The Skywalkers (Star Wars): The Skywalkers are more or less the gold standard for family dysfunction. Putting aside that twins Luke and Leia have the hots for one another, Papa Vader chopped off Luke’s hand, nearly killed him, and annihilated Leia’s entire home planet. Makes those family dinners pretty awkward.

Adding Han Solo’s DNA to the family tree doesn’t improve matters, as his Force-sensitive offspring Jaina and Jacen just end up battling to the death.

The Connors (Terminator): If it weren’t for all the time-traveling killer robots and the apocalyptic future, Sarah Connor’s treatment of her son John would be considered abuse. She intensely isolates the future leader of humanity’s Resistance against the machines, and encourages in him a level of paranoia, violence, and general criminal behavior that most parents would tend to avoid. And the future John will befriend Kyle and Derek Reese, never revealing to them that they are his father and uncle respectively. And, given that John and Sarah spend so much of their lives running from Terminators, they develop warm fuzzy feelings for a couple of them. A reprogrammed T-800 serves as John’s first father figure and Cameron proves a vital (and confusingly sexy) addition to the Connor clan.

The Ventures (The Venture Bros): Rusty Venture is a walking dysfunction all on his lonesome. Unable to live up to his father’s impossible example, Rusty turned into a pill-popping, underachieving neurotic with a shaky moral center. And it doesn’t help that his brother JJ (who played Abel to Rusty’s Cain in the womb) is successful in the very areas where Rusty fails. Conversely, Rusty treats his own children with less than benign neglect, cloning replacements whenever they are killed (which is often) and leaving their emotional care to the ultra-violent, highly promiscuous spy Brock Samson.

The Cylons (Battlestar Galactica): The Significant Seven models of Cylon are a big, dysfunctional family in their own right, albeit one that pulls out the heavy artillery when a disagreement over the family pets goes to far. But it’s within the individual model lines that the dynamics get particularly screwy. When everyone shares the same face and the same programming, personal identities and relationships tend to get blurred. At least one of the Sharons wants to be Sharon Agathon so badly that she sampled her fellow Eight’s memories and put the moves on her husband. And then there’s this scene:

The Mulder/Spender Families (The X-Files): It’s little surprise that Fox Mulder developed an interest in conspiracies given how much of his upbringing was based on lies. Bill Mulder, the man Mulder believed to be his father, traded Mulder’s sister Samantha for an alliance with a group of alien colonists. As result, Samantha is repeatedly cloned and Mulder develops an obsession with aliens and conspiracies. And no one told Mulder that his biological father is, in fact, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the ruthless conspiracy agent who has antagonized Mulder throughout his FBI career. The CSM has Mulder’s partner Dana Scully abducted, tries to ruin his career, lies to him about his sister’s fate, and generally torments him. Still, that’s nothing compared with the CSM’s treatment of his other son, Mulder’s half brother Jeffrey Spender. The CSM berates Spender for being inferior to Mulder, shoots him, and authorizes his agents to perform horrific and disfiguring experiments on him. It’s all enough to make Mulder’s emotionally distant relationship with Scully, the mother of his own child, seem downright warm and fuzzy.

Mama Ripley and the Alien Hybrids (Alien Resurrection): Ellen Ripley spends three movies ensuring the destruction of as many Alien xenomorphs as she could take a flamethrower to. Then, in the fourth film, her clone gestates and “births” an Alien queen. Tainted by Ripley’s human DNA, the queen develops a womb, letting her give birth to an Alien daughter of her own. Like so many children, the newborn Alien digs grandma a whole lot more than mom, and matricide ensues. Ripley repays her grandchild by getting it sucked out into space, but not before they share a vaguely erotic moment:

The Petrellis (Heroes): The Petrellis are generally marked by three characteristics: they all have superpowers; they all have secret parents, siblings, or offspring; and they are constantly trying to kill one another. Claire shoots her uncle Peter. Peter shoots his brother Nathan. Patriarch Arthur plans to murder his son Nathan. And brothers Peter and Sylar are constantly trying to kill each other. Only matriarch Angela Petrelli (wife of Arthur and apparent mother of Nathan, Peter, and Sylar) stays out of the attempted murder racket, though she’s pulling most of the other family members’ strings.

Just about everybody in Dune: The noble houses of Dune are dysfunctional precisely because they resemble so many of history’s noble families: propagated through inbreeding, filled with members of uncertain parentage, and driven by political marriages so that you can’t help but go to war with your cousin. That many of the series’ characters were conceived as part of the Bene Gesserit’s breeding program helps to further entangle the families. And the spice agony, which causes a person to take on the memories (and sometimes personalities) of all their ancestors, allows a person experience the full spectrum of familial dysfunction without ever leaving their own head.

The Endless (Sandman): Sibling rivalry is bad enough without having siblings who are the immortal embodiments of the world’s greatest forces. Dream gets along fine with his sister Death, but their sibling Desire, in concert with its twin Despair, interferes constantly in his affairs, and takes great pleasure in trying to bring the wrath of the Furies down on Dream’s head. Although generally fond of youngest sister Delirium, the Endless tend to ignore her incoherent babbling until it is far too late. And Destiny quietly watches on, acting only when his great book tells him he will do so. The only sensible one seems to be Destruction, who retired from his position and stays out of family matters.

Jodorowsky had a sweeping vision of Dune, planning to adapt the novel to his own psychedelic imagination (he said of the book, "I did not want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me Dune did not belong to Herbert as Don Quixote did not belong to Cervantes, nor Edipo with Esquilo."). He planned to cast his own son, Brontis, as Paul Atreides, Orson Welles as the Baron, who would be nearly immobile at 300 pounds, and Salvador Dali as Emperor Shaddam IV, who would be insane and living on a planet made of gold. Dan O'Bannon was on board to write the script and Pink Floyd had agreed to do the music. Unfortunately, by October 1976, Jodorowsky had already spent $2 million and was working off a script that would have produced a 14-hour film.

