[Rowan]

Originally Posted by justjackrandom

Firefly was an interesting show. I really liked it. I can’t wait for the movie. But one reason it didn’t work as television is because it broke too many dramatic necessities to make it interesting to a larger audience, and one of these was trying to be too realistic in its portrayal of vacuum operations.

As for what constitutes “realistic” in scifi, I’ll reiterate something I said earlier by posting a quote from another source: “We inevitably tend to envision the capabilities of putative extraterrestrials as being similar to, or slightly more advanced than ours”. (Seth Shostak November 2003, Space.com). Meaning that the more scientific-minded of us usually want our heroes to live and work in a world that follows roughly the same rules as ours does. Yet who is to say what those rules will be in 100 years, or 200, or 500?


JJR

I love Firefly and had no problem adjusting to no sound in space in fact when Serenity is passing close to the Reevers ship there was no sound and frankly I found it very eerie I loved it. I'm a total animal nut and vegetarian but I love the moment when Mal shot the horse because it broke the rules and loved it when he shot the "police officer" in his cargo hold without a second thought - again because it broke the rules. One of my most favorite Sci-Fi books is the series by C.J. Cherryh about Pyanfar Chanur who is an upright feline creature. In her culture only the females of her species are allowed on spaceships as males are notoriously unstable and emotional (sorry boys ) it's an area of space were oxygen breathers (Hani, Kif etc.) and methane breathers (the Knnn) have worked out an intricate web of communications and politics designed to maintain a mutually profitable economic climate and a shaky peace until one human arrives and throws the whole thing out of whack. Kind of like the way John does in Farscape. I love the battles and chases portrayed in these books all the variety of species and all the space stations everything is alien to me and the rules don't apply and that is why I like it. I like my Sci-Fi to be gritty, scary , unpredictable, I like fast paced but I also enjoy watching the day to day routines of peoples lives as lived on a ship or space station. I want it to be intense and not pretty and I don't want to feel safe. It's only in the third season of Enterprise that I started to like that show once it got a little less safe and characters that were around for a few shows were getting killed and alien species were plotting to eliminate the human race and when Archer throws his morals away. I want it to entertain me but I also want it to blow me away with it's imaginativeness and challenge my morals, ideals, my "humanity" this is why I liked the baby killing scene in BSG 2003. ( I'm not saying this to stir the $hit pot just using it as an example of how moraly / emotionally challenging I like it)