Zachary Quinto sure thinks so. He's been saying for months that an Obama presidency means the new Star Trek movie, where he plays the young Mister Spock, will be a huge hit. Because both the Obama campaign and the new Trek are about optimism and diversity.

Space opera with a social conscience

Certainly, Bill Clinton's first term represented a high water mark for the Trek franchise, which had been surging throughout the 1980s. The same month that Clinton took office, Trek launched its fourth series, Deep Space Nine, while The Next Generation was still on the air. Trek reflected Clinton's upbeat attitude, with its sunny gadget-happy future. And both shows were aggressively diverse, including the first African American and female main captains.

But Deep Space Nine also showed the underside, and occasional hypocrisy, of the Federation. And Voyager, launched in 1995, featured rebels against the Federation, the Maquis, among its main characters. When a juror in the Whitewater trial insisted on wearing her Federation uniform to court (see picture, right) it seemed only the logical extension of Clinton-era Trek-mania.

In a way, both 90s-vintage Trek shows were about Americans going to the third world and confronting the limitations of American power, just as the U.S. was getting caught up in failed interventions in Haiti and Somalia.

The other big space opera hit of Clinton's first term, of course, was 1994's Stargate, where James Spader and Kurt Russell go to Planet Egypt. There are huts in the sand, and all the poor space Egyptians are oppressed by Ra (Jaye Davidson's other big role after The Crying Game).

Another future utopia with a major downside? Demolition Man, where the near-perfect world of San Angeles includes women who ask if you want to have sex with them. Supervillain Simon Phoenix explains: "The year is 2032 - that's two-zero-three-two, as in the 21st Century - and I am sorry to say the world has become a pussy-whipped, Brady Bunch version of itself, run by a bunch of robed sissies." Okay, sure, Demolition Man was greenlit and filmed long before Clinton became president, but it comments on the feminist, politically correct ethos that made Clinton president.

The white man deals with his evil side.

Some of the biggest movies of Clinton's first term involved a white dude confronting his secret doppleganger or bad side. You had The Mask, where a guy puts on a green mask and becomes a super-powered destructo-maniac. And The Dark Half, the George Romero-directed Stephen King adaptation about a literary author whose pulp-author pseudonym has become real and gone on a killing spree.

And then there's Multiplicity, where Batman star Michael Keaton literally meets himself — thanks to a weird process that creates an instantaneous adult clone — and has to deal with a more obnoxious, rougher-edged iteration who macks on his wife.

Cyberpunk mindscapes and dark cities.

The cyberpunk boom finally hit the movies during Clinton's first term, with films like Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days and Virtuosity depicting noir-ish worlds where people interface with computers. It was the era when ordinary people were discovering the Internet, and the World Wide Web was booming, so the idea of "entering cyberspace" as a physical avatar popped up frequently in pop culture. This could be frequently cheesy — like in Virtuosity, where Russell Crowe's crazy rampage in a virtual sushi bar leaves a whole bunch of cops with their brains turning into CG confetti:

We'll we see a cyberpunk comeback, or more shows and movies about virtual reality, now that the technocrats are back in charge? Hard to say — nobody's as gee-whiz about the Internet as they were in 1993, but Ron Moore's new VR-on-a-spaceship show Virtuality has a very mid-1990s cyberpunk feel to it.

As for dark cityscapes and gloomy futures, movies like The Crow, Judge Dredd and 12 Monkeys all took place in futuristic cities that were overrun with crime and disease. This was the pre-Giuliani view of cities, which we still see from time to time, but maybe we'll see more of the gritty underbelly of the inner city during an Obama administration?

Subversive TV

On television, the biggest surprise hit of the Clinton era was the X-Files, which was also the president's favorite show. (And new Obama advisor John Podesta brags that he earned the title "first fan" because he built a shrine to the X-Files in his office in the Clinton White House.)

It was a subversive show in many ways — it reversed the traditional gender roles, with Scully being the logical one and Mulder being the intuitive, emotional one. It had the very Clinton-esque theme of trying to fix the corrupt and broken government from the inside. ("Reinventing Government" was Al Gore's big initiative in the early Clinton years.) And the FBI duo spent a lot of time going to small-town America and discovering that things were a lot weirder, and less wholesome, than you'd expect — most famously in the episode where the redneck monsters have their mom under the bed and they're having sex with her.

Small-town America isn't wholesome, it's not where the "real" people are, it's just as weird as city life. Don't believe me? Just watch one of the biggest cult hits of the Clinton era, David E. Kelley's Picket Fences, which took place in the small town of Rome, Wisconsin — the only Kelley show not built around a workplace. Rome is crammed with as much freakiness as any big city. (Maybe more, on a per-capita basis.) While not a science fiction show, Picket Fences seemed to take place in an alternate reality where every mayor is a porn star or bandit, and everybody's queer or polygamous. And then occasionally, you'd have episodes featuring spontaneous human combustion, or people having their kid cryogenically frozen. The underlying message always seemed to be: everybody's weird in one way or another, so let's not judge. Or something.

