Equally underappreciated, it seems, is the uniqueness in history of the American Civil War. Americans-and American science fiction writers, especially-have a strangely romantic view of rebellion. In most of the rest of human history, revolutions and civil wars are traditionally followed by the Wholesale Mass-Slaughter of the Losers, as the winners consolidate their power by the crude expedient of exterminating everyone who might conceivably oppose them in the future. Only in America did the West offer a continent-sized safety valve, where even former Confederates unhappy with the way the War of Northern Aggression turned out could find a chance to begin again.
And it is these overtly Western themes-no matter how vocally we may try to deny their origin-that recur time and time again in the literature of science fiction.
I suppose it was inevitable that science fiction should try to cut itself off from its pulp roots. Rejection of that which came before seems programmed into our genes. Sons argue with fathers; daughters clash with mothers; Mark Twain loathed James Fennimore Cooper. After all, science fiction as we know it today is primarily the creation of a group of young men who lived in New York in the 1930s, who called themselves The Futurians and thought that taking the train down to Philadelphia was a grand adventure, and who honestly believed there was absolutely nothing of interest west of New Jersey-and come to think of it, New Jersey was suspect, too.
But the conceits and prejudices of John W. Campbell have dominated science fiction for nearly seventy years now, so perhaps it’s time to think about finally stepping out of his shadow. An important part of the frontier saga has always been the story of the clash between the old order, struggling to maintain control, and the new, people yearning to write their own definition of freedom.
John W. Campbell, Jr., died in 1971. Every year the World Science Fiction Society honors his legacy by giving out The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, in the same ceremony in which they also honor Hugo Gernsback’s legacy by giving out a bevy of Hugo Awards for various achievements in science fiction. On a different night, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) presents a battery of Nebula Awards, as peer recognition of distinguished writing.
In 2006, Joss Whedon’s Serenity won both the Nebula Award for Best Screenplay and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.21 As a voting member of SFWA, it grieves me to admit that yes, I did hear some behind-the-curtains grumbling from the old guard about the fact that the Nebula was going to “a damned Bat Durston.”
But I say, look. The real American frontier closed in the nineteenth century. It’s now the twenty-first century. It is long past time to declare the history and folklore of the American West open for literary exploration and settlement. Bat Durston lies in a lonely unmarked grave somewhere on the windswept prairie of Bbllzznaj, where the six-legged megacoyotes howl at night, and as for me, I would rather ship out on a beat-up old Firefly than enlist in Starfleet any day of the week and twice on Sunday. It’s no accident that the second most successful science fiction franchise of all time begins with these words, even though the stories rarely lived up to the promise: “Space, the final frontier. . . .”
Or as Mal Reynolds might put it, “The pulp wars are long done. We’re all just writers, now.”
BRUCE BETHKE was a regular contributor to Amazing Stories in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as to a wide variety of other magazines. A critically acclaimed and award-winning science fiction novelist, he takes strangely perverse pride in knowing that he once managed to convince the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine that his unabashed swashbuckling pirate story was in fact a science fiction story.
Bethke can be contacted through his Web site, http://www.BruceBethke.com.
As a Buffy writer, I’m sometimes asked how much research we did into traditional demon myths to provide us with our villains. The answer is “almost none.” We needed our monsters’ properties, propensities, strengths, and weaknesses to reflect what would resonate with our characters. We needed not to research them, but to design them. In other words, we couldn’t just take a monster off the rack. Something similar occurred with Firefly. Joss needed a war. And he needed it made-to-order. The American Civil War almost fit. Vaughn talks here about the interesting alterations.
The Bonnie Brown Flag
EVELYN VAUGHN
Need stock villains for some escapist entertainment? You can never go wrong with Nazis. Middle Eastern terrorists also work, but then there’s the messy issue of clarifying that their religion doesn’t make them bad, just their zealous killing-of-people. Gang members as bad guys bring up that sticky socio-economic causal argument, and serial killers . . . well, there just aren’t enough of them to provide unlimited antagonists, the implication of many television series (*cough*Criminal Minds*cough*) to the contrary.
Nope, Nazis probably remain the easiest solution, from their pseudo-historic presentation in the Indiana Jones films (“I hate those guys”) to the thin disguise of the Star Wars series (c’mon-Storm Troopers?).
But before, during, and after we had Nazis, we had stereotypical southerners. Think Ku Klux Klan-unfortunately real but, at least since Birth of a Nation, generally considered less than admirable. Think of the Georgia mountain men/rapists in 1972’s Deliverance. Think Simon Legree, the villain of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel which helped start the Civil War.
I’m guessing Johnny Reb, and versions thereof, rank in the top ten of the bad-guy list-to everyone but southerners, anyway, and we’re understandably biased. In a black-and-white (no pun intended) simplification of the American Civil War, the common read is this: The mean old southerners wanted to own slaves, the noble northerners outlawed slavery, and the good abolitionist guys won.