Before working Dune, Moebius was known as the artist for western comic Blueberry, and would go on to work on films like Alien, Tron, Willowm and The Fifth Element. He would also collaborate with Jodorowsky again on the futuristic comic The Incal. Below are thousands of the character concepts and storyboard designs he created for the doomed Dune:

[Dune: Behind the Scenes via Sci-Fi-O-Rama]

It's hard to quibble with their picks for best movies and books. Being mostly Brits, the New Scientist group put Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy at the top of the novel heap. Iain M. Banks would have won, but his vote was split among a few of his books. (Including Feersum Enjinn. Really?) Frank Herbert's Dune also came close to winning. The best movie, according to the NS crew, was Blade Runner, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Serenity.

The "worst" lists might be a tad more controversial. The worst SF books include 3001, Arthur C. Clarke's fourth and final book in the Space Odyssey series, and L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. The worst films were The Blob and David Lynch's Dune. Several people apparently also voted for The Matrix (the original) for worst film, but others named it one of the best. One person said of The Matrix:

It has one of the worst backplot elements ever: using people as power sources. I could write an essay on how ludicrous that is.

Finally — and here's the part where some people may disagree violently — the New Scientist staff named Primer the "most incomprehensible" science fiction movie.

"Well worth watching," said one of our editors, "though you might be excused for wondering if it makes any sense at all."

You can vote for your own favorite books and movies, and give your reasons, at this link. Or you could just write a diatribe about why Primer really does make sense, if you watch it eight times. Shape-shifting robot image by Mondolithic Studios for New Scientist. [New Scientist]

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It's happened to all of us. We read a novel that blows us away, and a few years later its title appears on posters underneath the face of Harrison Ford or Natalie Portman. But at some inevitable point in that darkened theater, the movie takes a turn we didn't expect. Our eyebrows go up, our lips turn down, and the disappointment begins. Maybe the wrong director or writer can curse an otherwise excellent project — or maybe some things were just never meant to be filmed. Here are 10 books that we think should never have been committed to celluloid.

DUNE by Frank Herbert

There's no doubt about it: Herbert's Dune is a bona fide classic. It won the first ever Nebula award and the 1966 Hugo award, and most consider it to be the best-selling sci-fi novel in history. Set in a future where a feudal empire controls the planets of the unvierse, the novel tells the story of young nobleman Paul Atreides and his family's rule of the desert planet Arrakis. Arrakis is the only source of "melange," an addictive spice that lengthens lives and makes interstellar travel possible. Herbert's book explores the power struggles that arise around the spice, and the complexity of human society that exists even in the far future.

Big shoes to fill for a film producer. Yet in 1984 David Lynch wrote and directed a movie version of Dune, rescuing it from development hell and plunging it into bad-adaptation hell. Reviews panned the movie — Roger Ebert deemed it "the worst movie of the year," and others expressed similar disgust. Despite the movie's 40-million-dollar budget, its effects were notably cheap, and the screenplay did not hold up to the challenge of translating a four-hundred-page book to screen. You'd think you couldn't go wrong with Patrick Stewart, Sting, and Jürgen Prochnow, but evidently you very much can.

FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury

Who could forget Fahrenheit 451, "the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns …"? Bradbury's classic 1953 novel takes place in a dystopian future where television has entirely replaced the printed word, and firemen burn books instead of saving lives. The author himself has stated that the point of the story was to showcase how owning a TV set can destroy all interest in literature — so making a movie version seems pretty damn ballsy to say the least.

With that in mind, the 1966 film, helmed by French icon François Truffaut, seems doomed from the start. It certainly didn't help that there were many notable omissions, like the disappearance of the novel's nuclear war (which is, let's face it, a pretty big cut). Julie Christie plays the main character's wife and his illicit lover, which adds an extra level of pointless weirdness. The bottom line is, there are plenty of books for which you can tell your friends to "just watch the movie." But in the case of Fahrenheit 451, that probably makes you kind of fascist. Just sayin'.

V FOR VENDETTA by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

The book is probably one of the best graphic novels ever produced. Detailing the adventures of a masked anarchist and his sweet blond protégée, Moore's writing also delves far deeply beyond his two main characters into complex themes of fascism, anarchy, identity, and the meaning of life itself. Nobody is without a story to tell: Even his villains are creepily sympathetic. By the end of the comic, every reader will have at least one Lloyd image burned in their brain, and be wondering — with no small amount of fear — exactly how much control their government does have.

Enter the movie. For the Wachowski brothers, the boys who gave us the two-thirds-sucky Matrix trilogy, setting this story to film was easy. They just had to cut out all of the character depth, change Moore's nuanced portrayal of British fascism to the cookie-cutter Hollywood standby of Suited White Men, and (of course) turn the subtle, understated relationship of the main characters into romantic pining. But hey, at least they got the costume right.

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle

Though it's often marketed as a young-adult fantasy novel, make no mistake: This book is without a doubt a sci-fi classic for all generations, an incredible tale that deftly blends science, speculation, and humanity. L'Engle's 1962 story invented the concept of a "tesseract" — the fifth dimension, a phenomenon that folds the fabric of space and time. It introduced a mother who cooks dinner on a Bunsen burner, a father whose research leaves him imprisoned on another planet, and a brother and sister whose loving relationship turns out to be the most important thing in the universe.

