If you enjoyed the Firefly television show and the Serenity movie, you may be interested to know that science fiction and fantasy author Steven Brust has written a novel about the intrepid crew of the Serenity, called My Own Kind of Freedom. Interestingly, he doesn’t have permission to use the Firefly intellectual property as he notes on the back of the title page:
Firefly and the Firefly universe are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Inc. and 20th Century Fox. They are lovingly used without permission.
The novel is available under a creative commons license, and I’m curious to see if the property owners will take any action. In the meantime however, you can download it for free in Microsoft Word or PDF formats from Words Words Words. The novel will be available in more formats later.
In a Boing Boing posting about the novel, Cory Doctorow describes a discussion he had with Brust:
He talked to me about this book last year, saying that he just had to write it — that it sat up in his head one day and demanded to be let out.
This makes the book even more interesting to me. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to read it on my (non-jailbroken) iPod Touch because I am not accustomed to reading long works on my computer, nor am I interested in becoming accustomed to it.
I just hope the story is pre-Serenity. It simply would not be the same without Wash and Shepherd.
And, you can guarantee that if Brust wrote it, it’ll be a good read. His Vlad Taltos series is one of my favorites.
I’m going to watch the series and movie again before I read the story. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them and have been wanting to go though them again.