Table of Contents
OTHER TITLES IN THE SMART POP SERIES
Title Page
Introduction
Catching Up with the Future
Mars Needs Women - How a Dress, a Cake, and a Goofy Hat Will Save Science Fiction
Girls, Guns, Gags - Why the Future Belongs to the Funny
River Tam and the Weaponized Women of the Whedonverse
ALIEN: RESURRECTION
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER AND ANGEL
I, Malcolm
Freedom in an Unfree World
A Tale of Two Heroes
SUPERFICIAL DIFFERENCES, VOLCANO SIMILARITIES
FROM “SERENITY” TO SERENITY
The Good Book
Mal Contents - Captain Reynolds Grows Up
Curse Your Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal - Things My Husband and I Have Argued ...
Mutant Enemy U
Geeks of the World, Unite! - You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Lovebots!
The Alliance’s War on Science
The Virtual ’Verse
Firefly and Story Structure, Advanced
Cut ’Em Off at the Horsehead Nebula!
The Bonnie Brown Flag
THE CIVIL WAR PARALLEL
THE ELEPHANT
SAFE IN SPACE
INTERACTIVE LITERATURE
Signal to Noise - Media and Subversion in Serenity
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
OTHER TITLES IN THE SMART POP SERIES
Taking the Red Pill
Seven Seasons of Buffy
Five Seasons of Angel
What Would Sipowicz Do?
Stepping through the Stargate
The Anthology at the End of the Universe
Finding Serenity
The War of the Worlds
Alias Assumed
Navigating the Golden Compass
Farscape Forever!
Flirting with Pride and Prejudice
Revisiting Narnia
Totally Charmed
King Kong Is Back!
Mapping the World of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
The Unauthorized X-Men
The Man from Krypton
Welcome to Wisteria Lane
Star Wars on Trial
The Battle for Azeroth
Boarding the Enterprise
Getting Lost
James Bond in the 21st Century
So Say We All
Investigating CSI
Literary Cash
Webslinger
Halo Effect
Neptune Noir
Coffee at Luke’s
Perfectly Plum
Introduction
Everyone has Moments of Serenity. Here are four of mine:
August 2002: I’m walking though an elaborately decorated back lot street at Universal Studios. Mal is there, and Kaylee and Wash and Zoe and Jayne, and even Badger and his fine hat. There are girls behind glass windows, one of them sweating in a pink layer-cake dress. The place is teeming with extras and strange-looking set dressing. Huge electric fans are blowing, and crew members release bits of brightly colored paper in front of them, decorating even the air. There might be chickens. It is the most exotic, most alien, most thoroughly imagined set I think I’ve ever been on. It is absolutely magical.
September 2004: I spend the day on the set of the movie Serenity. I get to walk through the ship once more, recreated here, bigger and better, on a different soundstage across town from its original home. It’s easy to imagine it might have flown here. This is, I believe, the last day of principal photography. I know it is the day that River kicks Reaver ass. I get to watch multiple takes of the fight. Over and over she kicks and ducks and whirls. It is a blur of balletic violence.
September 2005: There is a red-carpet premiere for Serenity here in Los Angeles. The fans are here too, some inside the theater, others crowded just outside. Any of us fortunate enough to have been connected to the movie or to the series in some way are recognized as we walk into the event across an actual Hollywood red carpet. Joss-driven projects inspire a certain cult-of-the-writer, and we are hooted at and flash-bulbed at almost as vigorously as the stars.
February 2007: I am invited to WonderCon in San Francisco to speak on a panel about gender roles in science fiction, and to sign copies of whatever people want me to sign: Firefly scripts, artwork of Kaylee in that layer-cake dress, and lots of copies of Finding Serenity, the precursor to this book. People walk the convention floor dressed as Mal and Jayne. Almost five years after my one singular episode of Firefly was filmed, the world Joss created is still spinning.
So why is Firefly (note that I will use “Firefly” and “Serenity” interchangeably to refer to this particular Jossiverse as a whole) still inspiring this kind of interest and devotion so long after it began, so long after it ended? Why are there buyers for a book such as this one? Why are there contributors, for that matter? Other series, even ones with more viewers, even ones with much longer histories, don’t get this kind of treatment. There are, as far as I know, very few books filled with essays like this:“Stabler Than What?” A look at Law and Order: SVU’s Detective Elliot Stabler, this essay suggests that the character symbolizes the International Monetary Fund in a way that should be read more as cautionary tale than Hero’s Journey.
No, you just don’t get much of that kind of thing.
Part of the reason, of course, is that science fiction is a genre that naturally invites analysis. Sci-fi tends to work through metaphor. Some Other-World is intended to represent our own world through some sort of mapping. The details of the correspondences are not stated explicitly; that work is left to the viewers. This encourages participation, which leads viewers to feel proprietary. It also fosters debate: points of view, passionately contested. In other words, metaphor leads to books of essays. Go metaphor!
