Redshirts by John Scalzi. Tor, 2012.
In a certain sphere of the leftist sff scene—and which often overlaps with my own sff community—John Scalzi is the embodiment of everything wrong with liberal sff. He’s the banner carrier of squeecore, what the Rite Gud podcast initially described in 2022 as a (neo)liberal movement/vibe/feeling/concept/something within sff that places a certain set of wink-wink/nod-nod aesthetics in conversation with a (neo)liberal sense of identity politics, but which generally seems to lack any truly liberating impulse and/or is unaware of the real injustices at work in our world (and thus the sff worlds its creators generate). Squeecore is the Lin Manuel Miranda of the sff world.
Scalzi is pointed to as the guy who writes just Ok, middlebrow science fiction that is nominally witty and populated with references to other, usually better sff. He’s considered a lazy craftsman, paid too much, and an exemplar of why mainstream contemporary sff sucks. He is, in squeecore critics’ estimation, producing a body of writing that is not serious and not good.
There are of course many other names that come up in discussions of squeecore—e.g. Marie Brennan, Mary Robinette Kowal, Catherynne M. Valente, Ernest Cline, the MCU, and, long before any of this, Joss Whedon, whose Buffy and Firefly sort of set the stage for humor-forward genre fare that sardonically critiques society while staying mostly within the bounds of generic and social convention. Venues like Uncanny and Tordotcom (the imprint, not so much the more traditional publisher Tor) are regarded as the home of squeecore and are positioned, in the worst critiques, as soulless shills of the corporate takeover and depoliticization of feminist, queer, and anti-racist SFF storytelling. Some imagine squeecore as the award winners, the money makers. There’s a lot that’s interesting in these conversations, that rings true (sure, yes, there is a dominant mode, and many emergent and residual ones, too); there’s also a lot that thrives on vibes (especially critical imprecision) and frustration with the state of becoming an sff writer (which, fair enough).
Squeecore is, to me, a fascinating concept for genre studies to wrestle with and, like “cozy,” a thorny one that I’m glad exists, that I hate most of the online discourse about, and which I hope we can in time devote serious attention to parsing separate from the disdain-fueled voices of its originators. The question it ultimately raises, as Camestros Felapton puts it, is whether there’s a dominant mode of mainstream contemporary sff and, if so, what are its key features? While I’d love to think and write more about the concept in greater depth at some point, this little essay is my attempt to (re)visit a Scalzi novel that is often pointed to as perhaps the most obviously squeecore text of them all, Redshirts (2012).
Scalzi’s transformation in my sphere of the sff community into a bugbear for all the ills of mainstream contemporary sff has been interesting to watch. He was always marginally on my radar because of Old Man’s War (2005), one of the more valuable responses to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) since Joe Haldeman’s Forever War (1974); his Hugo and Locus wins for Redshirts, which only appealed to me because of my interest in Star Trek; and his role responding to the Sad and Rabid Puppies in the mid-2010s. I knew he had an outspoken blog and maintained a sardonic smug tone in his nonfiction that I find exhausting after one of two samples (then again, the Whedonesque was never my bag). But after this past year, I became increasingly interested in how Scalzi holds up as a writer given how much smack folks talk about him. Redshirts had been unread in my Audible library for 9 years, so it seemed like the right place to start. And I was surprised.
Redshirts is, at first, exactly what you probably expect: a Star Trek homage in which it’s made absolutely clear that the ensigns with red uniforms die at a much higher rate than other folks. It is a meta-commentary on Star Trek and the ridiculousness of “plot armor,” but it becomes so much more as the characters become slowly aware of their predicament and that the situations their superiors survive (and which kill their colleagues) don’t really make sense, usually break the laws of physics, and fantastically exceed statistical likelihoods, while always resolving unexplainably in the nick of time. The redshirts work together to discover that they might very well be on a bad science fiction TV show that is a rip off of Star Trek. That is, their universe came into existence purely so that a few moments in the lives of a handful of officers (and some unlucky crew members) could show up on Americans’ TV (Grant Morrison would be thrilled). When these moments happen, the laws of the universe break, a fact that the redshirts exploit to jump into our reality and convince the showrunners to stop, well, redshirting them. The novel then ends by suggesting that both universes the characters experience, and the whole idea of a TV show creating their universe, and so on, were actually just events in a novel, this novel, whose world and characters may or may not continue on after the last sentence ends.
The novel is a punch, funny, three-act affair. Each act deals with a discrete thing or, to be smart about it, a speculative-epistemological regime (thanks, John Rieder) within the storyworld:
- the crew join the Intrepid and things begin to seem amiss;
- the crew discover that things are definitely amiss and its because they might be on a TV show;
- the crew address the problem by traveling to the universe where the show is produced and solve their problem.
These acts each play various jokes and make references to Star Trek, internet culture, and the media industries without belaboring its winks and nods. The plot is tight, even if the storyworld doesn’t make logical sense. But that’s both the point of the meta-commentary about Star Trek and convenience-based plotting or black-box solutions that accrete into an increasingly unstable and irrational storyworld (which later writers or creators have to either rationalize, ignore, or retcon). It’s also the greater point made by the meta-meta-commentary about all of this existing within a temporary cognitive relationship between the reader of Redshirts and Redshirts itself (i.e. between readers and narratives) that may or may not cease to exist the moment we turn away (just as fan fictions and tie-in novels assert that things keep going even when the episodes don’t).
