You've worked on Lost, Alias, Heroes and now Day One. Have you been typecast as a science fiction and fantasy writer? Is there a great Grey's Anatomy script inside of you, waiting for the chance to come out?

I actually quite love my genre, the science fiction genre, and fantasy, and action adventure, really. It's what I grew up on. Growing up as a kid in the 1970s, I grew up on Star Wars and Ray Harryhausen and the Atari 2600 and Apple 2 and D&D and Doctor Who betamax bootlegs from England and all that stuff is really what I love. What drives me to be creative is coming up with new worlds and fun characters and extraordinary events and all that wonderful, fun stuff that so inspired me as a kid.

I think that I've been very lucky, incredibly lucky, to be able to work in the film and entertainment business doing what I love. Before I got into television, I did a little bit of writing in video games, which was very fun, and then I wrote feature screenplays for a number of years - None of which got produced, but they were all assignments and spec sales to Hollywood studios. My niche really was writing these big science-fiction adventure films, and videogames come to life. One of the first things that I sold was a modern-day Jason and the Argonauts, I sold that to Dreamworks, and I wrote a new take on Flash Gordon for Sony back in the day. I adapted the Berzerker novels for Alex Proyas as New Line, and made my bread and butter in the genre that I loved, and I've been lucky to continue to be able to do that.

So do you harbor secret wishes of going back and making that Flash Gordon movie? Do you want to go and work on a Star Wars project, now that you've made your name? Day One is your own creation, are you happier working on something that you've created, or do you want to make your mark on these worlds that meant so much to you?

I love creating my own worlds, it's something I'm very into. I think that now, with so many different platforms available to me as a storyteller, that I can really build out my own story. Day One is going to have many forms, it's going to have the version that is in prime time on NBC and then I'm going to be able to expand it into different arenas like comic books, novelizations and some really cool web stuff that we're going to be doing as well. So I love doing my own thing, creating my own intellectual properties and being able to build out my own little worlds.

So much of it for me is really about escaping to those worlds and being able to immerse myself in them, and explore more adventurous places and experiences that I'm not able to have in my daily life. I'm certainly open to working on other narratives and fictions, but there's something so special about creating something from scratch and then expanding it.

You're talking about what you've called on your blog "Transmedia Storytelling"; that there's going to be Day One the television show, but that there's also going to be Day One the web presence, and comic books as well... Is that how you see storytelling in general now? Multiple platforms for one story?

I certainly do see storytelling as going across multiple platforms now, but that really has a lot to do with how I grew up as a kid. As I always say, everything I learned about everything comes from Star Wars. For me, those movies were so impactful on me, such a consuming reaction. But it was also playing with the action figures, reading the comics, reading the books, playing the games, making Star Wars movies of my own... All that stuff just imprinted itself in my head. So when I think about the worlds that I create, I just automatically imagine the expanded universe component and get excited about using the different platforms to tell the story in new ways.

I'm very lucky that transmedia storytelling, crossplatform narrative, is so important right now in the entertainment business, in all facets of it, whether it's a video game or a movie or a TV show, it's important to be able to extend your story across platforms to be able to reach the fractured audiences that are experiencing the stories in so many different places and in so many different ways. I'm lucky to be able to think about that stuff naturally.

That's touching on something I wanted to ask. You have NBC behind you on this?

Absolutely, NBC were such amazing and supportive partners in Heroes expanding their brand across the web and into different arenas, and I really made some great friends in our dotcom and licensing divisions who understood what I wanted to do and were really excited in having a show creator reach out to them and treat them like collaborators and partners. So I've been very lucky in having support from NBC.

I want to make sure that people understand that it's not about 'exploiting the brand,' it really is for me about having more toys to play with. I very much designed Day One, and that world, so that it would organically and authentically exist on those other platforms without being exploitative and ancillary. That every piece of the Day One brand that exists on whatever platform is incredibly valuable and canon for the mythology and important and valuable to the people who are looking at it.

So how established is the Day One mythology at this point? Do you have a clear idea of where everything is going, or at least a firm enough idea of the backstory so that other people can elaborate on it without contradicting what you want to do on the show?