As with most of history, there’s a kernel of truth there and a cob full of truth being left out. Maybe that’s just as well. Slavery’s such an ugly issue, it stains all matter of discussion, to the point where attempts to objectively study Southern motivations beyond the preservation of slavery become almost impossible. And yes, slavery was bad. Really, really bad. But just because you had slave owners fighting for the right to have slaves in the Civil War, that doesn’t mean nothing else was at stake-and it doesn’t mean the destruction of the South wasn’t in itself a tragedy, and shouldn’t be treated that way.
Which leads us to one of the gazillion and two reasons I love the world of Firefly and Serenity. Joss Whedon doesn’t rest with the stock or the simplistic, and he sure as hell doesn’t overlook the tragedy. The conflict between the Alliance and the Independents allows us, at long last, to consider the devastation that was the American Civil War as someone from the South, the half most drastically affected, must have seen it. And in a great piece of synchronicity, the devastation of the American Civil War is then able to add depth and poignancy to the world of Firefly and Serenity.
How?
By editing out the messy aspect of slavery, in order to explore the sheer enormity of a conflict that continues to affect our world to this day.
THE CIVIL WAR PARALLEL
While it’s not quite as obvious as the idea that Firefly/Serenity is a “space Western,” I’m not making any huge leaps by stating that the world of the Browncoats has some basis in the aftermath of the American Civil War. It’s common knowledge that Joss Whedon came up with the idea of Firefly after reading Michael Shaara’s 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, about the Battle of Gettysburg. But how did he use that model?
Some of the parallels are downright obvious-consider that hoop-skirted “layer cake” Kaylee wears to a dress party in the episode entitled “Shindig,” or Mal’s comment to pugilistic Unification-Day celebrants: “I’m thinking we’ll rise again” (“The Train Job”). But the similarities go far deeper than a few allusions to southern fashion and rallying cries.
The words “Union” and “Alliance” are synonyms, and both reflect governments that demand a central control: “Unite all the planets under one rule so that everybody c
an be interfered with or ignored equally” (Mal, “The Train Job”). Both governments, the historical and the Whedonesque, are referred to as the “Feds.” And the Alliance seems to have more money, greater military strength, and better technology, a point similarly made about the Union by Rhett Butler in that other Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the South, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind:“Have any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there’s not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? [The Yankees have] the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines-all the things we haven’t got. . . . They’d lick us in a month” (113).
Of course, the Confederates to whom Rhett is speaking refuse to believe such heresy. And Rhett himself, after the fall of Atlanta and with the war nearly lost, finds himself joining the cause:“Why?” he laughed jauntily. “Because, perhaps, of the betraying sentimentality that lurks in all of us southerners. Perhaps-perhaps because I am ashamed [of not joining earlier]” (382).
Which-the sentimentality, not the shame-comes surprisingly close to Mal’s poignant clarification when he was accused of naming his ship after a battle he was on the “wrong side” of: “May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one” (“Bushwhacked”).
The Independents seem to have wanted something a lot like the states’ rights that the Confederacy demanded. As the teacher puts it in Serenity:The central planets formed the Alliance, so that everyone can enjoy the comfort and enlightenment of true civilization. That’s why we fought the War for Unification.
Presumably, there would be no war unless the outer planets refused the Alliance’s “comfort and enlightenment.” In that same vein, the American Civil War has also been termed, in the South, “The War for Southern Independence” (and “The War of Northern Aggression,” implying that the Union was the meddlesome side). One of the more popular songs for the Rebel troops at the time, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” puts into words what motivated these men:We are a band of brothers, and native to the soil,
Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil;
And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far-
“Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!”
The chorus begins: “Hurrah! Hurrah! / For southern rights, hurrah!” Clearly the fight was cast to many of its soldiers as a rebellion against insidious government control. That particular conflict, especially when removed from issues of slavery, has great lasting power-it reappears every time we debate issues from seatbelt laws to legalized marijuana. As young River Tam explains, in response to her teacher’s whitewash about “true civilization” in Serenity:We meddle. . . . People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think. Don’t run. Don’t walk. We’re in their homes, and in their heads, and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.
And River’s family was on the side of the Alliance . . . at least, if the flashbacks to her even younger play-acting are any indication: “We got outflanked by the Independents squad, and we’re never going to make it back to our platoon” (“Safe”). That would be right before the imaginary Independents attacked the imaginary Alliance troops, featuring young River and young Simon, with dinosaurs.
