Bruce Sterling, interviewed by Slashdot's readers in 1999, says that what we think of as community in meatspace is actually a collection of complex infrastructure, and we tend to understimate how vital that stuff is:

Q: It seems that many modern science fiction authors see the future as a time when society gives up on "physical" community in favor of technology. (i.e ruined govt, city states, corporate martial powers, etc..) Do you see this as an amplification of the state of community in today's world, or is it simply a convenient literary device?

A: I think the physical community was a "technology." Irrigation canals, harbors, army barracks, police stations, cathedrals, factories, clocks, forks, running water, that's all "technology."

There are a lot more ruined governments right now than there are sound ones. That's not a literary device. Go try living under a ruined government. Moscow right now — it's about the most William-Gibsonian landscape you are ever likely to see.

And more recently in 2006, BLDGBLOG talked to Jeff VanderMeer about the biggest mistake that science-fiction writers tend to make in thinking about cities and their infrastructure:

BLDGBLOG: How do you achieve – or hope to achieve – believability in an urban setting, giving readers something that (they think) might actually exist?

VanderMeer: As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating "reality" but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I'm creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don't just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Somehow these two quotes, juxtaposed, feel like fruitful ground for some urban world-building. Don't understimate the weight of the past — and don't forget just how much complex technology has gone into building a physical community. Any city, especially a future one, will be littered with the debris of past community-building, and will most likely be broken in some fascinating ways. In other words: don't make your fictional cities too tidy, or you'll be left with a sterile planned community.

Moscow decay image via Seriykotik1970 on Flickr.

Enjoy seeing Vampire Eric as a REAL PERSON? I know, so jarring. But take a little time out with the creators before we cross the river of bloody vampire tears into this weekend and watch our final True Blood for months.

Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) and Charlaine Harris:

There's been a lot of deviations from the books. How do you feel about what they've done this year to branch out from your books?

Charlene: Well I think it provides two forms of entertainment instead of one; I'm all for it, I love the differences. I like to be surprised -

Sam: And she is!

Charlene: And I am!

What's been the biggest surprise, the biggest change that you were happiest about in the series?

C: Oh, Jessica. Without a doubt I thought, "Oh, I wish i had done that." She's brilliant, it's brilliant to give Bill a child.

Sam keeps trying to leave town; is he ever going to get out of town?

S: He tries. He tries to get out of town. He's very loyal to Bon Temps, he's a very protective person and I think that ultimately he knows that he can't leave people hanging. And that's basically where he's at right now. So Sam's ... sticking around.

I don't think it can get any sexier, but it always manages to surprise me. What are we in store for, how do you blow our legs off?

S: Charlene's like, "I don't know if I want to hear the answer to that!"

But you wrote it!

C: That's true, that's true.

S: Yes she did, she created the whoooole thing.

C: Some days I go, "Ohh!"

S: That's right your family watches this. And you created this. It gets really crazy.

True Blood has really hit its stride this year. ... Are you guys a little intimidated by all the other vampire copycats that have come out of the woodwork, like Vampire Diaries or I Heart Vampires?

S: No. We wish them the best but -

C: No. This is an excellent show and I think quality will always rise.

Steve Newlin (Michael McMillian)

People seem to love Steve Newlin. I've been told I'm creepy and hateable but out on the floor at Comic Con there's been nothing but love, I have to say. I think people are just so excited, thankfully, by the characters on the show. I think it's the kind of show where the bad guys are just as fun to watch as the good guys. And who's to say that Steven is really a bad guy.

What's up with you and Jason, I feel like there was a lot of unnecessary touching going between you two?

You think so? Well Jason is a very magnetic personality. Obviously he caught the eye of Mrs. Newlin. I just think Steve is so infatuated with how popular and capable Jason is. I think well we'll see where it goes. I think it's a lot of fun. I like flirting with danger as an actor for lack of a better term. And it became really apparent to me really quickly that there really is something about Jason that Steve is drawn to. If you are familiar with the books and you know the future to Jason's character, it's sort of a subtle wink to an aspect about he and Sookie.

Vampire Eric (Alexander Skarsgård)

One of the favorite fan things was you coming down the stairs with the highlights in. Whose idea was that to put your hair in highlights?

It was Alan Ball's.

And how'd he tell you to go with that whole scene?

Well, I was wearing a wig ... and we all felt that maybe it was time to get rid of it. And they kinda needed a way to get rid of it, and came up with that, and I just kinda loved it; I thought it was a great idea.