Despite being a clear Star Trek homage, the novel pulls even fewer muscles winking at its inspiration than, say, The Orville (2017-2022?). It ends up reading a bit like Galaxy Quest (1999): a smart critique of the source text with just enough engagement with the parodied text to make it legible, but which departs plays the parody not for parody’s sake, but to make its own point and tell its own story. Like Galaxy Quest (or The Orville, for that matter, which I quite like), Redshirts is neither lazy nor untalented.
As a short, witty, sometimes biting little novel that critiques sff television and sff writing more generally, and which ponders the nature of our moral, ethical, and social (maybe even metaphysical) relationship to fictional characters, Redshirts is critically interesting and very much likable, exactly the opposite of what commentary from the past year would have me expect from a Scalzi novel. It’s therefore somewhat unsurprising that it won the 2013 Hugo and Locus awards for best (science fiction) novel, especially given the broad appeal of Star Trek both as an effect of nostalgia and at the very moment the franchise was attempting a comeback through a new film series. Redshirts was both a smart publishing decision, maybe even awards bait, but also a good little book.
At least until the codas. And, unfortunately, this is a novel that really wants you to know it has codas. The fact that it has three codas was inexplicably included in the original title, Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas. This means that, even more inexplicably, editors at Tor let this novel go to print not only with those three codas in tact, but with their existence highlighted. (I’m actually not sure how this became the acknowledged subtitle; it’s not on the first edition’s copyright page nor in the front matter of the print editions I’ve seen, but it is how the book is sold in some online editions and the book was represented this way in official Hugo and Locus awards listings.)
The codas make very little narrative sense in this novel; in fact, they undercut the most promising critical aspects of the novel by focusing on what happens to the “real world” characters. We get one coda about the showrunner’s son who was in a coma but, because of plot stuff, wakes up just fine. In another coda, the writer of the show that the Intrepid and its crew appear on/were created by (he was also an extra once, and thus has an alter-self in the show-world) has writer’s block and talks about it on a blog. This coda reads like Scalzi’s own rather annoying blog (even if that blog made him “internet royalty“). A final coda follows one of the actresses who played an insignificant extra in the show, but was someone’s wife (the alter-self of the writer’s) in the Intrepid-universe; she is visited in the novel proper by the redshirts and told of her alter-self’s importance to another character. In the end, the writer and the actress meet on a beach and, presumably, spark a romance.
All of the awkwardness and wink-winkery I had expected in Redshirts, but was thankfully and surprisingly spared, is here in these codas. They take the least interesting aspects of the story and make them into the implied “happily ever after” of a novel that otherwise smartly critiques narrative simplicity and give-the-people-what-they-want plots.
I want to resist the urge to say that these codas “ruin” Redshirts, because they are fundamentally part of the published novel and they represent a great deal of what Scalzi’s squeecore critics are reacting too. The codas give us unneeded and lengthy musings on what it means to find oneself when you’re the son of a rich TV producer, and how wonderful it is to have a second chance at life; sarcastic, elder millennial, blogger writing that swipes at readers and randoms on the internet for not interacting in ways the blogger wanted; and an unnecessary romance between characters readers are not invested in but which attempts to provide a sincere heart and soul to the story in a last minute pivot to generic impulses toward a happy ending, framed as justice for those people.
Redshirts sans its codas is an excellent critique of Star Trek specifically and sff writing generally, but also of our relationship and debt to narratives, characters, and the objects of our fandoms. As a potential example of what folks want to call squeecore, it doesn’t make squeecore sounds like a dis; the codas, however, firmly highlight the issues with squeecore that its critics are right about. If the codas define the afterlife of the main narrative, they have also come to define the afterlife of Redshirts; they have overdetermined what Scalzi otherwise achieved here and helped confirm his repeated inclusion in discussions of squeecore.
That the novel is symptomatic of a number of things we might call squeecore is actually rather interesting, in large part because most of the conversation about squeecore has been about whether it—and thus the novels that make it up and the authors who write it—is “good” or “bad,” usually with the suggestion that it is both artistically and politically “bad” (for us as readers and for sff as a genre). Cora Buhlert offers a summary drawn from Gemini Dreams of some key tenets of squeecore as outlined by the Rite Gud podcast. Redshirts almost seems to be the novel these criteria were written to describe, though there is certainly space to push back against and question what exactly those criteria mean.
Redshirts exemplifies what was highly popular and financially successful a decade ago at the very beginning of the Overton window for our current notion of “contemporary,” since much of what is described in squeecore debates has its beginning in a series of audience, creator, and industry trends (that is, what became dominant about and thus defined mainstream contemporary sff) that began in the early-to-mid-2010s and which we can locate in the orbit of writers like Scalzi and in the community’s, creators’, and publishers’ reactions to the Sad and Rabid Puppies (themselves symptoms of a larger right-wing shift in our political culture). Redshirts is, for the most part, a smart, fun, and critically interesting novel, even and especially when it is discursively engaged with aspects that have come to define squeecore; and it is also at its worst when it engages other aspects that have come to define squeecore (and which unravels the critical work the rest of the novel is trying to do).
Redshirts is a microcosm of the impulses of an emergent squeecore aesthetic that, from the vantage of a decade, seems absolutely dominant and with which we’re going to have to develop a better understanding of and language for in the years to come.
Sean Guynes 