The Alliance/Independence split isn’t the only parallel between Firefly/Serenity and the American Confederacy. Remember how often the show is called a space Western? What some people prefer not to recognize about the Western genre, whether in episodes of Gunsmoke or The Lone Ranger, is that the majority of its archetypes hail from the Old South, the losing side of the Civil War, as surely as do Mal and Zoe. Consider the most prominent figure of any Western: the cowboy. Cowboys rarely hail from Massachusetts, Vermont, or New York (as the Pace picante sauce commercial used to put it: “New York City? Get a rope!”). Cowboys come mainly from Texas. And in the War for Southern Independence, Texas was the sixth state to secede (point of trivia, it’s also the only state which can legally do so again). After the war, a bankrupt Texas found itself with a wealth of wild cattle and nowhere to sell them. This necessitated what would become classic cattle drives to the railheads, first in New Orleans (really!) and later in Kansas . . . known as “Bleeding Kansas” immediately before the war because of the violence that erupted over whether it would be a free or pro-slavery state. The classic Old West hookers in Kansas cow towns like Dodge City often took fake names such as “Dixie” or “Belle” specifically to appeal to the Confederate background of the Texas cowboys who were their best clients. The outlaws-and what’s a good Western without an outlaw or two?-were often Confederates as well, most notably Jesse and Frank James of the James-Younger gang.
Cowboys. Outlaws. Hookers with hearts of gold. Sound familiar?
If Firefly really is a space Western (and . . . duh), then it’s also, at least loosely, about space-southerners.
With one enormously notable difference.
THE ELEPHANT
You’ll run into a lot of metaphorical elephants if you read about the Old West. “Seeing the elephant” was slang for facing the newness and thrill of the frontier and, in the case of soldiers, for seeing battle for the first time. Think of an elephant as big and exciting and kind of frightening, as well as rare for the time and place, and the symbol makes moderate sense.
This is not, however, the metaphorical elephant I want to talk about. Instead, I mean “the elephant in the room,” something obvious that we could easily try to ignore-but without ever wholly succeeding. Even if nobody mentions it, you can’t ignore an elephant in a small room. And the elephant in any comparison of Firefly/Serenity to the American Civil War is the issue of slavery.
You may have guessed by now that I’m a southerner, by birth if not blood. Both of my parents were Yankees, but I’ve only lived six of my forty-three years north of the Mason-Dixon Line. As the popular bumper sticker says, “I Wasn’t Born in Texas, but I Got Here as Fast as I Could.”
Because of my geography, I’ve known perfectly nice southerners who are honestly bewildered that a symbol of their family’s valorous past-the Confederate Stars and Bars-is now met with accusations of racism. I even have some sympathy for them. For what it’s worth, I also have sympathy for the people who do see the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism. Go ahead and remove said flag from public buildings, by all means. Times change. The swastika used to be a perfectly nice Hindi good-luck symbol, but the Nazis took it over, and now it’s outlawed in Germany: I don’t have a problem with that, either. Yes, the Confederate flag used to be a symbol of states rights (I know, “including the right to own slaves”-I’m getting to that), but enough white supremacists have co-opted it that its original symbolism, itself perhaps naïve, is now hopelessly stained . . . assuming you believe its original symbolism had any purity in the first place.
To explain, if not excuse, such naivety, let me at least note: the majority of soldiers in the Confederacy were not slave owners. Feel free to ignore the suspiciously low statements by pro-Confederacy groups that “less than 5 percent of Confederate soldiers owned slaves,” because really . . . bias, much? But even the suspiciously heavy estimates, one of which suggests that almost one third of Confederate families owned slaves, leave over two thirds of the soldiers who did not. The obvious conclusion? Not everyone who fought for the south was risking his life merely to own slaves. They may well have been mistaken. They may well have been misled. But at least credit those two-thirds with less villainous, if more naïve, motives: the fight for states’ rights.
As I said at the start of this essay, it’s an argument that gets overwhelmed with subjectivity, almost every time. And why wouldn’t it? I mean . . . slavery.
As easy as it is in this day and age to see Nazis as evil, so it’s easy to see slavery as evil. And herein lies the glory of Joss Whedon’s Firefly parallel to the Civil War. The number one difference . . . well actually, the number one difference between the world of
Firefly and the world of the War Between the States is the setting. Mal and Zoe’s war was about planets, not states, and was fought with spaceships. But the number two difference?
The War for Independence, in the world of Firefly, had nothing to do with slavery.
And how do we know this for sure?
Because Firefly is brave enough to mention the elephant in the room.
The episode “Shindig,” in particular, faces the elephant of slavery. Our first introduction to the subject was a conversation going on in a bar, as Jayne played pool with some lowlifes:JAYNE: Made money, huh?
POOL PLAYER: Border planets need labor. Terraforming crews got a prodigious death rate.
MAL: Labor? You mean, uh, slaves.
POOL PLAYER: Well, it wasn’t volunteers for damn sure.
MAL: That why you didn’t have to lay in more rations?
POOL PLAYER: I didn’t hear no complaints.
Lest we somehow missed the fact that the pool player wasn’t meant to be admired, Mal picked his pocket, later noting, “They earned that with the sweat of their slave-trading brows.”
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