Ever feel like a walk-on in life? Like you were put in place just to open the doors for the main characters around you who do important things while you just stand there and hold a clipboard. If that's your experience, then you are living the life of a Red Shirt.
Science Fiction writer John Scalzi reimagined the brief, pointless and deadly life of Red Shirt crew members in his very funny 2012 novel, Red Shirts. In the classic Star Trek universe, hierarchy and episode longevity are determined by the color of your uniform: command is gold, science and medical is blue and operations, engineering and security are red. The joke among fans is that extras appearing in a "red shirt" were cannon fodder for the sake of cheap dramatic action, often killed before the first commercial break. The main characters (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty), on the other hand, always, miraculously, survive. If you think about it, this is the same formula for most television shows: the main characters survive while the extras are, well, extra. In some shows, the extras are the Walking Dead.
In Scalzi's book, experienced Red Shirt members of the starship become aware how mortality tables are slanted against their kind and hide in storage lockers, under cafeteria tables, and HVAC access tunnels when away teams are formed by the main characters. If you stay out of sight and off Away Teams, you survive. If, on the other hand, you call attention to yourself, you are doomed, and if you actually have a backstory, "you're probably going to have an entire episode devoted to your death." I suppose that's better than being eaten by sand worms after the opening credits, but still, a life lived hiding in an access tunnel is not much of a life even in a television show.
Not surprisingly, when Scalzi's characters become existentially aware, they decide they want to have more significance to their lives than the canned leavings of a rushed script writer. The novel starts off cute and clever, a fanzine exercise, and then asks questions that we might ask of ourselves especially if we are drifting through our own lives: am I a Red Shirt or am I a main character? We are, of course, main characters in our own story, but can we sustain a larger Narrative around us? One might call that a purpose. One Red Shirt in Scalzi's novel, admits, "I was never meant to do anything special, was I? I really was an extra. A placeholder character..."
That insignificance doesn't sit well with the characters of the book who have figured out by now that they are placeholders in a fictional television show (I'm not going into how that is done -- enjoy the book), and they are not happy with that discovery. Everyone, they decide, needs to write his or her own stories based on their own choices, which they do. They learn that fictional lives can become real just as real lives can become, tragically, fiction. Everyone, even Red Shirts in a 1960s television show, deserves a purpose in life.
