Part 3: Each Man Gets The Chance to Be His Own Kind of Hero: What Happened to Farscape and How It Made Me the Writer I Am (Patreon)

Part One 

Part Two 

We were all just children when this essay began, weren’t we? So long ago. A more innocent time…in February.

Well, this is the more personal part. I mean, yeah, I’ll talk about Farscape getting canned, because that’s a real (garbage) thing that really (garbagely) happened in real (garbageful) life, so this beautiful hypercolor story of the 90s would not be complete without something amazing getting punted into the sun by idiots. But I don’t have any special knowledge about the cancellation. I don’t have insights I can share with you beyond what any other fan at the time knew, namely, where to source just an absolute shit-ton of crackers. (Don’t worry, if you didn’t start grinning upon finishing that sentence, you’ll get it soon.)

What I do have is love. Love and memory. Love, and memory, and the future.

When Farscape first aired, I didn’t know I was going to end up a science fiction writer. I didn’t know I was going to end up a writer. I had no intentions that way—sure, I loved to write, but what gothy dreamfae nerdgirl of the late 90s didn’t? I couldn’t make money doing that. It wasn’t safe. Besides, I’d only ever really written poetry, and that really wasn’t the way to get ahead in life. My mother was an academic and professor, and that was, in a general sense, where I figured I’d end up.

And even if I did somehow get something published somewhere…science fiction?

Never happen.

She says with the wicked grin of hindsight.

I couldn’t write science fiction, you see. I wasn’t in STEM, an acronym that didn’t even exist yet. I’d heard all my life that I wasn’t any good at math or science and would never be, from a wide variety of (garbage) sources.

And I couldn’t write science fiction because I was a girl. It was 1999, soon to be 2000. It wasn’t just another world, it was another galaxy. The genre was so thoroughly dominated by men and male perspective, male heroes, male stories. Even stories with female protagonists were mostly by men, who imagined they were only really writing for men. Fantasy was better, but only somewhat. AFAB (another acronym that hadn’t gotten born yet) people who got to write science fiction were special. Ursula K. LeGuin. Connie Willis. Lois McMaster Bujold. A few others, all utter legends. Brilliant women who Made It.

I wasn’t special. I wasn’t brilliant. I wasn’t a legend. I was sitting on a milk crate eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch for dinner out of a borrowed bowl, afraid to go into my bedroom because there were termites everywhere and the landlord kept saying they’d send someone and kept not sending anybody at all.

So you see, I couldn’t ever write science fiction. Science fiction was something to love, not to make. Not for me. That was for people who owned chairs. People who were so smart and wonderful.

And I watched this beautiful show unfold in front of me and I dreamed, not of writing it, but of living it, escaping my dumb termite-toast life into it, because making a story like that was never going to be allowed for someone like me.

(Please don’t take from this that I don’t love fantasy as much, because I do, so terribly much. But fantasy was something that felt…available to me, to my specific self and brain, in a way science fiction simply didn’t then. I was a classicist; writing about witches and magic and prophecies felt achievable. If not an open door, one that was at least ajar.)

And life went on, Friday by Friday, for four years. I graduated, I went to graduate school and then dropped out to get married way too young and in the end, quite briefly, a truly superb life choice I definitely never came to regret with my whole fucking soul. I moved to Japan. I learned to pirate things specifically to keep watching Farscape overseas. I started a blog, back when we still called them blogs and regular IRL people had only just learned the word, and snickered when they said it.

And Farscape got cancelled.

I didn’t even understand what I was reading when it was announced online. Season Four had not only very clearly been set-up for a bigger story in the next season, with all kinds of new plotlines and characters, it ended on perhaps the biggest and most painful goddamned cliffhanger you could possibly imagine. There was just no way it was cancelled after that. Who would do that? It’s fucking demonic. It’s mean.

This was around the time that fans of the other two-syllable F-show in space, Firefly, managed to make enough noise that they got a movie greenlit to wrap up the cancelled series. In the slim window between online fandom being nothing and being everything to a niche show. The internet was just starting to flex its populist muscle, but getting another network or streaming service to pick it up, the current go-to move for lovers of mistreated shows, wasn’t yet possible. Farscape was definitely one of the moments that showed what connecting nerds all over the world through forums, blogs, and Limewire accounts, could actually do.

