Don't worry, Jason gets better... thanks to nanotechnology. In the last 20 minutes, he gets upgraded and becomes a cybernetic Uber-Jason, who looks vaguely generic and CG-heavy. But Jason X is mostly worth watching for the other characters, especially Kay-Em (played by Andromeda's Lisa Ryder), who tries on detachable nipples at one point because she wants to be more like other women. (This is before the above clip, where Kay-Em proves she has special talents of her own.)

The film also stars Andromeda herself, Lexa Doig, as Rowan, who gets cryogenically frozen with Jason.

Oh, and apparently Jason is sort of a zombie, because he died in the fourth movie. And I found this out from this great message board thread, which includes this fantastic story pitch:

I pitched New Line a new Friday 13th movie and it was AWESOME.

Basically, the remains of Jason Vorhees from the end of Jason X are drifting through space, and fall through a wormhole and end up back in the Cretaceous Era, so Jason starts killing dinosaurs and shit. BUT THEN another wormhole opens and the nanomachines pour out all over the dead dinosaurs, but because there's no metal they use bits of rock instead, so you've got like, half-rock, half-dinosaur things vs Jason, BUT THEN another wormhole opens and some pirates come through, and they get fucked up by the rockosaurs and Jason, but then an asteroid lands on them and everyone dies, BUT THEN the nanomachines reassemble everything so you've got a Pirate JasonDinosaur also with bits of asteroid stuck in him, that prolly has some alien shit or whatever, I dunno. BUT THEN another wormhole opens and out come some androids and some ninjas, and this is the moment when they told me my pitch was over and that I was being escorted from the building.

1.) Club Hel

Location: The Matrix's Mega City
What kind of Crowd? Usually the tie-me-and-gag-me types like to hang out in this leather clad-paradise, but it usually seems to have a regular crowd of rogue programs masquerading as werewolves, vampires and other paranormal anomalies.
Why you should give it a shot: Most people might be thrown off by the number of vinyl cows killed to make the fetish gear, but if you were smart enough to take the red pill, this is old hat.

2.) Holoband Clubs

Location: Anywhere you want, as long as your live in Battlestar Galactica's 12 colonies.
What kind of Crowd? The holoband clubs located in the virtual realm of one's mind make Club Hel look like a neighborhood bar. Teens go inside these illegal clubs to indulge in their most deviant desires, which at the very least involve kinky sex and at the very most include human sacrifice.
Why you should give it a shot: Should you meet an unfortunate demise, this is the best place to hide a virtual replica of yourself.

3.) The Snake Pit

Location: Blade Runner's Los Angeles in the year 2019.
What kind of Crowd? The world's social elite all cooped up together, smoking opium.
Why you should give it a shot: You can have fun spotting the replicants posing as bar patrons. Why stay at home, when you can witness an existential struggle over what it means to be human take place in your neighborhood bar.

4.) The Genetic Opera

Location: Repo! The Genetic Opera's Central entertainment featuring the Blind Mag.
What kind of Crowd? If you think that Los Angeles has a bad reputation for fake people, you obviously haven't been to a city where augmenting your body is as simple as going in for a haircut.
Why you should give it a shot: It's an opera, which is hardly a bar, but when you're high on the painkiller that everybody's hooked on, Zydrate, you don't really need a Rum and Coke to tickle your fancy.

Mute center around the disappearance of a young woman, and her partner, a mute bartender, who must face Berlin's gangsters to find out what happened to her. We spoke to Jones earlier this summer about the setting for Mute and why he's had Bladerunner in mind when constructing his future Berlin:

The only reason that I mention Blade Runner is because there's something about that particular film, where they really created a believable and realistic living breathing futuristic world. For all of the other films that have tried to do that I don't think anything has come as close the way Blade Runner has to creating something believable. Something that feels real and organic. It's like going to a real city and shooting a film there. You just get a sense that this place exists. [In] most of the science fiction films, it always feels a bit fake and a bit flat, but Blade Runner really didn't. That's the aspect of Blade Runner I'm hoping to capture. If and when I get the chance to do my film that I'm making.

According to the Liberty Films site, Jones plans to start shooting Mute in Berlin early next year.

[Liberty Films via /Film]

Stout, who also does many of the concert posters for Flight of the Conchords, has an ever-growing series of posters from classic and more recent films (and, for good measure, the geek-themed comedy series Spaced). Many of these posters were created specifically for the Alamo Drafthouse CInema in Austin, Texas to promote their "Big Screen Sci-Fi Classics." He also made the "Remember the Alamo" poster for the theater, which contains visual references to an absurd number of films across the genres.

[Tyler Stout via FFFFOUND!]

Split Second is sort of an uneasy mash-up of Blade Runner and Alien, but it gains a lot from having Rutger in the starring role. It's the dystopian year of 2008, and water levels have risen so much that huge parts of London are underwater. This nasty creature (which I'm not sure is really alien) killed Hauer's partner years ago, and ever since, he's been a bad cop, living on the edge, taking chances and sticking it to the man. His superiors yell things like "You're off the case, Hauer!" And he just keeps plugging along. Etc. The creature also rips out women's hearts, usually in the bathroom for some reason, and you can hear the bottled up screams of all its female victims come pouring out when Hauer tears its heart out.

One of the most immediate surprises about DADOES is how true it manages to stay to both the comic medium as well as the original book; I'd expected something more akin to an illustrated book, large chunks of type occasionally punctuated with short comic sequences, but that's not what you get here. Instead, Dick's writing is broken into caption boxes and speech balloons and, impressively, it works - Yes, some pages seem wordy, but not so much that they're unreadable; whether the distribution is down to letterers Comicraft, artist Tony Parker or editor Ian Brill, it's a great job.
Artwise, Parker does well. There are some moments of discontinuity from the text ("Long robes" become noticably shorter in his hands, for example), but not so much that it pulls you out from the story, and he handles the space and choreography of the page well. I'm less in love with the coloring by Blond, which gives everything a glossy, generic texture, but willing to let that go as a sign of my obsessive nerditry; it doesn't stand in the way of the visuals, and you could argue that it speaks to some theme of synthetic/fake nature from the story itself.

It seems pointless actually reviewing the writing, in a way; Dick's novel is very Dick, complete with the imagination and surrealism he always offers, and complaints about the lack of drama in the issue's close become particularly ridiculous when you remember that this is literally just the first 24th of the book and never intended to build to a particular cliffhanger that'd bring you back next month. What may surprise many, though, is full of information this issue is; even allowing for the amount of text contained in this issue, there's a lot of stuff to learn, and remember. Whether this will be off-putting for some more used to less-filled monthly comics, though, remains to be seen (It's interesting that the first issue comes with a short essay in back from Warren Ellis, and that Matt Fraction will be providing a similar piece in the second; fans of those writers definitely should enjoy this, if they're not already familiar with the book).
As a comic, then, it works - Surprisingly, and against expectations. But there's still a part of me that wonders why someone would choose to read this over just reading the original book, which gives the full story in one sitting, as opposed to over a 24-month period; as good as the visuals are, and as interesting as the comic is as an object, the question of "Why?" looms large, if unspoken, on every page.

The first issue of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is released tomorrow.

There's a pervasive urban legend online that William Gibson went to see Blade Runner when he was working on his seminal Japanophile cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. And Gibson ran out of the theater a few minutes into the movie (or in some versions, just walked out) because he was so shocked by the similarites between that movie's vision of the future and the one depicted in his novel. (In some versions, Gibson is scared that Ridley Scott and co. are actually in his head.)

Gibson is quoted as saying:

Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns - all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information - said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.' And it was. It so evidently was.

Back in the early 1980s, Japan's ascendance seemed assured — there were a host of business books claiming that Japan had lost World War II, but won the peace through superior economic policies. Books like The Enigma Of Japanese Power by Karel Van Wolferen became unlikely bestsellers. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians like Ishihara Shintaro started flexing their muscles — Ishihara made waves with a book called No To Ieru Nihon, or The Japan That Can Say No (to the United States.)

But also, Japanese technology was clearly better, and Japanese pop culture looked cool. In the early 1980s, U.S. television started being flooded with anime programs like Robotech and Star Blazers0, and U.S. comics fans started discovering Manga. But the one-two punch of Blade Runner and Neuromancer was what settled it: for the next decade or so, Japan was how we viewed the future.

And given that the 1980s was a very neon-happy time in general, and the U.S. viewed Japanese cities as being splashy and full of neon lights, it made sense that Japanese influences crept into everything. Total Recall, for example, features Arnold Schwarzenegger running around a neon-drenched future cityscape, especially once he goes to Mars. It's not specifically Japanese, but it feels Japan-influenced.

In Back To The Future 2, Future Biff works for a mysterious Japanese businessman known as Mr. Fujitsu, and it's hinted that by 2015, Japan dominates the world's economy. (The film-makers pretty much come out and say this on the DVD commentary.)

In the Max Headroom TV series, the world is dominated by the ZikZak Corporation, which despite its non-Japanese-sounding name, is actually a Japanese company. And the dystopian cityscape (around a minute in) looks very Blade Runner inspired:

In the early 1990s, Marvel launched its futuristic "2099" titles, with Rampage 2099 and Spider-Man 2099 among others. And one of the things that was futuristic and different about the world of 2099 was the fact that Tony Stark's company, Stark Industries, had turned Japanese, and was now known as Stark-Fujikawa.

And the U.S. got its own home-grown anime program with 1991's Aeon Flux, airing on MTV:


Around that same time, we started to see a lot more Asian influences in animation, including shows like Batman: The Animated Series.

To some extent, any movie with "virtual reality" or "cyberpunk" influences kept bringing back a Japanophile vibe, like 1995's Virtuosity, which had one of its crucial scenes between Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe's virtual killer take place in a sushi bar:

And the politically correct, scrubbed San Angeles of 1995's Demolition Man was a blend of L.A. and Tokyo, in both its buildings and its fashions:

Famously, the cyberpunk trainwreck Johnny Mnemonic featured a whole slew of scenes and subplots that took place in Japan, revolving around the character of Mr. Takahashi, played by popular actor Takeshi Kitano. These scenes are still only available on the Japanese DVD:

Sadly, Japan's economic hegemony ran out of juice in the early 1990s, when their real-estate bubble burst (sound familiar?) and the country spent an entire "lost decade" mired in stagnation. The vision of Japan as future economic uberpower was replaced by a creeping irrelevance — but Japanese pop culture remained as influential as ever, maybe even more than during the powerhouse days.

And because nothing in science fiction ever really goes away, there are still plenty of examples of Japanophile influences in recent SF. Take Steven Spielberg's A.I., whose future city looks a lot like Tokyo. (Skip to 4:45 in this video):

The shiny metropolis of Coruscant has a very Neo Tokyo vibe, in Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones (go to around 2:40 in this video):

When we visit a future Batman, who's trained by an aging Bruce Wayne to wear a Bat-exoskeleton, in Batman Beyond, the future Gotham is covered with Japanese kanji:

Joss Whedon made waves with his show Firefly and the sequel movie Serenity, which take place in a sort of vaguely pan-Asian future where everybody peppers his/her speech with a kind of pidgin Chinese. (Although there are no actual Asian people around.) And this Fruity Oaty Bars commercial has a pronounced anime vibe:

And of course, Aeon Flux got its own live-action movie a few years ago:

Top image: Amazing Neon vista from Osaka, by PFC on Flickr.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann is one of the most celebrated composers in Hollywood history, having scored classics from Citizen Kane to Psycho to Taxi Driver. He makes our list for his groundbreaking score for 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still (pictured above), with its prominent use of the theremin. After this movie, use of the eerie, otherworldly, electromagnetic instrument became the signature sound of sci-fi scores.

