As context, Old Man’s War is about 95,000 words, and the contractual length specified in my contracts for a novel is 100,000 words (we’re given leeway). Because the novel was short for a modern science fiction novel. So why did I format Redshirts this way? Here are some reasons, some practical, some craft-oriented.ġ. But the Redshirt codas are different in form and function than these appendices. The closest would be novels that have extensive appendices at the end of them: Dune is one, and The Lord of the Rings (which was written as a single novel) is another. This is an unconventional format for a book I’m hesitant to claim a first, but at the very least I don’t know of another book formatted this way.
The three stories at the end aren’t throwaway bits the three stories at the end matter.
But the complete experience of Redshirts, the book, includes the three stories at the end. The novel itself is a complete story - you can read just the novel part and have a complete narrative arc, plot and character resolution and so on. The “codas” in this case are three short stories presented after the novel, which offer some additional perspective on the events of the novel. More accurately, the book Redshirts is not just a novel. Many of the reviews of Redshirts note it, and the original subtitle of the book (which you can still see on the Amazon page for it) points it out explicitly, so I thought I’d write a little something about it here.
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