In this case, raise the dead.

Later…reboot fascism. BUT I DIGRESS.

LET’S FOCUS ON THE GOOD STUFF WE DID WITH OUR CUP OF INTERNET, SHALL WE?

Well, mainly, we all sent boxes of crackers to the SciFi Network’s headquarters (I sent extra-stinky seaweed crackers from Japan and hoped they sat in the sun on the customs dock for awhile) until they gave us a four-episode miniseries to make us stop before they alienated the exact type of people they needed onside to run anything called the SciFi, or Syfy, Network.

And it was a good ending, maybe not what it should’ve been, you can see the scaffolding of the full season arc it was meant to be. But good. They even managed to get a major cast member pregnant and follow it all the way to birth without annoying me to the point of ODing on birth control pills. I generally hate it when a show goes there as it’s usually a sign they don’t know what to do with their female characters so hey, women do babies right?

But of course Farscape goes at it in their weird, warped, bio-punk, outside the box way and I don’t mean to yada yada past it but yada yada yada mpreg is real and it’s canon and it’s spectacular.

And sad. Because it was over. And not everyone lived. And there would probably never be any more ever again, especially after Ben Browder and Claudia Black were brought over to late-stage Stargate to lend their absurd chemistry to the last days of the show. It was over, and through the next many years of science fiction and then fantasy becoming something enormous, something that both brought great acceptance, popularity, and a final realization of nerds and the nerd things we nerd about getting grand serious depictions that everyone and their jock cousins acknowledged as great, but also taken something of the specialness of those niche loves away, the sense of having found a secret jewel that only a few other interesting people knew about, of pop culture not chewing up geek lore and selling it back to us at ten times the price, but often enough a lot less soul, Farscape faded from that group consciousness in a way many other shows of the last pre-modern era of speculative screentime did not.

It was over, and people forgot. You can ask anyone with the most cursory knowledge of What’s Happened Ever in Space Stories about Battlestar Galactica, X-Files, Star Trek TNG, Firefly (which started practically the second Farscape’s gooey heart stopped beating), even Babylon 5 or Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, and 9 times out of 10, they’ll at least know it existed, if not actual fans themselves.

But most people these days have never heard of Farscape at all. God knows why, but it’s rarely-to-never even mentioned when people dream about reboots or spinoffs of old shows (though I don’t think you could possibly replicate the magic without the same cast. Then again, I would also have said that about Babylon 5 and would you look at that…) that deserve a chance at the slick expensive streaming marquee-nostalgia series treatment. No retro Funko Pops or memes or any of the sorts of ways the Children learn about the Deep Lore. and it’s been free on streaming for as long as streaming has been around (yes I know it’s not right this second, don’t yell at me, it’s supposedly coming back shortly). It hasn’t disappeared entirely—the actors still get huge lines at comic-cons and you can often find some merch at the Tower O’ T-Shirts stall. But for as utterly unique and complete a vision as it is, for as far ahead of its time as it is, it seems to have fallen down most people’s memory hole, and not found its way back as so many other less innovative properties have.

And that makes me sad. I don’t really want a reboot—as I said, I can’t think of any actors who would give it the same madness and unselfconscious weirdness of the original cast. But I want people to know it. I want people to see how beautiful it was while it lasted. I want people to see that things like Firefly, BSG, Thor: Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy, even the new slate of Treks, simply do not exist in the forms they are without a show that traveled back in time from the future of science fiction to show the early 2000s how it’s done.

Hence this whole essay the literal length of an actual novella telling you Farscape is good and beautiful and brave and daring and unique and you should try it. You might like crackers, you never know.

But really, none of that endgame stuff is what I wanted to talk about in this last section. That’s for part one! It is depressing and unfortunate. SciFi mistreated the show at every point along the way, ignored it and acted ashamed of it and refused to feed and water it and then kicked it when it was down.

