Freefall

From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.

Freefall is a popular webcomic written and drawn by Mark Stanley and hosted at Purrsia. It is a humorous science fiction story detailing the misadventures of the starship Savage Chicken and its crew: Sam Starfall, a lovable alien con artist; Helix, a childlike robot; and Florence Ambrose, a genetically engineered "Bowman's Wolf" (i. e. an anthropomorphic canine).

Stanley began writing and drawing the strip on March 30, 1998 as a feature for the occasional furry zine, Yarf!, with the intent of telling the actual story behind the characters. The comic is updated three times a week, and it celebrated its thousandth strip in August 2004. Most of it is in black and white, but the first 388 strips are also available in fan-colored versions. In mid-April 2006 (#1254) official colored versions by George Peterson became the default. Some characters from Freefall also appear at the Cross Time Cafe.

[edit] Plot outline

Sam Starfall is a Sqid, which is a tentacle-bearing once-aquatic race which lives on a low-technology world in an unknown and unspecified world somewhere in the universe. Wherever that world might happen to be, though, it's not far enough now for the residents of the planet Jean.

Sam stowed away on a human scout ship and found his way to Jean, a recently-terraformed world populated lightly by a mix of humans and terraforming robots and managed with a kind of frontier improvisation that requires people to mix together with other kinds more than they might otherwise do, and, outfitted with a human-resembling environment suit that allows him to move around freely, has been blithely ignoring the rules of Jean's civilization for years. Particularly the ones that have to do with property ownership.

Somehow he got his hands on a wreck of a spaceship, and with the help of his friend/worker, a robot named Helix, and with several rolls of duct tape and not a clue between them about how to build, repair or maintain a spaceship, they tried to get the thing spaceworthy.

Deciding eventually that the task was beyond even his advanced duct taping skills, Sam arranged an accident that assigned Florence Ambrose, a highly competent engineer who happened to be a Bowman's Wolf to his ship. Florence was in cold storage on board the Asimov, a transport starship, at the time, and Jean wasn't her destination. Officially, she's been "misfiled," but instead of making a fuss, she decided to make the best of it..

Together, with many misadventures, they assembled the tools and materials, and Florence set to the nearly impossible task of getting the wreck spaceworthy again.

By some miracle, they managed it, and Sam rechristened the wreck the Savage Chicken. The repairs weren't perfect, but the gang got their ship, originally designed for interplanetary commerce, cleared as an orbital shuttle, and have flown one mission into orbit.

Florence, meanwhile, has yet to learn that Sam's acquisition of her contract was less than honest. Sam lives in dread each time Florence sends out information about herself that might incriminate him, and also dreads what might happen if Florence finds out. Florence is a large carnivore, but she's been specially trained and conditioned not to hurt humans. Sam, however, is not a human, and every time he wants to try to push her around, she gives the patented Florence Grin,[1] and Sam finds something better to do.

Freefall's plot has been criticised by some as slow-moving. The comic's seven years (in 2005) of thrice-weekly strips has so far covered only a few days' activity in the story.

[edit] Trivia

Robots in the Freefall universe are sometimes programmed with the same Three Laws of Robotics that Isaac Asimov made famous in his stories, but their artificial intelligence is well developed, and they have a lot of autonomy, which helps them cope with a universe that has other intelligent species besides the humans and robots from Asimov's stories. It is implied that "Three Law Robots" are not created anymore, and modern AI's have more sophisticated safeguards.

A running gag throughout the comic is the reaction of the robots when they first meet Florence. Since the Bowman's Wolf is a brand new species, the Freefall robots do not recognise her, and their first reaction is invariably to throw their arms out wide and shout "doggy!". The effect can be "kinda freaky" when a lot of them do it at once. Despite this childlike behaviour, the robots have developed a great respect for Florence, especially after she risked her life to rescue two robots from destruction during a hurricane. Because the memories of most of the robots on "Jean" are networked together, all the robots on the planet are now aware of Florence's deeds and are desperate to help her in any way they can.

Freefall is noted as being one of the more scientifically accurate science fiction web comics available today. Author Stanley has stated he intends to keep the science in the comic as realistic as possible without relying on deus ex machina (or "magic") devices such as "warp drive," "artificial gravity," or "transporter beams."

An in-joke for Star Trek fans is that the Savage Chicken's registry number is 1071-CCN - the reverse of the Starship Enterprise's NCC-1701.

Freefall was nominated as Best Anthropomorphic Comic for the 2003 Ursa Major Awards.

Despite the world of Freefall largely being populated by humans and robots, furry characters other than Florence sneak into the background of the webcomic whenever possible. Often billboards, company logos or posters in the background will have an anthropomorphic furry character on them.

[edit] External links

• Freefall home page: http://freefall.purrsia.com/
• Websnark on Freefall: here.
• Cross Time Cafe: Webcomic (updated weekly) based upon Freefall's fans and discussion forum members.

Some of this page is derived from Wikipedia. The original article was at Freefall (webcomic). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WikiFur, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.