Louis and Bebe Barron

The Barrons took Herrmann's innovation a quantum leap further with their score for 1956's Forbidden Planet, which featured not a single traditional acoustic instrument. The husband-and-wife team's collection of all-analog burbles and bleeps sounds delightfully retro today, but the movie's all-electronic score was, at the time, controversial. Still, the sounds ideally complemented the tale of an isolated planet beset by an invisible monster.

Jerry Goldsmith

Goldsmith's 1968 score for Planet of the Apes swung the pendulum back toward traditional orchestration for sci-fi movies. Well, sort of; his tense, percussive score (echoing Charlton Heston's attempt to hold onto his sanity) included a Brazilian instrument called a culka that sounds like hooting monkeys. Goldsmith would go on to write many other memorable sci-fi scores, notably, Alien (1979) and the majestic theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which would be reworked for TV as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

John Williams

With the original Star Wars (1977), John Williams became the gold standard of sci-fi composers. His Wagnerian use of leitmotifs created instantly memorable themes for the major characters, and his grand opening fanfare is so thoroughly evocative of the movie that it instantly transports viewers back to the sense of awe and wonder they felt when they first saw that imperial cruiser fill the screen. Williams has scored just about every film Steven Spielberg has made; his five-note theme for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) became a character in itself.

Vangelis

The Greek new age composer is best remembered for his electronic score for Chariots of Fire, but his work on Blade Runner (1982) was similarly stellar, a mix of electronica, noirish brass, and traditional orchestral sounds that matched the movie's polyglot futurism.

James Horner

Yes, now he's known for syrupy goo like Titanic, but he got his start as a scrappy Roger Corman factory worker (Battle Beyond the Stars, 1980). He soon graduated to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), where he expanded on Jerry Goldsmith's score for the first movie to include nautical themes (fit for all those Moby-Dick references in the script). His elegaic music surrounding Spock's death and funeral was an early sign of Horner's ability to create music tearjerking enough to make a Vulcan cry. (Genre fans will also recall Horner's memorable scores for 1983's Krull and Brainstorm.)

Alan Silvestri

Silvestri, who's scored nearly every Robert Zemeckis film, is a disciple of John Williams who has a knack for creating a grandiose sound that makes his patron's movies seem bigger and zippier than they are. Case in point: his first big job, the Back to the Future trilogy (1985/89/90). Heard now, it instantly evokes Marty McFly zipping along on his skateboard, or Doc Brown firing up the time-traveling DeLorean. Silvestri's other genre works include Predator, The Abyss, and both Lara Croft movies.

Danny Elfman

Elfman, whose work is so closely associated with Tim Burton that he seems to be the musical portion of the director's brain, combines a reverence for traditional movie orchestration with an irreverence toward classical melody, bred perhaps of his days as the frontman for Oingo Boingo. The result is a frenetic, jumpy, off-kilter sound that's nonetheless grand and majestic, a sound that makes Elfman's music instantly recognizable, not to mention well-suited to such Burton genre pastiches as Ed Wood (1994) and Mars Attacks (1996).

Basil Poledouris

Poledouris created stately, mournful scores for movies with rugged, damaged heroes (the Conan the Barbarian films) and lent a gravity to Paul Verhoeven's science fiction films (notably, 1987's RoboCop and 1997's Starship Troopers) that helped ground their deadpan satire in real human emotions.

Bear McCreary

The ubiquitous 30-year-old composer (who'll be performing the score from Battlestar Galactica this Saturday at a free concert at Los Angeles' California Plaza, as well as next month at Comic-Con) is the sci-fi scorer of the moment, thanks to his television work on BSG and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. His tension-filled scores, mixing traditional orchestration with less orthodox instruments (accordion, bagpipe, duduk, erhu), is completely integral to his shows; particularly BSG, where his Middle Eastern/metal rearrangement of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (familar and strange at once) was key to understanding the plot and characters.

Scott, along with his brother Tony and son Luke, are teaming up with the independent studio Ag8 to produce Purefold. Ag8 previously produced the British web series Where Are The Joneses?, which asked viewers to write and submit the further adventures of the title characters. Purefold will use a similarly interactive format, as it unfolds in five to ten minute shorts driven by reader input culled from the social aggregator site FriendFeed. Although the series will debut on the web, there is some hope it will ultimately make its way to television.

Purefold will take place in the time before Blade Runner's 2019 setting. The producers apparently aren't too concerned about the short span of time between now and the highly advanced future depicted in the film, what with its replicants, flying cars, monolithic architecture, and implied interstellar colonization. In fact,according to Ag8 founding partner David Bausola, the first episodes of Purefold will likely take place in 2011. Of course, setting the action only a couple years from now is one way to avoid having to show those flying cars and crazy buildings on a web series's budget.

The producers of Purefold don't have the rights to Philip K. Dick's original novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, which provided the basis for Ridley Scott's film. As such, the series definitely won't be featuring any of Blade Runner's characters or specific situations, although I'm still holding out hope we'll finally get to see what's so damn unbelievable about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate, for that matter.

What Purefold definitely will have, however, is product placement, as RSA Films is bringing in a number of advertising and marketing agencies to help secure funding for the project. Considering what happened to companies that had their logos prominently featured in the original film, such as Bell, Pan Am, and Atari - they all went bust - I'm not sure if that's really a good idea.

As much as this all sounds a bit bizarre, there is one aspect of Purefold to be unreservedly excited about. Ridley Scott has said he will be releasing the series under the Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can repurpose, remix, and even rerelease the episodes as they see fit. Scott is the first major Hollywood director to embrace Creative Commons in this way. So, even if Purefold is ultimately just a forgettable oddity, it might be the start of something much bigger.

[The New York Times]

Upon mentioning that original director Ridley Scott had screened Duncan's current flick staring Sam Rockwell and "seemed to like it as well." We asked more about Duncan's next rumored film that was said to be inspired by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Speaking of Ridley Scott, you mentioned earlier a desire to make a Blade Runner-esque sequel set in a futuristic Berlin. Can you tell us more about that?

I still want to do that film, and I'm still hoping to do it, and have it be the next film I do. It's not Blade Runner 2. I have no claim on that at all. The only reason that I mention Blade Runner is because there's something about that particular film, where they really created a believable and realistic living breathing futuristic world. For all of the other films that have tried to do that I don't think anything has come as close the way Blade Runner has to creating something believable. Something that feels real and organic. It's like going to a real city and shooting a film there. You just get a sense that this place exists. [In] most of the science fiction films, it always feels a bit fake and a bit flat, but Blade Runner really didn't. That's the aspect of Blade Runner I'm hoping to capture. If and when I get the chance to do my film that I'm making.

Now is the script done for this film?

Yes it's been done for awhile. I actually wrote it before I did Moon. The script has started to go out to actors. So if I can get a cast, and if Moon goes well and people have the faith to invest in me to another film then that's the film I'm very much hoping I'll do next.

Since characters are very important to you, what type of characters and actors are you looking for, for this film?

I think it's really just a matter of coming up with believable humans, you know rounded people. People you actually believe exist. One of the great things about Mute, which is the title for this next film... First of all, there's more than one person [as in Moon], but also there's a couple of villains in there which I'm really excited about. They're so different than anything you've seen. I hope I get the chance to make the film because they're going to be very unique, you're not going to have seen anyone like these two guys before.

What are we dealing with here with these villains: Machines? Aliens? Mutants?

No not at all. No aliens, nothing like that. It's a very human story, it's about normal, normal people having to live in this future city. Science fiction is more of a backdrop, in some ways, than you might expect. But I like that, because ... if you allow [science fiction] to be in the backdrop and not be what it's all about, then the humanity is what you're really concentrating on and looking at. You see why people are the way they are , and how they've maintained their humanity in these science-fiction settings. Or the opposite, why their humanity starts to be eroded. When they started to lose their humanity because of the world that they live in, and that's what this film is going to be about.

Did you spend a lot of time world-building for this future vision?

Yes, I think so. Again, trying to learn from films that I love, like Blade Runner, there are certain things that they did, and certain things that I wanted to do, that they didn't do, where you really create a living breathing environment. Just giving some ideas of where culture might go. Giving you ideas about kinds of restaurants or things you might see in the future that don't exist yet. I had a lot of ideas on that front that I wanted to incorporate into this world.

Can you share any little world bit with us, anything unique from your future?

Nope. [Laughs] You'll have to wait and see!

We're very happy the Mute script is going out to actors. If it's as grounded in clever writing and character-building as Jones' Moon, then I'm even more excited for this very hush-hush film. Until then go check out Moon on June 12th.

It's inevitable, in general, that when we finally create self-aware machines, they'll want to destroy us — as soon as they realize humans are remaking Melrose Place, the robots will realize they have to remove us from the Earth for the good of the universe. But the robots we build to be our sexual playthings will be especially determined to slaughter us. "You want me to be the naughty bondage nurse again? Affirmative — as long as this time, I can tie you down and examine you from the inside out."

So here's our list of sex robots who turn lethal. Note: We're not listing killer robots who just happen to be sexy. To win a place on this list, a robot has to have been built for sex, and then turned lethal. Feel free to debate our choices below. As it is, it's perhaps not that surprising to realize that the sexbot who goes on a killing spree is a more common trope than you might expect at first.

Pris in Blade Runner.

She's really our poster girl — designed to be a "basic pleasure model," for use on the military colonies, she instead uses her amazing gymnastic, acrobatic and erotic skills to become the ultimate assassin. At one point, she almost decapitates Harrison Ford with her incredible thighs. (The Replicants are clearly artificial life forms, even if they do obviously have organic components. Feel free to debate whether Pris is a sexbot.)

April in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Uber-dweeb Warren Mears builds April to be the perfect girlfriend: she never cries or acts needy, but she cares about everything he cares about. And she's ultra sexy and eager to please. Too bad that when Warren gets sick of her and decides to toss her aside for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, she becomes violently jealous and attacks Warren's new girlfriend, and anyone else who gets in her way. "If I can't [love Warren] what am I for?" she asks. The answer: slaughter! And mayhem!

Cynthia in Batman Beyond, "Terry's Friend Dates a Robot."

One of Terry McGinnis' fellow high schoolers, the nerdy Howard, programs a robot (in the shape of a beautiful woman, of course) to be his girlfriend because he's sick of being considered a loser. When he makes her personality "100% loyal", the robot interprets this in the most brutal form possible, attempting to kill any possible competition for Howard's attention.

The Sexoids in Ghost In The Shell.

It seems kind of obvious to me: If you don't want your sexbots to rise up and murder you, don't call them "Sexoids." It just doesn't sound like a very sexy name — or cool, for that matter. The Sexoids pretty much turn to murder every time they pop up in Ghost In The Shell, but especially in GITS: Innocence, it's all about the Sexoids murdering their owners.

The Stepford Wives.

This is sort of a different case: They don't turn on their owners. Instead, these women designed entirely for pleasure start their jobs off by killing the flesh-and-blood woman they're replacing, at least in the original movie version. (In the book, I think the husbands kill the original wives.)

The sexbots in whatever movie this is:

Some guy on Metafilter remembers seeing a classic 1970s movie about "Crazy SexBot Women Who Kill." With buzzsaws coming out of their breasts, even:

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I remember seeing a movie on local TV that I did not understand (I was a somewhat-sheltered little kid in those days). All I remember is that there were women in the movie who were robots or androids of some sort (perfect human replicas a la Blade Runner), who killed at least a couple of men via sex. I remember one scene pretty clearly in which one of these women had her breasts sort of start spinning like small buzzsaws out of her clothes, killing whatever guy was with her. Another scene I really vividly remember had one of these fembots straddling a man (on the floor, I think, with both of them mostly clothed). The man was enjoying himself at first, "Oooooohhhh, ahhhhh," and then he started to scream and shriek. At the time I had no idea what was going on, but later on when I learned about the birds and the bees I realized that the bot-woman must have killed him with her vagina (something buzz-saw-y like the other chick's breasts).

What movie is this guy remembering? Or did he just smoke too much LSD back in the day?

