actually happening in those 100 pages? Besides the BJs and cliquey cynical back-patting (is it to Corey Doctorow that we owe this ‘voice’? God I’m sick of it.), there are sections that just rip off the obvious, awkward bits of Star Trek. Like, Spock always saves the day with some arcane bit of knowledge. Like- Lieutenant Barclay always gets sick and beaten up, but never dies. Oh fun. Which leads to the next problem.

It’s just a big rip-off!

Obviously. Scalzi is surfing someone else’s life’s work (uh, Gene Roddenberry) while flipping it the bird. No, I am not that sensitive. He just doesn’t seem to care, nor is he wiling to make any effort to add anything.

First off, nothing is described. Every set Scalzi uses he probably imagines we have seen a thousand times before, so he doesn’t bother to describe any of it. So everything is utterly generic, and he depends on Star Trek wholly. The same goes for characters. There is just no solid sense of time or space. It’s one thing to ‘let the audience use their imagination’ to make things vivid, it’s another to depend so completely on another person’s IP. At no point does his version of Starfleet seem fresh or original.

All he has are a series of potshots that EVERYBODY KNOWS. REDSHIRTS DIE. WE GET IT!

So why am I so angry?

I’m angry because I knew it would be bad before I read it, but I let myself be convinced by reviews that it might have some merit. It is very far from having any merit. I was hoodwinked, folks, my $6 is gone (or whatever it cost), and so is my time.

No more Scalzi for me, possibly ever again. Please no more sarcastic, disaffected, insincere and cynical paper cutouts for characters. It is not what comedy is!

Do not read this book, do not encourage him.

How to fix it

I often include a section on how to fix stories I think are bad. This story however cannot be fixed. It should be taken out to the barn and shot. Not to worry, it won’t fight, it’ll just sigh sarcastically and go with you. Best for everyone, really.

Redshirts

John Scalzi

★

★★★★★ If you liked Desmond in LOST, stuck in a hatch while some mysterious disease ravaged the land outside, eating an endless supply of canned food, finding strange maps hidden in secret places, then you’ll love Wool, Shift and Dust by Hugh Howey, collectively known as the Silo Saga.

It is full of mystery, and it handles that mystery far better than LOST ever did. Where LOST side-stepped every weighty question about the purpose of the hatch or the island itself with a cop-out ‘feel-good’ final season, the Silo Saga does not. It delivers on its mystery, every bit of plot and mythology thunking home across the three books like massive gears in one almighty machine, clicking back the lens of the world again and again until finally we see it all, understand it all, and see Hugh Howey‘s vision on the immense scale it really possesses.

Yet the story begins small, claustrophobically so. In fact it began with a short story, Wool, self-published for only 99 cents, telling the story of a depressed sheriff in an underground silo of 10,000 people, where the greatest crime is expressing a desire to go outside, and the greatest punishment is having that desire fulfilled.

The sheriff wants to leave, and resultingly is sent outside to ‘clean’, like endless numbers before him, and endless more to come. Clad in a special suit that can briefly withstand the corrosive atmosphere outside, armed with a number of wool (hence the name) scouring pads, he has to clean the cameras that allow those below to have a glimpse of the wasted world without.

To say anymore is to give spoilers that will ruin the joy of experiencing the puzzle of Wool for yourself. After reading the short story I was wowed, running over all the details Howey had given me and trying to figure out why things were that way, what could possibly have caused that particular set of circumstances to arise.

In the rest of Wool, four more ‘short stories’ of increasing length, Howey begins to show his wider world, and we glimpse what is possible. In the sequel Shift the focus widens massively, and we begin to see the full scope of this interwoven silo conspiracy. In Dust, most everything is resolved.

Wool, Shift and Dust are excellent books, full of fresh puzzles and original ideas (or better renditions of older ideas, a la Desmond) that are almost always delivered upon, and delivered in a very satisfying way. After every reveal I wondered what could possibly come next, then something new came. This is a saga about ruins, and mad people living in ruins, and the shell of a grand and ruinous dream slowly creaking to its infernal conclusion.

