Cover -- Contents -- Contributers -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 'Good Myth': Joss Whedon's Further Worlds -- 'They Tried to Kill Us, and Here We Are': Episode and Film Guide -- Language and Rhetoric -- 1 'But She Was Naked! And All Articulate!': The Rhetoric of Seduction in Firefly -- 2 Representing the Future: Chinese and Codeswitching in Firefly -- 3 'Much Madness is Divinest Sense': Firefly's 'Big Damn Heroes' and Little Witches -- Gender -- 4 The Threat of the 'Good Wife': Feminism, Postfeminism, and Third-Wave Feminism in Firefly -- 5 The Companions and Socrates: Is Inara a Hetaera? -- 6 'I Aim to Misbehave': Masculinities in the 'Verse -- Genre -- 7 'The Alliance Isn't Some Evil Empire': Dystopia in Joss Whedon's Firefly/Serenity -- 8 Back to the Future: Retrofuturism, Cyberpunk, and Humanity in Firefly and Serenity -- 9 Firefly's 'Out of Gas': Genre Echoes and the Hero's Journey -- Social and Cultural Themes -- 10 Reavers and Redskins: Creating the Frontier Savage -- 11 A Geopolitical Interpretation of Serenity -- Religion and Morality -- 12 'I Do Not Hold to That': Joss Whedon and Original Sin -- 13 Humanity in a 'Place of Nothin'': Morality, Religion, Atheism, and Possibility in Firefly -- Music -- 14 Music, Race, and Paradoxes of Representation: Jubal Early's Musical Motif of Barbarism in 'Objects in Space' -- 15 Marching out of Step: Music and Otherness in the Firefly/Serenity Saga -- Visuals -- 16 Between Past and Future: Hybrid Design Style in Firefly and Serenity -- 17 Deathly Serious: Mortality, Morality, and the Mise-en-Scene in Firefly and Serenity -- Fans, Transition, and the World Outside -- 18 'Can't Stop the Signal': The Resurrection/Regeneration of Serenity -- 19 The Browncoats Are Coming!: Firefly, Serenity, and Fan Activism -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.