Redshirts (novel)

Redshirts

Author	John Scalzi
Country	United States of America
Language	English
Genre	Comic science fiction
Publisher	Tor Books
Publication date	June 5, 2012
Pages	317
Awards	Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2013)
ISBN

Redshirts (originally titled Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas) is a science fiction novel by John Scalzi. The book was published by Tor Books in June 2012. The audiobook of the novel is narrated by Wil Wheaton. The book won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel and Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

In the prologue, several senior officers of the Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union, lament the unusually high number of casualties of low-ranking crew members during recent away missions and conclude that they will need more crewmen to replace them.

Docking at a spaceport, the Intrepid takes on five new Ensigns including Andrew Dahl, an expert in alien religions and xenobiology; Dahl quickly discerns that the crew is extremely phobic of being near the senior officers and of going on away missions due to their unusually high fatality rate. Over the course of several away missions, various crew members suggest that the deaths are due to incompetence, superstition, or cosmic forces, requiring “sacrifices” of some crew members so that others will survive.

After several close calls, Dahl meets Jenkins, a crew member who offers a different theory: their reality and timeline are under periodic influence of a badly-written television show from the past. As the writers create the plot, their free will temporarily ceases in order to progress “the Narrative” of the show. This is why otherwise good officers occasionally seem incompetent, Ensigns make poor decisions, and the ship has mysterious technology on board to produce last-minute inventions and medicines which would otherwise be impossible to produce.