Stover is nothing if not enthusiastic and honest and the project, and she readily admits that keeping contributors behind the veil is part of the process.

How do I share a magic trick with you without actually giving away the magic trick or sacrificing my philosophy as a filmmaker?

Check out the website which features an in-progress timeline that can induce motion sickness if you aren't careful.

• Y: The Last Man: Every male on Earth, human or otherwise, has died from mysterious causes... except for Yorick Brown and his monkey. This all happens in the first issue, and the entire series is about how the remaining women deal with a planet devoid of men. The series will wrap up this year, so if you haven't checked it out, try out issue #1 and you'll have plenty of time to catch up.
• NYC2123: Set in 2123 in a Manhattan that was devastated by a tsunami 70 years ago, the post-apocalyptic survivors struggle to continue living. This comic was originally conceived for Sony's PlayStation Portable and distributed under a Creative Commons license, although you can now read it online and check out the fantastically stark artwork.
• The War of the Worlds: Dark Horse Comics has the entire graphic novel adaptation of this scifi classic online, and it looks pretty vibrant even on a laptop screen. The art looks similar to Kevin O'Neil's in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Victorian-era story is a favorite of Moore's, so you'll only feel two steps slightly removed from one of his works.
• Doom Patrol: Grant Morrison's take on this superteam from DC Comics past went well beyond the envelope and into the realm of the bizarre. He had god-like supervillains, heroes who could only use their powers when asleep, and of course, Robotman... the lone holdout from the 1960s who has appeared in every version of Doom Patrol. This is some vintage Morrison at his best and most wacky.
• DMZ: This comic book about a civil war raging in the United States in the near future follows a journalist who has become trapped behind the Free States and the United States in the demilitarized zone that is Manhattan. It's not just a comic book, but it's also a harsh political statement about our current government practices.
• Swamp Thing: This title was fading fast and heading into obscurity when DC agreed to let relatively unknown scribe Alan Moore have a crack at it. He rewrote the origin of the character, so he no longer came from chemical origins but was instead a plant elemental. However, we'll forgive him that transgression, since he brought back The Floronic Man, who was bonded to plants through chemicals.
• Chaos PhD: This tribute to the silver age of comic books features very well-drawn art, tongue in cheek humor, and of course supervillains and capes. Plus, a well done web interface that makes it easy to read.
• 1984: George Orwell's classic novel about the future as a free webcomic? Big Brother would not be pleased. Particularly with those other websites you've been visiting on your filthy little computer.

Unfortunately, the fairly awesome website for the movie, complete with radio transmissions, video, and pieces of a backstory suffered from a lapsed domain last night, so we're only left with scatterings from around the web. Of course they have a MySpace page, but that points you to the now-defunct website.

According to press materials around the web-o-nets:

"Two convicts, held in an orbiting detention facility above a post-apocalyptic earth, are hired by mega-corporation Hunsinger to perform a risky salvage mission down on the planet. They land, and work their way into a gigantic underground industrial complex, following a map to their ultimate destination, to retrieve and salvage... the item. Being prisoners, they are given little info, and are given credit toward early release as payment. They get more than they expected, and things go from bad to evil."

Which, granted, doesn't seem to make too much sense. They get hired and tossed down onto the planet without anything except a map? Do they even know what they're supposed to be down there picking up, except for heartache and death? The trailer unfortunately doesn't tell us much more than "the future makes Earth a pretty rough place," although the visuals look gorgeous. If you pieced together the sandy parts of Star Wars and tossed in doses of Cube, Primer, and Pi for low-budget crunchy goodness, you'd end up with something that looks like The Men Who Fell. Get this film to the States — we're impressed and want to see more!

And no, fannish friends, despite the title the film doesn't seem to have anything in common with David Bowie's 1976 The Man Who Fell To Earth.

[Quiet Earth]

Even that allegedly friendly year brought only three sci fi-ish films to be screened in competition, including Primer which was critically lauded, but seen by very few viewers. In fact, if you haven't seen it, it's well worth your time.

Sundance has a "Park City at Midnight" category that serves up what the jury thinks of as weird, alternative films, and it tends to serve as a catchall for anything remotely in the scifi vein. Last year Crispin Glover's bizarre It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine screened in this slot, and it's also been host to films like Saw and The Blair Witch Proejct. But why? Science fiction can clearly be as deep (or as shallow) as any other kind of art film.

Marteinn Thorssson, co-director of the 2004 indie sci fi film One Point O put it best:

A science-fiction film doesn't need to be $80 million and use CGI. Science fiction is about human beings interacting with each other and with technology, and technology has become part of who we are today.

Here are the synopses for this year's semi-science fiction films:

• The Broken is a psychological horror project, starring Lena Headey as a woman whose life descends into nightmare after she sees an apparent double of herself driving by in her own car. Granted, it sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and might have little, if any, science fiction in it. At least they're throwing us a bone and it's not just another hack and slash film!
• Timecrimes: A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences. Again, sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, and based on the thumbnails they both look like they have a high horror potential.

• So where are all the indie science fiction films? If you're trying to seek them out at Sundance, you're going to have a hard time of it, but we recommend checking out the Midnight films, and the Animation Program. In fact, one of the coolest retro science fiction steampunk films we've ever seen, The Mysterious Geographic Expeditions of Jasper Morello, screened as part of the Animation Program in 2005 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. Check out part one below.