Mostly we make an effort to ignore it, but it's true: Many of the great sci-fi writers were (and are) better at dreaming up nifty science ideas than they were at weaving together a compelling story. L'Engle, however, belongs in no such group. Her work was never meant to be a crappy Disney movie, and yet in 2003, a crappy Disney made-for-TV adaptation appeared that one critic described as "lightweight, saccharine, rather slow going most of the way, and somewhat simplistic" as well as "sometimes clunky, and... often uninspiring". Let us speak no more about it.

THE MINORITY REPORT by Philip K. Dick

Dick's 1956 short story introduced the chilling concept of "precrime," a police system whose officers arrest would-be murderers, rapists, and thieves before they get a chance to do their dirty deeds. His futuristic New York City is a world where three future-seeing mutants control who goes to prison and who doesn't, and free will is a gray area — a luxury that not everyone possesses. One veteran cop, after seeing a prediction that he will kill someone he doesn't even know, is having none of it.

So what did Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie add, besides a gross eye transplant? Well, for one, it brought in Tom Cruise — balding, out-of-shape 50-year-olds are never attractive narrators as far as Hollywood's concerned, no matter what they might be able to share with us in real life. The setting's different, too, and names have been changed, but at least it presents the idea with a lot more nifty special effects and a lot less storytelling, right? And that, my friends, is frighteningly endemic of the print-to-film adaptation.

I, ROBOT by Isaac Asimov

This is a revolutionary sci-fi classic, a collection of nine short stories exploring the limitations and dangers of human-created artificial intelligence. Asimov's 1950 publication of I, Robot established the Three Laws of Robotics, supposedly unbreakable rules which govern the actions of these metal beings, and his short stories read like the best sci-fi mind puzzles you will ever find.

2004's movie adaptation was undeniably well done, and it ended up being one of the best of the year — due in no small part to Jeff Vintar's tight script and the total awesomeness of Will Smith and Chi McBride. Asimov certainly meant to get us thinking, so one could imagine he'd be pleased that his work inspired a smart sci-fi thriller like this. As it happens, however, the main plot of the movie is actually lifted from a 1939 short story by Eando Binder that bears the same name; Asimov's publisher gave his collection the same title, against Asimov's wishes. The Three Laws of Robotics were only added to the script after the film's producers secured the rights to Asimov's anthology. This project, then, has been plagued from the beginning by intellectual property snafus: It's a confused collaboration of several minds, and it seems that not all the minds involved were properly credited. And since it's caused most of the problems, can we let go of that title already?

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer

It's a crusty old staple of hard sci-fi, a 1933 novel that first saw print as a magazine serial. Wylie and Balmer's story begins with a South African astronomer, Sven Bronson, who discovers that a pair of rogue planets are headed for Earth's orbit. Only a small group of scientists believe his claim; they work to build two ships that will carry the beginnings of a new human settlement to one of the rogue planets, which is projected to replace Earth in its orbit. This is the kind of pre-NASA speculation that works best in old-fashioned typewriter font on yellowed paper.

But of course, Hollywood felt the need to put it in Technicolor. The film adaptation did win an Oscar for special effects, but it was 1951, so you decide for yourself if that's impressive. The movie's story doesn't so much explore sci-fi ideas as showcase human hysteria when tidal waves sweep the Earth and survivors are chosen by lottery — and it naturally also allows for the most groan-worthy of romance subplots. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the way the film's hero pushes his handicapped financier off the boarding ramp as the ship leaves, despite the fact that he funded the entire project. "Politically incorrect" doesn't begin to cover it. Apparently there's a remake of the film scheduled for a 2010 release — isn't one mistake supposed to teach you a lesson?

STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein

War sucks, and Heinlein proved it with his 1960 Hugo-award-winning novel. Told from the point of view of Johnnie Rico, a young soldier, this futuristic tale explores a world where only veterans can vote or hold public office — and where humankind battles endlessly with giant bugs. Rico's flashbacks to his time at school, and his experiences in the military, serve to illustrate the total destruction that war causes.

In the book, the bugs barely ever appear; Rico views them only through a giant battle suit. For the 1997 film adaptation, though, that was not an option — after all, there ain't a moviegoer born of woman who doesn't want to see giant grasshoppers. Special effects left little screen time for Heinlein's philosophy discussions, but director Paul Verhoeven admitted he never got past the first few chapters of the novel anyway. If he hated the story that much, what do you think was keeping him from writing and directing his own friggin' screenplay?

THE POSTMAN by David Brin

Originally published as two novellas (both of which won Hugo awards), this post-apocalyptic story grapples with the concepts of survivalism, civilization, and hope. In a world destroyed not by disasters but by its own people, one man discovers a worn-out United States Postal Service uniform — and discovers that his fellow humans are so desperate they'll even take hope from that. The complete novel, published as the two novellas combined, was named the best science fiction novel of the year in 1986 in the John W. Campbell awards.

And then Kevin Costner decided to direct and star in a film adaptation. The 1997 story, while still broadcasting a message of hope, centered that message more around the Postman as a war hero — and don't forget his tagalong baby mama. The New York Times blasted the movie for its "bogus sentimentality" and "mawkish jingoism," but Roger Ebert warned that we "shouldn't blame them for trying." Well, I think perhaps we should.

THIS ISLAND EARTH by Raymond F. Jones

The year 1952, I'm sure, saw many new creations in sci-fi, but I'm willing to bet that almost none of them were as silly as the interociter — an alien transmission device, which despite its apparent sophistication is about as big as a truck. Jones gave us the interociter in his novel This Island Earth, which told of an alien race that recruited Earth's greatest thinkers for a group called the "Peace Engineers." Not surprisingly, the "Peace Engineers" were actually helping the aliens wage an intergalactic war. On a planet that had already seen the genius of 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, this should not have seemed a good candidate for a film adaptation.