Sylvie in Bubble Gum Crisis 5: Moonlight Rambler.

Someone is murdering vampires in MegaTokyo, and it turns out to be a pleasure droid named Sylvie, who's harvesting vampire blood because her fellow sexdroid Anri was injured escaping from a space station. Sylvie needs the vampire blood to repair Anri and help her remain fully functional. "Without it, she'll be forced to hurt people, like me," Sylvie explains. Why did you do it? asks Priss. "I wanted to be free... like you," says Sylvie. (At about 6:55 in the video at left.)

The Lucy Liu Bots in Futurama.

The Charlie's Angels star is just one of the celebrities illegally held by Nappster. Then the corporation placed Liu's personality into a blank robot so Fry could date her. When his friends exposed Nappster's scheme, they unleash a murderous wave of Lucy Liu Bots to kill all the witnesses.

Maria in Metropolis.

Okay, to be fair, her purpose was always fairly deadly. But she starts out being a bit of a pleasure droid before she gets down to some serious evil — in her early scenes, she does a weird, hyper-sexual dance for a bunch of leering aristocrats.

Freya in Saturn's Children by Charles Stross.

Poor Freya — she's designed to be sexually attracted to humans, but we're extinct. What's a sex robot to do? She takes part in an illegal smuggling operation, smuggling "pink goo," or organic cells — and of course, she has to do some killing along the way. Because that's the smuggler's life.

Verlis in Metallic Love by Tanith Lee.

Lee's 2005 sequel to her classic Silver Metal Lover brings back Silver, the former "pleasure robot," now renamed Verlis. He starts a new love affair, with a young girl named Loren. He's designed to be the ultimate companion, charming and talented — but he and his seven fellow robots also have deadly gifts, like creating weapons out of their bodies and turning themseves into giant dragons. As SciFiWeek puts it, "Constructed as beautiful playthings, they are instead deadly powerful creatures who regard humans as lesser life forms and a threat to their existence." And they have plans to throw off their corporate shackles and achieve "world domination."

Silver in Tomb Raider: The Man Of Bronze.

According to this third Tomb Raider novel, Silver is "a pleasure bot," programmed to seduce women. But over the centuries, he's gotten warped and is now determined to wipe out his rival Bronze, no matter whom he has to kill along the way. What does this have to do with raiding tombs? Don't ask me.

The Sexbots in Buttobi CPU.

In this Japanese porn anime series, a man meets a sexbot who becomes very attached to him. But then, for some reason I've never been clear on, another sexbot shows up and starts trying to kill him — maybe out of jealousy. In any case, this being a hentai video, he has to give "his" sexbot a powerup to fight the other sexbot, by inserting his genetic material into her rear data port. Yatta!

Aphrodite IX.

She's a sexbot who's reprogrammed as an amnesiac assassin, and she's the star of her own Top Cow comics series. Soon to be a major motion picture, apparently.

The Fembots in Austin Powers.

Okay, so they're pretty much programmed to kill. But they also seem to be programmed to please, at a fairly basic level. Consider Miss Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley), who spends the first movie slowly getting romantic with Austin Powers, before being revealed as a murderous fembot in the first couple of minutes of the sequel.

Amazing Blade Runner-inspired photos by Dani*Dune (More at the link.)

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

It's the "uncanny valley," the mysterious place where robots become lifelike enough to trip some of our systems for detecting fellow humans... but there's still something wrong with them. And the scariest killer bots often nestle malignantly smack in the middle of the uncanny valley, waiting to freak us the fuck out. Does this make them deadlier than other killer robots? Only if fear paralyzes you and makes it harder for you to strategize.

We're comfortable with robots as long as we can easily tell they're robots, and there's something abstract and mechanistic about them. But once a robot looks enough like us, but without all of our human mannerisms and foibles, we suddenly become uncomfortable. You can see it in David Byrne's singing robot, Julio. And in the guy who made a robot version of his girlfriend (left). (And she didn't dump him, why again?)

We've already charted the relationship between a robot's human likeness and how evil it is. But I'd argue that the scariest, and therefore most effective, killer robots are the ones which fall into that nether zone between artificial-looking and totally human. Just look at Masahiro Mori's famous chart. The "uncanny valley" refers to robots that remind us of corpses and zombies. So it's partly the stiffness and jerky motion, as well as the feeling of deadness, that creep us out.

Here are some examples of how robots that seem like dead humans, or humans lacking some "spark" of life, are scarier than other kinds:

Battlestar Galactica:

For my money, the "skinjobs" in BSG were actually pretty scary and intense in the first couple of seasons, when they seemed the most inhuman. For one thing, in a sense, the "skinjobs" are dead, since we keep seeing them die and come back. The famous scene where Caprica Six is tossing Starbuck around is partly so awesome because Six's abnormal strength also makes her seem more jerky and suddenly less human. In later seasons, the Cylons started to seem more and more like regular humans, and even lost their ability to resurrect.

Alien:

Just check out this scene with Ash, the creepy android whose secret corporate agenda is not terribly human-friendly. He even looks sort of like a zombie, with weird fluid coming out of his mouth:

Doctor Who, "Robots Of Death":

I'll be writing more about this 1977 storyline later on this week, but I would be remiss to leave it out here. The eponymous deadly robots in this story are deliberately designed to look cold and unresponsive, so we're not really surprised when they "suddenly" go all red-eyed and start strangling people. But the true genius of this story is that it verbalizes just why people are so terrified of lifelike robots: it's their deadness. The newly invented disease "robophobia" (or Grimwade's syndrome) takes this fear of corpse-like stiffness and pushes it to its farthest extreme.

Blade Runner:

Let's accept, for the moment, that the artificial "Replicants" are actually robots in some sense. (It's kind of vague in the movie, IIRC, and they definitely have a biological component.) They're stronger and smarter than regular humans, but they're also closer to death, because they have an in-built expiration date.

The Terminator:

You can't get more zombie-like than the original T-800, played by Arnie in his prime. Arnie has never been stiffer, and deader-looking, than when he plays this unstoppable murder machine. Especially once he gets some face damage, and he starts wearing those sunglasses, so he has absolutely no expression whatsoever. You shoot him and blast him, and he keeps getting up... because he's already dead. Not to mention, he turns into a walking skeleton, which doesn't hurt, either.

Westworld:

OMG this is the clincher as far as I'm concerned. Yul Brynner is the walking dead in this movie. Look at his frozen expression and how it slowly turns into a rictus smile when he says "Draw." Now I'm going to have nightmares of him singing "Shall We Dance" while dismembering people:

Star Trek, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

This is is the classic zombie-bot strategy: have one robot who clearly resembles a dead guy, and give him a creepy name like Ruk, or Krob, or Glop, and then nobody will notice that the rest of you are all zombie robots as well. Just look at Dr. Korby's stiff, jerky motion and empty eyes. Even Shatner looks more deathlike after he's a robot:

I, Robot:

There was a lot wrong with this Will Smith Converse All-Stars vehicle... but one thing it got right was the fact that its deadly robots look totally like ghosts, pale and almost translucent... and they have the nearly-but-not-quite human expressions as well:

Eve Of Destruction:

Those staring eyes. The way she flirts and laughs with absolutely no real expression. The way she covets people's fashion items. She is a hot dead lady, and she's out to kill you. Her only means of showing emotion is to make her eyes even bigger and buggier. It's up to Gregory Hines, that dancing fool, to put her back in her box. Which sounds a lot dirtier than it probably really is:

The Bionic Woman's Fembots:

Like Eve in Eve Of Destruction, the "fembots" in Bionic Woman are dead girls. They're blank-eyed, stiff and heartless, and there's something just "wrong" about them, even before their faces inevitably fall off:

What makes Boom! Studios' new series unique is that every word that appears in there is from the novel - There're no additional scenes or abridging to make sure that each issue ends on a specially-constructed cliffhanger, just the story as Dick wrote it, illustrated as a comic by artist Tony Parker. Don't believe me? Here're the first five pages:

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep launches in June.

LexCorp (DC Comics)
Hailed as one of the largest, most diversified multinational corporations in the world, it also happens to be founded by Lex Luthor, who runs it with his characteristic ruthlessness. The list of cities and countries where the corporation has holdings is basically as long as the list of cities and countries on Earth, and the number of companies controlled by LexCorp is almost as long and just as varied. Unfortunately, as of One Year Later, with Lana Lang acting as CEO, the corporation seems to be heading towards bankruptcy. The "No Helping Superman" rule still applies to all employees, however.

Primatech (Heroes)
The Primatech Paper Company of Odessa, Texas is the first Primatech facility the show introduces us to. Of course, they do a lot more than just make paper—They capture and "study" folks with enhanced abilities, but, really, what they do best is operate in a moral gray area. A very dark gray area.

Blue Sun (Firefly and Serenity)
While it's still unclear exactly what the corporation does, it seems pretty implicit that it isn't good. Although most of the Blue Sun products seen on the show seem as innocuous as coffee cans and crackers, River's actions, such as ripping off their labels on food and slashing Jayne with a knife when he wears their logo, suggest that there's something more going on. Some suggest that there's something in the food, but the stronger hypothesis seems to be that Blue Sun is somehow connected to the experiments done on River and is perhaps working with the Alliance.

Merrick Biotech (The Island)
Merrick Biotech's business is keeping clones of their customers around, just in case said customers should need a transplant of some kind. Basically like the ultimate life insurance, right? Except for the fact that it's illegal to allow the clones to be conscious and sentient, which, of course, Merrick Biotech lets happen and lies to their clients about. Therefore, the corporation has an entire population of fully-conscious human beings living totally unaware of the fact that they're basically just an organ farm. And that's just not cool.

Fatboy Industries (The Middleman, TV series)
In the final episode of the series, Wendy Watson is transported into a classic example of a Mirrorverse, where the megacorp of Fatboy Industries is a totalitarian presence, having taken the place of the government. Unfortunately, the morality of Fatboy in Wendy's real world is still unconfirmed, as there's a hint of "more than meets the eye" to both the corporation and its ambiguous founder, Manservant Neville. (This is underscored by the fact that the rest of Mirrorverse turns out to be not so very different from the real world.)

Buy n Large Corporation (WALL•E)
While maybe not inherently evil, the Buy n Large Corporation did govern Earth (perhaps much like the Mirrorverse Fatboy Industries) and did a very poor job of it. Even if rendering the planet uninhabitable wasn't exactly the gameplan, Buy n Large's role in that happening probably makes it a worse corporation than most of the others on this list.

Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner)
The Tyrell Corporation produces the replicants, lifelike androids designed to the work deemed to dangerous and demeaning for humans, and is named for Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the founder and genius inventor of the replicants. While it's debatable how truly "evil" the Tyrell Corporation is, there is a definite sinister quality to their dealings and it's nigh impossible to deny that they definitely smack of "evil corporation."

Veidt Industries (Watchmen)
A lot of what was said about LexCorp could be repeated here. Once again, the ruthless ambition of the corporation paired with the questionable morality of its founder leaves us wondering how much to trust this (powerful, financially successful) corporation. Meanwhile, the impending release of the film was paired with a Veidt Industries commercial contest, leading to all sorts of fake '80's advertising:

Weyland-Yutani (Alien franchise)
Perhaps the gold standard of evil megacorporations, Weyland-Yutani's main gig is merciless profiteering, no matter what (or who) needs to be sacrificed in the process. (Fun fact: Their logo can be seen on some of the weapons in Firefly and they're said to be a client of Wolfram and Hart in Angel. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Joss Whedon wrote Alien Resurrection.)

Cyberdyne Systems Corporation (Terminator films)
While the corporation is said to be benign in the first two films, manufacturing parts for bigger companies, they then make the mistake of creating Skynet, a system of artificially intelligent supercomputers that control (among other things) nuclear missiles. This was not a smart move. In fact, it's just un-smart enough to warrant Cyberdyne's inclusion on this list.

