★★★☆☆ Ontological comedy

Redshirts

John Scalzi

Let me start by asking you a question. Is Spock (science officer of the Enterprise, played by Leonard Nimoy in the original Star Trek) real? Here's the answer given by a Cornell philosophy professor (probably Max Black)

Whenever anyone asked him whether something was real, he always gave the same answer. The answer was "Yes." The tooth fairy is real, the laws of physics are real, the rules of baseball are real, and the rocks in the fields are real. But they are real in different ways.
-- Max Black (?), quoted in Sokal's Hoax, by Steven Weinberg

So, yes. If you buy Black's ontology, Spock is real. Hermione Granger is real, ghosts are real, money is real, the Presidency of the USA is real, SO(3), the group of three-dimensional rotations -- all of them are real. They are real, even though they exist only in people's minds.

Now, I admit that if someone asks me with no context, "Are ghosts real?", I will answer "No." For everyday discourse, it is useful to distinguish between the different ways of being real that Black referred to, and not count some. As Weinberg writes

What I mean when I say that the laws of physics are real is that they are real in pretty much the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks in the fields, and not in the same sense ... as the rules of baseball -- we did not create the laws of physics or the rocks in the field, and we sometimes unhappily find that we have been wrong about them, as when we stub our toe on an unnoticed rock, or when we find we have made a mistake (as most physicists have) about some physical law.

That was not a digression -- the reality of imaginary things is what Redshirts is all about. Now, let me reassure you: John Scalzi is a much better writer than me, and his foray into the ontology of imaginary things is far more amusing than mine. Nevertheless, the questions I raised are there and are central to Redshirts.

The main characters of Redshirts are low-ranking grunts on the spaceship Intrepid. Intrepid has ridiculously frequent senseless violent deaths among the low-ranking grunts. If you're familiar with the Star Trek Redshirts trope, you've already guessed at the reason. The crew of the Intrepid are characters in a TV show, and things that happen on Intrepid happen to satisfy the writers' dramatic needs.

Are they real? Well, we've already beaten that to death. If they're real, do the writers who created them owe them anything?

It's all very clever and I enjoyed it, but as Scalzi himself has written, "The failure mode of clever is 'asshole'.". Redshirts is not an asshole-level failure -- in fact, it's engaging and fun, if a touch narcissistic. It is, IMHO, decidedly TOO clever. It's an inside baseball story -- it's a story of a writer writing about writing. Also, a warning -- it will make more sense if you are familiar with at least one Star Trek TV series.

So, clever and fun, but not Scalzi's best.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★☆☆☆☆ Biography by a cultist who knows no physics

Wizard: The Life And Times Of Nikola Tesla Marc J. Seifer If you take part in Internet discussions that sometimes stray onto science, you have probably run into Tesla cultists. These are people who believe that Nikola Tesla was the greatest genius and greatest scientist of all time. I've always been puzzled by this, as looking at short-form biographies such as can be found in encyclopedias, Tesla didn't accomplish all that much. Oh, yeah, clearly he was a genius and a brilliant inventor and played a big role in radio and in making our current power grid practical. But he wasn't much of a scientist. (The cultists, among whom I count Marc J. Seifer , fail to perceive the distinction between "inventor" and "scientist".) He never accepted the early 20th century physics revolution. He thought relativity was wrong, and as far as I can tell had nothing to say about quantum mechanics. So, I read this biography to better understand where all the Tesla worship co...

★★★★☆ Mihi meets Jack and the Giant

Mihi Ever After: A Giant Problem Tae Keller A Giant Problem is the second book in Tae Keller 's Mihi Ever After series. As you know if you've read Mihi Ever After , there is a portal to a fairy tale world called the Rainbow Realm hidden in Mihi's school library refrigerator. Mihi stumbled into it with Savannah and Reese, with whom she is now fast friends. They resolved never to go back there, or even to talk about it. But it transpires that all three of them have been dreaming of the Rainbow Realm. (What could be less surprising, right?) Then Mihi kind of by-accident-on-purpose tells her old frenemy Genevieve, not expecting Genevieve to believe. But Mihi, Savannah, and Reese find Genevieve's backpack abandoned on the floor by the fridge. The Rainbow Realm is a dangerous place, and Genevieve is not prepared. Mihi, Savannah, and Reese decide they must rescue her. When they get to the Rainbow Realm they discover that there is trouble there -- a giant beanstalk...

★★★★☆ A story for Laundry insiders

A Conventional Boy Charles Stross A Conventional Boy is a novella set in Charles Stross 's LaundryVerse . The Laundry Files is my all-time favorite Science Fiction series. My opinion of the Laundry Files is not universally shared. They're targeted at a particular subculture, a subculture of which I am a charter member. To wit: I have degrees in Biochemistry and Mathematics, have been programming computers since I was knee-high to a grasshopper*, and was at one time an enthusiastic player of Text-based computer games . Humanities-oriented fans of F&SF tend to find the Laundry Files daunting. A Conventional Boy is the story of Derek Reilly, who readers of the Laundry Files met (under the name Derek Blacker, and also the handle the DM = the Dungeon Master) in The Labyrinth Index . "Derek ... has spent his entire adult life in prison for playing Dungeons and Dragons. It's not his fault: it was 1984, the ...