Since the movie version of This Island Earth now gets most of its viewings in the form of Mystery Science Theater 3000's lampoon, the folly of bringing it to film is assured. Plastic skulldomes, toilet thrones, and raspberry bushes are not the stuff of eternal movie classics. Before you adapt a book, my advice is to run it through a quick Mike-Joel-Crow-Tom Servo test. You might be surprised how much money you save on camera equipment and actors.

As a biologist who studies whole organisms and populations, I find that more and more of biology (in terms of funding, positions and emphasis) is going to the sub-organismal level. We now have lots of cell biologists, geneticists, neurologists, biochemists, biomechanics, bioengineers and so on, but not a lot of behaviorists, population ecologists, biodemographers and others who study the emergent properties that arise at the higher levels of organization. What role, if any, do you foresee for understanding of these higher level biological phenomena in the future sci-fi-ish stuff?

As far as emerging biotechnology goes, science fiction grapples more frequently (if not always very seriously) with issues of organismal or ecological impact than the scientific establishment. There are good reasons for this. Ecological ruminations are a tradition for the authors, and the scientists have - until quite recently - been limited by technical considerations. As a scientist, I hope the title Planetary Ecologist will go on someone's tax return someday.

A Sandworm of Arrakis, from Frank Herbert's Dune.

Some would say that Frank Herbert's Dune was the beginning of ecological science fiction, but its roots go much deeper than that. Every time an author has imagined an alien world and then tried to fill it with beings capable of surviving on it, that author is grappling with issues of ecology, and every time an author has decided how those aliens would act, they were engaging in a bit of recreational behaviorism. Herbert elevated the tone and raised the bar, no doubt, but there is a long-standing tradition of biological and behavioral what-if in SF. The rise of environmentalism coupled with another favorite SF theme - dystopianism - brought us the environmental disaster subgenre, from the ridiculous The Day After Tomorrow to more thoughtful treatments like David Brin's Earth or the works of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Mars (with a little terraforming and a lot of luck).

While there are (of course) ecologists in the scientific community, there are very few thus far that bridge the gap between research at the molecular level and ecologies larger than a tissue culture dish. This is not to imply that ecologists are ignorant of molecular biology; the field has generated far too many useful tools for that. The bioengineers and cell biologists who are designing new organisms at the molecular level, on the other hand, are not always well versed in the basics of ecology and evolution. They are necessarily focused on what one scientist has called the molecular sociology of the cell.

Up until quite recently it would have been ludicrous to expect a molecular biologist to consider the higher-level environmental interactions of, for example, a particular gene, because he or she was still trying to figure out (at a molecular level) what the damn gene did to the cell itself. Take a peek at the inner life of a cell (if you haven't seen if before). A single cell is a giant bag of confusion. Trying to sort out web of interactions between the thousands of molecules present in hundreds of compartments using the technology at hand has been compared to figuring out the rules for a game of football using only pictures of the field (that only show certain players) at various times. This is why many researchers like to work with single cells instead of a cell in its natural environment, whatever that is - the cell alone is complicated enough. Experimental limitations or therapeutic concerns often require an intimate knowledge of a single organism's physiology, effectively tying a researcher to a single animal. Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects". I would add grad students to the list.

Take E. coli as an example. We've had its genome sequenced for over a decade. Type its name into Google Scholar and you'll find over 1.5 million hits. Yet programming this bacteria - synthetic biology - is still a difficult and time-consuming process. When The University of Texas at Austin's entered their light-sensitive pigment-producing bacteria biofilm in the intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) contest, they realized that their achievement barely scratched the surface - that the "program" they'd written into the bacteria was relatively simple compared to the programming it already used to survive. In recognition of this fact, they produced perhaps my favorite "Hello world" program ever.

10 GOTO e. coli 20 Hack it genetically to turn it into a light-sensitive film

It's also important to note that almost all of the engineered cells and organisms made today are never meant to be released in the environment (and wouldn't be likely to survive in it if they did). Those that aren't created purely for research purposes are typically meant to live in small, artificial, and easily replaceable ecologies, like bioreactors in a pharmaceutical company or fermenters in a winery.

Either the bacteria are doing what they've been programmed to or we have a serious Cthulhu problem.

Genetically modified foods are a special case, but as a special case they've already received the most attention by ecologists. GM organisms that are designed to move outside of the lab enter the purview of the ecologists.

While disciplines like bioinformatics combine computational and molecular biology with evolutionary studies, increasingly complicated bioengineered organisms designed for the wild will require the ability to effectively model the ecologies they were designed for. In brief, once we're good enough at figuring out how to make a cell jump or play dead, the next frontier of design will be figuring out when we want a cell to jump or play dead, considering its surroundings. Top image via Electro-Plankton.

Do you have questions you've always wanted to ask a biogeek? You can email me at tdj@io9.com.

