The Great Celestial Ship of the North
"Production came to an end
on Buffy, Season 3 [1999],
and over my Summer vacation,
I was reading
The Killer Angels,
about the survivors of
Gettysburg, and it immediately
made me think of the
Millennium Falcon.
You know, as
most things do."
— Joss Whedon
"The great thing about writing
Science-Fiction, is that it's basically
like writing everything in History
that interests you --
You can take from anything, because
every piece of History is a piece
of Human Nature.
It's Season Three of Buffy, I get my two-week vacation,
and the second book I read is 'The Killer Angels',
which is about the survivors of The Battle of Gettysburg;
and right after that, I sort of become obsessed
with the idea of Life on The Frontier, and that
of course immediately made me
think of the Millennium Falcon --
because, of course, most things do.
I wanted to tell a story about
People who are Living in Space,
but not living in grandeur, and not living in great portent,
but who are more The Fringe -- people that the Enterprise
would have just BLOWN right past, and never noticed --
Here we are, five hundred years
in The Future, and we've used up
The Earth; where once we had new countries
to explore, we have new planets; we've terraformed them
all to be useful for Human Life, and it's a vision
of The World, more or less as it is today....
The one thing I did that I thought
was a little utopian, was the idea
that since America and China
are the two greatest superpowers
on The Planet, that once we went out,
forward and created new planets, that
they had merged into the beginnings of
The Alliance, and that is why everybody
who's American, speaks Chinese.
That these two cultures actually settle
their differences and become, you know,
one great superpower, feels very,
very real, because that's what's going on
right now -- power-companies are
merging into more and more
powerful conglomerates.
As the more advanced cultures
become more homogenised and
spread out into the other worlds,
where Life is tougher, and where
people are more diverse,
there's conflict.
I was dealing with the idea of
a Civil War, and every building, and --
people who had lost The War;
This is something that's, you know,
a big part of American fiction --
There's very little American Fiction
about the people who WON The War,
about The North....
The people we all like to be identified with,
we're all interested in, The South because
They LOST -- and We love Losers.
We love a sense of loss in American Fiction, and
even though Mal wasn't fighting for Slavery,
I'm happy to say, he is someone who fought at a time
when he was just crushed
by the opposing force,
and it changed him --
The forming of The Alliance causes A Power
so great, that there's NO WAY it can justly rule
over the entire universe, and so I'm dealing
with the people on the fringes, who are going
"You don't belong here, you don't belong on our soil;
Yes, you guys are progressive, you've got great Medicine,
incredible Healthcare-plan, you've got Freedom of Religion,
you've got all these great things, but we don't have that stuff
and some of our customs are arcane, and some of them are
maybe a little barbaric but We have
A Right to be ourselves --"
And that's where The Utopian Vision stops,
because whenever you create some kind of Utopia,
you find something ugly working underneath it,
and that's basically what this movie is about --"
