Redshirts by John Scalzi

Redshirts
by John Scalzi
Tor Books, 2012
318 pages

Oh John Scalzi. You are one of the big Good Guys in my world. There are so many reasons to be impressed with Scalzi and his writing, most of which one can glean from his blog and his Twitter feed, both of which I follow daily. He's not universally loved - someone with a blog tagline of "Taunting the Tauntable since 1998" is not going to be universally loved - but for someone with my sense of humour and sociocultural views, he's brain candy.

So are his books. They are clever, funny, extremely well-written, entertaining, thoughtful, and often moving. Well, the three I have read, one of which was non-fiction, so I suppose my sample size is limited, but I have faith. Old Man's War remains one of my favourite science fiction novels ever (and it's military SF, no less!) and holds the distinction of being the most fully genre-y book that my entire adventurous book club agreed was great.

Those of you who have watched Star Trek (any iteration) will be familiar with the concept of the redshirt, whether you know it by name or not. These are the minor characters, the ones who might not even have a name, who are along for whatever away mission might be happening, and who generally end up dead in order to prove that there's some sort of danger. Notice that with extremely rare exceptions, the main characters don't end up dead. They might end up injured, but not dead. It's the low-ranking extras who bite it.

Redshirts is about the ones who end up dead. Scalzi imagines them with real lives and loves and ideas, histories that are more than just pertinent to the storyline, and a realization that the way things are happening on their ship, the Intrepid, is statistically totally improbable. They are fighting to regain control of their lives, which means they are literally fighting for their lives - fighting The Narrative, an unseen menace that takes over people's minds, bodies, and even the laws of physics with disturbing regularity. And what's worse, as Jenkins, the conspiracy theorist who eventually convinces our main characters says, is that the sci-fi television show they're all living in isn't very good.

This is very clever, loving satire. It pokes gleeful holes in all the SF television tropes, but it does it in a way that is thoughtful - it really follows the consequences through - and what I really appreciated was that it wasn't only about the satire. It was also a book about friendship, love, and loyalty; about peeling back layers and asking the important and sometimes difficult questions. It was about fate versus free will, and even about what it means to die, and what it means to live.

I think having more than a passing familiarity with Star Trek in its many incarnations helped in the enjoyment of this book, because I really got it. I got the jokes, I got the references, and I appreciated all of them. It added an extra layer of glee.

But - and this is important - because of all the other wonderful things about this book, and the fact that it isn't just about the satire, you don't have to be familiar with Star Trek to enjoy the story. Or even get most of the jokes, because the relevant parts are explained. This is a funny book whether or not you know the backstory, and it contains far more than it appears at first glance. Highly recommended for science fiction buffs, and definitely readable for those of you who don't read sci-fi but think you might like it. It's an excellent entry into the genre.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Old Man's War
by John Scalzi
Tor Books, 2005
362 pages

Ever since reading On Basilisk Station I have been extremely, extremely wary of anything that hints at military science fiction. That was a good book, and I got attached to the characters, and then it caused me sleepless nights for days after I finished the thing. Not exaggerating. But Old Man's War has been on my list for ages (since Nymeth's review, to be exact) and I thoroughly enjoy John Scalzi's nonfic writing. So, looking for something different for my genre book club, this made the cut, and I went ahead and read it. Not without trepidation, which was somewhat justified, but I'm very glad I was brave and didn't cheat by just reading a summary on Wikipedia.

Without giving too much away: John Perry is 75, and he is about to join the army. The Colonial Defense Force, to be exact. Humans are a spacefaring race, but we're not the only ones, and competition for habitable planets is fierce. Earth is a quarantined backwater, and the only way off for most of those humans is the way Perry has decided to go: volunteering for the military force that keeps human colonies safe, scouts out, and (as necessary) takes by force new habitable planets for colonization. But the CDF only takes recruits of a certain age, and John Perry has made it there. And he is smart enough to know that the universe is a strange place - but nothing could prepare him for how strange, wonderful, and terrible it really is.

And it is easy to give things away, so I'll stop with a summary there. There are numerous little and some large surprises along the way, for Perry and therefore by extension for us. Some of them are funny, some of them are dark, some of them are just plain cool. I do not wish to spoil them for you.

What is interesting to me is how smart this book is. Which is not to say that science fiction, or military science fiction, or space opera (which this is, I think, though I have a surface understanding of the term) cannot be smart, and knowing what I do of John Scalzi I should have been prepared for just how smart this book is. But a large part of me had written this off as a fun book, a book with spaceships and larger-than-life heroes and battles and really nifty technology, written well and probably often quite amusing because, well, Scalzi. And I also assumed that there'd be some major space battle and most of the characters I'd grown to like would die, because I respected John Scalzi's intelligence and integrity enough to figure he wouldn't write a book about a space army without characters dying. He wouldn't play with the reality of what war is that way.

