New Series
POSTED BY: SpaceGeneral
UPDATED: Saturday, May 29, 2004 02:29
VIEWED: 16802
PAGE 7 of 7
I always thought the worms in Dune were native to Arrakis. Since you've read the book in more detail, tell me about how the worms came to be. I'd be fascinated to learn of it. Was it a terraforming effort gone awry? "These worms will help make rich topsoil... OH MY GOD!!!"
--Ant
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Perhaps Spacegeneral would be happier watching a Reality TV Series: there are precious few humans on them, and they tend to get whittled down with each episode.
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spacegeneral, the show was cancelled prematurely. much information about the firefly universe did not have a chance to trickle down to the viewers.
that being said: you claim to enjoy science fiction. are you aware of any hypothetical terraforming in any other science fiction story that would allow the survival of anything on the planet before terraforming took place? because i don't.
i assume that these worlds in the firefly universe did at one point support alien "life" in probably the sense of grass and algae and whatnot. however, all indigenous life was destroyed in the terraforming process. that is what terraforming does. every science fiction story i know that hypothesized terrforming admits that it destroys everything that was originally there. including any alien "cattle" or intelligent beings.
now if you want to actually be serious, there is an obvious and good reason for a lack of aliens in this story. besides the above, which more than anything is an explanaiton within the story framework of why not, the real reason is this:
this story is about people. human beings.
relateable characters who, when put in an unfamiliar, new, original setting, remain realistic. in fact more so. the idea behind all science fiction, all fiction in general, is to reveal through story thruths about the human condition.
now, other stories have chosen to invent aliens as one tool to reveal truth of the human condition, in a sense expanding the idea that not only are all genders, races, and ages of humans beings fundamentally alike, and therefore all intelligent life forms must also share these fundamental truths.
i find this foolish, personally. science fiction is allowed one great leap of imagination and then must constrain itself within its own universal rules. usually scifi claims to be based on science. ok. a future, obeying all the laws of science.
we may not be alone in the unverse. given. what are the chances these others will be bipedal. have two eyes. breathe air, no! breathe at all? close to none, in my opinion.
this leads to "aliens" being makeup-heavy metaphors for peoples we are actually already familiar with. this is a shame. romulans aren't the japanese from world war 2 nor should they ever have been. the klingons aren't the russians from the cold war nor african americans of today nor should they ever have substituted for them. it's false. jar jar binks should never have been made into a jamaican. it's superficial. it's cliche. it's not "true".
a firefly universe with no aliens is a truth. both within its own fictional framework, and the truth that is communicated to the audience through story.
i, personally, don't choose to relate to the green, voluptious alien macking on captain kirk. i do relate to human beings circumventing authority, trying to make a living, falling in and out of love, battling mental illness, trying to keep secrets, etc.
maybe that's me. you like aliens. good thing for you you have plenty of other choices in today's world saturated with fiction of all kinds, including the science variety.
a wise man once told me, through a device in my living room, that the world don't move to the beat of just one drum. amen, brother.
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All I have to say is that when Joss, in his infinite wisdom, sees fit to give us a "new" show, (and when some network is run by people with even a little bit of wisdom who see fit to actually air it), I suspect quite strongly that it will have none of these characters in it. That it will not be set on a space ship. That it will not be a watered-down redo of Firefly, but something new and different and wonderful, that none of us can begin to predict, and that we will embrace none the less, as we have with Firefly, Buffy, and Angel. Because if there is one thing I have learned from a collective 12 1/2 seasons of Joss TV, it's that I'm never going to be able to guess what he'll come up with next.
Equally, I believe that when Firefly returns to us, in the BDM and beyond, that it will still have Zoe and Wash, Book, Inara, Simon and River, Kaylee, Jayne and Mal. And that there will be no aliens, bovine or otherwise.
BTW, Shiksa, I love your description of "Reality" TV.
Delia
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ANYA: Don't be ridiculous. Martha Stewart isn't a demon. She's a witch.
XANDER: Please, she-- Really?
ANYA: Of course. Nobody could do that much decoupage without calling on the powers of darkness.
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
I always thought the worms in Dune were native to Arrakis. Since you've read the book in more detail, tell me about how the worms came to be. I'd be fascinated to learn of it. Was it a terraforming effort gone awry? "These worms will help make rich topsoil... OH MY GOD!!!"
--Ant
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
You have to read the books after the original. There are quite a few. I'm not sure if they mention anything about the past that leads up to Dune in the original. Its been a long time since I read it. But the Dune books afterwards go into more detail about the universe that Dune is set in.
But I believe it has something to do with the spice that makes the worms what they are and that help the spice reach the top of the soil and it was later found out that spice has these special properties. I'll have to read up on it again. Give me a few days.
Oh, and play Cantr II at www.cantr.net.
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