The Unborn comes out on DVD July 7, giving all of us another chance to appreciate the upside-down-headed dogs, Jewish exorcisms featuring Rabbi Gary Oldman, and lots of Odette Yustman freaking out. Aren't you excited?

In Flash Forward, as in Sawyer's novel, everyone blacks out for a couple of minutes and experiences a vision of the future. Except that in the television version, people see five months into the future, not 18 years. And each season of the show will end with a new "flash forward" into the future, in a structure that co-producer Brannon Braga says is not unlike 24, which Braga also produces. (Braga co-wrote the pilot, along with The Dark Knight co-scribe David S. Goyer, who's directing it.)

Sawyer traveled to the Los Angeles set and met stars Jack Davenport (Coupling), who plays physicist Lloyd Simcoe, Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare In Love), John Cho (Star Trek), and Sonya Walger (Penny from Lost). And he saw a "sizzle reel" which "looks like the trailer for the best damn movie you've ever seen." He was thrilled that so many of the show's stars have read and enjoyed his novel, and said Walger is doing such intense acting (with a fake American accent) that she had to be reminded to blink.

Sawyer adds:

The buzz from ABC and the industry press is incredibly positive about Flash Forward. It seems highly likely that we'll be picked up for the Fall 2009 season. We'll know for sure by May 17 — and ABC will announce its fall line-up over two days on May 18 and 19.

And it turns out another "major TV player" was interested in developing Flash Forward four years earlier, but Sawyer's agent encouraged him to walk away, because they could do better. [Robert J. Sawyer's blog at SFWriter.com]

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The main character of this well-known novel can't get enough of Substance D, a psychoactive drug that's also known as Slow Death. It turns out that even his dealer works for the government and has been part of a police operation all along — and even more surprisingly, he finds Substance D grow fields at his rehab clinic. Dick never reveals the true source of the dangerous drug, but his hints on the subject are the staples of conspiracy theory fiction: evil Communists, evil aliens, evil government, or evil corporations.

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

Drug use and conspiracy theory stories go hand-in-hand, it seems. Morrison wrote The Invisibles after an incredible hallucinogenic experience in Kathmandu — one he originally attributed to alien abduction. He later learned to just blame the drugs, and so The Invisibles became the most psychadelic comic ever, filled with swearing, bright colors, and wild characters. The protagonist of the first volume, Dane McGowan, is plucked from his life as a petty thief and sent to a corrupt juvenile detention center. After his rescue, the vast conspiracies surrounding everything in his life begin to reveal themselves, and he teams up with the eclectic Invisibles to discover more and more about the vast suffering of humanity.

Dark City, written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer

In 1998, a revolutionary sci-fi film noir hit cinema screens. It began with a man waking up at a murder scene in a city that never sees daylight, a man who's unable to remember who he is or how he got there. As he's trying to find answers, he discovers that the world is not at all what it seems, and that a group of mysterious figures called the Strangers are controlling human reality. There's a conspiracy for ya. Luckily, this man possesses the ability to change reality, or "tune," as well, and so puts up a good fight so he can escape to a better world with his wife.

The Matrix, written by Andy and Larry Wachowski

A year after Dark City's release came The Matrix, which was far more successful — the stories are similar, but there's a lot more gunplay and leather in the Wachowski brothers' version. The Matrix certainly offered us a very good reason to be paranoid: It's possible that aliens have invaded, subjugating all of humanity by convincing us that our lives are progressing as normal. The chilling reality, that humans are harvested for energy and fed with the dead matter of their own species, is one of the scariest sequences in film. Plus, the simulated reality that most humans believe is nothing more than a computer program, and the stewards of that program are stony-faced agents who have all the power. That is, until a cute computer hacker shows up to save us all.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Often thought of as a sequel to her also fabulous dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a scathing criticism of current society. She portrays the 21st century as a world dominated by international corporations who subjugate their employees, a world where even children watch live executions on the internet, a world where humanities and the arts are vilified in favor of fields like biotechnology and engineering. The Crakers, human-like creatures who also inhabit this world, have a mysterious origin — and at the end of the book, Atwood reveals that they were created by a giant corporation's genetic engineering experiment. In the end, the creator of the Crakers also launches a genetically engineered virus that kills almost all of the humans; it's quite a formidable cautionary tale about the dangers of corporations with too much power.

Dreadful Sanctuary by Eric Frank Russell

1948 saw the release of perhaps the first major conspiracy novel in science fiction, Russell's Dreadful Sanctuary. In his story, a secret society keeps the rest of humankind from discovering or contacting alien life. After several failed missions to space, it seems that Earth is being quarantined by the universal community; in fact, however, the secret society is simply spreading that illusion to control the population. Dreadful Sanctuary was originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, but Russell rewrote it to publish it as a paperback novel in 1967 — just two years before humans successfully reached the moon. Thank goodness no one's stopping us from space exploration in real life ... or are they?

Whether it's Communists, Russians, our own government, or an extraterrestrial one, fears of hidden and powerful villains will probably never end. As ridiculous as conspiracy theory stories may sound sometimes, they're necessary for a society that wants to give its average, ordinary members some level of control. After all, nobody likes totalitarianism, except perhaps totalitarian leaders.

Two things jump out at me about Magneto, as described by reviewers. First, it tweaks Magneto's origin by suggesting that Nazi scientists either created or activated Magneto's powers by experimenting on him in the concentration camp. This could annoy some purists, especially since the first X-Men movie showed Magneto's powers starting to work when he first showed up at the camp and was separated from his parents. Also, early descriptions of the Magneto movie suggested it would show the beginnings of the rift between Magneto and Charles Xavier. I don't think that's in this script.

So the movie starts at the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz, where Ian McKellen's Magneto surveys the metal gate he twisted in the first X-Men movie. Then we flash back to the young Magneto surviving horrific Nazi experiments at the hands of mad scientist Dr. Kleinmein. Then we zip forward to the 1950s.

Meanwhile, Erik Lehnsherr, who will one day be Magneto, has a wife and daughter — until the suspcicions ofa small town lead to their deaths. It's implied that Erik kills everyone in the town as revenge, but we don't really see it. Eventually, Erik decides to hunt down the Nazis who escaped after the war, including Dr. Kleinmein, who is still doing his evil experiments on the bodies of mutants. Magneto meets and befriends Dr. Charles Xavier, and they rescue two mutants who are being imprisoned for experiments — the mutant prisoners sound a bit like Sabretooth and Mystique.

At first Magneto tries to work with the authorities to round up Kleinmein and the other loose Nazis, including CIA agent Owen Graves. But they only get in his way. So in the end, he decides to take the law into his own hands. And in the end, Professor X offers Erik some hope for the future — and then we zap back to the 60th anniversary Auschwitz event, where Senator Kelly is warning that Mutants are the new threat after the Nazis, setting the stage for Magneto's battle with the humans.

[Coventry Telegraph and Sal's Scripts]