I love Joss Whedon's writing. I didn't start watching "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" until mid-way through season 4. I had heard the writing was good; my brother, Aaron Barnhart, the tv writer for the Kansas City Star, regularly noted the quality of Whedon's work (and annually bemoaned the lack of Emmy recognition for same). When I did get around to watching Buffy, I was as thrilled and impressed as other viewers. His writing is so good that actors of moderate skills – and let's be honest, that's what the cast of Buffy was – were able to give performances they're never likely to match. Whedon the writer accomplishes what so many in Hollywood fail to do. I have been disappointed by so many movies and tv shows that should have been good – the premise, the actors, even the director – and instead stank. And why? Crappy writing. Writing is at the heart and foundation of every television show and movie, and few do that kind of writing better than Whedon.

So when "Firefly" was originally announced, I was thrilled. Television is bereft of quality science fiction. The first adult fiction I read was science fiction. I moved out of adolescent reading with Robert Heinlein, and I discovered great literature in the short stories of Harlan Ellison. For a large chunk of my life, I did not read much of the genre, but it seemed that all that was being produced were variations on Anne McCaffrey's dragon stories or bad takeoffs on "The Lord of the Rings" (which I read for the first time, out of about thirty or more readings, in 6th grade). I lost my taste for science fiction, but a few years ago began to try and discover if it was worth reading today. I soon learned that Ursula LeGuin has only improved with age, and that Kim Stanley Robinson is a genius ("The Days of Salt and Rice"; wow), and that along with the dungeons-and-dragons crowd are still creative and innovative writers of the stuff I grew up on.

Joss Whedon, however, ain't one of them. This was a major disappointment to me. Knowing what a great writer he is, the way he took the hackneyed genres of vampire and teen romance movies and melded them into something unique and wonderful, i was sure "Firefly" would be as brilliant. In terms of story, it was, of course. The characters were surprising and well-developed, the action was brisk, there was humor, and there was danger and pain that seemed to loom at every turn and was possibly beyond escape. Pain and sadness are the underpinnings of Whedon's emotional worlds when he writes, and his goal in creating characters and sending them into these worlds is to see if they can function and survive and, if they are very lucky, be happy for even a short time. Think of Buffy, dying to save her idiot sister and then being dragged back from heaven by unthinking friends. Or Angel being saved by Willow – seconds too late, forcing Buffy to kill him (season 2). This is Whedon at his finest.

If you are simply a fan of great storytelling, "Serenity" is also Whedon at his best. There was almost no part of the story that could not have been predicted, yet he still managed to make it feel fresh. I was surprised by nothing, but I was entertained from beginning to end. Even the thinly disguised moral at the end came across as sweet, with a light touch. River was especially enjoyable, and if sequels do come into being, it will be to follow her, I hope, and not Mal, a self-centered, self-pitying bully for whom I developed no sympathy. If Whendon pitches a sequel with River's potential being developed, he'll have a winner.

The trouble is that he is not writing science fiction. In one of the dvd extras, he states that science fiction is a great genre because the writer can pick and choose from any era, any part of human history. That's not science fiction; that's Wikipedia. Harlan Ellison, one of the greatest talents ever to work in the genre, and certainly the most courageous, separates "sci fi" from "sf", his own short hand. "Sci fi" is what Whedon is doing: the pop stuff, Star Trek and the Millenium Falcon, aliens and zap 'em up adventures that have no basis in either science or the future. Science fiction is an exploration of how humans can develop and evolve as we move into the future and out into the universe. We will invent new technologies and create new machines; what will these be like? What will they allow us to do? How will they change us? Arthur C Clarke likes to confront humankind with these challenges by having the unknown future arrive on our doorstep mysteriously, forcing us to deal the universe before we're ready. Ursula LeGuin, without positing any timeframes or specific histories, has written many stories about the apparent successors of humanity and how they change and develop as they settle new worlds and live generations in these new places. She has created a number of technical possibilities, but mostly she explores what the nature of the human experience and how it could evolve "out there".