Absolutely. Look, because I'm a psychopath and really into stories and a total D&D nut, I can't help but think about where everything is going and where everything came from, and who people are and why they're doing the things that they are. It comes very naturally to me to think about a massive arc for what's essentially a space opera. Again, it comes back to Star Wars: That's what George Lucas did! He sat down, and thought about it, and certainly Tolkein did as well. That's very much the school that I come from.

For Day One, I very much have a long term plan that's broken into, for the series, these different events. NBC, and rightly so, is very committed to making sure that, when Day One is on the air that it's very special, and doesn't overstay its welcome, and that every episode is important.

We're going to try some interesting things about a limited run. We're going to be on for twelve weeks in a row, starting in March. We're really trying to have the first season feel like a solid event that has a real sense of closure, and if it's successful, there are ways to continue the story. As I've been building Day One, I kind of think of it like I'm creating a D&D campaign, just to keep referencing D&D [laughs]. I feel like I'm designing a campaign, a ruleset, a world, and modules, and then my writing staff, or my partners in the publishing space or online are really the players. It's up to me to build space where they can be creative, and create stories that are fun for them to create and for other people to experience, and be integrated as canon into the Day One mythology.

How do you feel about the awareness of Day One? When it was first announced, a lot of people thought it was going to be something like Jericho, but here, you're talking about it being a space opera...

I can only hope that people will be surprised and excited about Day One. It's natural for people to compare it to other franchises or movies or stories, I certainly don't blame anybody for reading NBC's press release or looking at some images and comparing it with something that they're more familiar with. I'm totally okay with that, and I certainly do that all the time when imagining what Avatar's going to be like or some other movie that I'm really excited about. But I'm hoping that I'm being creative enough, and have hired amazing writers and collaborators to help me, to build out stories and a world that absolutely have familiar elements that people will see the influences, but they're going to be so fast and furious and thick that I think we're going to come up with something that's ultimately original. That's certainly my goal.

Do you have a finite ending in mind for the series? Are you heading towards a particular endpoint, or are you preparing to be Gene Roddenberry and have Day One still going in thirty years?

I certainly have a plan for the stories. Again, I am a product of sci-fi, fantasy and everything I grew up with in the seventies. I absolutely have a finite version of one of the Day One stories, but there are also ways that those stories can continue on television and in other places, as well. I don't necessarily need to be the guy in charge completely, it's important for a creator to have a firm hand on the tiller of their story, to believe in it and love it, but also be willing to bring on people who can collaborate in making those stories the best that they can possibly be. Certainly, Roddeberry was at the helm of Trek, but he certainly wasn't at the helm of The Next Generation, which was so great, or Wrath of Khan, or JJ's Trek. He established the culture and spirit with which Star Trek stories are told.

Lucas and Star Wars is another interesting example. He created an amazing universe and some fantastic movies, and there were periods in the development of the expanded universe where some amazing collaborators came in and were allowed to expand on it. I think some of the novels are such an amazing extentions of the Star Wars universe, as were some of the games. I think Knights of The Old Republic was such a great Star Wars adventure, and I can't wait to see what BioWare and Lucasarts come up with for the new MMO. And, you know, there were some good things about the prequels and there were some things that weren't so good. I'd love to see KOTOR the movie. Or Neill Blomkamp's adaptation of Republic Commando.

It's important, as an entertainer, a commercial artist really, to understand the value of having other voices in your process, to help make the work better and give it a longer shelf life.

If you had your chance to be part of the writing staff of any SF television show of the past, what would it be?

Well, I did just write about Space: Above and Beyond, and certainly Battlestar did some amazing things. Growing up with Star Wars was huge for me so being able to work on the new TV show that Lucas is doing would be really interesting as well. I'm completely obsessed with the Russel T. Davies and David Tenant years of Dr. Who. That would've been something magnificent to be part of. I can't wait to see how Steven Moffat tops Blink! But, really, At the end of the day, anything with spaceships in it is something that I would be all over. I just love spaceships. I hate to geek out like that, but that's what makes me more of sci-fi guy than a syfy guy. Know what I'm saying? it was so awesome to have Star Trek come out this summer and go and see a movie with space battles. It'd have to be something with some tech and some hardware. And you can bet your ass that, somewhere down the line, Day One will have it's fair share of that as well.