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• The Holtzman Effect: In the Dune series, the spice melange was able to increase your lifespan, heighten your senses, and let you see safe paths through the space-time continuum. Of course, in order to use this last benefit, you had to live in a micro-gravity environment while being constantly saturated with spice. Plus, it would mutate your body into something fairly hideous. However, in order to actually fold space and make this travel happen, you'd need a Holtzman Drive, which used subatomic energy fields to fold space and let you travel over vast distances in the blink of an eye. Without a navigator, you might not make it to your final destination.
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• The Infinite Improbability Drive: In order to get around traveling over the enormous distances in space, Douglas Adams created this drive in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to avoid "all of that tedious mucking about in hyperspace." It was invented by a student who was sweeping up after a party, and decided that if such a machine was a virtual impossibility, then it had to logically by a finite improbability and went from there. Basically, when you activate the drive (which is an electronic brain hooked up to a Brownian motion generator... like a cup of tea) it causes you to pass through every point in the universe at exactly the same time. Then you just drop down the improbability levels, and hope you come out where you need to be.
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• The Stargate: In the universe of Stargate, you can travel over huge interstellar distances simply by stepping into the giant Stargate, and popping out on the other side where another giant gate exists. You could select which gate you wanted to travel to by dialing a "code" on the gates and locking the nine different chevrons into place. They were constructed as a network by a race of ancient alien beings, and basically open up wormholes for travelers to jaunt through.
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• Jaunting: In Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt" (found in the Skeleton Crew anthology) the technology exists to teleport people over huge distances. However, you have to be put to sleep for the trip, and revived on the other end. If you travel through while awake, very bad things happen. In fact, they send a convicted murderer through while awake, in exchange for him getting a full pardon. When he comes out the other end, he mutters "It's eternity in there" and then dies of a massive heart attack. In the story, a father tells his children about these bad things, and of course the son holds his breath when they hose them down with sleeping gas, so he can see what it's like. It ain't very pretty.
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• Artificial Black Holes: In the movie Event Horizon, the ship (of the same name) creates artificial black holes by using a gravity drive, and this allows them to fold space in order to travel large distance quickly. As usually happens with a technology like this, something goes wrong along the way. In this case, the ship literally ends up in hell, and seems to become possessed by an evil entity. Everyone goes a little bit nuts, Sam Neill tears his own eyes out, and that's about enough to make you not want to try out this method of travel.
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• Cryogenic freezing/sleep: In Alien and countless other science fiction books/movies, travelers often enter a suspended animation hypersleep so they don't go insane from space madness when their trip takes 40 years to complete. The downside is, everyone else you know in the world will continue aging at a normal rate, while you're frozen in place. This is why all of Ripley's friends and her daughter were dead once she was found drifting in Aliens some 57 years later. This doesn't mean that the ship you're in will be traveling faster than the speed of light, but when you wake up on the other side it'll feel pretty instantaneous, which is what really matters.
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• The Wave Motion Engine: Whether you know it as Starblazers, or under the original title Space Battleship Yamato, they both traveled the same way via the Wave Motion engine. This enormous device powered the entire ship, allowed them to fire the Wave Motion Gun, and also had to ability to make them jump quickly through space using tachyon energy. Since they had to travel 148,000 lightyears to bring back a device that would cleanse the earth of deadly radiation, this came in pretty handy. However, this could not be used constantly, since both the place of origin and the destination had to be locked in "phase," and if this wasn't done correctly the ship could destroy the universe.
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• FTL Drives: In the world of Battlestar Galactica, the ships of the colonial fleet and the Cylons alike both travel over large distances by using FTL drives. While a bit of a misnomer, since the ship actually teleports instantaneously rather than rocketing at speeds great than the speed of light (a la Star Trek) to a new destination, it still has the desired effect. The process by which this works is not actually discussed on the show, but we do know that the drives are powered by the ore Tylium, and that ships can even jump out of a planet's atmosphere. The constantly jumping episode "33" shows just how much they rely on this technology, and how the Cylons use it to stay a step behind, or a step ahead in some cases.
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Star Wars: A New Hope

Tattoine, the remote desert planet where Luke Skywalker is raised by his Aunt and Uncle, is full of nomads and farmers who scrabble out a life among rocks and dunes. The Jawas roam around in caravans, and the Tusken Raiders are dressed in strips of towel and called only by a name (Sand People) that is probably the space version of a well-known US epithet for Arabs. The only "nice" people on the planet appear to be the transplanted (white) humans like Skywalker and Obi Wan. As usual, George Lucas serves up racial stereotypes, likes white people, and doesn't do much else.

Dune

Arakis, the desert planet whose rolling dunes shelter sandworms and a tribe of polygamous insurrectionaries known as the Fremen, is clearly set up as a Middle Eastern country that has been colonized for centuries. Arakis is the only source of "the spice," a substance that makes interplanetary space travel possible and is mined from the sands by giant spice rigs (that look a lot like oil rigs in the films). Not only is the culture in the Dune universe intended to refer to Muslim culture — for instance, a massive war is referred to as a "Jihad" — but the economy of Arakis is similar to the Saudi, Kuwaiti or Iraqi economies. The planet is full of many oppressed tribes, and ruled by a tiny elite class that trades a single natural energy source for wealth and power. What's interesting is that the books side with the Fremen, who are essentially the insurgents bent on overthrowing the wealthy offworlders who want Arakis' spice.

Stargate (the movie)

While the Stargate television series deal with many different worlds, the original film is focused on only one: Abydos, a land of space Egyptians, ruled by an alien named Ra. According to Stargate lore, Ra came to Earth during the Egyptian era to steal slaves for Abydos. So the culture of the desert planet is a direct descendant of early Middle Eastern culture on Earth. Weirdly, it hasn't developed in the centuries since its transplantation, though of course modern Egypt on Earth is far more technologically advanced than ancient Egypt. It's as if the people on Abydos have just been waiting for some white dude to come and rescue them.

Starship Troopers (the movie)

In the first Starship Troopers film, and the book, our Earth soldiers first attempt to mow down the alien bugs on their home planet of Klendathu. It's a desert planet, much like Planet P where the bugs and humans do most of their fighting in the first movie. While there is no direct connection between the culture of the bugs and Middle Eastern cultures, the desert surroundings definitely suggest it. The bugs are the ultimate, dehumanized "enemy," and therefore it's tempting to say they stand in for Iraqis since the films were all made during a period in history when there was tension between Iraq and the United States. Still, it would be just as easy to say the bugs stand in for other "enemies" in desert regions. So the connection in this franchise between a desert planet and the Middle East is weaker than in the previous three, though it's still there. Especially because so much wartime propaganda is about dehumanizing the enemy.