And Firefly isn’t just sci-fi. It is also, in its own way, a Western. Westerns are the other major genre that tends to work through metaphor. Traditional movie Westerns used the wide-open other worldliness of the American frontier to stand for everything from the quest for personal freedom, to general continental expansion, to Vietnam.
But this is not the complete answer to the question. There’s something else that made Firefly special.
Here is a Pre-Serenity moment: When I was fairly new to television writing, I attended the Writers’ Guild Awards one year. Someone won a WGA award for writing an episode of ER. She got up on the stage, clutched the award, and thanked “The Creator.” It was only a few sentences later that I realized she was referring to Michael Crichton. She hadn’t intended to be humorous; the phrasing was totally ingenuous. It was also very apt.
When a creator is also a showrunner he or she really is the god of the show. Joss Whedon, the god of Serenity, is that missing element, the key to the lasting appeal, the lasting lure, of Firefly.
Joss had other brainchildren before Firefly. I was lucky enough to work with him for five years at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and to write two freelance scripts under his direction at Angel. I was able to observe some of what makes Joss’s storytelling so powerful.
Any new writer on a Joss Whedon show learns early on that the way not to sell Joss on an idea for an episode of television is to try to sell him on a cool monster, a cool visual, or a cool moment. There always has to be a real reason to tell the story. There has to be a truth exposed through the story. Either a truth about the world, or a truth about a character. Or, ideally, both. Joss’s takes on gender, the nature of heroism, and the role of religion cannot be separated from the ways he writes his people. This insistence on having a reason to tell the story means that Joss’s stories are striving in a very real way to communicate content beyond just a str
eam of well-imagined fictional events. They set out to do more than simply keep the audience tuned in through the commercial breaks.
Which brings us to the other secret ingredient: Joss’s attitude toward the viewers. I don’t recall Joss ever talking about “the audience” as a separate identity with an agenda separate or lesser (or greater, for that matter) than his own. He writes what interests him, what he would want to see. This is why when Joss writes a surprise it genuinely surprises, why his shocking revelations shock us, why his jokes make us laugh. It’s not just that he assumes that you, the viewers, are as smart as him. He assumes, in a way, that you are him. And that he is you.
Not every writer does this. They assume that there is a chance that the viewer is distracted, or very young, or unsophisticated. They try to accommodate. Joss doesn’t give you an inch. He demands attention and intelligence and he rewards it.
So, after all that . . . what better way could there be, really, to invite analysis? Create a world that floats on a layer of metaphor, drench it in big ideas about the world, fill it with real people, and then absolutely demand intelligence of your viewers.
Welcome to Serenity.
Jane Espenson - Los Angeles, 2007
We’ve all assembled here today because of a shared interest in Firefly. (Unless your interest is actually fireflies. Sorry, you have purchased this book in error.) But how does Firefly fit into the pantheon of sci-fi greats? There can be no doubt that Orson Scott Card knows his sci-fi, and here he explains what it is that makes the Firefly universe special, literary, modern, and smart. He also makes the point that good writers are inspired by good writing. Indeed. Read this and be inspired.
Catching Up with the Future
ORSON SCOTT CARD
It was 25 May 1977. A work day, supposedly. But it was the opening day of Star Wars.
Jay Parry and Lane Johnson and I were editors at a magazine in Salt Lake City. We were conscientious employees. We worked hard. We often worked late. We gave an honest day’s work for each day’s paltry pay.
We were also novice science fiction writers. We would spend our lunch hours down in the miserable cafeteria in our building, drinking generic soda pop (you couldn’t guess the flavor if someone hid the can), and talking about our ideas for sci-fi stories that we would sell, launching brilliant careers that would turn us into the Heinleins, Asimovs, Ellisons, Silverbergs, or Nivens of our generation.
So when Lane suggested that we take a “long lunch” and see Star Wars, it actually caused a moral quandary.
A brief one.
(I suspect that Jay told our boss what we were doing and got tacit permission. He’s a better man than I am, and always was. But maybe not, in which case that was certainly the most wicked thing Jay ever did in his life, and his conscience is still bothering him about it, and it is so wrong of me to tell.)
When the time rolled around, we were out the door and walking down the street to one of those grand old theaters-the kind with only one screen and a very large seating capacity. With an actual stage, where you could imagine someone actually performing a play. (I have to describe it, because the youthful readers of this book have probably never seen theaters like that. For that matter, most of the youthful readers have probably never walked to a theater, unless you count the trip from the parking lot to the box office.)
There had been a lot of hype about Star Wars. The screenings for the press had resulted in cover stories in magazines and full-page spreads in newspapers, with reviewers talking as if George Lucas had just invented the moving picture.
