Firefly: What Makes Us Mighty is a 2022 novel by M.K. England set in the Firefly 'Verse. It is seventh in a series of novels set between Firefly and Serenity.
Serenity docks at the estate of a duke on the planet Kerry, carrying sealed crates of some kind of thing the Duke wants. Despite Mal's misgivings about working for such a fancy person, especially one with ties to the Alliance, the pay is good, and the perks are great. The Duke is friendly and personable, and despite Zoe having a bad feeling about this, the crew partakes of the Duke's fine food, fine booze, and fine hospitality, as the Duke promises to get them more work, make Kerry a regular port of call. Everything seems shiny. A bit too shiny.
Inara has been engaged by the Duke's general. While she's keen to spend time with Inara on her first vacation in way too long, the General also needs Inara's help with something. The whole crew's help, in fact.
This Novel contains examples of the following tropes:
- Anachronic Order: The novel is set at some point between Firefly: Big Damn Hero (the HTX-20 crates are mentioned) and Firefly: The Ghost Machine (Inara and Book have not left the ship yet).
- The Coup: the third act of the novel is the Serenity crew helping the Duchess and General overthrow the Duke so the planet can actually do well.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The Devil's Thorns. Shrapnel warheads coated in paralytic neurotoxin, and the shrapnel is nanotech. As the toxin paralyzes you, the nanotech starts growing the shrapnel in your body, tearing through everything in its path. And the toxin prevents any kind of passing out or pain receptors shutting down from overstimulation, meaning you're awake, unable to move, unable to stop feeling the metal tendrils slowly piercing your body, until they finally hit something vital enough to do you in. Jayne calls it "the worst possible way to die," and the Alliance itself outlawed them after only a handful of uses, deeming them too inhumane. Even Shepherd Book recognizes that the only thing to be done for the victims is give them a Mercy Kill.
- Foreshadowing: If you pay close attention, you'll realize before it's pointed out that the Duke never address a woman directly, only talking to men like Mal, even when women address him directly. His Straw Misogynist nature is a critical plot point.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: The Duke enforces rules to ensure his people follow the Alliance recommendations for how to do things to the letter. Because he assumes the Alliance really does know best, and the people who actually live and work on the land are idiots. He's exactly wrong, the Alliance way of doing things is destroying the planet, and the Duke won't even allow people to leave the continent to get away from the increasingly hard work, diminishing returns, and rampant poverty. This is exacerbated because Duke just doesn't see the point in distributed infrastructure, honestly thinking that having just one of everything in a central location (i.e., his location) and making that the best it can be is better. Simon has to bluntly state that for example, travel time to a hospital is one of the most critical factors in treatment of severe trauma, and a close bad hospital is vastly better than an amazing hospital a patient won't live to arrive at.
