We are excited to announce tickets for our main event are now available for purchase!
Tickets are $18.00 (online price) and are available from Dramatix
Please spread the shortlink: bit.ly/csts2011
And the QR code:
Tickets are limited, so it’s best not to wait until the day (when they’ll be $20). Please remember to print out and bring your tickets with you on the day, it just makes getting everyone into the venue that bit easier.
For details on where and when, see the event post.
Don’t forget Thursday is Firefly rewatch night!
We’re up to Ariel and Out Of Gas, so break out the DVD, grab a pizza, get online and watch with us, if you can’t make it to this week’s venue. If you would like to come along to the designated venue, log on to the forum and PM this week’s host for details.
The Melbourne Science Fiction Club is holding a Whedonverse night on 15 April, which will be hosted by us! So come along for a lively night of Whedon fun!
There’ll be some very cool videos screened, a shiny round of trivia with cool prizes, and lots more … you won’t want to miss it!
MSFC meets at:
St. David’s Uniting Church Hall
74 Melville Road, West Brunswick
Hall opens at 8pm for a 9pm start (usually finishes by 11pm)
(Melway ref 29 C5, or catch a 55 tram from William Street in the city, to tram stop 36).
Friends, visitors and guests are welcome – gold coin fee on your first visit, and $5 door fee for second and subsequent visits. The Kitchen serves hot and cold drinks and snack foods for a small cost.
PopMatters.com continue putting the spotlight on Joss Whedon lately, with a series of articles that are both fun and facinating.
In this article, Leanne McRae presents her thoughts on A Postcolonial Provocation: ‘Serenity’.
“As far as Firefly is concerned, that will always be unfinished business. Serenity was a Band-Aid on a sucking flesh wound. I think every day about the scenes that I’ll never get to shoot and how badass they were. It’s nice to know that people still care about Firefly but it’s actual grief that I feel. It’s not something you get over, it’s just something you learn to live with.”
—Joss Whedon, SFX World of Whedon, 2011Joss Whedon evocatively conveys the mourning he still experiences when his short-lived series Firefly was cancelled by network executives in 2003. The demise of this program created a special moment in popular culture when something unexpected emerged from the crisis. What was created activated a transformative dialogue between the postcolonial and the popular that generated space for questioning and representing processes of power that normally remain unseen. Serenity operates in unclear spaces of meaning as it was conceived as a brokered attempt to extend the life of a severely curtailed plot envisioned for Firefly.
Through the series, Whedon would have been able to map out the complexities of characters and plot trajectories to provide challenging televisual terrain for a new generation of TV fans post-Buffy and -Angel. Instead, Whedon had to make do with the temporal compressions of cinematic viewing to do justice both to the narrative and to the characters who provided the paradoxes and paradigms of story motivation. As a result, Serenity was composed of half-truths and conflicted contexts where the spaces for unconventional and unruly meanings were able to emerge from the diegesis. These meanings offer insight into the political trajectories of colonization and the creation of Empire that are difficult to control.
Click here to read the full article.
PopMatters.com continue putting the spotlight on Joss Whedon lately, with a series of articles that are both fun and facinating.
In this article, Chris Colgan explores The Death of Utopia: ‘Firefly’ and the Return to Human Realism in TV Sci-Fi.
Science fiction television before the year 2000 was remarkably uniform in its view of humanity becoming a somewhat idyllic society in the future. True, wars still existed, but most other problems that plagued mankind in the current era had disappeared from these universes. Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Babylon 5, and even seaQuest DSV all showed a future where mankind had, for the most part, eliminated poverty and disease from the social structure and people lived in a clean, almost utopian environment, as long as war was not in the picture. Consequently, most of the television franchises during the 1990s, Star Trek chief among them, also showed a future where social classes had disappeared, and the baser desires of people for acquisition and wealth had been suppressed.
While this vision did help represent a better future and gave people aspirations for such a future, many of these series omitted the human struggle against one’s own environment and the desire to improve one’s standing through possessions and material worth. This is one reason the Star Trek franchise has received some criticism in the past, for having human characters that are nearly devoid of current-day motivations, and for depicting characters that did have such motivations as either wholly evil, comic relief, or inconsequentially minor.
