Firefly: Life Signs is a 2021 novel by James Lovegrove set in the Firefly 'Verse. It is the fifth novel set between the events of Firefly and Serenity, effectively being the show's second season.
Inara is dying. An old acquaintance, Stanislav L'Amour, has summoned Mal to his floating island on Bellerophon where Inara will spend her final days. As Mal visits with Inara to say goodbye, Zoe waves Shepherd Book to inform him, and he mentions a doctor who might have cracked the cure to Inara's condition. Trouble is, he's held on a maximum security Alliance prison planet. Chasing after this slender ray of hope, the crew of Serenity set about a daring prison break.
This Novel contains examples of the following tropes:
- Ace Pilot: Wash is in fine form, destroying two of three missiles launched at Serenity by making them hit each other, then piloting back at the destroyer that fired them in a game of chicken to get the commander to abort the missile. When she detonates it instead, Wash keeps damage to Serenity to a relative minimum. When Wash is incapacitated by this, River takes up the controls, and proves herself just as good a pilot as Wash, if not better, deliberately causing a cascade of debris from a wrecked freighter to create cover for Serenity to escape, and when that fails, arranging for the two Alliance destroyers to ram each other, destroying both. While dodging all the fire both can lob her way.
- Berserk Button: Meadowlark Deen hates it when people lie, especially people in authority whose word the public should be able to trust. This is such a berserk button for her, in fact, that she's a Serial Killer who targets liars.
- Deadly Environment Prison: Atata is noted as a planet where the terraforming didn't take, resulting in an ice world. The buildings are chilly but habitable, the surface is bitterly cold and not a place to wander extensively.
- Great Escape: The Serenity crew's plan is to break Doctor Esau Weng out of a maximum security prison planet.
- Hellhole Prison: Zig-Zagged. Atata is broken up into several "Correctional Units," each effectively run by the inmates, since Blue Sun doesn't see the point in hiring guards. Some are noted to be quite awful, but Correctional Unite 23, where the Serenity crew need to he, is rather pleasant, with a leader, Mr. O'Bannon, who keeps things at least mostly civil.
- Mutants: As a result of failed terraforming, Atata is home to numerous "terrafreaks," animals that aren't quite right. Because the terraforming process also seeds the planet with the starts of Earth-That-Was life ready to adapt to the created environment, when terraforming doesn't work quite right the results are animals adapted to that not-quite-right environment. On Atata, this includes a few different kinds of animals, including essentially dire wolves.
- Penal Colony: Atata, the Alliance prison planet.
- Persona Non Grata: Esau Weng is apparently this, with Simon being warned the first time he mentions Weng to never do so again.
- Savage Wolves: Mal and company have to contend with a small pack of terrafreak wolves.
- Serial Killer: Meadowlark Deen, who hates liars so much she believes she's on a mission to punish them fatally for it.
- Stating the Simple Solution: Simon asks why, instead of attempting to infiltrate an Alliance prison planet and rescue someone they don't know for a fact is even still alive, why not go to his house and look for his notes? Mal replies that since the house burned down, they can't be sure the notes are there, and even if they are, asks Simon how much time he'd need to decipher them and come up with the cure. Simon does some figuring, and agrees Inara doesn't have the kind of time he'd need.
- Super Serum: Blue Sun thought Dr. Weng's work could be turned into this. He had no desire to help people become more efficient killers, so turned them down and burned his research so it couldn't be duplicated. This led to his incarceration on Atata.
- The Topic of Cancer: Inara has a particularly nasty and incurable form of cancer.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: The crew finally get some leads on Esau Weng, only to find that he left Correctional Unit 23 because he couldn't cure Mr. O'Bannon, and elected to brave the wilderness instead of stick around and have the regulators beat and torture him until he did the impossible. So Mal, Zoe, Jayne, and Simon have to go out into the wilderness looking for him.
