Farscape Forever!, subtitled Sex, Drugs, and Killer Muppets, has been sitting in my to-be-done pile for quite a while now. Oddly enough, its connection to Henson’s merry band of puppeteers was what made me finally read it, as I’ve been watching the first season of The Muppet Show on DVD these past few weeks. (Trust me on this — nostalgia, like really old cold coffee, can really taste bitter. Some of the material on The Muppet Show holds up very well — the theatre critics being really good in a nasty, cynical sense — but much of the show really, really sucks.) Killer muppets courtesy of the Henson folk were just one of the many elements that went into what I think was the finest science-fiction show ever to grace the video screen. If you haven’t seen it yet, watching it in DVD format is a real treat, as there’s none of those frelling annoying adverts that chopped it up in almost total incoherency when it ran on the American Sci-Fi network for a few years. Never heard of the American Sci-Fi network? Outside of this programme and the first Stargate series, it ran some of the worst merde that one could ever possibly not want to see so you haven’t missed much. Shudder!
Farscape Forever! is in the same Smart Pop series as Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Other titles have covered series such as Buffy, Angel, Stargate, and Alias, to name but a few. Having not looked at any of those, I can’t comment on them at all, but I can tell you much about this title. I think that there was a good book trapped, to a certain extent, inside a project that needed more focus, more attention to detail. Indeed this is an unauthorized book on Farscape, so one would hope that revelations would be forthcoming. Alas no, there’s nothing terribly noteworthy here, but there are some really silly essays, as writers who are very obviously diehard fans hold forth on aspects of the series very dear to them.
The best bits here? Jim Butcher, author of the Harry Dresden series, offers up his view in ‘Crackers Don’t Matter, but the rest of us insignificant humans do’. Likewise Martha Wells in ‘Don’t Make me Tongue You’ does a great job at looking at the rather dysfunctional ‘buddy’ relationship that existed between John Crichton, smart-assed human, and Ka D’Argo, the often bellicose Luxan. (Ok, let’s admit something right here. The show is always about John Crichton. Everything exists merely as window-dressing to tell the tale of Crichton. And a strange tale it is.) Both of these essays remind me of the best material that runs in fanzines devoted to a specific series, be it the Harry Dresden series, or a favourite television series like that of the Trek mythos. It is, for better or worse, fan writing intended for other fans. When it’s, say Josepha Sherman’s take on Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan, the orgasmic plant and follower of the Goddess, the writing is very, very good.
Where the writers go bad, they really go bad. Rick Klaw’s ‘Flatulence, Foods and Fornication’ reminds me of two University students, rather drunk and very late at night, trying to out-gross the other. Rigel’s farts serve a purpose and are oft times funny — this article is neither. Likewise Roxanne Longstreet Conrad’s article, ‘Universe on a Budget’, on the best vacation spots in the Uncharted Territories, reads like the worst of fanfic (Wikipedia defines this sort of writing as ‘fiction written by people who enjoy a film, novel, television show or other media work, using the characters and situations developed in it and developing new plots in which to use these characters.’ ) I love the Farscape series as much as I love the Harry Dresden series, but badly written fanfic bores me terribly.
Ok, you like Farscape so much that you bought the entire set of DVDs. Hell, you even combed eBay looking for the ever-so-rare action figures that were issued. And you even bought the John Crichton figure! Now do you need this book? No, but you’ll find it interesting in places, irritating as all hell in other places. Unlike Joe Nazzarro’s The Creatures of Farscape: Inside Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which all Farscape fans should own a copy of, this is a piece of fluff, nothing more.
(Benbella, 2005)
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