Chaos’n'Coffee

Almost on a whim, after watching Serenity a couple of weeks ago, I spent the last day or so going through the 14 episodes of Firefly.

Now, I’m usually immune to tv series but I’m starting to see a pattern: sci-fi gets me. Battlestar Galactica first, Firefly now (well we should mention Star Trek too, but that’s somehow part of the classics, that layer of shared cultural texture and thus doesn’t really count ;) ).

Weird thing is that they don’t share much, those two series: dark, claustrophobic, conspiracy driven the first, solar, fast paced, more light hearted and reassuring the second.

They don’t share much, I was saying, but starships and a certain fascinating retrò flavour.

So maybe it’s the idea of a somehow simpler life, where the “global village” and the social dance are actually constrained to the decks of a ship in the middle of cosmic void, or maybe it’s the charme of a life always on the move (possibly at faster-than-light speed), or even the theme of exploration of unknown places and cultures, echoes of a more adventurous, younger humanity, still striving to get itself acquanited with its own home planet.

Fact is, stars & ships make my mind spin.

or, as Tennyson puts it:

“[..] Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die. [...]“