We finally saw a little bit of your backstory, with Godric. Are we going to get more flashbacks with you?

I truly hope so. We have like ... I wanted more stuff with me and Godric, I thought that would be fun. Because Allan Hyde, the guy that plays Godric, is really good, a really fun guy, and he'd be fun to ... I mean Eric and Godric hung around for almost a thousand years together and had a lot of fun together so I think there's definitely a possibility for more flashbacks.

Tell us more about Eric. He seems so fed up with humanity and yet constantly finds himself in the throes between vampire and human conflicts.

I think he's kind of in general over humanity, he's kind of like, they're not very interesting to him. He's kind of like, whatever, they're kind of naive and that interaction doesn't give him anything at all. But Sookie's obviously different; there's something interesting about her and he doesn't really know what it is and I think that kind of triggers him.

Banks tells the Guardian:

I'm getting less money for my next book contract. But I've heard of writers having their advances cut by 80%, and others getting nothing. You know, 'Sorry; we just don't want you any more.'

And in response, he will put out a book a year, instead of a book every 18 months. Which is good news — as long as Banks can keep the quality up. And the Guardian also says the literary side of his writing career has been in a bit of a slump in the past decade, but that seems to be over.

Iain Banks writes under two pen names: Iain Banks, and Iain M. Banks. The books without the "M" are classified as mainstream literary fiction, the books with the "M" are sold as science fiction. We just got done singing the praises of the M-less literary works and their potential appeal to science fiction fans, but the Guardian article says his most recent three literary novels — The Business, Dead Air, and The Steep Approach To Garbadale — were "lackluster" and left many people wondering if Banks' literary output had run out of steam. (Banks admits to the Guardian that Dead Air is full of rants and self-indulgence.)

Meanwhile, Banks' science fiction books, especially Look To Windward and Matter, have been as good as ever. His new book, Transition, is being marketed in Britain as another literary work, and "is being talked about as a return to form." But it'll be sold in the United States as a science fiction book, with the M, because, says Banks, "I sell better as a science-fiction writer over there." Since the novel takes place in a series of alternate worlds, either label might fit. [Guardian]

I'm dying to get into this volume, which does look staggeringly awesome. Writes Keith Brooke in the Guardian:

The word "classic" could justifiably be applied to many stories in this volume, which, as a tribute to the magazine and an introduction to some of the finest authors of fantasy, SF and horror, is a landmark anthology.

But while you're waiting to get your hands on a copy, you can listen to some of the writers who've made F&SF so classic, plus the magazine's current editor. According to book publicist and blogger Matt Staggs:

Peter Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, Mary Rickert, Jeffrey Ford, John Kessel, Delia Sherman, Ellen Klages, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, and Fantasy and Science Fiction publisher Gordon Van Gelder himself are among those interviewed.

You can listen to the first half of the interviews as part of Kleffel's regular podcast, Agony Column.

Storytelling:

We felt as though there was a pervasive theme of storytelling and storytellers, and the power of creation, throughout Gaiman's work, especially after touching base with Gaiman mega-fan Rob Clough. So we asked Gaiman why he thought that element comes up again and again for him.

Gaiman says he tries to do something different with every book he writes — he wants the rabbit to be popping out of a new and different hole each time. When faced with a choice between doing a book that's comfortable and safe, and which all of his fans are clamoring for, versus a different book that he has no idea how to write and has nobody waiting for it, he'll always choose the latter. But in spite of this diverse body of work, he feels like after 25 years, he can look back at what he's done and "the themes start piling up." The power of storytelling is definitely one of them, and so is "themes of doorways and transitions," and also his books often seem to feature a kiss that signals the beginning of the third act.

As to why Gaiman's books include the theme of storytelling so often? "I don't know, because I make them. I don't know that writers have origin stories, and I wouldn't believe any writer who said that he did or she did... So why do I write about storytelling? Why was Sandman such a great huge monumental story about the nature of stories?" He says he thinks stories are important and the imagination is important, but those are things he's saying after the fact, not while he's writing a new story.

On the other hand, Gaiman says that everything that exists is here because someone dreamed it up — we sit on chairs because someone imagined them. And he went to the first officially sanctioned science fiction conference in China, and asked why the Chinese government was sponsoring imaginative fiction after so many years of disapproving of it.

It was because the Chinese had noticed that they were incredibly good at making things, but that other people seemed to be inventing the things that they were making, and they had come out to the U.S., and they had gone around Google and Apple and Microsoft, and one of the very few things that the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft had in common was they were science fiction and fantasy fans from way back.

