Casting an Imaginary Fermi Series

I wrote Fermi’s Progress, and its sequel, Fermi’s Wake, because I was missing a very specific kind of old school TV sci-fi storytelling. But as I was writing a series of novellas, rather than a TV series, I felt that it was only fair to do everything in my power to make it completely unfilmable.

The premise, a prototype faster-than-light spaceship that blows up every planet it encounters, is on the face of it too grim to get past any TV executive’s desk (or publisher’s desk for that matter, the story was also tailor-made for self-publishing). But even aside from that, the settings and aliens are designed to break even the most ambitious TV budgets. And I frequently use storytelling techniques that simply wouldn’t translate to TV, like relying on viewpoint characters who you cannot see, having stories that pivot on the audience’s access to a character’s interiority, or straight up telling the reader they have remembered the entire story up to this point wrong.

But a man can dream, and indie publishing relies on a constant stream of sharable content-based marketing to keep drawing in new audiences, and this week those two elements have combined to answer the question – just who would star in the astronomically budgeted prestige streaming adaptation of Fermi’s Progress and Fermi’s Wake before it was unceremoniously cancelled halfway through the second series?

Samson 39 & Connor Brandt

Samson and Connor are tricky ones from the start. Ostensibly clones (or possible twins, we’re still a bit vague on Ernest Brandt’s methodology), Samson is the product of a eugenic super soldier experiment continued illegally after the Second World War. Connor is the control group in that experiment (his birth name was “Control 39”).

Now you might ask “How can you have clones or twins where one is the product of a eugenics program and the other isn’t?” And the answer is that Ernest Brandt is not a good scientist (the spaceship he built blows up every planet it visits).

But it creates a casting problem, because short of casting twins with wildly different lifestyle choices, you need one actor who could star in a Fascist propaganda poster, but also play the Simon Pegg role in a romcom about a loveable slacker trying to win his girlfriend back.

Tom Hopper is practically playing a version of Samson already in Umbrella Academy, and at least in the final season, he also shows he can master the kind of down-and-out and out of his depth energy to do Connor, but is incredibly jacked. Will Poulter, brought the right kind of public schoolboy vibe for Samson to his Adam Warlock in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and looks like he could be a superhero or a guy helping you fix your laptop in Currys depending on how you do this hair.

But I think today I’m going with Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden. Samson is pretty easy to play for anyone with stage presence, and Lowden has the looks (while also looking oddly like Simon Pegg), but also that exasperated out-of-his-depth performance he brings to River Cartwright is perfect Connor.

Even if I’m not sure about that beard.

Rajita Deb

Rajita is the Fermi’s engineer, theoretical physicist, and occasional impromptu gunsmith. One of the more challenging ones to cast as there are not many prominent trans, South Asian actresses who can pull off a Leicester accent. Ideally, we want a brilliant as-yet-unknown trans actress with the energy of Anjli Mohindra.

But the game isn’t “make up an actor to fit the role”, so although representation is important, we’ll have to tweak Rajita’s backstory and sacrifice her Leicester accent to allow Jessica Jones’s Aneesh Sheth to play the role. 

She can bring the levels of enthusiasm Rajita needs to tap when encountering Weird Space Shit, while also having the Boss Management skills needed to deal with Gordon. Which brings us to…

Liz Gordon

The founder and CEO of tech and aerospace company the Eg. Corporation, depending on who you ask Gordon is either the Captain of the Fermi, or simply the person who bankrolled the efforts to retrieve, renovate and relaunch the ship. Gordon is the one willing to make the tough calls, whether they need to be made or not.

Obviously, if you’re looking for girlbosses in their 50s with zero moral compass there is a smorgasbord of casting options available. Sigourney Weaver with the same energy she brought to Chappie or The Cabin in the Woods is an obvious contender, and it’d be a lie to say she wasn’t at least part of the composite I imagine when coming up with Gordon. Portia de Rossi in her Better Off Ted guise is also part of that mix, although I reckon Gordon considers herself far more “one of the guys” than Veronica Palmer did.

The thing is, Gordon isn’t just a girlboss – she also considers herself a bit of an action hero. So I think I’m going to go with Sonya Walger, For All Mankind’s Molly Cobb.

The World

A mind that used to occupy an entire Dyson Sphere, now reduced to a little robot that walks around on legs like vacuum cleaner hoses. A vast alien machine intelligence that needs to do an impression of something much stupider just to talk to the Fermi’s human crew on a relatable level. They are not, like some sci-fi robots, devoid of emotion. In fact, the World considers their own emotional make up to be far deeper and richer than the limited, hormone-fueled palette of feelings biological entities have access to. It’s something they get a bit sniffy about, to be honest.

My pick for casting the World (aside from some ingenious animatronics) is Mason Alexander Park, channelling Ellen McLain’s GLaDOS performance.

Dr Naomi Grant

SPOILERS: If you’ve not read as far as Fermi’s Progress: Planet of the Apiaries, there are some dead plot giveaways from this point on.

The Fermi’s flight surgeon and xenobiologist. Like Rajita, Naomi has important exposition-related jobs when it comes to explaining the latest weird alien the crew has encountered. She is also one of the few members of the crew who is still trying to maintain something like a moral compass. Most of the crew either consider events completely out of their control, or that the planetocidal stakes mean that any action, no matter how grim, is justified (Gordon). Naomi not only tries to do the right thing, but against all evidence to the contrary, believes that there even is a right thing to do.

For this one, I’m going straight to Susan Wokoma. Not even got a long justification for this one. In stuff like Crazyhead and Year of the Rabbit she has the right mix of bolshiness, awkwardness, and exposition-delivery that Naomi needs, plus, she just looks like the Naomi in my head.

Applejack

The Fermi’s latest crewmember, picked up during Fermi’s Progress: The Phone Job. A creature that looks a bit like a landed pteradon with no wings, a bit like a horse, a bit like a seahorse. He has a mouth for eating, but speaking is done primarily through a pair of highly articulated nostrils. It means that sometimes he harmonises with himself.

So Applejack’s clearly going to be a masterful piece of CGI or puppetry, and as in the stories, his actual voice is going to have to be dubbed over by his phone’s translator.

This means actually picking a voice for him is difficult, because he could sound like literally anything.

Like Connor, Applejack is just some guy who works in a (space) call centre when we meet him. But unlike Connor, Applejack is excited to be here.

So I’m just going to pick Eugene Cordero for this one, and not just because I love Rutherford.

If you want to hang out with the crew of the deadly starship Fermi, Fermi’s Wake: D & Deception is out now. You can buy it individually or as part of the Fermi’s Wake season pass at Scarlet Ferret, which means I get more royalties and you get a bonus short story, or you can buy it from Amazon here.

Fermi’s Progress is also available as a season pass from Scarlet Ferret (which includes all four Fermi’s Progress novellas in one volume), and can be bought as a paperback from Amazon.

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