Firefly/The Alliance

The Alliance

The Union of Allied Planets, also known as the Anglo-Sino Alliance or just The Alliance, is the central government of the Firefly universe. Alliance worlds tend to be either extremely decadent or extremely poor, with not a lot of ground in between, and the delineation appears to be visible in the differences between the "Core" worlds and the outer planets: Core planets, at least those seen on screen, are utopian and almost like something you'd expect to see on Star Trek. However, as you get farther from the core, the planets become more and more primitive, to the point where most of the outer planets look more like 1800s Old West towns like Dodge City than anything we would recognize as modern.

History

The Alliance as it is seen in the television series came into existence when the major powers decided to unite all the planets colonized by the settlers from Earth-that-was under a single flag. While many planets bowed to the new single government, others did not, spawning the Independent faction. The Independents and the Alliance fought a bloody conflict which climaxed in the Battle of Serenity Valley, when the Independent leadership surrendered to the Alliance.

Joss Whedon's premise was that sometime in our future, Earth has a major world war which results in a stalemate. The two major remaining powers eventually decide to pool their resources, culture and even language under one banner. The two nations are presumably the United States (Anglo) and China (Sino). This is why most written language in the Firefly universe has chinese characters alongside english words, and many of the people seem to blurt out mandarin chinese phrases when provoked. However, from the perspective of the characters in the story, these events are so far distant in the past that they are almost forgotten.

Alliance Tech

The Alliance's technology is quite different from that seen in the hands of the independent ship crews and citizens seen in the series. Technology possessed by the lower-class citizenry tends to be older and beat-up, while Alliance technology is state of the art. Alliance ships are essentially spaceworthy cities, with their large cruisers looking not unlike several skyscrapers built straight up lumbering gracelessly through space.