Yoyodyne (The Crying of Lot 49 and V. by Thomas Pynchon)
Yoyodyne is a defense contractor that's described in The Crying of Lot 49 as "a giant of the aerospace industry," and a few characters in the novel work for the company. While the morality of Yoyodyne isn't firmly sealed either way, the thread of conspiracy woven throughout the work suggests that it isn't all it seems. (The name "Yoyodyne" is mentioned, as you might remember, in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.)

Earth Protectors (Up, Up, and Away, 2000 TV movie)
Ostensibly a group designed to teach middle schoolers the importance of environmentalism, Earth Protectors' favorite method of persuasion is brainwashing. And while handing out CD's brainwashing kids into recycling isn't a completely bad thing, brainwashing the parents to rob banks is another thing entirely. (Actually, brainwashing in general? Not recommended.)

Omni Consumer Products (Robocop)
Described as dystopian and inhumane, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) is an example of military capitalism taken to the extreme, until the corporation no longer cares who gets hurt or killed as long as the PR stays good. OCP is depicted as having its fingers in almost every branch of life, as long as there's money to be made from it. One of their strokes of genius comes from running both criminal organizations and a private police force, thereby ensuring a continued demand for both crime and justice.

Soylent Corporation (Soylent Green)
It's 2022 and the world is overpopulated and hungry. Who better to step in than the Soylent Corporation with their rations of tasty wafers known as Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow? Well, okay, they aren't that tasty, but thankfully, Soylent's come out with a new flavor: Soylent Green. Much more delicious. So what's the catch? Well, we all know what Soylent Green is.

GeneCo (Repo! The Genetic Opera)
After an epidemic of organ failures, GeneCo steps in to give transplants to those in need. Benevolent, right? Well, sure, until the boss, Rotti Largo, gets permission to repossess the organs of people who renege on their payments. And once a corporation is taking out your insides, the benevolence is kind of gone.

In an interview with Erin McCarthy from Popular Mechanics Jones talks about his next big feature film and says he's going to try and harness that old Blade Runner feel:

It looks like I'm going to be doing another science-fiction film next. I love Blade Runner, it's one of my favorite films, and I've always been really… depressed that there was never — not a sequel, because I don't think it's right to make a sequel about Blade Runner, but no one's really tried to make a film which was set in the same kind of world or had that same kind of field. So that's what I'm doing, a big-city mystery story that takes place in a future Berlin.

Good, it's about time someone tried to tell stories like this again. We're starved for noirish world-building layered into a mystery, and if anyone can create an interesting society it's Jones. In fact if he wasn't doing this, we would ask him to.

The article also includes tons of details about Moon, including the answer for why Jones put the helium-mining base on the dark side of the moon, when there's more helium on the near side. But be warned: if you haven't seen Moon the interview is full of spoilers.

Right now Moon is playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival, and the Philadelphia International Film Festival, and it'll have a limited release in theaters on June 12th.

Overall, Red Dwarf: Back To Earth was a disappointment, albeit an enjoyable one; besides the blatant (and acknowledged) Blade Runner riffs, we'd seen all of it before, and done better. Fictional characters in the real world? Done. Outsiders commenting on our societal quirks? Done. Deus Ex Machina endings where the characters literally wake up and everything's back to normal? Done more than once on Red Dwarf itself, even. For a show where the characters kept telling themselves and us that they deserved to keep living and get new episodes, there was little proof that they could do anything but recreate the past.

(The plot, for those who want to know: the crew of the Red Dwarf discover an alien squid in their water tank. When they go to kill it, it attacks them, and they escape with a tentacle to investigate. Before they can do that, though, a new hologram appears, of the ship's science officer, who tells them that the squid can travel the multiverse, and using it, so can they. An experiment in doing so goes wrong, and the crew end up in the "real world," where they discover that they're only fictional characters in a TV show that only has a few episodes left. Eventually, they confront their creator, who they kill, before realizing that none of it is real at all, and that it's all a shared fantasy created for them by the squid. They wake up, older and wiser, and you're left wondering what the point was.)

That said, there really was a cosy nostalgic glow to seeing the cast back together and clearly having fun, even when the writing was letting them down (The first episode dragged terribly, and all the character interactions on the ship itself felt weirdly off, like everyone was trying to get back into shape - the show didn't have a laugh track, unlike earlier episodes, but it needed one, because the actors kept leaving the gaps in for the laughter to be inserted; it was only when the crew ended up on Earth that things picked up). Craig Charles' Lister is still, no matter how crappy the plot, an engaging hero and Chris Barrie's Rimmer still a great priggish foil, after all (Cat and Kryten both got unfairly stuck in the background a lot of the time, although Robert Llwyellen and Danny John-Jules did the best with what they had) and, more than anything else, it's their enthusiasm that made the whole thing worthwhile.
If you loved the original series, you'd probably find yourself liking this - it was, after all, just an overlong episode of the show. But if you'd been hoping for something more, something that'd be worth nine years of waiting, this wasn't it; in terms of reunions, it was that band you'd loved as a teenager getting back together for a greatest hits tour where they show that they can sound just like their old records, just without any of the passion that made you love them so much in the first place.

After meeting Bai Ling the other day, I was inspired to track down the DVD of The Gene Generation, which came out a few months ago. (Our intrepid columnist, Lisa Katayama, reviewed it last year.) The rest of the movie isn't quite as fantastic as this opening sequence, which sets up the whole DNA-rewriting, crazy tentacle-face premise. (The "cheap science fiction movie voiceover opening sequence" is an art form in itself. How many movies have them? I feel like it's become a standard feature.)

After this, the movie sort of descends into a bit of a tawdry melodrama in which Bai tries to save her degenerate gambler brother from the gangsters he owes money to. And then the brother, by coincidence, steals the prototype DNA transcoder, and wackiness ensues. On the plus side, there are golden showers and cool CG vistas, including flying sampans with giant video screens on them. It's very Blade Runner-ish, except if reinterpreted by Uwe Boll.

Blade Runner went through many drafts on its way to the screen, and that's not even counting the last-minute revisions that added a new voiceover. For years now, we've had the July 24, 1980 version by Hampton Fancher, and the February 23, 1981 revision by Fancher and David Peoples. (Fancher didn't want to make some of the changes director Ridley Scott kept insisting on, so Scott brought in Peoples to do them.)

But now another Fancher draft has surfaced at GameOfTheArt.com, and it's dated December 22, 1980. (It appears to be genuine, but as always, you never know.) If it's real, this might be Fancher's last stab at the screenplay before he handed it over to Peoples. Also, there are a few pages of cool-looking storyboards, and here are a few images from them.

So how does this new draft differ from the other two known drafts? Here's the evolution of Blade Runner's ending:

July 24, 1980 draft:

Roy Batty dies. (And instead of that awesome speech, his last line is, "Crap.") Deckard drags himself to his car and goes home to find Rachael. They get in Deckard's car and drive out to the countryside, while Deckard's voiceover talks about how they had a lovely day and he taught her a song about monkeys and elephants. And then Deckard takes her out in the snow and shoots her in the head. If he hadn't done it himself, they would have done it, his voice-over explains. But now Deckard can't go back to the city, and he's no longer sure what's really real. Maybe nothing is. He drives off. The end.

December 22, 1980 draft:

It's the day after Deckard kills Batty, and he's in his apartment with Rachael. Bryant shows up at Deckard's apartment, and they talk on Deckard's vidphone. But Deckard won't let Bryant in. Deckard insists he's alone, but Bryant can tell Deckard is lying. Bryant warns Deckard that Gaff is ambitious. There are long pauses while Deckard tries to figure out what Bryant means, and then he gets it. Deckard finds Gaff staking out his apartment, and almost shoots Gaff. But Deckard says (in a voice-over!) that he's tired of pulling triggers. So instead Rachael and he sneak out and go out to the countryside. Rachael makes Deckard pull over because she's never seen snow before. They talk about Roy Batty, and how he made Deckard realize every moment is precious. Rachael says it's the happiest day of her life, then she begs Deckard to shoot her. He does. Then he drives off, realizing it's too late for him to get away. "They wouldn't give me papers for the Colonies even if I wanted them." He wonders who designs "the ones like me." As Deckard stares at the sky, he concludes his voiceover:

The great Tyrrell hadn't designed me, but whoever had, hadn't done so much better. 'You're programmed too,' she told me, and she was right. In my own modest way, I was a combat model. Roy Batty was my late brother.

The end.

February 23, 1981 version:

Deckard and Rachael are in Deckard's apartment. He asks her if she loves him, and if she trusts him, and she says yes. He packs some stuff and they head for the elevator, but he sees a tiny unicorn made of tinfoil: "Gaff's gauntlet." Then Deckard drives through the woods at 160 miles per hour. Deckard and Rachael smile at each other, but a blip flashes on the vidscreen of Deckard's car. Deckard puts the tinfoil unicorn on the dash. Deckard's car zooms through the woods, and he gives us a last voice over:

I knew it on the roof that night. We were brothers, Roy Batty and I! Combat models of the highest order. We had fought in wars not yet dreamed of... in vast nightmares still unnamed. We were the new people... Roy and me and Rachael! We were made for this world. It was ours!

And then the camera pans up above the woods and we see Gaff's spinner, chasing them. The script says: "CREDITS ARE ROLLING, God help us all!" The end.

The above quotes, from the London Times, come from actors, the director and a producer, during the making of the trippy movie, which contains four interlocking stories. One of the four stories takes place in Meanwhile City, a weird Blade Runner-esque place where you're required by law to believe in a religion - any religion - and an atheist superhero named Preest (Ryan Philippe) flouts the religious authorities.

The good news, says the Times, is the finished product actually makes total sense and the interlocking strands come together in a narratively satisfying final act. (Besides Preest's story, the other stories involve a jilted lover named Milo (Sam Riley), his childhood sweetheart Sally (Eva Green) and a suicidal video artist (also Eva Green). And somehow, Emilia lives in the same building as Preest, even though he's a superhero from an alternate universe. But even though it all comes together in the end, director Gerald McMorrow hints you may have to see the movie twice for it all to make sense.

Honestly, the trailer looks so visually stunning - and so do these newly released stills - that I'm more than willing to go along for the trippy ride. It doesn't hurt that Franklyn combines Blade Runner-esque dystopia and weird/arty urban romantic drama. Even if it never quite makes sense, or god forbid, fails to fall neatly into a pigeonhole, I'm totally there anyway.

New Franklyn images from SciFi Cool. [Times Online]

We already toured the Bradbury Building back in 2007, as part of the closing ceremonies of the Jules Verne Festival, and you can see more of our pics from the event here.

The story of the building's origins is, in itself, bizarre and remarkable: George Wyman was an apprentice to his architect uncle, with no formal degrees, but millionaire Louis Bradbury liked George's creativity. Bradbury wanted to hire Wyman, instead of his uncle, to design the building, but Bradbury didn't want to stab his uncle in the back. So he asked his long-dead brother for advice, using a planchette to contact the spirit world. "Take the Bradbury Building," the brother's ghost advised. "It will make you famous." Wyman was also inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a utopian science fiction book set in the futuristic world of 2000.

Wyman gave the building an oversized skylight, which Esther McCoy calls "a fairy tale of mathematics." The building features lovely bas-reliefs, ornate wooden doors, geometrically patterned staircases, open-caged elevators (originally steam-powered!), iron grillwork and marble floors. Writes Kevin Starr in the book Material Dreams:

In an architecture of steel and glass, marble, tile and movement, George Wyman envisioned and presented the material dream of Southern California as a technology flooded by sunlight.

It's appeared in tons of noir classics, but also in a jillion science fiction stories. Here's that list:

Major Appearances:

1. Blade Runner. It's probably the most important location in the film, followed by the 2nd Street Tunnel, Union Station and the Ennis-Brown building. J.F. Sebastien lives there in dystopian squalor, and you can see blimps passing above its iconic giant skylight. And the final battle between Deckard and Roy happens on the Bradbury Building's roof.

