Oh yeah… the *book*! Steven Brust’s Firefly novel reviewed

Oh yeah… the book! Steven Brust’s Firefly novel reviewed

So hey, Steven Brust’s Firefly novel is fabulous! You should read it instantly. (It’s called My Own Kind of Freedom and is available for free download here.) I love that moment when you get a few pages into a work and realize you can relax: This author is going to treat you right. Plus Brust is clearly a passionate fan who knows Whedon’s world inside and out and was chomping at the bit to write something worthy of it. So no worries about, you know, Zoe turning up in a crinoline or something.

Reading it, I was reminded of the big problem that dogged the show: It just had too dang many characters. Yeah, yeah, I know — heresy! But think about how little we ever learned about Zoe, Wash and Kaylee. Whedon has an uncanny ability to make a character live and breathe with just a few miraculously economical lines of dialogue, but ultimately it’s still 9 characters packed into a 40-minute show. Buffy and Angel never had more than 5 major characters, and you could feel the difference.

(I think Whedon really felt this problem when he was writing the movie. He gave Book and Jayne short shrift — tellingly, Book wasn’t even on the ship.)

Brust seems to have thought about this problem and vowed to take it head-on. My Own Kind of Freedom is intensely character-driven, sometimes at the expense of plot. He switches the point of view from character to character with each chapter — a feat that must have required prolonged contemplation of each character’s history, motives and styles of speech. As a result, we get the luxurious pleasure of inhabiting the consciousness of remote and unpredictable figures like Zoe and Jayne. Of course, River is the best one!

Oh yeah, Inara and Book aren’t in it at all. See what I mean about too many characters? Even a 50,000-word novel can’t contain them all.

This book has its problems – we could do with a bit more about Mal’s history on the planet, for one. But they don’t matter because, you know — free!
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