I wish I could tell you I don’t know how that feels. That no author has ever gotten that treatment. That none of us have sat up in the middle of the night, baffled, because the same higher-ups who offered the contract, signed the checks, approved the work, and said it was all gonna be great suddenly vanished when it was time to release the thing, do publicity for it, and get behind the thing they said they wanted in the first place. That very specific bafflement; that very unique pain—but never unique enough.

Sure do wish I could tell you that.

Totally unrelated, did you know I had a novel come out this spring? Like, a whole one. Thicc, even. It’s pretty good and all, maybe it coulda been something.

But I guess not.

AHAHAHA LIFE IS DISAPPOINTMENT AND NEGLECT FROM CORPORATE AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT? PAY ATTENTION TO THAT CANCELLED SHOW, PAST CAT, THAT FEELING’S GONNA COME AROUND AGAIN.

Nah, I didn’t want to talk about any of that stuff. How personal it can feel. How almost precisely like a spouse betraying you it can hit the heart. How much it can take your pride, your confidence, your hopes for the next book, the next season, the next groundbreaking TV show. How much it can steal that next show, or book, right out of the minds that were ready to make it, steal it so wholly it’s as though it never was or will be. Steal optimism. Steal hope.

That is just a plainly miserable thing to have choking on your heart. I don’t even think there is a German word for it, much as that’s always the joke. Maybe Finnish. I’m sure the cast and crew and writers and creators of Farscape felt it. I’m sure most people reading this have too, sometime and somewhere.

You said this thing was beautiful and told me to make it and then you starved it to death in front of me. Fucking…why? Let’s get on a gold spaceship and blast the hell out of here, I have HAD it. Officially.

No, that stuff sucks. It’s a deeply ingrained par tof the experience of creating speculative fiction in any medium, for any audience, at any time during which such a genre was recognized to exist.

But it sucks.

I wanted to tell you nice things.

Mostly.

Mostly that I didn’t realize just how much this one show informed my sensibilities as a science fiction writer until Claudia Black posted her amazing twitter thread approximately one million years ago. My sensibilities and modern SF’s in general. The process of writing this essay has made me see even more how heavily Farscape crushed itself into my being.

I look at Space Opera now and just start laughing, because I’ve even got my big blue girl helping the poor dumb humans figure life out. It got in there so deep I didn’t even notice. There is literally a Looney Tunes bit. When I think of chosen family, that idea film and TV have glommed onto so hard it’s not even a plot point anymore, just a given, I don’t think of Buffy or Trek. I think of Moya and her people. I think of when I was still young enough to long to be one of Moya’s people. The fire hose of pop culture references, the side-by-side combination of comedy and gut-burning tragedy, the bromances, the romances, the sismances, the honesty about politics even when we’re just super busy doing space action and sparkly FX, the women allowed to be anyone, the colors, the lack of grimdark slogging through “realistic” pain that isn’t at all, the sheer risk, the willingness to look stupid if it gets you somewhere brilliant, the willingness to look brilliant if it gets you somewhere stupid, the bonkers imagination, the interrogation of how SF does and did and will do things, the utter shameless sincerity, in the best of all possible ways, the longing, the endless endless longing that makes story out of need.

I am nothing if not sincere. If not shameless. If not leaking longing at all times from all pores.

I see now that Farscape was one of my artistic parents, and I love it so much more than I did when I started trying to explain to you why I love it, AND I LOVED IT ABSURDLY HARD THEN, TOO.

And part of that original thread that inspired all this was about real, incarnated parenting too. The gooey, bodyhorror-filled, hierarchy-inverting, weird, inappropriate, colorful, shamelessly sincere one. It broke my heart in half to see the Claudia Black talking about how invisible you can suddenly feel when you have a child, especially when you have a child while working in entertainment. How it can feel like you fell off a cliff and nobody noticed. How it can feel like you died. How judged you suddenly are, and of course you’ve always been judged as an AFAB person daring to breathe and exist and take up any space at all, but now, despite everything in society telling you your whole life that you definitely should have a child, once you finally do, that same society considers you and your character arc completed and ghosts like it never knew you at all.

And how brutal that can feel when you’re also neurodiverse.

I was not ready to hear those things form my hero. I was way too used to hearing them from my own head. But humans have this funny thing where they can get far more upset about something happening to a person they love and look up to than they do about that exact same thing happening to themselves.