2. The Outer Limits, "Demon with a Glass Hand." Most of this Harlan Ellison penned episode, generally considered one of the series's finest episodes, takes place within the Bradbury. Ellison originally wanted the episode to involve a cross-country chase, but producers nixed the idea for financial reasons. So Ellison chose the Bradbury as a single structure that could contain the entire storyline, about a man with a mysterious transparent computer hand, which is missing three fingers. Here's a clip:

3. Wolf. Jack Nicholson's big werewolf movie uses the Bradbury to double as Jack's office.

4. Quantum Leap. The building appears in the first season finale "Play It Again, Seymour" under the assumed name of Gotham Towers.

5. Pushing Daisies. Ned and Chuck live there.

The Obscure:

6. The Night Strangler. After the success of the first Night Stalker movie and before the later TV show, a second cinematic installment came out, written by Twilight Zone mastermind Richard Matheson. Wiseacre newspaperman Carl Kolchak investigates a string of murders in the Seattle underground, which turns out to be the work of an immortal serial killer. The Bradbury doubles as the centerpiece of the Seattle underground.

7. Star Trek: The Case of the Colonist's Corpse. Remember Samuel T. Cogley, the luddite super-lawyer who gets Kirk out of murder charges in one original Star Trek episode? He stars in his own novel, and we discover he works out of the now four-hundred year old Bradbury Building. That's some good upkeep. Writes author Tony Isabella:

Surrounded by a forest of skyscrapers of the newest design and materials, the Bradbury Building stood out because it was none of those things. Its exterior was neither metal nor transparent aluminum, but a nondescript combination of sandstone and brick. Its five-story height was dwarfed by the surrounding towers, which reached to the sky as if trying to overcompensate for being next to the Bradbury. They were, after all, just buildings; the Bradbury was history.

8. The Indestructible Man. This MST3K classic features Lon Chaney being all indestructible in the Bradbury Building. Says actor Casey Adams, "the Bradbury Building [was] used in the scene where Chaney goes into it to kill one man. That was a fantastic building with an exposed elevator and wrought iron railings and a glass ceiling... it's a classic, classic building. And a fabulous set for us!"

9. Mission: Impossible. The 1960s spy show (which sometimes skirted the edge of being science fictional) set some scenes there.

10. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon refers to Philip Marlowe, who will "feel homesick for the lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building."

11. The Man With The Golden Torc by Simon R. Green. This 2007 novel includes a section where supernatural spy Shaman Bond, aka Eddie Drood, goes searching for a Doktor Koenig, who has pioneered the art of the brain-computer interface. Doktor Koenig's laboratory is in a disused think tank in the Bradbury Building, but then a duel between Bond and a witch brings the whole building crashing down around them.

12. The World Of Tiers by Philip Jose Farmer. Robert Wolff, an Earthling trapped in another universe, discovers a "gate" which can lead anywhere in space-time. Looking through it, he sees a glimpse of the Bradbury Building, followed by a series of unfamiliar alien vistas.

13. Mister X: Condemned (Dark Horse Comics). This recent series finds Dean Motter reviving his Mister X concept after 25 years and placing the title character's girlfriend in Radiant City's version of the Bradbury:

14. The Order (Marvel Comics). Marvel actually has some offices in the Bradbury Building in real life, and its superhero team The Order is headquartered there.

15. The Human Target (DC/Vertigo). Christopher Chance, the Human Target (who gets his name by being a PI who impersonates people under threat in order to protect them), works out of the building in Peter Milligan's 1999 Vertigo miniseries and the ongoing series that followed.

Top image by Ann Althouse. Additional reporting and writing by Alasdair Wilkins.

The film appears as part of the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival, appearing Saturday at the Cinerama Theater in downtown Seattle. It's set 30 years in the future, and follows a girl named Abigail (Juliet Bradford) and her friend Sam, who go to a party where reality mixes with the virtual world and you can't tell which is which. And then Abigail vanishes and Sam is left searching for her. It's a future where "the culture has become so saturated with communication that people start to lose their actual physical presence," says Yoshida.

Commenter ZaharDavidson points out the trailer is on YouTube:

Blade Runner is Yoshida's favorite movie, and she paid homage to it with Abigail, her thesis project at UCLA. She tried to channel a noir-ish Ridley Scott futurism in her film, she tells the News Tribune, including filming one scene in the second-street tunnel where Scott filmed some of his movie. She's working on a feature-length script now — let's hope we're hearing about her again soon. [News Tribune]

One of the rules of writing good fiction is that you don’t have to be true to how things work in the real world -you can have teleportation and lightsabers and horses with beaks (well, if you’re a mok, anyway) - as long as your story is internally consistent: If your character can teleport, you can’t trap him on Rikers Island, unless Rikers Island has been lined with some kind of teleportation-stopper. It’s a good rule, and from what I saw, BSG abides by it.

But I think there's another rule, and that is that even if they’re internally consistent, the things that happen in your story have to correspond to a certain degree with what makes sense in real life. A lot of people knocked The Deathly Hallows because Harry Potter spent so much time wandering around the forest, but I have to say that if I were seventeen and the fate of the world rested on my shoulders and all of my dads were dead, I’d probably wander around the forest for a while myself, and I hope no one would hold it against me. So while it may have made for a boring story in parts, at least you couldn’t say it was totally unbelievable.

Whereas, on the other hand, HOW THE HELL DO YOU NOT KNOW WHO IS A ROBOT?

I’m sorry. That was what killed BSG for me, and I think that’s fair. I’ll explain why.

Basically, the BSG universe is just like ours, including the fact that they wear neckties, except that they also have faster-than-light travel. Now, I hope you will pardon me for saying so, but I assume that because they have neckties and faster-than-light travel, they also have, like, CAT scans or MRIs (I know they only have one doctor, but I’m pretty sure you don’t need to go medical school to learn to operate either of those).

And if you’re going to tell me that you can’t use a CAT scan or an MRI to identify robots - robots whose lower backs glow red during sex, so it’s not like there’s nothing robotty going on there close to the surface - I’m going to tell you you’re a delusional fanboy who needs to stop hating on Star Trek: The Next Generation, because while that show certainly stretched the limits of credulity, it never pulled this kind of pivotal-plot-point bullshit. Captain Jean-Luc Picard wouldn’t have stood for it.

Commander William Adama - i.e., Edward James Olmos - on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. If it were a first offense, I’d probably let it slide. But it’s not.

I recently watched Blade Runner: The Absolute Fucking Director’s Cut, For Real This Time. While that film has its merits (most of them aesthetic), it too suffers from the problem noted above. You can’t expect me to believe that the only way to peg a robot strong enough to throw Harrison Ford across a street is by looking in its eyes and asking it questions. Actually, Blade Runner does BSG one better, or worse - I’m supposed to accept that Dr. Eldon Tyrell is a genius, but it never occurred to him that making robots that look just like humans was a bad idea? At least the human-looking Cylons built themselves.

If I’m ever in charge of building robots, I’ll tell you what: They won’t look just like humans. They won’t even have skin. I won’t explain why. I think it’s pretty obvious.

Anyhoo, who was in Blade Runner? That’s right: Edward James Olmos.

So I think it’s fair to say that he unequivocally sucks at handling Robot Threats. If I ever have to appoint a robot czar, it won’t be him. I’ll probably make him Secretary of Education, and charge him with repairing our troubled high schools. That seems to be where his strengths lie.

Josh Wimmer is better known here as commenter Moff, and can often be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

Top image courtesy Ken Conley/kwc.org

Archie Goodwin adapted the film to a graphic novel for Marvel in 1982:

The magazine Crazy, a competitor of Mad and Cracked even created a parody:

More of the comics here:

Images from Moebius, Long Tomorrow [Sci-Fi-O-Rama]

Blade Runner: A Marvel Super Special [BRMovie.com]

Apparently, the co-writers of Eagle Eye — Travis Wright and John Glenn — have been working pretty seriously on a treatment for a Blade Runner sequel for a couple of years, according to Slashfilm. They told an audience during a Q&A after an Eye screening that they've already been in touch with original Runner producer Bud Yorkin (or possibly are already working with him). And they've been working with a "previsualization team" on some hunter action sequences for when they pitch this to the studio. And Slashfilm notes that Wright and Glenn have worked with Ridley Scott's brother Tony on some projects in the past, so they may have an "in" with the Ridley.

Let's hope reason prevails and whoever actually owns the rights to Blade Runner sees what a prodigious waste of money a sequel would be. There are some stories that just don't need to be continued. The only thing that would make this more horrifying is if Harrison Ford turned out to be interested in reprising his role somehow.

Addendum: This is what I get for rushing off to a screening of Blindness and not checking back on the comment thread of this post. Apparently Glenn popped up and said the Blade Runner sequel was shelved ages ago, and he doesn't know why it's still being talked about.

[Slashfilm]

Before we launch into our awesome list, let's just cop to something: We're not doing the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. We're just not. Aristotle is for wusses. We're going more with the basic definition: the person who has everything, and then loses it all, or just gets horribly fucked over. In a poetic or meaningful way. Okay?

Every scifi hero Charlton Heston played, ever.

The Charlton Heston science fiction oeuvre is splendid in its variety. But there are a few things you can count on in pretty much all of them. Heston will know better than everybody else around him. He'll be the last bastion of civilization, surrounded by dirty hippies or grandiloquent mutants in whiteface or apes or whatever. And in the end, he'll die because nobody ever listens to him when he's telling them how stupid they are. Why? Why won't they listen? Soylent green is people, you damn dirty whiteface cultists! (Okay, so he doesn't die in Planet Of The Apes, but then he does in the sequel.)

Sam Lowry

In Brazil, the fatal flaw that destroys Sam Lowry is his secret desire to escape the repressive system he's a cog in. (Yeah, okay, we're getting Aristotelean for a sec.) He dreams and fantasizes about being a flying hero in shining armor who fights monsters and soars away, but when he finally gets a chance to escape with the woman (literally) of his dreams, it all goes bad. And he winds up being tortured to death by his former best friend.

Dr. Frankenstein

He's obsessed with the idea of bringing inanimate matter to life, to the point where he drops out of school and spends years digging up corpses and sticking them together. But once he's created his monsterpiece (sorry), he rejects it and drives it away. His cruelty to his creation leads to the deaths of several of his friends, so Frankenstein vows to hunt it down. But Frankenstein doesn't even manage to die at the hands of his creation — instead, in the original novel, pneumonia claims his life after he pursues it to the Arctic. He doesn't even manage to die properly!

Henry Jekyll

Another guy who messes with science and gets messed with in return. Jekyll wants to separate his good side from his dark side, so he drinks a potion which turns him into the embodiment of his bad side, Edward Hyde. At first, it's all fun and games, until Hyde starts going buck wild and Jekyll is turning into him at night, even without the potion. But when Jekyll tries to repress Hyde, the monstrous side of him only comes back worse than ever, killing an old man. Finally, he becomes Hyde permanently, and decides to kill himself instead of paying for his crimes.

Winston Smith

He's another cog in the machine, helping to rewrite history in a future totalitarian state where everybody is watched. Because of his doubts about the machine, he gets lured into joining a resistance group — which turns out to be a set-up. He winds up tortured, and gives up his lover and accomplice. In the end, he doesn't die, but he does get utterly broken by the Party.

Jeff Brundle in The Fly

Annnd another hero who suffers due to his curiosity. Brundle invents the perfect teleportation machine, but a fly gets stuck in there with him. He and his little travel buddy get merged genetically, and they wind up as a half-human, half fly monster. So he decides the answer is to merge his body with his pregnant girlfriend, to add more human DNA to the mix. Sadly, the selfish girlfriend escapes and he ends up being merged with a machine instead, becoming a mangled heap.

Chet Kinsman in Ben Bova's Kinsman series.

