Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon's Classic Series ed. by Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith (review)

Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon's Classic Series, edited by Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith, adds new voices to the critical scholarship about Joss Whedon's short-lived but much-loved television show Firefly (2002–3). This space Western centres on the crew of the spaceship Serenity, who, in order to evade the oppressively bureaucratic Alliance, travel the edges of space, having illicit adventures while eking out a living. Firefly imagines a future society heavily influenced by American and Chinese cultures; it is also one burdened by scarcity, violence, dangerous outlaws and political inequity. Despite Firefly's single-season run and quick cancellation, fans were extremely devoted to the show, and after a number of fan campaigns, a theatrical film, Serenity (Whedon US 2005), was released two years after the cancellation of the series; there have also been comics based on the series, and growing rumours of a series reboot.

Firefly Revisited deliberately shifts the focus away from the show's much- studied history and fandom and onto the content of the series (and subsequent additions to the so-called ''verse', or universe, of the stories). Goodrun and Smith assert that the show's themes continue to speak to contemporary issues – something their collection certainly demonstrates. Particularly laudable is their commitment to foregrounding questions of race, whether in relation to the 'savage' Reavers, the show's references to the American Civil War, Chinese music, or multiculturalism in the 'verse. Indeed, the question of how to define Firefly's exact politics – in particular regarding its attempts at multiculturalism and its ethical and socioeconomic philosophies – implicitly undergirds the volume. Is the show a critique of capitalism or a libertarian manifesto? Is its multiculturalism exoticising or successfully nuanced? Is Serenity's crew a utopian community or a patriarchal hierarchy? Firefly Revisited does not answer these questions, but provides space for multiple points of view and productive uncertainty.

The collection's introduction is one of the book's most valuable resources for scholars of the series, as it provides a helpful overview of existing Firefly scholarship. Divided into thematic sections, such as 'Race', 'Masculinities' and 'Genre', it sums up and comments on a wide array of previous writing on the series, placing earlier scholarship in conversation with the essays in the collection. Firefly Revisited may not touch on all of the many subjects the introduction surveys, but the themes that comprise each section of the introduction are very much present throughout the book.

Firefly's engagement with the Western genre is one major source of critical ambivalence about the show's politics: it straddles a line between critiquing and honouring some of the most ideologically fraught elements of American narratives of expansion, the frontier, and the Wild West. The collection's first two essays engage with this difficulty. John Wills's essay situates Firefly within the genre of the Space Western, tracing Firefly's Western inspirations while also differentiating it from other similar works, noting its unusually wholesale transplantation of the Western frontier – sagebrush and tumbleweeds intact – to a temporally and spatially distant realm. Wills argues that Firefly thereby engages in both nostalgia for and distrust of the 'frontier', indulging in its mythologies while ultimately expressing ambivalence about its moral underpinnings. The ambivalence about the ethics of frontier mythology is also present in David Budgen's chapter, which traces Mal's links to the ex-Confederate soldier. Budgen notes that Firefly, like many of these texts, de-emphasises the question of slavery to make the ex-Confederate more sympathetic, a troubling tendency which Budgen considers only partially solved by Mal's anti-slavery stance and the relative diversity of Serenity's crew.

The collection then turns towards sf, a realm which – perhaps erroneously – seems further removed from the problems implicit in the former genre. Essays by Lisa K. Perdigao and co-authors Gareth Hadyk-Delodder and Laura Chilcoat centre...