![]() “In ground forces, when someone does you a favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. Seriously, this is what passes for character development in Redshirts: And I’m never given much reason to care about anyone in the book, which makes it awkward when the story stops to give a minor character some growth. The story is played seriously, but without the pathos it needs. This dallies in both extremes (some death scenes are played for laughs, while at other times characters betray each other to save themselves), but it usually ends up stuck in an awkward middle. Redshirts should either be a light farce that doesn’t take its situation seriously, or a psychological horror piece about people who can’t escape the force that is killing them one by one. But the characters are flat and pointless, and the writing usually doesn’t feel right for the content. Scalzi takes a metatextual nerd joke and builds a story around it that actually makes sense at times. And I assumed that his writing had probably improved over the years. Redshirts didn’t need to be brilliant, but just the clever, well-structured sci-fi adventure that Scalzi does best. It’s no secret that I dislike John Scalzi’s writing style, but I still had high hopes for this. They look for an explanation and a way to save themselves. It’s a running joke that the bit characters on Star Trek get killed cheaply, but what do they think about it? Redshirts is the story of the crewmembers on a ship very much like The Enterprise who realize that they’re always the ones to die on missions. ![]()
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