If you need dose of science sensationalism, or just a hot fact injection, we're here for you with these four terrific books.

The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange, by Mark Barrowcliffe (Soho)
A British novelist and comedian, Barrowcliffe was a Dungeons and Dragons obsessive throughout his teen years, a time when he speculates that he should have been getting drunk and hitting on girls. Instead, he jokes, he became "a wanker." Funny and extremely self-depreciating, Barrowcliffe tells the story of his misspent youth battling imaginary monsters with his male friends, and getting beaten up (sometimes badly) by jocks. His most basic premise - that playing D&D ruined his childhood - will probably annoy gamers who know there's a positive side to role playing games. But Barrowcliffe admits that his experiences were specific and personal, and that's where this book gets intriguing. Because his other premise is that D&D is a kind of distilled version of the social conditioning that turns all boys into "wankers" who would rather compete in a fantasy world than form intimate relationships in the real one. The Elfish Gene begins as a kind of anti-nerd rant, but winds up being a lot more than that.

Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End . . ., by Philip Plait (Viking)
Author Plait is the creator of the brilliant and addictive blog Bad Astronomy, so it's no surprise that he's written the most entertaining astronomy book of the year. Each chapter is devoted to some kind of astronomical disaster that could destroy Earth, and begins with a chillingly convincing description of how the disaster would unfold. Black holes invade the solar system, solar flares kill electrical power grids in the dead of winter, gamma rays from a nearby supernova fry the ozone layer, and (in the most fanciful chapter) self-replicating alien space probes turn Earth into raw materials for more probes. After Plait scares your socks off with these stories, he explains the science behind them: How gamma rays work, what black holes do when they meet other gravitational fields. If you like your astronomy lessons full of stories about how Earth could be destroyed, you need this book.

Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero, by E. Paul Zehr (Johns Hopkins University Press)
Becoming Batman takes the same tack as Death from the Skies, explaining the science behind compelling tales of death and destruction. Except in Zehr's obsessive, charming book, the destruction is all from superheroes fighting each other. A neuroscientist who studies muscular movement - and a serious Batman fan - Zehr answers definitively whether a real human being could become Batman just through physical training. He asks weird questions you never thought about, such as what Batman's range of motion might be, how fast he could throw punches, and what kinds of spinal damage he might sustain from injuries he gets in the comics. There is really nothing more awesome than reading a book that cites obscure neuroscience journals in the same sentence with citations to obscure Batman comics. Becoming Batman is a terrific introduction to the science of kinesiology (movement), and a fun way to learn more how much we can change our capabilities through physical training alone.

Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell us About Development and Evolution, by Mark S. Blumberg (Oxford University Press)
Eminent neuroscientist Blumberg offers a strangely poetic analysis of new theories of evolution, based on biological mutations from conjoined twins to people born without limbs. Like many evolutionary theorists, he's interested in developmental biology - what happens to creatures between the time of conception, to the time they are born. What forces act on and in an embryo to make it grow into an anomaly? And are these anomalies actually evolution in action, nature tinkering with lifeforms to see what works? Blumberg explores the complicated ways our genes tell our bodies to grow, using weird examples from the history of human and animal mutation. If you're interested in the science behind the macabre, this book will thrill you. It's also a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about a cutting-edge area of evolutionary theory.

Called SPHERES (for Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites), these colorful game pieces may be about to change the way spaceships operate. They're tiny prototypes of what could be large, autonomous ships that fly in formation and automatically rendezvous with each other in space. Universe Today's Nancy Atkinson points out that these are essentially maintenance droids of the future, which could perform satellite maintenance and even build an entire spacecraft in orbit.

