ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book have not attempted to engage extensively with discussions of narrative genre, because these discussions have not been immediately pertinent to the arguments I have sought to construct. This chapter is different, however, in that the analysis I present here relies in part on an understanding of the genre that defines the analytical vehicle: the vehicle is Firefly, and the genre is science fiction (SF). Briefly, ‘genre’ in literary theory is taken to designate the type or category of a work (‘from the Greek genus, meaning “kind” or “sort”’, Rosmarin 1985: 23), be it visual or written in form, and genre is also assumed to affect or sometimes determine content (ibid.: 25; see also Frow 2005: 1–2). For example, ‘war films and Westerns are identified by subject matter, the gangster film by its protagonist(s), thrillers and horror films by their effects upon the viewer’ (Langford 2005: 4). Despite a necessary lack of unity or coherence within each genre, viewers and critics still use generic descriptors to delimit the boundaries of different types of text, and I do the same here in my analysis of SF, offering below a brief overview of the accepted indicators of the genre.