What else can I say without spoiling it? The writing is taut and clear, the characters tough and hardy if somewhat archetypal, but it’s the series of revelations and the underlying idea that make the Silo Saga sing. I was left with only one dangling strand by the end, one plot point that was never fully addressed (a clue – 50).

Perhaps though that too will be addressed in one of the many other works set in the silo ‘world’, as Hugh Howey has opened up his mythology like a sandbox for other authors to play in. Already there are numerous stories available, and the legend can only get deeper. I may even read some of them myself.

If you haven’t read them yet, you should. Here’s a link to them on amazon.

Artist’s impression of the Silo exterior (Image from here)

★★★ The premise of ‘Constellation Games’ is a playful and wholly original take on an alien invasion, as told through the eyes of a slacker My-Little-Pony game developer called Ariel Blum. When the Aliens come, with a friendly armada of every race in their ‘Constellation’, Ariel is only interested in their old video games, so he can mine through the millennia and port out a hit game of his own.

It’s brilliant. Ariel is a cocky, snarky dick, but like any true ‘otaku’ he suspends his sarcasm for good content, and ‘Constellation Games’ delivers that content in spades. As I started out reading this book, through the choppy first blog posts, the unclear switches in time and timeline as suddenly the aliens were everywhere, sending diplomats and starting-up cultural embassies like franchise Chinese ‘Confucian Centers’, I increasingly began to wonder how on earth the writer, Leonard Richardson, was gonna show me alien games without them being a massive let-down.

Then he did, and it wasn’t. The alien games were absolutely the best thing about this book. The one I remember most was the ‘up-skirt’ view (not pornographic) prevalent in the games of a sea-dwelling race. Clear? Think about the games we play, a very large number are ‘top-down’, looking at the character’s heads or at their profiles in an isometric. Now imagine reversing that, watching from the ocean floor from the up-skirt view as the hero (you) went wherever he/she/it was going.

That’s just one of the ingenious little reversals that make this book a gem. Others focus around other senses, with smell and memory getting intertwined in the game Ariel decides to port, with identity being important in another, many of them subverting our idea of what a game really is.

The book froths with other ideas too, as Ariel works his way up the chain of the Constellation’s computer-mind ‘call-waiting’ system, as he bonds with Curic his contact in the Constellation, as he encounters the other alien races and starts building his own game.

The problems come when Richardson has to start ending the book. In effect, he tacks on a ‘big’ kind of ending, to what was really only ever a sweet little story about video games and making friends with aliens through video games. He goes big, goes soppy, makes his sarcastic narrator suddenly twee and needy, undercuts all the importance I as the reader had come to place on the porting of the new game, and just stuffs up the landing.

This was a shame, and annoyed me. It made me feel like I was spending time with a hungry wuss, just because I kept reading it- when before Ariel had always put himself across as too cool for school. Perhaps he had always been like that, perhaps his sarcasm was a front for it, but it just didn’t belong in this book as it was. The strongest part of the book is the games, so when the last third becomes all about Ariel’s needs, and Ariel’s love, and Ariel’s ego, with the games dropped on the cutting room floor, I disengaged.

That said, it’s still a great little book if only for the first half, which does deliver. I found the snarkiness of Ariel annoying at times, as was the hop-scotch narrative, but the sheer fun-ness of the ideas made up for it. Except for the ending, of course, which was also wracked with, hmm, guilt? Maybe.

So, 3 out of 5.

Highlights– Up-skirt game perspective

Lowlight– Snarky protagonist turns needy wuss, cover sucks…

If this book sounds interesting, you’d probably also like-

Ready Player One

An adventure deep into 80’s video game nostalgia, to the heart of a secret buried in the world’s greatest MMORPG. Great fun, if a little slow to start.