The Years of Rice and Salt

This novel by Kim Stanley Robinson is not set on another planet — instead, it's set on a very different Earth from our own. It's an Earth where the plagues of the middle ages wiped out nearly all of Christian Europe, and where Islam became the dominant religion in the West. So it's not about the Middle East, but instead a brilliant thought-experiment in which what many people think of as "Middle Eastern culture" has been superimposed on what many think of as "Western culture." The results? Muslim feminism, for one thing. And India colonizes Europe rather than the other way around.

Now that Hancock director Peter Berg is officially remaking Dune, it's hard not to see his superhero romp as a bad omen. Official synopses of Hancock have portrayed it as the story of a drunken has-been superhero (Smith), who gets a press agent (Jason Bateman) but then has an affair with the agent's wife (Charlize Theron). But a rough cut of the film just screened in Texas, and attendees came out with much, much weirder plot descriptions.

According to the early reviews, Will Smith's Hancock is an immortal god, created thousands of years ago. But he's suffering from amnesia and doesn't realize his true nature. Plus he got mugged 20 years ago (when he'd lost his powers) and remains traumatized by the experience. Now he's a superhero who abuses his powers and does more harm than good.

Then Hancock saves Bateman's marketing exec, who offers to salvage his image in return. Bateman's big idea: Hancock should turn himself in and offer to go to jail for all the damage his heroics have caused, plus an underage girl he had sex with. (Apparently, when Hancock ejaculates, his sperm blasts through the roof of the trailer he lives in.) But then it turns out that Bateman's wife (Theron) is also a superhero, and is actually married to Hancock from thousands of years ago. But when Smith and Theron are together, they lose their superpowers for some reason.

When Bateman learns his wife is an all-powerful god who was created thousands of years ago to be Will Smith's perfect mate, he's somewhat distraught. Then Smith and Theron have to stop some escaped convicts, but can't get too close to each other without losing their powers. [Superhero Movie clip from MTV Movies. Hancock reviews at Ain't It Cool News.]

Arrakis, the "desert planet," full of blinding sands and barren, eye-splitting beauty, should be the star of the show. Consider, for example, how director David Lean depicted the vastness of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. You can see two tiny figures slowly making their way along a dune in this clip, and only after we've absorbed the hugeness do we finally get a closeup of the humans.

John Ford's The Searchers, a movie about a posse of men (led by John Wayne) searching for a woman kidnapped by Natives in the Old West, was filmed on location in Utah and Arizona's Monument Valley. It's an epic set in another kind of desert — one full of vast, eroded rocks and huge, haunting pillars carved by wind. It's the kind of place you might easily find on Arrakis, and should serve as a model for Berg. Notice how the landscape swallows up the people, providing a frame and a sense of power.

What Berg should also absorb from these filmmakers is their sense for character-driven drama that takes place within an action-packed war zone. There are fights and spilled blood aplenty in both Lawrence of Arabia and The Searchers, but what people remember about both films are the intense characters that drive the stories. We know that Berg can make a war movie, and that he gets the fact that there's a parallel between Middle Eastern politics and science fiction. (See clip from The Kingdom, below, with the weird reference to Saudi Arabia being "like Mars.")

But can Berg make the transition from an interior-heavy flick like The Kingdom, where the Mars-Saudi Arabia parallel borders on xenophobia, to a film set in wide-open spaces where the desert terrorists are the romantic heroes? Remember, if you want to read Dune as an allegory about the Middle East (and you should), the heroes are the guys who live in caves and bomb the shit out of the developed-world imperialists who've come to suck up their spice.

So Berg's got a lot on his plate if he wants to make a truly kickass Dune worthy of the epic sweep of the novels. He needs to learn how landscape on film can speak for itself. And he also needs to give us a desert people full of heroes and justice-seekers rather than the alien villains of The Kingdom.

Image of Monument Valley by Duane Shoffner.

When I started putting this poll together, I was shocked by how many remakes are currently on the slate. Some of them are more definite than others: Jason Statham in Death Race, Brendan Fraser in Journey to the Center of the Earth and Keanu Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still are definitely happening. (Oh, and Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost.)

Less definite: Gerald Butler is supposed to be starring in the remake of Escape From New York, with a director TBA, but some reports say Butler has pulled out. (Butler himself said recently he's still considering doing it.) Peter Berg's Dune is in the early stages, and so is Roland Emmerich's Fantastic Voyage. Robert Rodriguez's Barbarella is in limbo, but he's still trying to get it made with Rose McGowan.

Even less definite: The remakes of Logan's Run and Metropolis seemed so uncertain, I left them out of the poll. Oh, and I forgot to include The Greatest American Hero and Scanners, which are also in the early planning stages, in the poll.

I started to make a joke along the lines of, "next they'll remake Westworld or something," only to realize a Westworld remake is also in the planning stages.

So leaving out the super-iffy Westworld, Greatest American, Scanners, Logan's Run and Metropolis, there are still a lot of forthcoming remakes to choose from. Which one fills you with the most revulsion?

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Gold-pressed Latinum, the currency used by the Ferengi (and sometimes other races) in TNG-era Star Trek. It's a super-valuable liquid encased within (possibly) worthless gold bars.
Exchange rate: According to this site, you can buy 2,000 tons of Kohlanese barley for 189 bars of Latinum. Assuming Kohlanese barley is similar to the Earth kind, that would make one bar of Latinum worth about $1587. Or somewhat more, if you factor in shipping and handling. We're not even going to try and figure out an exchange rate for other Trek currencies like quatloos or Federation credits.