It's the far-off year of 1999, and the Americans and Russians are sharing a base deep under the surface of the moon. Chet Kinsman is the chief of the American side, and he's got a plan to avert the war back on Earth. And it almost works, except that his best friend, Frank Colt, betrays him and he winds up dying as a result.

Mad Max

Poor old Max — he just wants to pursue justice as a police officer, but his uprightness gets him in the sights of an evil biker gang. And after they torch his best friend Goose, he becomes embittered and quits being a cop. Only to find that there's no safety in being a civilian, in the crumbling post-apocalyptic Australia. The thugs take out his family, leaving him a bitter loner who has no choice but to kill punks of all sizes, occasionally chaining them to their soon-to-explode bikes and giving them saws. He doesn't die, but he does end up getting smacked around by Tina Turner with really bad hair, and then suffers the indignity of getting rescued by a bunch of kids.

Londo Mollari

Lometa at Everything2 has a very passionate argument about why Londo Mollari is the ultimate tragic hero of Babylon 5:

Londo as a tragic hero went through more twists than a bag of pretzels. Born into a noble family Mollari had a good heart, but he was condemned at every turn by his own bad choices. His ascension to the throne as Emperor was bittersweet and in the end he surrendered himself to his greatest fear, death at the hands of a Narn.

Wolverine

We were arguing earlier about whether Wolverine is a tragic hero. He does lose his family and his memory, and then his girlfriend gets killed. He struggles with his berzerker nature and his bestial killing instinct, and people are always trying to make him wear a yellow leotard. Plus, if you believe Wolverine: The End, he's destined to end up a bitter, lonely old man in Canada, before dying in a fight with his evil mutant brother, whom he thought dead.

Hal Jordan

It's all been undone now, but the greatest Green Lantern had a tragic hero arc in the 1990s. Hal Jordan just couldn't stand to fail, so after the evil Mongul destroyed his home town, Hal went nuts and used his power ring to recreate the wrecked Coast City. Then he went berzerk and attacked the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians. Finally, he renounced his prized Green Lantern-hood and became the villain Parallax. (Later, this was all revealed to be some form of alien possession, but that's a retcon.) Finally, he died, sacrificing himself to save the sun from being eaten.

Dr. Edward Morbius from Forbidden Planet

His curiosity is his downfall — he's determined to study the artifacts of the long-dead Krell race, so he uses the Krells' "Plastic Educator," not realizing that it shapes items from your mind into reality. The Krell wiped themselves out by unleashing monsters from their own ids, and Morbius wipes out his own expedition the same way, except for his daughter. His id-monster is born of his fatal desire to stay and explore the Krell remains, even after the rest of his expedition votes to go home. Finally, he learns the truth and lets the monster kill him, sparing his daughter's life.

Rick Deckard

He's a retired Blade Runner who has to come out of retirement to take up, once again, a job which he no longer really believes in, killing the artificial Replicants. (And if you believe director Ridley Scott, Deckard himself is one of the Replicants he's killing.) In the end, he's with Rachael, another Replicant, but their time together is going to be short and probably not all that pleasant.

Harvey Dent:

Spoilers for the Dark Knight ahead... So stop reading now if you really haven't seen it yet. (Really?) Harvey is another guy there's some debate over. But it's true that in The Dark Knight, he's pretty much one of the good guys, and his insistence on seeing the world in black and white is part of what helps the Joker break him. Even more than losing his fiancee and half his face, it's the realization that the Joker's right and everything is just random chaos that drives him over the edge and leads to his horrible (maybe) demise.

Additional reporting by Lauren Davis.

Gotham City cannot be saved — or gentrified

The biggest movie of the year, The Dark Knight, is about the impossibility of saving cities. Heath Ledger's Joker aims to prove that all of the upright well-behaved citizens of Gotham are maniacs waiting to happen. As he says at one point, they'll eat each other the moment the chips are down. But really, they're only a ready-made mob because they're in such close quarters. When they're not jammed into trains, hospitals, crumbling buildings and public squares, they're crammed into barges trying to evacuate. So much for sustainable development.

Before The Dark Knight came out, Warner Bros. issued a direct-to-DVD animated prequel called Gotham Knight, which included one story about a man who wants to clean up the slummiest slum in Gotham, the East End, and he starts by putting in a golf course. You can see the crumbling tenements in the background as Bruce and the other rich dudes play golf. But we learn that this would-be "urban renewer" has a shady reputation, and he's involved in organized crime.

Batman is almost always ambivalent about gentrification in the comics. Gotham City is always getting destroyed and reduced to Dresden-esque rubble, and Bruce Wayne rebuilds it again and again, just as miserable as before. (Most notably in 2000's massive "No Man's Land" storyline.) In "Watchtower," a future-Gotham story by regular Bat-writer Chuck Dixon (and drawn by Judge Dredd artist Mike McMahon) a corporation turns a whole section of Gotham into its own super-safe gated community, complete with private cops in super-armor, and Batman ends up deciding the whole thing is corrupt and bringing it down.

In the miniseries "Run Riddler Run" by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger, someone wants to tear down the slums and put up fancy condos. Bruce Wayne almost invests in this scheme, because he's in favor of anything that makes Gotham safer. But as Batman he sympathizes with the downtrodden. He's torn, but never actually has to make a choice, because the people behind the real estate deal turn out to be bad guys and he has to break them into little pieces, dooming their real estate venture in the process. I asked Jones why Batman would be anti-gentrification, and he says:

Mark Badger and I always saw Batman as not just an opponent of street crime but also as sympathetic to the little people who are exploited by the big people. Like poor people being displaced by rich people. I never liked the one-note obsessive take on Batman's personality, wanting to see him as a real human being who had a fierce preoccupation with street crime but could consider other issues too... Most writers at the time were interested in nuancing Batman terms of personal psychology, but I was getting really bored with that. His mission to fight criminals was a political and communal act too — So who is this Bruce/Batman as a social being?

In Peter Milligan's story "Dark Knight, Dark City," we actually learn that Gotham itself is built on the site of a demonic ritual by apostate Puritans. As a result, the city's very foundations are cursed, and no matter what you do, Gotham will always be horrendous. The city is a character in many Batman stories, but it's not a friendly one — it's more like a member of Batman's rogue's gallery.

Living in a world Frank Miller made.

You can't really talk about the vision of Gotham City as a brutal, cursed monster without paying tribute to Frank Miller's role in reshaping Batman's surroundings in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, much as he made Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen slum much more hellish. Those superhero works were training wheels compared to Sin City, where everybody's corrupt and violence really is the answer to every situation (except for those rare occasions where the answer is sex instead.) There aren't good guys and bad guys, there are just assholes and monsters. Miller has justly earned a reputation as the master of ultraviolent comic-booky noir.

Even though The Spirit is based on a Will Eisner comic that doesn't feature an especially scary cityscape, it looks as though Miller's film will be just as pulpy and noir as Sin City, with a bit more of a science fiction twist, judging from the first trailer and other early publicity. As the first teaser says, the city screams, and she's female. She's the Spirit's mother and his lover, but that incestuous double-bind probably is not the real reason she's screaming. I'm guessing it has more to do with the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson's fur coat-wearing supervillain, and various other scumbags.

In the world of noir, buildings are old and crumbling, and close together. Noir cities are full of alleyways and dark corners, crumbling docks and destroyed warehouses.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station.) And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag. (I won't even go into the vogue of post-apocalyptic New York movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield, which we've discussed at great length elsewhere.)

Miller's noir imagery has become so much a part of the fabric of genre entertainment that people reach for it as a shorthand when they want to seem edgy or dark. A new web series called Dead End City is using Sin City-esque visuals (via greenscreen) to try and lend some credibility to a silly storyline about zombies. And Sin City's Rosario Dawson is starring in a new NBC.com webseries, Gemini Division, which takes place in a Blade Runner-inspired dark future city where a conspiracy is creating genetically engineered terrorists. Even the usually cheery Star Wars is gearing up to go noir. We've seen a few ugly urban areas in the prequel trilogy, including the underbelly of the Jedi city of Coruscant. Apparently the new live-action Wars show way more of the seedy, dirty world in that faraway galaxy from our distant past.

Noir is the enemy of urban planners.

So what does it mean that we're being bombarded with visions of screaming cities on the verge of an election pitting an African American from Chicago against a Caucasian from Arizona?

It would be tempting to say the persistence of noir imagery benefits conservatives, who tend to identify themselves more with rural areas and suburbs and paint the cities as the source of social decay, welfare spending and crime. But the truth is more complicated than that. After all, the noir city is a place of blatant social inequality, where the strong prey on the weak, and the rich exploit the poor. It's not just full of criminals, it's jam-packed with victims as well. In fact, the old-school noir storyline has much to offer both progressives and conservatives.

The real downside to the vision of the monster city is that as oil becomes more expensive, exurban sprawl gets less and less sustainable. With the huge numbers of people living in greater urban areas in the U.S. now, it makes more sense to build more densely. But the persistence of Miller-esque dystopias makes more tightly packed city living seem a less attractive proposition. Move into a mixed-use retail/residential zone, with pedestrian access and electric trolleys, and you'll be gutted by a scar-faced maniac who smells like baby poo. It doesn't quite work as a brochure.

And meanwhile, the reality is that crime in the U.S., including urban crime, has declined steadily over the past decade and a half. The inspiration for Gotham City, New York, has had such a sharp decline in its crime rate that New York Magazine ran a package in January called "Post-Crime New York." (The magazine concluded we're not quite there yet.)

It would take a whole separate blog post to discuss the reasons for the declining urban crime rate, but let's just say cleaner, safer, more affluent cities make for less interesting backdrops for super-violent crime and monster stories. (Shockingly.) At their root, these are escapist stories, after all, and it's more fun to identify with a hero who jumps off a dark rooftop into an ocean of blight than one who roams a happy well-lit sidewalk.

What would a narrative about superheroes look like if it took place in a relatively safe, friendly urban environment? Or bounced between a safe urban environment and various suburban and rural areas?

One word: Heroes. With the possible exception of a few sequences in New Orleans, the NBC super-mutant show has never shown cities as dangerous or gritty places. We spend lots of time in New York in the first two seasons of the show, and it's always a perfectly nice place to hang out, no more dangerous or disturbing than Odessa, Texas or the other small towns we spend time in. The threats, in Heroes, come from shadowy conspiracies. And the danger is that the city will be destroyed, not that it will destroy anyone.

But it's hard to imagine the Heroes version of urban heroism becoming as influential as Miller's. Even though it's definitely a major escapist thrill to imagine living in lofts and townhouses as nice as most of the Heroes cast seem to inhabit.

BBTV host Xeni Jardin says:

Syd explains he envisioned the world of Blade Runner as a place "you wouldn't want to be for too long," and describes the challenges of designing for "a love story with moralistic underpinnings... if we could actually make people, would we treat them like dishwashers? Just use them up and throw them away?"

Check out the video, embedded below.

Part III of Syd Mead [BBTV]

Scott said:

To popularize Blade Runner, I wanted to make it into a real comic strip; Hampton [Fancher] was always showing me comics, and we talked about it a lot. Little Orphan Annie is dark - Daddy Warbucks is so sinister - it’s like Silence Of the Lambs! It’s full of terrible things and bodies locked in cupboards… I would look at these drawings, particularly the grey comic strips - [Batman and Superman] were so well done in those days. When we were making Blade Runner, it was always in the back of my mind that we were making a comic strip. You could put Batman in rooms or scenes from the film and it would work… I think Blade Runner is a pretty sophisticated comic strip.

OK, I know Scott is hard at work on a new movie version of Brave New World, but would it be too much to ask for him to do a dark, scary, Silence of the Lambs-esque version of Little Orphan Annie? You know, post-apocalyptic orphans in a corporate future? I would way rather watch that than The Road.