Another show which took on the X-Files theme of gender reversal was Lois And Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman. By putting Lois' name first, the show's creators wanted to signal that she was the intrepid adventurer and he was her sidekick. Of course, it broke down pretty quickly, and the show became more like a traditional Superman spectacle, before degenerating into a cheesy mess.

Meanwhile, the biggest breakout hits among books included Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, about a young girl who receives a copy of the book A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, which teaches her how to become a master engineer and super-ninja. And possibly the most surprising hit? Nicola Griffith's Nebula-winning Slow River, about a duo of lesbian con artists who put on live sex shows in exhange for money for drugs, in a future dystopia dominated by hydroponic technology.

Female action heroes have been on the wane since the 1990s, with only Milla Jovovich (and maybe Angelina Jolie) waving the standard. But could a more feminist, more sensitive Obama administration lead to the return of the woman who kicks ass (and her male sidekick?)

Goofy aliens.

Where have all the goofy aliens gone? I feel like there used to be a lot of goofy aliens, and nowadays it's all zombies, mutants and vampires. Maybe an Obama administration will see the return of crazy-ass aliens, like the invaders in Mars Attacks and Independence Day, or the sex-mad, monster-breeding Natasha Henstridge in Species. Instead of paranoid allegories about terroirsm and scary Arabs, we had weird aliens who wanted to have sex with us, or who could be defeated using an Apple Mac.

Here are a couple of pictures from the premiere of Mars Attacks, showing Tim Burton and "friend" Lisa Marie. It was an optimistic time!

All images from Getty Images, except for Whitewater juror image from AP.

Virus Freakouts
The US was just coming out of the 1980s AIDS horrors, and a big theme of Clinton's first term was the need for universal health care. Science fiction of the era responded with countless tales of viral decimation and health care run amok. In 12 Monkeys, a Terry Gilliam film, a guy who has become unstuck in time is trying to stop a deadly virus from wiping out most of homo sapiens. In Greg Bear's novel Slant, everyone has gotten high-tech brain implants to prevent them from falling prey to crippling depression and other health problems — a virus destroys the implants and people go nuts. And in Gattaca, the health care system goes wild, producing a completely genetically-engineered human race where disease is bred into non-existence. Except our hero is a wild type, born without any genetic engineering. Can he fight the medico-industrial state?

The Liberal Happy Place
Clinton's theme song was Fleetwood Mac's groovy "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," and his presidency ushered in an era of unprecedented economic growth during peacetime (well, if you forget about a little bombing in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia). Several popular works of science fiction celebrated the idea happy liberal tomorrows, such as Contact, based on Carl Sagan's novel about first contact between humans and nice, glowy aliens who just want to help us. Liberal icon Jody Foster stars as the atheist astronaut who meets the friendly alien. Star Wars I was also notably warm and fuzzy, focusing on the out-in-the-country boyhood of Annakin. And in bookstores Ursula LeGuin's Four Ways to Forgiveness focused on characters who have left war behind and are adapting to peacetime.

Dude, It's the Interwebs!
The World Wide Web was still young (people still called it "the information superhighway"!), and the Clinton White House was the first to have a Web site. Plus, as libertarian cyber-journalist Declan McCullagh never stopped reminding us, Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. Two of the greatest SF books of the era, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, managed to present us with plausible and brilliant visions of a future where the internet is thousands of years old — and in the second book, humans are given brain tweaks to turn them into human extensions of the Web (essentially, for you nerds, they become the top layer on the OSI model). In cinema, however, movies about cyber-serial killers such as Virtuosity, and cyber-what-the-hells in Lawnmower Man, did not get it right. It wasn't until Clinton was nearly out of office that The Matrix came along and finally gave us the internet-influenced science fiction we deserved.

Conservative Paranoia
All that crazy liberal "atheists bond with aliens" crap got the neoconservatives completely freaked out, and a counter-trend of Contract with America-influenced science fiction came into being. Though Clinton loved the X-Files, it was actually the perfect right-wing paranoia show, all about how a soft-hearted girly man is trying to bring down the government by discovering its secrets, cavorting with Native Americans, and loving the alien. Books from the Left Behind series, about the Christian apocalypse, gave evangelical scifi fans their fix. As for Independence Day, I'm guessing the cheers weren't about being glad the real-life president was safe. Keeping the Aliens in Line
Clinton may have kept the U.S. (mostly) at peace, but the strongly conservative Congress was making other plans. Those plans eventually bore fruit during the Bush Administration, but you could still see them reflected in scifi fantasies of the Clintonian variety. Stargate was the ultimate "let's shut our borders to the Middle East" movie, with a portal that opens to a world ruled by space Egyptians who would love to destroy our precious Western way of life. Men in Black outlined a new border policy with alien life — keep them monitored and tagged, and if they get out of line bring in the big guns. And although Armageddon wasn't about aliens, its muscular men with their big nukes and giant drills fighting a nasty asteroid certainly presaged the Bush Era to come. Plus, in Armageddon, all the nasty liberal cities in the world like Paris are destroyed.