Cubits, the money used on Caprica and the other planets in the Twelve Colonies in Battlestar Galactica, both new and old versions. It's just coins in the old version, but there's paper money as well as coins in the reinvention.
Exchange rate: Pretty much worthless, now that the Cylons have trashed everything. That's Starbuck tearing up a 1,000 cubit note in the picture above.

Solari, the currency used in the Dune universe. Of course, Spice represents the true wealth, and the value of Solari is pretty much measured in how much Spice it can buy.
Exchange rate: This site claims one solari is worth roughly one pound sterling, or U.S. $1.95.

Dollarpounds, the currency used in the distant future of Red Dwarf.
Exchange rate: I'm guessing about $0.30 to the dollarpound. Olaf Petersen is able to buy a fancy house for just 2,000 dollarpounds — super cheap, because it's in a dome that hasn't yet received an atmosphere. Also, 1,000 dollarpounds is regarded as a stupendous amount to pay for George S. Patton's sputum.

Galactic Standard Credits, the money used by the Republic and the Imperial regime in Star Wars. It's a remarkably stable currency, having expeirenced no inflation whatsoever over a 4,000 year period. Eat your heart out, Allen Greenspan!
Exchange rate: I'm guessing about $0.50 to the GSC. Luke Skywalker got just 2,000 credits for his worn-out land speeder, which is also what Han Solo charged for passage to Alderaan. A hyperspace-capable starship costs a bit more than 10,000 GSCs.

Whuffie, the reputation capital in Cory Doctorow's Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. Not, strictly speaking, a monetary currency, but you can pretty much turn it into goods and services.
Exchange rate: Hard to define, really. But the real-world Penguicon is using Whuffie as a unit of exchange. You can get a T-shirt for three Whuffies, which would probably mean three Whuffies are worth $5 to $10. Penguicon is probably not quite "paying" its volunteers minimum wage, since it pays one Whuffie per hour.

Why yes, it is indeed the cover for Dune, re-used by Manor books in the 1970s for its edition of The Three Stigmata. This Stigmata book cover is from the collection of a lovely lady named Murilee Martin, who writes:

You can just imagine them at the publisher: "Yeah, we already paid for this art . . . what the hell, space, planets, whatever- use it!"

The Organians (Star Trek.) Okay, so Trek is chock full of annoying space gods, from Squire Trelaine all the way up to Q. But the Organians are the worst. For one thing, they're totally passive-aggressive. They're like, "Oh, hurt us, we like it." And then when you get too feisty, they turn around and burn your hands off. And they literally wear tunics and have crappy beards. But worst of all, they're gods with ADD. It's like, "We forbid you and the Klingons to fight ever again. We're going to be WATCHING y— hey, is that a quarter? It was shiny! I think it rolled that way. Where did it go?" And then you never see them again, except for one prequel appearance on Enterprise.

The Guardians (Doctor Who.) They're color-coded deities with birds on their heads: the white one's good and the black one's evil. And they send the Doctor on the wackest quest in history, then come back and pester him. They keep changing the birds on their heads, so the Doctor can't tell which one is good and which one is evil. Oh, and they're all-powerful, but they can't intervene, so they have to recruit cowl-headed skull guys, schoolboys and pantomime pirates to help them. Lame. Here's the Black Guardian, pimpin:

The New Gods (DC Comics.) Yeah, I know, Jack Kirby invented paper, and he is the comix god. But the New Gods weren't among his better ideas. They're a weird fusion of superheroes and mysticism, with a healthy dose of 70s hippie stuff thrown in. You have the evil leader, named Darkseid (pronounced "dark side," I think) and the good leader, named Highfather. Death is personified by a shadowy guy on skiis named the Dark Racer. Everybody faces the "camera" and makes lots of weird speeches about good and evil and the Source Wall and the Anti-Life Equation. It's demented in a good way, but also a little too spiritual for that type of comic-book silliness.

The Hybrid (Battlestar Galactica: Razor.) The echo-y voice, the weird pretentious mutterings about "my children," the mystical-ish mutterings about the apocalypse and how all this has happened before and will happen again. Basically, he fell asleep in the bath and totally lost track of his sponge. In general, there are wayyy too many prophecies on Battlestar. My eyes glaze over any time someone mentions the Scrolls of Pythia or the bathroom graffiti of Hermes or whatever.

The pilots (Dune). Okay, so the idea that drinking worm barf could mutate you into a being who controls space and time is kind of silly. But are they gods? Let's ask famous SF author Norman Spinrad. Here's what he says intro to Dune:

Paul Atreides passes through these three ascending stages on his way to finally employing the drug to achieve the ultimate level, to become the Kwisatz Haderach, the fully Enlightened One, able to view the conventional realm of space and time from the outside, as Einsteinian four-space, a consciousness rendered therefore prescient up to a point, an Enlightenment that turns out to be both a godlike power and a tragic curse.

Jodie Foster's daddy (Contact). Jodie Foster zooms through a beautiful sweaty wormhole and then finds herself in the midst of a lovely, lovely, lovely, gorgeous nebula thingy that makes her go on an ecstasy trip. And then she's floats down onto a beach, in a mid-air fetal position. And then her dad shows up, wearing a really dorky dungaree-type outfit, and gets all condescending, with the "that's my scientist" crap when she asks questions. It gets really sense-of-wonder-y until you feel like you're getting a marshmellow enema, and the god-daddy gives a speech about how amazing humans are, withour beautiful dreams and our icky nightmares. "In all our searching the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." Barf!!!! And then he condescends some more, when she tries to talk sense to his new-age crap. You can see why Penn Jilette hated this movie. Oh, and here's a pukey clip:

The obelisk dudes (2001: A Space Odyssey). An alien monolith comes to Earth during prehistoric times and helps the apes to evolve intelligence. Later, at the turn of the millennium, Dave encounters another obelisk orbiting Jupiter, and goes on a trippy-ass journey to a whole seven-ages-of-man diorama, until he turns into a super-fetus in space. It's zoomy and spiritual, and leaves you with a whole guided-by-divine-ish-beings feeling.