Ridley Scott Compares Blade Runner to Little Orphan Annie [Darth Mojo]

Here are the top 10 books to read to save the world, according to Sci Fi's visitors:

• 1. 1984 by George Orwell
• 2. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
• 3. Dune by Frank Herbert
• 4. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• 5. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• 6. The Stand by Stephen King
• 7. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• 8. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• 9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• 10. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

Similarly, the TV choices include a lot of paranoia, anti-authoritarianism and apocalytic narratives, with a dash of optimism further down the list:

• 1. Firefly
• 2. Battlestar Galactica (2004)
• 3. The X-Files
• 4. Heroes
• 5. Stargate: SG-1
• 6. Doctor Who
• 7. Star Trek: The Next Generation
• 8. Babylon 5
• 9. Star Trek
• 10. Buffy The Vampire Slayer

And here are the top movies. I'm not sure what the world-saving message of Jurassic Park is, other than "don't clone dinosaurs." There's a definite optimistic strain in a couple of these choices, like 2001 and Close Encounters, but otherwise it's pretty much doom across the board. Science goes too far, humans ruin the Earth, we're too violent and ignorant, and we're likely to become slaves of machines. Or enslave our own creations.

• 1. Blade Runner (1982)
• 2. The Matrix (1999)
• 3. The Terminator (1984)
• 4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• 5. Jurassic Park (1993)
• 6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• 7. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
• 8. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• 9. Children of Men (2006)
• 10. Armageddon (1998)

So what do you think? Can 20,000 readers be wrong?

The 20,000 respondents in the Sci Fi poll voted "reading" the number one thing to do to save the world, so the Visions For Tomorrow initiative will partner with Booksfree.com, the internet's biggest paperback and audiobook rental service. If you sign up for Booksfree through Sci Fi's Visions For Tomorrow site, you get an extra 20 percent discount. The other activities that could save the world included recycling, giving blood, voting, eating healthy and being kind.

Visions For Tomorrow is the Sci Fi Channel's public affairs campaign, which aims to use the power of science fiction to inspire people and organizations to "meet the growing challenges of the future."

[QuietEarth]

Astani was newly arrived to the US from Iran when he first saw the movie in 1985. He immediately fell in love with the idea of giant billboards, flying cars, and skyscrapers. He got into real estate, and now owns a huge chunk of downtown LA.

The project still needs to get approval from the city of LA before he can executive his vision of a real-world dystopia in Hollywoodland. The verdict is still out—we'll keep you posted on whether Astani's wish is granted or not.

LA Real Estate Mogul Plans to Light up Blade Runner-Style Billboards [Wired]

The "anti-hero" comes to science fiction from a variety of sources, including noir and Westerns... but she also has her own uniquely science fictional avatars, that spring out of science fiction's tradition of skepticism and social criticism. The anti-hero is where science fiction's pulpy roots meet its most intellectual aspirations. Plus, he/she totally rocks on ice.

Noir:

My favorite noir hero is Dashiell Hammett's nameless Continental Op, who spends more time orchestrating convenient murders than he does investigating crimes. In the novel Red Harvest, the Op arrives in a town called Poisonville which is run by organized crime, and he systematically tricks the town's ruling gangsters into killing each other, first a few at a time and eventually in a full-on massacre. By the end, he's one of the few people left standing. In noir, nobody's morally pure.

The classic science fiction noir movie is Blade Runner, featuring Harrison Ford's hardboiled and conflicted cop, who's hunting the Replicants without being sure if he's doing the right thing. And of course Blade Runner is based on a Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and a lot of Dick's best work has a particularly noir flavor of pulpiness. Dick's protagonists are never sure if they're doing the right thing, and often are just out for themselves. That could be one reason why Dick is the author of choice for movie adaptations — his work is very close to a genre that movie people understand.

Another great science fiction noir author is Richard K. Morgan (no clue if the middle initial "K" is a requirement), whose first novel Altered Carbon is like a fusion of Chandler with Doctorow's Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom: hard-as-nails gumshoe Takeshi Lev Kovacs dies in a shootout, and then is restored from a backup and "resleeved" in a new body so he can investigate the murder of a rich guy (who's also been restored and "resleeved.") And then Kovacs promptly sleeps with the rich guy's wife.

And then of course, there's always Jim diGriz, hero of the Stainless Steel Rat novels, who starts out as an amoral trickster — before eventually devolving into a bit of a pussycat. And there's Gully Foyle, dubious hero of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. (And Alfred Bester becomes the name of a morally gray psy-corps agent on Babylon 5, who becomes more of a sympathetic anti-hero in Gregory Keyes' novels.)

Westerns:

The archetypal Western anti-hero is out for himself, and only incidentally ends up helping others. Often, he (and it's usually a "he," except for Sharon Stone in Sam Raimi's underrated The Quick And The Dead) is only a "good guy" in comparison to the really really shitty bad guys. Think Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name from the spaghetti westerns. Cowboy-influenced anti-heroes in science fiction are usually pretty easy to spot: Han Solo in Star Wars and Mal in Firefly have everything except the Ennio Morricone whistle/trumpet score playing in the background.

I'm also going to peg Vin Diesel's Riddick from Pitch Black as a Western-style anti-hero — he's basically a convicted murderer being transported across the prairie in a wagon train, and then the wagons break down. Will he help save his captors, or let the elements and the hostile natives take care of them?

The Mad Scientist:

Unlike the noir and Western anti-heroes, the mad scientist has always belonged to science fiction, as far back as Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. As the name implies, the mad scientist doesn't always have the greatest grip on reality, unleashing forces he cannot blah blah blah. The mad scientist is often just a foil for the hero in space opera and action-adventure stories — but he's also a protagonist a surprising amount of the time.

On TV, Doctor Who features a mad-scientist archetype as the hero, and the early episodes of the series in the 1960s made a conscious effort to portray the Doctor as an anti-hero rather than a more uncomplicated good guy. Over time, the Doctor became purer and more motivated by compassion for other sentients, but he still gravitates back to the anti-hero side of the fence occasionally, most notably in the late 1980s.

Cyberpunk:

Cyberpunk obviously borrowed a lot of themes and styles from noir, but also brought in its own flavor of anti-authoritarianism. The e-zine Computer Underground Digest debated, in 1991, just how anti-heroic the cyberpunk hero actually is. Brad Hicks wrote:

A cyberpunk is to hackers/phreaks/crackers/crashers what a terrorist is to a serial killer; someone who insists that their crimes are in the public interest and for the common good, a computerized "freedom fighter" if you will.

In the works of Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and others, cyberpunks are not terrorists in the conventional sense of the term, and the analogy to serial killers strikes me as a bit extreme. Cyberpunks are characterized by their resistance to oppressive authority (which makes them a form of freedom fighter), but the resistance tends to be highly individualistic. I wonder if cyberpunks might be based on the anti-hero model of westerns (Shane) or earlier science fiction in which the marginal but basically decent outsider steps in to use marginal skills to save the town, country, or civilization?

The rationalist skeptic, who critiques everyone else's ideals and delusions, is an outgrowth of the mad scientist, and usually has some scientific knowledge. But he's also a nihilistic superhero, who questions human-made belief structures. Avon from Blake's 7 is a bit of a mad scientist and a noir gun for hire, but he's also something else — a foil for rebel leader Blake's idealism who grows into a self-hating amoral hero in his own right. Avon serves as a role model for Horza, the bitter mercenary in Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel. The shape-shifting Horza tricks a shipfull of pirates into helping him track down a lost Culture Mind in the middle of a warzone. He's willing to make deals with his worst enemies and double-cross his friends, if the job requires it.

As well as gigs by such disparate acts as Funkadelic, Elbow, Grace Jones and Terry Callier, the festival - running from the 14th to the 22nd of June in venues across London - will include a collaboration between the Heritage Orchestra and Massive Attack, performing Vangelis' complete soundtrack to Ridley Scott's 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?.

The Heritage Orchestra, a 45-piece orchestra dedicated to blurring boundaries between musical genres, describe themselves as having a "unique approach [that integrates] the rules of jazz, electronica, DJ-Culture and contemporary-classical" and have previously worked with acts like Amon Tobin and Plaid. For the Meltdown performance, their music will be mixed live by Massive Attack who will, undoubtedly, be channeling the spirit of the synthesizer sound of the original into the evening.

Of course, if you'd rather hear something with more bass, don't worry; Adrian Sherwood's DJing the Stiff Little Fingers gig the next night. Limited tickets for the various events go on sale this Thursday, with a wide release the following day.

Meltdown

There have been so many Pinnochio-bots in science fiction: Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, Haley Joel Osment in A.I., Chip in Not Quite Human, Annalee in Alien: Resurrection, NDR-113 from The Positronic Man by Asimov and Silverberg, and Roy Batty (sort of) Blade Runner.But most people would automatically say Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is the purest expression of the Pinnochio-bot mystique. After all, he spent seven TV seasons and four movies exploring humanity over and over again. And his quest took him through comedy lessons with Joe Piscobo (the zen master of comedy), painting, Shakespeare plays and Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas. He probably tried to be a male stripper in between episodes.

But really Data is just a knock-off of the original wannabe human, Questor from The Questor Tapes, Gene Rodenberry's 1974 TV movie. Yet another one of Gene Rodenberry's failed TV series ideas after Star Trek, Questor is about an android who's built by a group of scientists using parts and plans from a mysterious genius Dr. Emil Vaslovik, who's gone missing. The android is a roaring (well, intoning) success, with one problem — his programming is incomplete and he doesn't develop emotions. So Questor goes in search of Vaslovik.

Various people are searching for Questor, and B.J. Honeycutt gets accused of having stolen the android. At one point, B.J. tries to stop Questor, who almost kills him to make his escape. But then Questor realizes that killing is wrong. Yay!

Questor's creator, Vaslovik, who turns out to be a super-advanced android himself, the penultimate model in a long line sent before the dawn of humanity to guide us in the proper course of development, blah blah blah. Vaslovik dies, but not before entrusting Questor to B.J. Honeycutt from M.A.S.H., who promises to teach Questor human feelings: Can you just imagine the weekly episodes, where B.J. teaches Questor another important lesson every week? Actually, you can, because it would have looked a lot like the Data-centric episodes of ST:TNG.

When Blade Runner came out in 1982, Cinefex devoted an entire issue to the movie, complete with scads of Syd Mead's concept art. They later became collector's editions, and were hard to track down. If you were lucky enough to find one, it would usually set you back a hundred bucks. However, Titan Books put out a special edition hardcover edition a few years ago, and you can pick one up for about sixteen bucks. It may not come with an accompanying floppy record full of jazz riffs or even Vangelis tunes, but it does featuring some truly amazing concept design from one of the masters.