They might also eventually replace satellites altogether. Atkinson writes:

Smaller, multiple satellite missions are economical and provide redundancy. Instead of launching one big, heavy satellite, launching lots of little is easier. They can orbit Earth in tandem, each doing their own small part of the overall mission. If a solar flare zaps one satellite—no problem. The rest can close ranks and carry on. Launch costs are reduced, too, because tiny satellites can hitch a ride inside larger payloads, getting to space almost free of charge.

Floating Battledroids [via Universe Today] Thanks, Belabras!

Images via NASA.

First, there are the excellent fuzzy 20-sided dice for your rear view mirror, available through ThinkGeek.

You can get a silver necklace with a picture of a 20-sided dice on it from SplitReason.

Over on Etsy, pawandclawdesigns offers a necklace made with a real 20-sided dice. And beepbeephello offers 20-sided dice earrings that are lovely.

And just yesterday, I heard a rumor that soon there will be 20-sided dice socks available from the wonderful people who bring you RobotSocks. Maybe even by next month! WIN!

MIT image via Eric Schmeidl via Laughing Squid.

This takes us onto the Physical and Mental Mutation tables, full of exotic adaptations to the new brave new world ("Quills/Spines", "Pyrokinesis" "Multiple Body Parts"), and the occasional dark side of genetic damage ("Hemophilia," say, or "Epilepsy").

When it arrived in stores in the early 1980s, Gamma World was announced like this:

The first world is lost in the mythical past, the second was destroyed by apocalyptic energies, and now a whole new world awaits you - GAMMA WORLD!

...or would we!? Because maybe we'd still be around, and everything would be messed up in a cool way. When I was playing Gamma World in junior high, it seemed vaguely plausible that in a few years we'd have tattoos, and cool rubble to climb around on. There would be tribes!

Gamma World's principal architects were Gary Jaquet and James M. Ward - the latter of whom must be touched by some visionary quality, since his name is on Metamorphosis Alpha and Deities and Demigods. It's patterned more after science fantasy than science fiction proper - the creators cite The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's marvelous Wizards, a post-apocalypse subgenre boiled down and codified into 56 pages of narratively generative charts'n'tables.

Players set out into an America remade as a country of mutants, rural communities, and the mystery-shrouded ruins of a prior civilization. Robot farms, nomadic tribes, ancient spaceports, mutated forests and radioactive desert dot the landscape as well as the Cryptic Alliances, crackpot factions contesting for the fragments of what used to be.

As a context for storytelling Gamma World gets full marks. Gamma World's crazy mix of high-tech and ruined-garden aesthetics is still my preferred vision of the post-Reaganite era. In Mad Max, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the post-nuclear world is a humorless burned-out husk, but Gamma World is lush and green, a hothouse full of unwholesome life - like dropping the bombs just kicks everything up a notch.

It combines that neo-tribal waste-land adventure with a Riddley Walker, Motel of the Mysteries vibe - familiar artifacts become strange to us, the present day world we walk around in becomes a strange and distant past, a lost technological climax instant for the human race. Poignant and thrilling at the same time.

But Gamma World never caught on in a big way. Some X-factor was missing - maybe it lacked D&D's potent fantasy urtexts. Or maybe it was in the game design? GW's character creation lacks the hard-wired archetypal structure of D&D's class system - sure, mutations are fun, but it doesn't bring the ready-made type-casting of fighter vs magic user vs thief.

And the reward schedule isn't there. You don't go up levels - in Gamma World your base stats go up, and you can find artifacts, and there's a thin chance of further mutation (here I consult the Radiation Matrix), but you don't find that steady treadmill of advancement that keeps D&D and WoW players grinding onward and opening up new areas in the game mechanics.

And of course the nail in the coffin is the post-Reagan New World Order itself, which let the air out of our collective investment in a grim post-nuclear endgame.

But Gamma World keeps being remade, even unto the Sixth Edition. Cormac McCarthy, along with Jericho, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and even Al Gore, show that the devastated future Earth still has a place in the contemporary imagination. I like to think McCarthy would appreciate the final pages of the 1981 manual, a 100-item treasure table full of poignant relics as "57. Jungle gym - fair condition, used," or "1859 Swiss Infantry Sabre - excellent condition, well polished blade." Gamma World is a future with a past that includes the world we see around us, which ought to mean as much as a bunch of halflings.