Joss Whedon, however, changed all of this with Firefly. In one fell swoop in 2002, he took the concept of the human utopia in science fiction, tossed it aside, and revolutionized the view of the human future on television. Whedon did not want a future without struggle against environment, nor did he want humanity to be without social classes and the allure of the almighty dollar. Thus, he created Firefly as an antithetical foil to Star Trek—a universe where power was still in one’s wallet, where corruption and deception retained their strongholds in the highest levels of society, and a man would (and actually could) still bleed to achieve his dreams. Science fiction was forever changed by this, and it is why Firefly should be one of the names listed among the greatest science fiction series of all time.
PopMatters.com have been putting the spotlight on Joss Whedon lately, with a series of articles that are both fun and facinating.
In this article, Candice E West explores Heroic Humanism and Humanistic Heroism in Shows of Joss Whedon.
For those who believe that popular culture, and especially popular narratives, can be an important place to explore meaningful ideas, Joss Whedon has been something of a patron saint. Whedon’s focus on female strength tends to be the most visible part of his work—this has much to do with his self-professed feminism. In what follows, I’ll be looking at a set of somewhat different, though not wholly unrelated aspects of his life and work. The first is his humanism, which I will then relate to his ideas of heroism. Given the breadth of his creative output, I’ll focus on two examples, Firefly/Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’ll suggest that in addition to telling good stories that raise important issues about gender, they’re both also thoughtful considerations of heroism in contemporary humanistic terms; specifically, both re-examine the relationship between the hero and the larger community.
Click here to read the full essay.
SFX interviews Serenity Architectural Cutaways artist John R Mullany:
You may not recognise John R Mullaney by name, but it’s likely that you’ll recognise his Serenity Architectural Cutaways poster set, available to purchase on QMx. No Browncoat should be without this poster set – each one is a true tribute to the beloved Joss Whedon franchise.
The highly talented John Mullaney is one of the UK’s leading architectural technical illustrators, and lucky for us geeks, has a love for science fiction. Before the release of the Serenity cutaways, John was an illustrator for the Star Wars Incredible Cross Section series for Lucasbooks and has also had work published with Dorling Kindersley for their Doctor Who Visual Dictionary and Batmobile Owners Manual. And if you were at Atlanta’s DragonCon in 2006 you might have seen him showcasing his amazing cross-section artwork of the Dropship from James Cameron’s Aliens. He also later that year painstakingly produced the Terminator Endoskeleton. The limited edition collectable prints for purchase on his site will make any sci-fi fan drool; it’s obvious that John has a passion for producing awe-inspiring illustrations.
The interview also contains some wonderful images and videos of the Serenity cutaways.
Read more: Interview with Serenity Cutaways Artist John R Mullaney
OMGrey analyses the strength of Inara Serra:
Inara is a companion. In the world of Firefly, this is similar to a Geisha or a Courtesan, a high-class, well-educated sex worker. Although Mal seems to take pleasure in calling her “whore” and other such misogynistic attacks on her choice of career, as the audience gets to know the characters it becomes clear that he says these things in order to remind himself and attempt to keep an emotional distance from her, because he is deeply in love with her. And she is deeply in love with him. The tension between the two is undeniable. Then the question remains: why don’t they ever get together?
The easy answer, of course, is that Joss Whedon is a sadist, which he is when it comes to romantic relationships in his stories, or that the sexual tension is necessary for plot or conflict purpose. Certainly the above two reasons are true, but the more important answer lies within the characters themselves. In fact, it is what helps define those characters.
Love is powerful. Sexual desire is powerful. Combined, they are virtually impossible to deny, especially when one is in such close proximity with one’s beloved day after day after day. Additionally, Inara and Mal are normally in the middle of space for weeks on end without seeing anyone other than the other members of Serenity’s crew.
Only someone with amazing strength could deny such a strong attraction and deep love. Day, after day, after day.
Click here to read the full article
Serenity will be screened on the new channel Eleven at 8:30pm tonight!
Summer Glau will also be gracing our television screens with 7Mate screening her new series “The Cape”. The series premiered on Friday 1 April, and will be shown in the Friday 8:30-10:30pm slot.
Thanks to Fannish Inqusition for the heads up!
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