Firefly Novel: The Ghost Machine by James Lovegrove
I have read all the Firefly books written by James Lovegrove and I have enjoyed all of them. They feel like they should, episodes of a TV show that I love. They don’t outdo the things that would have happened on the show, and it gets the characters just about perfect. That said, if they continue down the path they are on, I don’t know if I am going to continue to read them.
That may seem strange because it is. In almost every way the books are exactly what I wanted, but it is in part because it is giving me too much of what I want and I’m not sure how much longer it can go because as much fun as these books are they rely too much on the TV show. The references and nods to the show are constant, and its willingness to stray away from what the show already created is far too limited.
From this point on there will have to be some minor spoilers.
Each of the books has to me felt like a specific episode of Firefly. And this one feels like one of my favorite episodes, Out of Gas. In that episode you got flashbacks for every member of the crew filling in gaps about their lives. In The Ghost Machine you don’t exactly get flashbacks, but you get visions of peoples’ lives.
This book is set between the TV show and the movie. The basic premise is that the crew of The Firefly has been hired by Badger to pick up a package. But once they get there, Mal decides that it’s too dangerous. But Jane wants to take it anyway and so brings it onto the ship and hides it in his bunk. The device is created to pacify people and gives everyone in the ship visions of their ideal life.
It’s an interesting view of each of the characters and one that becomes even more interesting as the story goes on and this is one of the few places where you get something that feels fresh. And even then, it’s mostly things we already knew. We see Jane’s mother and brother and Kaylee’s parents, along with more of River and Simon’s family. But everything is in their mind and every scene feels as if they tried to cram in one more line or character from the show. For example, Wash in his dream is rich, so he knows Atherton Wing, a character that didn’t need to be there. But there were also characters made sense. There was a moment in Serenity Valley and some characters we’ve seen before return, and having both Inara and Shepard book in people’s visions makes sense, but for every reasonable reference there are two or three that seem to exist to remind you of the show and eventually that starts to be more distracting than fun.
This entire series of books by James Lovegrove are a lot of fun. It’s great to have what feels like a new episode of Firefly every year. But if it’s going to continue, then it has to move beyond reminding you of episodes of a TV show without that many episodes and build its own lore and one major thing it could do to help that is to move the story forward to past the movie. And while they may have reasons they haven’t or can’t do that, you can only tread water when I know what will happen so long before it becomes frustrating. But until then, this is still the best you will get, and it’s pretty good.
