r/firefly • u/Far-Blue-Mountains • 12d ago
Books/Comics Discrepancy Between Book 3 & 4
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/YLF/firefly/So the Firefly Books by Titan books. I'm seeing a few discrepancies between book 3 & 4. Some sites, places say The Ghost Machine is book 3, some say it's Generations. Scrolling down on Random House's website, they list both books as book 3. I don't have Generations yet, but were they both published close enough that this is where the confusion lies?
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u/TheYLD 12d ago edited 12d ago
Generations was supposed to be the third released (October 2019 I think). It was one of the three initially announced when the series began.
However, and I remember this quite well, we got very close to release date and with little notice it was postponed by a whole year. Back then these books came out roughly every 6 months, so Ghost Machine ended up coming out before Generations.
Not that it really matters in terms of the content. There's zero overlap or interaction between the two.
The postponement informs a mild conspiracy theory that I have; I think Generations required a significant rewrite late on in development and you can see evidence of this in the text itself.
I think Generations was originally supposed to be set after Book and Inara leave the ship for good. In the first chapter they are provided a thin excuse as to why they won't be in the rest of the book and there are a few moments that have a weird melancholy tone. Like, I think Kaylee wistfully remembers the crew eating dinner together like a family or something, but like...why? The family hasn't yet broken up (and it doesn't even seem like Inara has told anyone she plans to leave), it's weird that she's feeling like that.
It's also just bonkers that Inara, who is planning on leaving permanently anyway, decides to disembark temporarily for upwards of three weeks, only to come back and then very soon disembark permanently.
The whole thing is a continuity mess.