Firefly

5 August 2005, 2003 EDT

Dan Drezner posts on one of the best science-fiction series that was ever cancelled before its time… and the upcoming movie. Firefly, for those of you who don’t know, was a Joss Whedon series in which he took the western influences in space opera (Roddenberry described Star Trek, after all, as “Wagon Train to the Stars”) and magnified them to create an explicit “space western.”

I find myself a bit annoyed to discover that the Sci-Fi Channel is now running old episodes of the series. They declined to pick it up when Fox cancelled it.

Dan does not pick up on the most obvious “precursor” to Firefly, however. That would be Cowboy Bebop, which itself spawned a pretty good feature film.

That’s all.

Filed as: Firefly

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.