Evil, slutty Feyd has challenged the Spice-altered Paul Atreides to a duel — and he does it while wearing this bizarre, floating triangle behind his head. What the hell is that thing? Apparently it's attached to his coat because it falls off when he takes off his shiny red cloak. Yes, there is shirtlessness matched with red silk trousers. Basically, on a scale of serious to campy, this clip is super awesome.

• 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?

There's a natural crossover between druggies and science fiction fans, writes Robert Silverberg, author of Son Of Man:

Surveys have shown that the audience for science fiction is primarily adolescent and above average in intelligence; most of the readers are between 15 and 25 years of age (though of course some remain addicts of the genre throughout their lives.) Therefore, there is great correspondence between the main drug-using and science-fiction-reading segments of the population.

So no doubt all this talking has made you wish you were doing drugs right now. So you tell us. If science fictional drugs were real, which one would you want to take?

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• Is Sarah Michelle Gellar's new movie Possession science fiction? Her character's husband and brother-in-law both wind up in comas, then the brother-in-law wakes up thinking he's the husband. Telepathy or mysticism? We'll find out in February. [Shocktillyoudrop]
• The Russian trailer for Cloverfield showcases some previously unseen sequences of soldiers fighting the monster, plus women with fake sweat on their chests. [BloodyDisgusting]
• Similarly, new clips from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem show battle scenes in a sewer, a hospital and a pool party, plus a soldier doing the whole "you go on without me" martyr dance. [IESB]
• Coming (eventually) in Heroes: more of "badass" future Hiro, Hiro's dad's secret powers, the long-promised Jessica Collins super-spy, and a cop and crimelord in New Orleans. Oh, and Monica will dress up as Saint Joan, that cheesy comic book character, more often. [Ohnotheydidnt]
• Screencaps from the Torchwood season two trailer reveal Martha Jones in bondage! [FreemaAgyeman]
• The new KITT from the Knight Rider relaunch has all-wheel drive, laser weapons, a "mini-KITT drone" and other features that the original lacked. But no grappling hook. [Popular Mechanics, via SFSignal]
• Chuck has two more episodes in the can, which reveal more backstory on Adam Baldwin's character. [SpoilerTV]

In fact, the bible itself is often called a work of fantasy, although there sadly isn't much scifi in it. Unless of course you count things like the Ark of the Covenant laying waste to armies as science fiction. After all, who knows what that baby was packing for its punch ... maybe that sucker was nuclear? Although the bible is full of savior figures itself, even if you discount the son of God. For instance, Moses led his people to safety, even parting the Red Sea for them (maybe his rod concealed some sort of a force-field generator?), at times putting his own life in dire jeopardy. So who is really stealing from whom?

At any rate, there are dozens of saviors in science fiction, such as Leeloo from The Fifth Element, ready to sacrifice herself to save the human race and gets saved by love, Roy Batty in Blade Runner, dying after saving Deckard's life (and releasing a lone white dove into the air), and don't forget Ellen Ripley's terrible sacrifice scene in Aliens III, where she gives birth to a queen chestburster while throwing herself into something that resembles the flames of hell. Holy dramatic biblical undertones, Batman.

They don't just stop with the movies, which is evident since some of these films are based on classic works of science fiction. Even novels like Ender's Game and 2001 have savior figures at the heart of their stories, proving that there might be some truth to the fact that all stories can basically be boiled down to three, eight, nine, or 36 plots, pick your poison. It's probably true that at some point a caveman painted a scene on a wall of a victorious hunter bringing home a big kill amidst insurmountable odds, unknowingly creating one of the first savior stories. In fact, it's surprising that Hollywood hasn't optioned that story yet.

Christ Figures in Sci-Fi [Fantasy & Sci-Fi Lovin' Blog]
Christ-Figure in Movies/Books: Grace or Redemption? {The Alien Next Door]
Jesus in Outer Space: Messiahs in Sci-Fi [SciFi Scanner]

Famous names: David Lynch, Kyle McLaughlin, Sean Young, Sting

Crunchy goodness: 3

Spinoffs: With Dune, freakboy director David Lynch managed to make something epic and visually-arresting out of Frank Herbert's cheesy series about a teenage boy who takes drugs and conquers the universe with his giant worm. Of course fans of the novels hated this movie, vastly preferring a 2003 TV mini-series based on Dune Messiah.

Sight you'll never unsee: Young Paul has his mental powers tested by a witch, who orders him to place his hand in a "pain box." Paul resists the urge to snatch his hand out by chanting, "Fear is the mind-killer. I must not fear." This line became a kind of nerd mantra for reasons that nobody can adequately explain.

Stunt casting: Pop star Sting, still wreathed in a vague air of hipness due to his role as Police frontman, plays an evil young nobleman with shirtless, mousse-haired menace.

Bang for your buck: Fresh from his Academy Award wins for Elephant Man, Lynch managed to score a pretty big budget for special effects design, and his baroque spaceship interiors and goth-industrial costumes manage to suggest powerfully what a far-future, space-faring human culture might look like.

Kris' Movie Reviews - Dune (1984)