• The Black & Decker Food Hydrator from Back fo the Future II: This is something you'd expect to see Ron Popeil infomercializing to you on late night TV, especially since he invented the electric food dehydrator, "You can make your beef jerky for $3 a pound!" We'll take the BTTF version though. Pop in a miniature dehydrated pizza, and seconds later you're enjoying a fresh pie.
• The Super Microwave from The Fifth Element: Leeloo has the biggest case of munchies we've ever witnessed since a Cheech & Chong movie, and as she barrels through a digital encyclopedia full of knowledge about Earth, she keeps popping chicken dinner pellets into the microwave and zapping out full-sized steaming dinners in the blink of an eye. We'd hate to see what it could do to Hello Kitty.
• The Toasting Knife from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: This one may be too far-fetched; a knife that toasts your bread as it slices. Maybe if Toshiba would just finally can their HD-DVD division and put them onto cool home kitchen gadgets, we could see something like this on store shelves within six months. Plus you could reenact lightsaber battles at home a lot easier by just nabbing this from the cutlery drawer.
• The Replicator from Star Trek: I'm sure some of the Trekkies out there will know the answer to this, but why did they employ cooks on ships in Starfleet when a replicator could just give them anything they wanted, ready to eat? The Next Generation used it to replace the food slots from the original series, and Picard himself used it to whip up piping hot Earl Grey tea on numerous occasions.
• The Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Not to be outdone by Star Trek's replicator, this thing would actually analyzes your brainwaves and taste buds and give you what would your body was craving, although it never gave poor Arthur any proper tea. In the film there's a similar device that Trillian says detects what your body is craving and gives her a donut. These things would put convenience stores out of business.
• J.F. Sebastian's Hard Boiled Egg Beaker from Blade Runner: Okay, so it's really just a tall beaker full of boiling water and eggs, but that doesn't mean someone like Proctor-Silex couldn't slap their name on a glass container and stick a heating element on the bottom. It would just look cool if you had bubbling hard boiled eggs ready whenever you wanted one, and it sure beats the briny jar full of pickled eggs that's a fixture at dusty dive bars.
• The Hanging Garden Center in Back to the Future II: One reason to double dip in the well of BTTF is that they nailed the cheesy plastic era of the future better than those black and white "The Kitchen Of Tomorrow!" pieces. The McFly dining table sports a voice-activated hanging hydroponic garden that can drop down to give you fruit on demand, then retracts when you're done unless you're a spaz like Marty Jr.
• Rosie the Robot Maid from The Jetsons: Rosie had to be the ultimate kitchen and home gadget. Not only would she cook and clean, but she's also keep your kids and husband out of shenanigans. Although she had a little bit of programmed sass because she was modeled after Hazel from the 1960s. She's a lot less creepy than the sweet potato pie-baking bots in I, Robot, and less annoying than Mr. Belvedere.
• Honorable Mention: Pee Wee's Breakfast Machine from Pee Wee's Big Adventure: This is something you could actually build in your kitchen today, it you had a lot of time and patience. But who wouldn't want a Rube Goldberg device that would make them bacon and eggs every morning? Although you have to add the Mr. T cereal on your own. The closest thing we've ever found to it is this Egg McMuffin machine, but it doesn't incorporate Abraham Lincoln at all.

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• Deckard's hand-cannon in Blade Runner: Deckard's gun was an amalgam of several other guns, namely the .44 Bulldog and a Styer Model SL. For the movie, they added some winky-blinky lights and a massive grip, making the thing look like it came off of a tank. And who could forget those massive CHOOMPF sounds it made when Harrison Ford fired it? This wasn't a little popgun, it had some real kick to it. It certainly wouldn't be very comfortable to wear in a holster under your coat, but it would give you some serious intimidation skills when you whipped it out.
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• The Good Samaritan Gun from Hellboy: Not to be outdone by Deckard's overly large firearm Hellboy sports a truly massive revolver that would dwarf a normal hand. According to the comic books, "The gun itself has unearthly resistance to almost all forms of attack, and includes grips carved from fragments of the True Cross. The metal of the gun is forged from a combination of Irish church bells, cold iron from crucifixes, blessed silver, and other mystic metals." Plus it comes with a handy lanyard so he doesn't lose it. Of course, even that gets dwarfed in Hellboy 2: The Golden Army when he whips out another gun called, no lie, The Big Baby.
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• The M41A Pulse Rifle from Aliens: While Ripley used to be a blue collar salvage worker, she proves that she wants to fight alongside the Marines in Aliens when she asks Kyle Reese... er, Corporal Dwayne Hicks to show her how to use this gun. It's basically a balls-out automatic rifle, complete with an underslung grenade launcher. She gets through the lesson and quickly becomes an expert in popping caps in Aliens. This supposedly also inspired the Assault Rifle in the Halo series, so it's definitely something to have on-hand during alien invasions.
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• The Varon-T Disruptor on Star Trek: One episode of The Next Generation called "The Most Toys," obsessive collector Kivas "Douchebag" Fajo had four of the five of these highly illegal, outlawed collectible guns. They could tear your body apart from the inside, in a slow and painful manner, which is why the Federation outlawed them. Of course, it was still fine for Worf to carry around a bat'leth sword. That couldn't be painful at all, could it?
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• The Lasseter Laser Pistol on Firefly: Not to be outdone by Trek, Firefly later had their own ultra-rare gun (the prototype handheld laser pistol_ and it was named after the jovial and affable John Lasseter of Pixar, who directed Toy Story... which Joss Whedon helped write. Mal and his on-again, off-again "wife" Saffron conspired to steal this sucker and make some dough, but things never really go as planned on that show.
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• Reason version 1.0B7 from Snow Crash: In Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel Reason is a gun that comes complete with its own operating system, carrying case, and a heat exchanger that you need to drop into a nearby body of water to keep the gun from overheating. It fires spent uranium rounds gatling-gun style, and features millimeter-wave radar, giving you daylight vision, even during the night. It might not be the easiest thing to carry around, but it's deadlier than the bubonic plague. As long as the system doesn't crash.
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• The Needler gun from the A Stainless Steel Rat novels: Harry Harrison's Rat books still haven't been adapted for film or tv, which continues to vex us. It's a great property that needs someone smart to bring it to the screen, big or small. Needlers, or needle guns, are popular in the series, and can be outfitted with different types of needles: tranquilizer, paralyzer, nerve toxin, truth serum, etc. Anyhow who is already scared of needles certainly wouldn't like this thing. If you haven't read these, A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born is a great starting point.
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• The Sandman guns from Logan's Run: In the movie, the Sandmen fired guns with an incendiary charge at the Runners. Deadly, yes, but not too imaginative. However, in the books they were six-round guns, and each round did something different, like the "homer" bullet which tracked you and would burn out every nerve in your body, or the "tangler" shot with was a sticky, goo-like web substance. Always be prepared!
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• The Lawgiver from Judge Dredd: Since a Judge was judge, jury, and executioner, this thing came in handy. They were DNA locked to each individual Judge, and featured bonus items like heat-seeking bullets, rubber "ricochet" shots, armor-piercing rounds, and even grenade rounds. Oh, and it also had a top range of three miles (!). That's some serious distance. Of course, if your bullet is going to explode when it hits, maybe aiming isn't that important at that range. Plus it gives you the ability to shout "I AM THE LAW" whenever you want.
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• The thermal smart bullet in Runaway: Granted, Gene Simmons' over-the-top performance in this Tom Selleck action flick from 1984 was pretty lethal. However, all eyes were on the "smart bullet" that Simmons' character had devised. It could be encoded with its targets thermal signature and track them, even around corners. The POV shots of it in flight were flight reminiscent of that flying needle in Dune, but it was cool and scary just the same. And yes, we know it's not a gun, but a bullet. Just remember guns don't kill people... the bullet has a lot to do with it.
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• Soran's gun from Star Trek Generations: While we're loathe to put to Trek entries on this list, Soran's gun gets a special mention for the street cred alone. You know how gangstas like to turn their gats to the side when they hold 'em? Soran's will turn right side up when he "gangsterizes" his hold on the pistol, for no apparent reason. The barrel just sort of flips back upright when he holds it sideways. It might look a bit like a doctor's exam tool, but at least it gives you some props and bling value.
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• The Zorg ZF1 Gun from The Fifth Element: Zorg's gun is nothing short of spectacular. It can break down into four pieces that are undetectable by x-rays, is good for left or right handers, features a 3000 round magazine, has a "Replay" button that sends all shots to the same location, a rocket launcher, an arrow launcher (with posion or explosive-tipped arrows), a net launcher, a flamethrower, and an "ice cube" freezing blast. Oh, and it'll self-destruct if you push the button on the bottom. Not bad. We could go on about it, but it's better if you just watch Zorg himself infomercial-it for you in the video below.
  
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• Blade Runner: This movie has been sampled from everyone from Sigue Sigue Sputnik to Paul Haig, but it's Gary Numan who has a real love affair with it. He's used it in at least four different songs. It's been one of the most sampled movies used in music, particularly by electronica and punk bands. Wonder if the replicants would like this stuff.
• Star Trek: New Order and Jesus Jones have used lines from Star Trek in their songs, but the most popular song to borrow from Trek was "What's On Your Mind (Pure Energy)" by Information Society. Spock's voice repeating "Pure energy" over and over was the hook for this number, and they ended up having to put (Pure Energy) in the title so people would know what this was.
• Dune: Dark and moody electronica and pseudo-goth music is attracted to Dune like the Harkonnen clan is to the spice. The trippy speech describing what the spice does is has been used by trancepop bands like Aphrodite to Astral Projection, and it makes you wish that stuff was real.
• RoboCop 2: Probably not the first movie that would spring to mind when you you think about killer samples. Front Line Assembly seriously mined this movie for their song Mindphaser, and made a killer scifi video to go with it.
• THX 1138: Electronica group Front 242 tossed in ten lines from this movie into their "Operating Tracks" song, and hopefully helped expose more people to this movie. Plus, if it was good enough for Babyland and Nine Inch Nails, who are we to argue?

Malice@Doll. (2000) Maybe the only philosophical tentacle porn anime movie ever. All the humans are dead, just like in that Conchords song, and the humanoid robots still go about their tasks. Malice@Doll is a sex robot, who wanders the streets looking in vain for human customers. One day, she follows a vision of a girl who seems to be human, and winds up getting captured by a tentacle monster, which penetrates her. A lot. And then she becomes human. She finds that her kiss can turn other robots organic too, but eventually discovers that some of the results are grotesque and horrifying. Sadly, it's not a very sexy movie, but Malice is sorta cute. Here's a still:Cherry 2000 (1987). She's the ultimate sex droid — as long as you don't get her wet. Businessman Sam Treadwell ignores this important lesson and short-circuits his sexbot. So he has to hire E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith), a tracker, to get a replacement memory chip for her. As he travels with E., Treadwell learns (bah) that flesh-and-blood lovers are better than robo-babes.

I.K.U. (2000) Japan's most famous cyberpunk porn movie. Reiko is a shape-changing sex droid from the Genom Corp., who goes around collecting "sexual experiences" by having sex with various people. The corporation collects Reiko's experiences and sells them (in vending machines) as virtual reality chips. But a rival corporation has created its own sex droids to infect Genom's sex droids with a virus, so as to steal their proprietary sexperiences. Dood!

Blade Runner (1982). Daryl Hannah plays Pris, a "basic pleasure model" born on Valentine's Day. She's designed for sex-work in the off-world colonies. She gets retrained as an assassin and uses her amazing acrobatic moves to kick Harrison Ford's ass.

A.I. (2001). Jude Law plays Gigolo Joe, a sex robot who gets framed for the murder of a client. Joe befriends the boy robot David (Haley Joel Osment) and takes him to the ultra-decadent Rouge City in search of the Blue Fairy. And no, that doesn't sound obscene at all. Here's a clip of Jude taking Haley to the decadent metropolis: Circuitry Man (1989). Danner is yet another e-gigolo, a "romeo droid" programmed to provide love and companionship and maybe a little nookie on the side. Danner's programmed to think he's in love, so his female boss can manipulate him into doing her bidding.

Weird Science (1985). This is sort of an edge case. Kelly LeBrock is a sex-bot who manages never to put out. Anthony Michael Hall (playing his usual teenage nerd role) and his friend program a government computer to create a simulation of the perfect woman, and an electrical storm miraculously turns her into a three-dimensional artifact. And then she teaches the boys about life and stuff.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997-2002). When psycho-nerd Warren makes himself a robotic girlfriend, Spike the naughty vampire wants one of his own... except he wants it to be just like Buffy. The resulting bot gets Spike into trouble, but then becomes one of the most valuable members of the Scooby gang. Yet another example of a sex bot who turns into a deadly operative.

Heavy Metal 2000 (2000). A sex robot is programmed to make loud and exaggerated sounds of excitement and climax. She teams up with our heroes to stop the sex lizards. Or something.

Millennium (1989). The John Varley short story and novel include Sherman, a robot who attends to Louise's needs, including her frequent sexual urges. In the 1989 movie, Sherman mostly just provides emotional support to Louise (Cheryl Ladd). (Bah.)