★★★☆☆ 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.

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