Why are there no Firefly novels?

[OmahaStar]

why don't you write one?

He could write one as fanfiction, but he couldn't get it professionally published or legally sell it.

Are we forgetting all those books where that exact thing has happened? Fans who wrote Trek or Wars books and published them, despite being nothing more than fanfiction? Amazon certainly doesn't seem to care whether something is licensed or not, until Paramount/Lucas finds out about each specific incident and complains. Until then ...

Granted, the reviews of each of those have been pretty dreadful.

 

[Christopher]

Are we forgetting all those books where that exact thing has happened? Fans who wrote Trek or Wars books and published them, despite being nothing more than fanfiction? Amazon certainly doesn't seem to care whether something is licensed or not, until Paramount/Lucas finds out about each specific incident and complains. Until then ...

Granted, the reviews of each of those have been pretty dreadful.

Like I said, he couldn't legally sell it. Amazon is too big to keep track of every last thing it sells, so sometimes people are able to get away with such flagrantly illegal sales until they're caught. But that's certainly not something we should encourage anyone to do.

 

[ConRefit79]

Why are there no Firefly novels? I know there are graphic novels, but I don't care for graphic novels. Is it because the industry doesn't believe there is a market or is it some kind of licensing issue?

why don't you write one?

I wish I had the time to work on a novel. I have original ideas I would like to try and write, but haven't made the time to do it. I would like to at least to try and get to the outline process. But I'm not sure what an outline should include or the format.

 

[Kegg]

Look how well Doctor Who novels are doing, and they've even recruited the likes of Michael Moorcock, Stephen Baxter, and Brian Aldiss (for a short story), with the widespread hope of Neil Gaiman doing a novelisation of The Doctor's Wife (which at least report wasn't off the table).

Doctor Who is a cultural touchstone in England, has existed for decades, is fairly widely known, and rather aggressively merchandized. In those terms I guess you could call it the British equivalent of say, Star Trek (which last I checked does have a reasonably healthy media-tie-in novel line).

You know that said:

Imagine George RR Martin doing a Firefly novel (OK, maybe not...)

Well one might be on to something. I don't know how Martin feels about Firefly, but I know Orson Scott Card is a fan of the series.

And for some reason I recall one reading an interview - many, many years ago - with Joss Whedon where he expressed the statement that he had a very controlling interest in all aspects of the Buffy franchise, but then admitted he had no idea what the novelisations were doing - that there could be anti-abortion Buffy novels for all he knew.

Probably an unrelated thought, but then again maybe when Whedon did Firefly he wanted more oversight in the whole novelization business.

 

[James Swallow]

Interesting to see this thread pop up after so long...

A few years ago, I was asked to moderate a panel about this very subject at a UK Firefly/Serenity convention. At the time, I spoke briefly to Nathan Fillion, who was on record as saying he enjoyed KRAD's Serenity novelisation; he told me he would have loved to see more...but alas Joss Whedon declined the opportunity to let the book line proceed.

While researching the panel, I put together this (probably incomplete) list of authors who, at the time, had either pitched or expressed an interest in pitching for the Firefly/Serenity tie-ins...

James Swallow; Keith DeCandido; Terri Osborne; Chris Roberson; Karen Miller; Steven Brust; Laura Ann Gilman; Jamie Chambers & Margaret Weis; Aaron Rosenberg & David Honigsberg; Susan Wright; Greg Cox; Robert Vardeman; Nancy Holder; Max Allan Collins; Christina York & J.Steven York.

 

[OmahaStar]

Terri Osborne doing a Firefly novel? I would have paid good money to read that!

 

[Mal]

Why are there no Firefly novels? I know there are graphic novels, but I don't care for graphic novels. Is it because the industry doesn't believe there is a market or is it some kind of licensing issue?

why don't you write one?

I wish I had the time to work on a novel. I have original ideas I would like to try and write, but haven't made the time to do it. I would like to at least to try and get to the outline process. But I'm not sure what an outline should include or the format.

You have time to hang out at TrekBBS, but you don't have time to write a cool story about our Big Damn Heroes???

We could do a collaborative novel here in this very thread. Just start off with a paragraph of intro, and everyone has to add a sentence or two to continue it along. We all know the characters. We all know the verse. This could be fun

 

[Christopher]

^There is a Fan Fiction forum on this board that would be a more appropriate place for such a project.