I had missed most of that, being such a conscientious, hard-working, and newly married guy. (Eight days by actual count, and no, it didn’t cross my mind to take my wife to the movie-why would she want to see a sci-fi film? You have to understand that up to that moment, sci-fi films were generally-and more or less correctly-perceived as a branch of the horror film genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been one of a kind.) Who had time to notice the newspapers and magazines?
So it was without any particular expectations that I sat down with Lane and Jay and watched those massive letters crawl up the screen. And crawl and crawl and crawl.
Then the massive ship came into view and I felt a tingle under my skin. This did not look like the standard rocket ships from old sci-fi films. Nor did it look like the realistic, utilitarian, minimalist spaceships of 2001 or the real space program.
This was a ship that was more like an old-time surface battleship, except that there was no hull-the bottom bristled with structures just like the top and sides. And, like an aircraft carrier surrounded by gnat-like planes, the big ship dwarfed the fighters swarming around it.
The tingling continued as I saw robots that looked like nothing I’d seen before-or, when they did, they at least didn’t talk like they had before. When we met aliens, they were a potpourri of every alien ever imagined in science fiction. (We recognized many of them-the wookie was an obvious borrowing from Larry Niven’s Kzin, for instance.)
This was the science fiction of my earliest imagining. This was space adventure, a kind of storytelling that had been missing from the movies for a long time.
And at the end, when my friends and I walked out of the theater, we were floating. What a great experience.
But it took about three minutes for somebody to say to me, “Don’t you wish you could write something like that?”
I’m afraid I laughed in the person’s face; Lane and Jay laughed too. We all knew the same thing: No writer of science fiction stories in 1977 would aspire to write something as childish as Star Wars.
The movie experience was great. The story was fun. But in the world of print, that level of storytelling had “1935” written all over it. In print, science fiction had come a long, long way since then. It was still possible to write wonderful adventures-Larry Niven was proving that with every book-but they had to be way smarter than Star Wars.
In print science fiction, the science had to be at least remotely plausible; Star Wars had real howlers, like treating “parsec” as a measure of time rather than distance, and fighters that moved aerodynamically in space, complete with impossible whooshing sounds. And light sabers? What a hoot. No self-respecting science fiction writer would dare to use something so unnecessary and improbable-but it made a great visual.
Star Wars amounted to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy, except in space instead of in a medieval kingdom, and not a particularly clever or emotionally engaging one at that. And “the Force”-can you imagine something so silly? In print science fiction we would have recognized that instantly as either magic or religion; nothing to do with science fiction.
But that’s how things were back then-and still are, mostly, today. Film science fiction was firmly rooted in the era of lurid adventure writing-which wasn’t a bad thing, as long as you understood that print science fiction had long since grown up into a multi-faceted genre in which you could have writerly stories like Harlan Ellison’s and Samuel R. Delany’s, or thoughtful anthropological science fiction like Ursula K. LeGuin’s and James Blish’s, or gung-ho, hard-science competent-man stories in the tradition of Asimov and Heinlein, Clarke and Niven.
But sci-fi films were stuck at the level of Lost in Space and Star Trek on TV: aliens who all spoke English, ray guns, spaceships that looked like living rooms with odd furniture (because that was the kind of set that was cheap to build), with magic technology and stories that could always be resolved by courage and brawn and a thimbleful of brains.
Above all, sci-fi films and television shows had no characters whatsoever.
Oh, they had people wearing costumes and saying lines, but once you had stated their role, there was nothing more to say. On Star Trek, what were the crew of the Enterprise after you set aside their ethnicity and their job description on the ship? Nothing. And as for Spock, he was a one-note character. (He gave the illusion of being an interesting character because he was played by the one excellent actor in the series.)
(I realize, of co
urse, that saying these things will result in Trekkers burning me in effigy, but it’s simply true. We know what film and television characterization looks like-finally-and it simply was not present, was not even attempted, in Star Trek-or, I must add, any of its spin-offs and sequel series. It simply wasn’t part of the formula as it is today in, say, Lost and Medium.)
As far as I knew, the only science fiction film that showed any awareness of where print science fiction was up to 1977 had been 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I had enjoyed 2001 very much-it had accomplished the formidable task of making movement in space look real. It certainly did a better job than Star Wars of getting space and technology right. But it also moved at an excruciatingly slow pace-a deliberate and, I think, correct choice for the story that was being told.
It was a very cerebral story, and it collapsed into deliberate incoherence at the end-with Kubrick in charge, it was always going to be about the director, not the story. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel was, as a story, much better. It was as if Kubrick decided that he would make a film that looked like it knew about good science fiction, but he had to prove that as an auteur, he was above mere storytelling.
2001 hadn’t changed film sci-fi that much, because it was regarded as a fluke, a one-shot. Star Wars, however, remade the landscape, especially when the first two sequels showed that the phenomenal ticket sales could be repeated.
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