By Jane Espenson
I first heard about this book listening to The Signal, a podcast all about the TV show Firefly
and the movie Serenity
. You can listen to the interview with the editor of the book at the above website. I tried looking for the episode where they talked with Jane Espenson but I couldn't find it. If I had to guess it's in season 1.Notice I said editor, not author. This is a collection of essays about the TV show Firefly. Yeah my wife thinks my Firefly obsession has gone overboard. She might be right.
Initially I had no interest in reading Finding Serenity. It just didn't sound interesting from the interview that I listened to. Then after hearing the interview with Jane Epson talking about Serenity Found
, audio review, which I found much more compelling, though I can't remember why, I decided that if I was going to read the 2nd book I might as well read the 1st.I don't really know how to review a book of essays. I guess I'll just mention the few that caught my interest. If you are a Firefly fan you might find Finding Serenity interesting. If not, stay away. The book delves deep into analyzing the minutiae of the show. The music, the Chinese phrases, character studies, the history of the TV western, and contrasting Firefly with Star Trek Enterprise.
Unfortunately for me, most of the essays were pretty unmemorable. There are 20 in all. I made notes while reading and found 6 that I could really get into. Two are tongue in cheek essays that gave me a chuckle. One is the aforementioned Firefly vs. Star Trek that pokes fun at the cleanliness of Enterprise. It does a good job of pointing out the differences between the shows. It also made me realize how "lived in" the Firefly world is. You really can imagine yourself in it, much more so than the sterile world on Enterprise. The other essay was a correspondence between a Fox Executive and Joss Whedon. It wasn't very favorable to Fox.
There were a few essays on women in the verse. The one about Zoe being a strong character and Zoe and Wash's marriage stood out among the others. Some of the essays on women compared the Firefly women to those in the other Joss Weadon TV shows.
The book was written before the movie Serenity came out. It was interesting to read the essay speculating how the Reavers came to be. Were they forced to become cannibals to survive? Had they gone mad? Were they recruited by someone who wished to challenge the Alliance but not directly? I found in interesting when taken in context, as we now know that all the guesses presented in the book are incorrect.
Unless you are a huge Firefly fan you probably won't get much out of this book. I'd tell you to try skimming through it at your local bookstore or library but I've never been able to find a copy at a bookstore. I haven't looked in a library. Or do as I did and pick it up for a few bucks used from Amazon.