And, seriously, as futures go, would you rather the boring old Singularity, or Gamma World? Do you really want to float around in space chatting with Farsc4pe_Guy_21 or do you want to explore a secret bunker shattered by nuclear fire, to learn the truth of our elder civilization? Leporinoid art by David Trampier.

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• Gygax spent his formative years reading science fiction authors Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber as well as the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian via Robert E. Howard's books.
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• In 1953 Gygax first played Gettysburg by Avalon Hill, and later ended up ordering blank hexagonal mapping paper from the same company.
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• In 1966 he founded the International Federation of Wargamers with friends, and in 1967 he organized a 20 person gaming get-together in his basement that was later billed as Gen Con 0. Gen Con is now the world's largest hobby-gaming convention.
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• He founded the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, which was a military miniatures society. This guy sure loved his Associations, Federations, and groups.
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• In 1971, he and Jeff Perren wrote Chainmail, a medieval miniatures game, which later featured a supplementary set of rules featuring magic spells and other fantasy elements.
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• After playing Gettysburg, he became obsessed with finding ways to generate random numbers rather than using traditional six-sided dice. He found a set of the five platonic solids in the back of a school supply catalog and ordered several sets, and later introduced them into gaming in D&D. In fact, owning your own dice and keeping them in a little velvet bag was a sign of geek coolness, back then.
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• In 1974 he formed Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye and released the first set of Dungeons and Dragons rules, and their first run of 1,000 hand-printed editions sold out in nine months, and were later passed around college and high school campuses across the nation.
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• In 1976, TSR introduced the game Metamorphosis Alpha, which later became Gamma World. The game was inspired by Brian Aldiss' novel Starship, and later crossed over into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world with the "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" module. Gygax said the module was meant to show what would happen if a ship like one in Metamorphosis Alpha crashed into a D&D world.
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• In 1982 TSR followed the scifi vein with Star Frontiers, which featured swashbuckling space adventure through the unexplored worlds of the Frontier. This was actually my first introduction to role-playing games, and I have to admit that I loved this game a lot more than D&D. In fact, I'm tempted to dig through trunks to see if I still have the rulebook.
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• Gygax left TSR in 1984 during changes to management, and began working on the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon show.
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• In 1987 Gygax developed Cyborg Commando, a science fiction roleplaying game "set in 2035 at a time when the earth is invaded by aliens called Xenoborgs intent on subduing humanity and taking control of the planet. Luckily humanity has developed a new kind of solider: the Cyborg Commando, a mechanical/electronical man-like structure that can be implanted with a willing human's brain." Unfortunately it was later criticized as "the worst role-playing game ever written."
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• In 1999 he introduced Lejendary Adventure, which was meant to be a return to less-complicated gameplay with an emphasis on fun, although it explored the familiar gaming territory already well-covered by D&D. One of the last projects he had been working on was an expansion module for Lejendary called "Lejendary AsteRogues", as sort of "fantastical science RPG." According to Gygax, "The Lejendary AsteRogues game is actually in the "Fantastical Science" area, not true SF. It is a sort of mix of steampunk and super science with a leavening of Napoleonic Era military material." Sounds pretty scifi to us.
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• He wrote two science fiction short stories, "Pay Tribute" and "The Battle Off Deadstar," which were published in the scifi anthology The Fleet and Breakthrough (The Fleet, Book 3).
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• He has a strain of bacteria named after him: "Arthronema gygaxiana sp nov UTCC393." We hope it's not flesh-eating.
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• In 2000 he appeared as himself on an episode ofFuturama along with Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, and Stephen Hawking. He rolls the dice to determine which greeting to give to Fry.
  

The plot is right out of a Pearl Jam song, or the headlines of a newspaper. When two bullies at school start knocking Ben around for his milk money, the lines between game and real life become blurred. Epect some angsty teen ass-kicking and emo music. Flemish director Nic Balthazar is working on the U.S. version of the film, and he is searching for "The new Leonardo DiCaprio" to star.

Balthazar to remake 'Ben X' in U.S. [Variety]