The immediate answer to my angsty ‘wherefore reading?’ post of last week was, as it turns out, John Scalzi.
I’d read his post about how Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas was, among other things, a fast, accessible read. Since part of my picky-reader issue is, in fact, a bit of fatigue, this news hit me very much in the “Hey, sign me up!” place. And Redshirts
was, indeed, one of those books one can blow through in a few hours.
It’s witty, breezy, full of delightful fannish in-jokes and has a good dose of the voice Scalzi uses on his blog, which is one of the things I find appealing about Whatever.
Redshirts isn’t the only work of fiction to explore the tropes of shows like Star Trek
and its creative brethren. There’s Galaxy Quest
, and James Alan Gardner’s excellent novel Expendable
. (And I’m sure there are others I’m missing, so do sing out.) I laughed a lot as I read this book–it had all the sugary crunchy goodness of caramel corn.
Ultimately what I liked most about the book was not just the piss-take, as Scalzi calls it as its meta-story, which is all about writing. Bad writing specifically, or perhaps lazy storytelling. The issue in Redshirts isn’t that people die in fiction; it’s that it’s so easy, as a writer, to throw in the meaningless death of barely-named characters as a pretense to upping the emotional stakes of a story. The novel questions the blatant emotional manipulation of audiences, in other words. It lays out a proposition that contempt for our readers or viewers is pretty much contempt for ourselves as artists. So, you know, don’t.
Finally, I am such a one as enjoys clever metafiction in almost any reading situation. But I love seeing it deployed in SF, in a book that isn’t pretending to be anything but SF. If the poking of fun at the Trek tropes makes this popcorn, the play with reality and the writer/reader/viewer wall in this novel makes it the surprise appetizer popcorn you get in a gourmet restaurant, drizzled with truffle oil and maybe a bit of boutique buckwheat honey.