In other words, sf – science fiction, the genuine art form – is not just contemporary life stuck in a spaceship or on another planet (or in Whedon's case, the 1870 transported 15 lightyears away). We will not explore the galaxy without changing radically. We will talk differently, we will think differently, we'll interact with each other – even with our things – differently. The humans of 2500, the time in which "Serenity" is set, should bear little similarity to what we know of ourselves now. Language will change, relationships will have transformed as societies transform. Science fiction explores these changes while recognizing the flip side of the coin: For all the changes, human nature remains remarkably fixed over long periods of time. The need to love and be loved, the tendency to act from fear, the effect of ignorance, the hunger of greed, tribalism and so much more; these are aspects of human nature that seem to be fixed over the thousands of years we know of our history. We can assume that for all the ways we will change over the coming millenia, we will have to deal with these verisimilitudes. We perceive the world so much differently now than a mere thousand years ago, yet we still act on many of the same impulses.

This is the fundamental nature of science fiction Joss Whedon misses. Small point: When Mal is trying to get to find an alternate route to River on the bridge, he accesses an air shaft using a manual ratchet. The damn thing isn't even battery-operated, like one I could buy at Home Depot for about twenty bucks. Did it not even cross his mind that technologies other than machine-bored screws might be in use? Panels that slid? Apparently, 500 years in Whedon's future, steel is still the best material for building spaceships. (And the "mule" can't carry five people? Are they using Honda Civic engines left over from 1997?) Most irritating to me is the idea of people "driving" spaceships. Pilots are already nearing obsolescence. No human can pilot a spaceship as well as a computer; I would expect by the time in which Serenity occurs that you would walk onto your ship, tell it where you need to go, and it would take you there. The motto of the spaceship industry will be the same as Ron Popeil's Showtime Rotisserie Oven: Set it and forget it.

But not Joss Whedon. He's got to have his brave heros (and oh my god, this whole idea of language devolving to some bizarro world form of Old West pidgin, which completely flies in the face of how human language works), which means seat-of-the-pants flying – and pistols and shotguns. No robots assigned to carry out military tasks, safely and effectively. Just because we are currently working like crazy to build these today does not mean we'll want to use them in the future, I guess. Far better to take a needless chance in dying than to use available technology. And when you need to kill lots of people, you will hire black English ninjas and load your army up with rifles. Such thinking, of course, is typical for pop sci fi: no science, no human evolution, nothing real other than what we already know about ourselves. "Serenity" is nothing more than a cowboys-and-indians shoot-em-up set on spaceships.

This makes for terrific movie-making, but it's terrible for science fiction fans. SF is not an easy genre. More than any other, it challenges assumptions. SF makes everything we think we know suspect, open to challenge and doubt. Carl Sagan's "Contact" demonstrated the role sf plays in our world: We take a ride on a creation we scarcely recognize, and, as a result, everything we thought we knew, even what we thought we experienced, becomes alien and troubling. We comprehend that something occurred to us, but we really don't know what it was, and we have no proof. Life is turned inside-out. This is the nature and role of science fiction, and it's a tough gig. There are very few writers who can do this. Joe Haldeman is one of the few who even attempts to try to do it without making the aliens the bad guys. LeGuin creates the most humane literature in any genre while working firmly, although not exclusively, in sf. David Brun and Orson Scott Card are able to pull it off on occassion, and there are others, but none with the visibility and clout of George Lucas or Joss Whedon (the former, of course, being far more guilty of every sin listed above).

Joss Whedon may yet make a real science fiction movie one day. I hope so. He would make it very human, that's for certain, but I think he'd need to collaborate with a Robinson or Haldeman or, better yet, Ellison, someone who knows how to write science fiction. But if Whedon produces more works like "Firefly" and "Serenity," and if they become the kinds of successes that "Buffy" and "Angel" are, the chances are that sf will be in real trouble. A committed few will stick with it, but other talented writers who might have explored the genre will be drawn to Whedon's sci fi shadow world, and with them they will take readers and viewers, denying them the chance to discover what is possible in sf. Whedon will draw admirers and imitators, and fewer writers will attempt the hard work that science fiction can be. The greater his success with his sci fi pop culture adventures, the worse for real science fiction.

Joss Whedon is so good, he could just kill science fiction forever.