Archive for the ‘firefly’ Category
Hugo nominated novella: The Last Stand of The California Browncoats, by Mira Grant
Posted on: July 9, 2013
- In: comic con | firefly | Hugo Awards | Mira Grant
- 12 Comments
Let’s talk about some Hugo Nominated novellas! click back a day or two to see the whole list, and to click on novellas I’ve already reviewed. Ready for the zombie apocalypse?
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, by Mira Grant
What do you get when you mix a Comic-Con with the zombie apocalypse? You get Mira Grant’s San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats. If you’re not familiar with Joss Whedon’s breakout show Firefly, fans often refer to themselves as Browncoats in reference to the long brown coat the main character wears in honor of his military service. If you’re not familiar with what a Comic-Con is, we got bigger problems. But that’s another blog post.
A long brown coat, like that!
It almost sounds like the beginning of a comedy – cosplayers and merchants attend Comic-Con, and give the zombie apocalypse a beat down! But Grant’s novella is anything but a comedy. This is what Mira Grant does: she grabs you by the feels, and does horrible things to you.
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats is a stand alone novella that can be read as a prequel to her Newsflesh Zombie trilogy (the third book in that series, Blackout, is nominated for best novel this year). You don’t need to have read any of the Newsflesh books to enjoy The Last Stand . . .
The Last Stand . . . is mostly told as a flashback. It’s thirty years after the event that irreparably changed the world, and journalist Mahir Gowda is interviewing an aging Lorelei Tutt, the only survivor of the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con. She doesn’t want to talk about what happened, but he needs her memories. They talk about other footage from the event, other evidence, and what she witnessed. Along with Lorelei’s story in flashback, we get the POVs from an ensemble of characters who are attending San Diego Comic-Con, including a television actress, a blind journalist, some merchants from the dealer room, and a couple on their honeymoon, among others.
No one is the wiser when Lorelei is sulkily helping her parents and their friends unload merchandise for their booth in the dealer room at the Comic-Con. Fed up with her attitude, her parents send her back to the hotel to have a nap, or a bath, or whatever teenagers need to stop being total brats. The rest of the adults continue setting up the booth and trading geek culture quotes back and forth, and generally annoy their less good natured neighbors.
Elsewhere on the Con Floor, actress Elle Riley is desperately trying to get to her panel, with or without the help of her idiotic handler. Fans ask for autographs, squee at celebrities, compliment costumes, shop for fake weapons, whine about the lack of wifi, try to find the bathrooms. Just a regular day at Comic-Con, right?
Until someone starts coughing. And then someone starts screaming, because the biting and chewing has begun. And then the lights go out. Lorelei’s parents are able to contact her via walkie talkie, but it gets harder and harder to insulate her from the worst of what’s happening inside the locked down convention center. Things get bad, and then they get worse, and then they become unimaginably horrific.
Hello, Captain Tightpants
Posted on: February 18, 2011
- In: firefly | Joss Whedon | scifi | serenity | Uncategorized
- 9 Comments
Everything I need to know about life I learned from Joss Whedon’s show Firefly. I’ll admit, I was late to the party, seeing it on DVD after the fact, and that it was my husband who originally said “honey, you have GOT to see this!!!”. But really, Firefly is one of the best shows ever to grace the small screen, it’s a western scifi dramedy romance action, and when it ran, Fox had no idea what to do with it so they ran the episodes out of order and then canceled it.
Starring Nathan Fillion (@nathanfillion), Morena Baccarin, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau, Adam Baldwin, Ron Glass, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite (@jewelstaite), and Sean Maher, have any 14 episodes ever had a greater cult following?
Science Channel has picked up the rights and will be showing Firefly in it’s entirety (hopefully in the right order) along with some little extras after each episode. Honestly, the extras sound a little cheesy and unnecessary, but I ain’t complainin’. So mark your calendars for March 6th at 8pm to see the full 2 hour pilot and weekly episodes in the correct order of some of the best science fiction ever filmed.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re in luck because you know what they say about your first time.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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