★★★☆☆ Writing to the test

The Annihilation Score Charles Stross, Elle Newlands (Narrator) One of Charles Stross 's goals when he wrote The Annihilation Score , novel 6 in the Laundry Files , was to pass the Bechdel Test . The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a test to measure the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man. In some iterations, the requirement that the two female characters be named characters is added. On his blog Stross scores The Annihilation Score as follows Pass (solid) Dominique O'Brien, Mhari Murphy, and Ramona Random form a superhero team and fight crime: their supervillain enemy is another woman; explicitly references the Bechdel Test in the very first chapter. (I wrote it while feeling self-conscious about the hard fail in Palimpsest.) Those of us who have...

★★★★☆ We return to the world of the Others

Lake Silence Anne Bishop Lake Silence continues Anne Bishop 's series The Others , except it doesn't quite. The Others consists of five novels about blood prophet Meg Corbyn and the city of Lakeside, which is located where, on Earth, Buffalo, New York is. Lakeside and Meg, however, are on Namid, a world that is geographically much like Earth, but ruled mostly by beings that call themselves terra indigene , who regard humans as prey. In The Others a group of profoundly stupid and badly informed humans take on the Others (as they call the terra indigene ) and are very nearly wiped out. A few humans survive by learning to live with the terra indigene . The story of Meg finished, we now move on to a different part of Namid and other humans. Three such novels constitute the successor series the World of the Others . We don't actually move very far. Lake Silence takes place on the shores of Lake Silence, one of the ...

★★★★★ Fred Cassidy is just the right kind of weird

Doorways in the Sand Roger Zelazny I'm not sure when I read this for the first time. It would have been not long after I discovered Roger Zelazny and was reading everything of his that I could find. It was published in 1976, so I'm guessing I read it that year. What I like about Doorways in the Sand is the hero Fred Cassidy. When the story begins, Fred is a student at some unspecified university. (For some reason I believed the first time I read it that it was Harvard, but I can't say why.) His uncle (who, we eventually learn, is not quite dead yet ), left Fred an income that would support him for as long as he was in university. Fred has thus made it his mission never to graduate. (Perpetual studenthood appeals to me -- I literally graduated from university in 2020 at the age of 64.) We first meet him in a conversation with his academic advisor, who believes he has trapped Fred into having fulfilled the requirements for a degree and therefore can forcibly ...

★★★★★ Logic and multiple worlds

Anathem Neal Stephenson ** spoiler alert ** I read Anathem eleven years ago (23-Nov-2011). Actually, I believe I listened to the audiobook during my daily workouts over the course of some weeks. It's a long book -- 1010 pages in kindle. Fellow Neal Stephenson fans will recognize this as nothing out of the ordinary for Stephenson . He is an author who writes long books, partly because he is always ready on the slightest provocation (or really, none at all) to leap into a 20-page treatise on orbital mechanics ( Seveneves ) or the genetics of North American feral pigs ( Termination Shock ). Those of us who love Stephenson recognize this as part of the experience and enjoy it. I would have thought the audience for this was small, but his books sell well and he's harvested a not insignificant number of major awards. The premise of Anathem is that we live in a quantum multiverse. (This proposition may be true, for certain...

★★★★☆ Starring Miss Judson

Myrtle, Means, and Opportunity Elizabeth C. Bunce At the end of Elizabeth C. Bunce 's In Myrtle Peril Myrtle (snooping in his desk) discovered hints that her father, Arthur Hardcastle, had secret plans that involved jewelry and boarding schools. In book 5, Myrtle, Means, and Opportunity , we find out almost immediately what those plans were. You've probably already figured it out. Yes, Myrtle's father is finally going to ask Miss Judson to be his wife. The real action, however, kicks off when Miss Judson receives a thick letter telling her that she has inherited an estate in Scotland from a great-uncle she has never even heard of. Well, you know Miss Judson, so you know that she immediately decides to go there herself, to see this estate and decide what to do about it. She takes Myrtle along, of course, and (this was a bit of a surprise) also Cook. Arthur Hardcastle, having obligations, is not immediately free to accompany them. The estate is located on the...

★★★★☆ Emily Wilde is terrifying

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales Heather Fawcett Everyone seems to think that Heather Fawcett 's Emily Wilde novels are a Cozy Fantasy series. I don't see it. I'm not saying you're wrong, if you think that. No one but you can tell you how you feel, and if Emily gives you a cozy feeling, then she just does, and there is no more to be said about it. But I just don't see it. In Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries Emily tortures a child, then defeats a terrifying fairy king in part by chopping off her own finger with an axe. In Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands she infiltrates a fairy kingdom and gets rid of the ruler by poisoning her. She has a familiar called Shadow who is a monstrous Black Hound. I'm not going to tell you what she does in Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales , except to say that she doesn't dial it back. She terrifies even her romantic interest Wendell. He is not afraid she will harm him, but that she will, by...

★★★☆☆ What a difference a few inches make...

Fed Mira Grant **Spoilers for Feed follow ** (Also spoilers for Deadline and Blackout , but I will protect those in spoiler tags. Fed is an alternative ending for Feed . It is available free from Orbit books as a PDF download. At 53 pages it's either a long short story or a very short novella. When I reviewed Feed , I wrote, "The book ends well". Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. (That's the big spoiler for Feed I promised above.) I thought this was a splendid ending. Tragic, yes, Gruesome, yes, but Feed is, after all, a zombie novel. I added the remark, "While I say, 'The book ends well,' I'm pretty sure that many readers are going to be unhappy with the ending." That was certainly true. For instance, one Amazon reviewer, following in the long tradition of people inventing ar...

Search This Blog