I am realizing this doesn't reflect well on me -- because yes, I'd apparently bought into the stereotypes I carry secretly about mass-market military science fiction, and I expected that sort of thing. I got a lot more and that is why I should read out of my comfort zone more often. Or one reason, anyway.

There were two themes that really struck me and stayed with me, and that were investigated in more depth than I would have expected. The first was aging, and what it means to grow old, and that theme really shouldn't surprise anyone, given the summary of the book I gave above. The second was marriage and love, and what marriage is, and what it means over a lifetime, and that is not the sort of thing I expected in a military SF book at all.

Aging, both mentally and physically, plays the largest role at the beginning of the book, but does come back again in interesting ways later on. Perry is 75, and despite the fact that we're a lot further in the future and some medical advances are to be expected, no one on Earth has come up with a way to reverse the aging process, and 75 in that future looks pretty darn similar to 75 in this present. Except that the CDF has apparently found a way to get a 75-year-old human into some sort of fighting shape. What this means, and what this means to Perry as an individual, and some of his newfound friends, is investigated pretty intimately, since the book is from Perry's perspective in first person. It's handled with sensitivity and insight and I was impressed.

I was even more impressed, and somewhat flabbergasted, to find marriage holding a central role in the book. Perry's wife Kathy had also volunteered to sign up, but died of a massive stroke before her 75th birthday. He misses her, thinks of her often and often first, and while I wouldn't say that the Perrys' marriage plays a central role in the book's plot, exactly, it is such a central part of John Perry's character that it therefore looms large over the whole book. It's a rumination on the effect on a person of sharing the better part of a life with someone else one loves dearly. It adds a very human dimension to Perry, who could possibly be a larger-than-life character, except that he is so grounded in this very fundamental relationship that has very much defined who he was and is. And it adds a very warm, gentle dimension to a book that is, at its core, about someone learning to be a good, efficient, and effective soldier.

Unexpected, and delightful. The writing is also just excellent, the world imaginative, and other themes and conundrums interesting and worthwhile. Characterization is solid at worst and really, really good at best. I've recommended this book to several people since reading it. One of my book club members has already come back for the second book in the series, The Ghost Brigades. I may even read that one myself, though I'm pretty satisfied with where I left John Perry and company. I wasn't sure it was possible for me to have a higher opinion of John Scalzi than I already did, but reading Old Man's War managed to surprise me there, too.

Your Hate Mail will be Graded by John Scalzi

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

by John Scalzi

Tor Books, 2010

368 pages

I have to admit: I have never read any of John Scalzi's fiction. I keep meaning to get to Old Man's War, but you know how that goes. And yet, I am a huge fan of his blog, Whatever, and so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to pick up this book, a collection of archival Whatever entries, when I noticed it in the local bookstore. See, the thing is, there's a lot of great material in the Whatever archives, but I only started reading in 2009 and I'm not about to go back all the way to 1998 to see what I missed. So I thoroughly enjoyed having someone pull out the best of Whatever and plunk it in a book for me to read.

I think the ideal place for this book, and this is not an insult, would be the bathroom. (Ironic, as I know Scalzi does some work for the Uncle John series of readers, too, heh). The entries are generally no more than two or three pages long, and range in topic from political, to parenting, to writing, to financial, to clones, to cheese. Perfect lengths for bathroom reading, and rarely the same thing twice. Also, they can be read in any and all orders -- there is absolutely no order to the entries, as they're not arranged chronologically nor topically. So you can read the last one without feeling like you've missed anything.

There can be trouble in assuming that what one writes on a blog will translate well into a book. I think part of the success here is that Scalzi is interesting. He's got big opinions, he thinks about things thoroughly, and he doesn't just discuss the minutiae. But what makes Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded work is that not only is Scalzi interesting, he can write. He can write really, really well. Well enough that a book full of his blog entries don't start to feel repetitive or samey.

The entries are often informative, and always entertaining, even when I don't agree with everything Scalzi says. That said, I seem to agree with the vast portion of it, which perhaps makes me an ideal reader for this book. I could see his style grating a bit on people who don't agree with what he says, especially, but that's quite deliberate. The current tagline for Whatever is "Taunting the Tauntable since 1998." His style can be hyperbolic, his metaphors can be vulgar (not in a bad way, to my mind), his sense of humour is always pointed and very sarcastic, his arguments somewhat steam-roller-like. But the metaphors, if unexpected, are always apt, and the arguments he makes are exceedingly well-reasoned. And I laughed out loud and often while reading this.

I wouldn't recommend this for a straight read-through, if just because it starts to be a lot. It would be like spending a full day just reading blog entries; your brain goes numb after a while. As above, it's less likely to go numb with Scalzi at the helm than it would be with many other bloggers out there (I include myself in this; most of us aren't award-winning authors). For someone who is having trouble committing to an entire narrative, this is the perfect pick-it-up-put-it-down read. It had me giggling, it had me thinking, and it had me thoroughly engaged. The best part about it? Reading Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, like reading Whatever, makes me have some hope for humanity, if there are people like Scalzi out there thinking and writing and being alive in this world.