elodieunderglass:

lionesshathor:

garashirs:

you know what i need??? more myth and superstition in scifi.

give me starship captains like the sailors of old, weathered and wary of the vast beast that is deep space, who religiously keep their own personal traditions and rituals to appease her and guide their ships safely through her vast depths.

give me wide-eyed ensigns eagerly drinking in tales of great creatures of the void, space whales and other more malevolent leviathans, dismissed as tall tales by more cynical cadets who only trust the sense of their own eyes.

give me whispered accounts of ghost vessels, lost long ago in great battles across the universe, populated by a literal skeleton crew.

give me a space bermuda triangle.

give me a universe as cold and unfathomable as the ocean, and no less mysterious and forboding.

One thing I’ve read about are “wounded birds”, ships that have been damaged or run out of fuel and cannot propel themselves. They drift on the tides of space, sometimes as their crew slowly wastes away and dies. Every captain dreads the sight of these vessels; it’s important to search for survivors, but you may find rotting corpses, or half-mad spacers amongst cannibalized dead…

I want to be accosted by madmen at weddings with long, curiously involved stories about albatrosses or How They Lost Their Leg (With Footnotes). I want a –

 – wait, no, we have that already.

Isn’t “Firefly” kind of like that? I mean, I know the Reavers are real, but people tend to think they’re just a nautical ghost story.