Big Damn Writers 2

Last one was about how to avoid the flagrant, boneheaded mistakes in Firefly's cultural setting. Now I shall enumerate its sins against science, and how to avoid them.

Just in general, the series' deliberate vagueness about the tech hurts it, rather than helping as it was supposed to. I'm sorry, but if you don't tell me why something that would be lethal in the real world, isn't, I'm going to have to assume you just didn't know about it.

Oh, and all you little Whedon worshipers: if you come and tell me "it's used consistently in story," I'm afraid all I'll do is laugh at you. Maybe you didn't get the memo, but part of the definition of SF is, save where explicitly contradicted, and that only as strictly necessary, physics as we understand it is canon. You don't like it, go back to watching Buffy the Live-Action Magical Girl.

Anyway.

First, the issue of the engines. So Whedonites tell me—thinking this is a defense, the little darlings!—that the engines are deadly, and used as weapons as per the Kzinti Lesson. Only, that only makes it worse, since people just sit and eat and sleep right next to the engines, and Kaylee and her boyfriend were making out directly underneath it, in the flashback to how they met her. Do they have forcefields? We've established that the engines are not something like a VASIMR rocket, somehow souped up with nonsense (hey, the writers think artificial gravity can negate rest mass, it could've been their defense here)—the engines are a bona fide Kzinti Lesson rocket. They apparently don't understand that such a rocket is also, ipso facto, a deadly radiation source. Or maybe they do understand, to an extent (Reavers/no radiation shielding), but they seem to think radiation is an issue of "it's poisonous if it gets in the atmosphere", rather than "it will cook you like a pickle in the microwave."

And how about the terraforming? Leaving to one side that Earth can't become unlivable in 1000 years, let alone the couple centuries the series seems to posit, Firefly does not involve FTL. So. If they're orbiting Alpha Centauri (and they're almost certainly not), it'd take them a half-century to get there from earth, even at a very respectable .1c. Apparently terraforming finished in 2435, despite the fact it could realistically take millennia; either their tech rivals that of Kiddy Grade, or every planet in that system was suspiciously earthlike to start with.

And then there's how the Alliance tested the drug Pax on Miranda colony, and it turned 99% of the population catatonic, and the other 1% insanely aggressive, making them the Reavers. I'm no expert, but I'm guessing lab tests would've caught that (assuming they used more than 100 subjects). But no, apparently the Alliance's process for new drugs is

1. Drawing board.
2. Full-scale field test.

The Reavers, of course, would not be able to crew ships; they'd kill each other first.

How is it, incidentally, that the Alliance cannot "stop the signal?" Last I checked there was a thing called jamming, not bad at stopping signals. Worse, Whedonites have attempted to justify the laughably conspicuous assassins the Alliance uses, by saying "it has total media control." Really? Because if it did—and it actually is possible, if it controls all the satellites and servers—it could stop the signal, too. Of course, if it controlled all the satellites and servers, it would also control all the things that make their little "tramp freighter" premise possible ("tramp spaceship", of course, actually being about as realistic as "tramp nuclear submarine").

And here's how we avoid these risible pratfalls.

Go ahead, have people making out right on the engine. Just mention Bose-Einstein condensates (they have very weird properties where photons are concerned) and plasma screens. Actually, don't have people anywhere near your ship's engines, but if it comes up, that's how to handle it—technobabble isn't the enemy, random technobabble, a la Trek, is.

Rather than the terraforming, how about setting the whole thing in the Solar System, on space stations? Colonies in Lagrange points, a civil war with Earth...somehow I seem to recall someone has used that idea successfully. If you are gonna do the terraforming...well, actually you shouldn't do terraforming, you should do paraterraforming, i.e. habitat domes. But if for some reason (on a bet or something) you need terraforming, you're going to have to reconcile yourself to a setting with much higher tech, one where "man against the elements" stories simply won't happen.

About Pax: one, use another name, any other name. Two, all they had to say was "the atmosphere of the planet produced a side-effect that didn't show up in the preliminaries". Again, lampshade hanging.

The Reavers: hey genius, use aliens. Seriously. Or reconcile yourself to coming up with a reason for people who actually could crew a spaceship to also be wantonly destructive.

Finally, either the Alliance is actually a Banana Republic, and would need to cover its tracks better than the Operative and Hands of Blue are up to doing, or it can "stop the signal"—and would also never let Kaylee anywhere near an engine room. And if it's the latter—aside from the fact that the whole "tramp freighter" thing just isn't going to work—you need to have characters being very savvy hackers, concealing "the signal" inside other communications, possibly using some old Independent code or something. That'd be much cooler anyway, wouldn't it?