Firefly ran for fourteen episodes and still gets quoted more often than shows that made a hundred. The reason is a writing decision: Joss Whedon put a cargo ship with nine people aboard at the centre and let the plot arrive afterwards. The jobs exist to make the crew talk. Cowboy Bebop had done the same a few years earlier with four bounty hunters and a dog.

In novels that model has a longer tradition than television suggests. These five cross it in different decades and registers.

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers (2014)

The Wayfarer punches tunnels through spacetime for the Galactic Commons. Aboard: a human captain, a reptilian pilot, a doctor who is also the cook, an AI that some of the crew treat as a person, and a new clerk with forged papers whose narrative job is to have everything explained to her.

Chambers gives whole chapters to dinners, arguments and paperwork. The real twist lands when you notice the tunnelling work is the last thing you care about. This is the book closest to Firefly in emotional architecture, and probably the one most aware of it.

2. All Systems Red, Martha Wells (2017)

A security android has disabled the module that enforces its obedience and could now do anything at all. What it does is watch space soap operas and try to avoid conversation. It has named itself Murderbot, and it comes rented out with the equipment to a survey team on a remote planet.

Wells builds affection backwards. Her narrator finds the crew unbearable, and within a hundred and fifty pages is risking decommissioning for people whose names it barely keeps straight. Hugo and Nebula, and a series still running.

3. Gateway, Frederik Pohl (1977)

Gateway is a hollow asteroid full of abandoned alien ships. They work, nobody knows how, and each has preset courses to unknown destinations. You can come back rich. Or not come back. Robinette Broadhead signs on because on Earth he mines oil shale and has nothing else ahead of him.

Pohl alternates the voyage with Rob’s sessions with an automated psychoanalyst many years later, and the second thread explains why this wealthy man cannot sleep. The crew here is a sentence to be served: four or five people sealed in a capsule that will not tell them where it is going. Hugo, Nebula, Campbell and Locus.

4. Startide Rising, David Brin (1983)

The Streaker is a Terran ship crewed by uplifted dolphins, raised to intelligence by humans, plus a few humans and a chimpanzee. It has found something half the galaxy wants, and it has crash-landed on an ocean world while the major galactic powers fight above it for the right to capture it.

Brin writes the dolphins as difficult colleagues. They have dialects, hierarchies and breakdowns under pressure, and part of the crew regresses as conditions worsen. Hugo and Nebula.

5. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

A cylindrical object fifty kilometres long enters the Solar System. Commander Norton’s Endeavour is the only ship positioned to reach it before it swings past the Sun and leaves for good.

Clarke gives his characters no great interior drama, and the choice does specific work: the crew is a group of competent professionals doing their jobs well inside something they will never understand. The coolness of the prose is what makes the object enormous. Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Jupiter and the British Science Fiction Award.

And then

H.O.M.S., the space opera trilogy I wrote for Demy Publishing, works the same ground. The novels were written in Italian and are also available in English translation.

The Blue Whale is a freighter on the Earth-Mars run, with a record of zero incidents and a crew of two: Rey commanding and Ampy as copilot. The story had no plans for them. They are pulled in because they are in the wrong place when an attack destroys Internodal Station Three, and from that point the ship becomes home to a group nobody assembled. Marvin Hale, an Inclusive Police officer called back to investigative duty after years on ordinary patrol. Asad, of the Arab Consortium secret service, who performs a cynicism that is not really his. Blondie, a second-generation Homs who was running a shift in a lunar mine a few days earlier.

The Solar System of the novels is colonised and stratified. The Homs, Homo Origenis Mutatae Sapiens, are humans modified with physical or aesthetic capacities well outside the normal range, and a vocabulary has grown around them: the Inclusive Police, the Freak Side district, and the word «normo», which the Homs use for unmodified Sapiens.

The trilogy is complete and available on Amazon, including Kindle Unlimited: Phase One: Space Conspiracy.

If this list was useful, the blog also has books like Altered Carbon and books like The Expanse.

Background photo in the featured image: NASA, ESA / NASA Goddard (Hubble reveals heart of Lagoon Nebula)