Space, the final frontier
These are the adventures of Ensign Andrew Dahl
His most important mission
To explore strange secrets
To seek out ways to survive
And hopefully
To not die where many redshirts have before
It’s a long standing joke among Trekkies (and meme lovers) that the most deadly job in the Galaxy is that of the redshirt in the original Enterprise series. For those of you not aware of the color code: the captain (Kirk) wears yellow, blue is the shirt color of officers (like Spock or the Doc), and the usually nameless masses wear red shirts. And everytime William Shatner fought aliens on strange new worlds, someone would die for dramatic reasons, and since the main cast was untouchable, the poor victim always ended up being a nameless red shirt wearer. It has become a joke, a meme, even a kind of trope.
Leave it to the brilliant mind of John Scalzi to take exactly this joke and turn it into a plot. I know that John Scalzi is kind of like pineapple on pizza – you either love it or hate it. I confess belonging to people that love both – pineapples on pizza as well as John Scalzi (not necessarily on pizza, though). Old Man’s War is a book everyone should read.
What I love about Scalzi – and what makes this novel so fun to read – is his approach to dialogue and descriptions. He’s describing stuff in a fun, yet terse way, and his dialogues read like actual people doing actual talking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying most authors don’t get their dialogues right – they do. Some fumble it and it sounds wooden, but most get it right. And then there are a few who get it right in a way that the dialogue starts to flow. Tarantino does that in his movies (it’s one of the things that sets him apart from other people), and John Scalzi is the Tarantino of novel dialogues.
Although if this book was to be turned into a movie, I think it would better fit thr style of another director. John Carpenter would be a great idea!
Anyway, Andrew Dahl and his fellow new members to the spaceship Intrepid quickly discover that every crew member is mortally afraid of away missions. Death by pulse gun vaporization, misfunctioning air lock or ice sharks are just some examples of the fates met by their predecessors.
Sometimes, movies like to do a fourth wall break where a character addresses the audience directly. It’s not medium bound and can happen in novels, too – but what John does here is slightly akin and totally different to the classic fourth wall break. Instead of being aware of the audience, some characters in this story become aware of the narrative (and the drama that ensues in the plot). The only other author I know of who has ever used the narrative itself as part of his narrative was Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels. Although John uses it differently, almost turning his story into metafiction.
So, to recap: Kidnap a senior officer, steal a shuttle, fly dangerously close to a black hole, go back in time, find the people making the show, stop them from making it anymore, and then come back to our own time before our atoms divorce us and we disintegrate.
— Ensign Dahl explains the plan to stop weird shit from happening
Which basically boils down to this: If the redshirts want to survive, they have to kill the narrative before the narrative kills them. It’s like metafiction squared, and I’m loving every second of it!
With regards to pace, this one is a page turner. Once I started to dig in, I had to stop myself from going overboard. What a fun way!
This novel features one of the shortest chapters in novel history (no, not the shortest, but in the top ranking, for sure). And also more than one ending, and more than onelayer of meta fiction. And here’s the thing: There’s an after story, following the main story. You need to read the codas as well, because they complete the story.
5 stars for a great and fast, fun filled space ride.
Crossing the Pond Reviews 