How could Claudia Black ever be invisible to anyone? You can’t ignore legends. It’s not allowed.

But of course it is. It so sadly is. And not just allowed, but encouraged and enforced by thousands of years of bullshit.

And it happens to most of us, maybe to all of us, to different extents. The disappearing act of giving birth and early childhood. Watching the world and feeling like it’s passing you by. And if you work in any kind of culture-creating profession, feeling like that culture is moving on without you and not even noticing your lack. Sometimes that's just a feeling, of course. But sometimes it isn't. Like you’re on the other side of the portal-hall in that one episode called Picture If You Will, trapped in a place where you can see everything upside-down and backwards and way bigger than it really is, but can’t touch it. Any of it.

Like you were a beautiful weird wonderful show that suddenly got cancelled for no good reason at all. Like you worked so hard to make something amazing and the system made it impossible for anyone to actually see it.

Something like that.

And maybe you emerge and maybe you don’t, but worst of all it isn’t really even entirely up to you whether the pain and work and love and wonder and discovery and strangeness of it all is something you can grow back from as your child grows, or whether it does a very Hollywood trick of re-casting you as a collection of relations to other people: mother, wife, daughter, sibling, carer. Whether crates of crackers arrive at the studio or just in the creases of your couch where they propagate like nano-bots forever. Whether circumstances and societal structures allow you to come back. To reboot. But there’s no word for your familial relation to yourself, and so many structures loom out there to carve everything away but the services we can provide to others, preferably as quietly as possible. 

Oh you dumb frelling world, you can do that to me, but not to Aeryn Sun.

One of the things I loved about Farscape was how differently it treated pregnancy, not as a crippling, terrible thing that sidelined a female character, or “completed” her arc because no one could think of anything else for a woman to do but get knocked up, but something badass and amazing that more than just one slowly-invisibling person could carry and bear. I loved how differently it could treat pregnancy because there are literally no human women in the main cast, only aliens. That is one of the gifts of science fiction: to imagine how different even something as common as having a kid could be, if only everything else was different too.

And I loved that people cared enough to try to write a pregnancy in a way most screen science fiction was not then, and honestly kind of still isn’t, even considering.

I wish we could all have a daring science fiction experience of all this. I wish anyone with real power in the real world cared enough to try to imagine a way for women to both fully exist and reproduce or not as they chose. It seems a very fantastical and faraway thing, and further away now than it ever has.

What I loved and still love about this weird bronzey puppet show is just that: that it tried to be different. It risked being different. Even abused and mistreated and ignored as it was, it never stopped striving to be entirely itself without compromise, and to find, out there in the scary unknown, something new.

And all these years later, I try to be different, too. I try to risk. Even ignored or mistreated or cancelled or unpublicized, I try to be something new.

I try so fucking hard to live up to the legacy of a short-lived, unceremoniously-cancelled television show from the 90s.

So we arrive at the end. FINALLY. An end that can’t be cancelled because I run this show, if not much else.

Farscape was good, even if not many people saw. You are good, even if not many people see. And on good days, so am I.

It’s an awful lot of words to say I love Farscape and it made me who I am please watch it. But sometimes you need a lot. Four seasons and a miniseries, even. Sometimes a thing is too big to say simply. I grew up to be a weird gooey bronzey often-inappropriate poorly-publicized highly-emotional slyly queer crazy looney tunes writer because sometimes fan-love is as big a factor in the person you turn out to be than any physical gene sequence. A weird gooey bronzey often-inappropriate poorly-publicized highly-emotional slyly queer crazy looney tunes writer who fell off that same cliff of invisibility and child-rearing and is still trying to claw her way back up so slowly that it’s taken this long to finish one stupid giant essay, only finishing right now in late summer as my beloved baby closes the lid of my laptop every five minutes.

Life is science fiction; science fiction is life. Always was, and always will be.

The important thing is the trying. The trying to get somewhere new. Trying to get somewhere fascinating. Trying to get somewhere where true strangeness thrives.

And bringing everybody you love along, laughing about crackers in one grand, huge, golden ship of life.