And because they were science fiction fans, they believed the world could be different tomorrow, instead of just being the same thing day after day.

Comics hitting the mainstream:

Somebody else asked Gaiman how he felt about graphic novels being on the Hugo ballot, and he basically said it's about time. When The Dark Knight Returns came out some 23 years ago, the Hugo Ballot included it — but in the non-fiction category, giving the impression the Hugo voters believed Batman was real. Watchmen got on the Hugo ballot, but only in some special made-up category.

Gaiman sees three factors bringing comics into the mainstream:

• The formerly rigid distinction between high and low culture is eroding. Gaiman did his first college appearance in 1992, at a St. Louis college, where the Art Dept. invited him and the English Dept. boycotted the event because Gaiman wrote for comics. But some of the English students sneaked in, and they're professors now. And people like Michael Chabon have come of age loving comics and being excited to be part of that world.
• We're living in a science-fictional age. Just imagine explaining an ipod touch to someone in the 1950s.
• Hollywood special effects have improved to the point where comic-book storylines can play out credibly on screen, and that means comic-book stories have infiltrated the mainstream to a much greater extent.

Movie adaptations of his books:

Someone asked Gaiman if he writes his books differently now, hoping to gear them for movie adaptation, and he said that he just wants the books to be the best things they can be. He's pleased that many people loved the film of Coraline, but he doesn't see it as the perfected form of the book — the book is separate.

And if you wrote a novel aiming to make it easy to adapt into a movie, it would be a disaster, says Gaiman:

I don't know if you've ever done the thing of reading a novelization of a film, before you see the film, but they're always very very odd. As reading experiences, they're always very unsatisfying, because they have all the beats of the film, and they don't work in the way a novel works. They're things that come from the pre-DVD era [where a book version was the only way you could revisit the film]. If you do that [i.e., write a novel so it will make a good movie] you come up with a very broken-backed story.

He also said that for years, execs from major studios would call him up about making a movie of his novel Anansi Boys, and say "We love this book. Can the characters be white?" Gaiman would reply no, because the book was about the children of the African spider god and the characters in the book are all African American. And the execs would reply, "Black people don't like fantasy." And when Gaiman would accuse them of being racist, they would backpedal and say "No, no, we're just being practical."

Working with Marvel and DC

Gaiman says he doesn't have "a lot of patience left" with the two big comics publishers. "They're sweet people and I love working with them but dealing with them is often a lot like being nibbled to death by ducks." It does sound like he's having fun working on the Metamorpho comics for DC's Wednesday Comics, and he's being super careful to make it look like a comic from 1965-1966, even down to a periodic table of the elements that appears in one upcoming issue, which only shows the elements known as of 1966, and Lawrencium would have the letters "LW" instead of the more recent "LR."

Random other stuff: Gaiman also says he loves "plotting by place," treating places in his novels like characters and seeing how characters interact with different locations. And he says he wrote Stardust and Neverwhere right after he moved to the U.S. and he was homesick for Britain — so he found himself creating a fictional version of London and the English countryside respectively. And then he did American Gods, in which he came to terms with living in the U.S., and tried to understand the place.

So the BSG TV movie, "The Plan," is airing some time this fall, and it retraces the first two seasons of the show from the point of view of the Cylons. And, we've been hearing, the Machiavellian Brother Cavil will take center stage. So we asked Park if we'll come away from "The Plan" with a greater understanding of her character's sudden love affair with Cavil in BSG season four. She says yes:

Are we going to understand more about Cavil and Boomer's relationship? Yes, we are... It's kind of fun because it would get scripted one way, and then Eddie (James Olmos) would have us do something in the middle of it, and it would kind of change it, so it would either make it more intimate or creepier... It's not a normal relationship at all. And I don't think she understands it fully herself. What's really cool about is that because you have the seeds planted way back then, you realize... it makes way more sense later on why she's with him. She kind of inexplicably is drawn to him again, and they're a couple again.

And she says the TV movie explains a lot of stuff that we never really saw about Boomer, including how she got into the position she was in. Boomer never really knew that stuff, so we, the viewer, never knew either. At the time, she had come up with her own explanations, in her own head, for that stuff. But now she's learning that the official explanation is something different, and she's having to revise her own internal version of events.

She also says that it was really "quick and dirty" when Athena shot Boomer. She knew it was coming, and yet it was still shocking when she filmed it from both sides. "To me, that's really good storytelling."

We also talked to writer Jane Espenson about how this TV movie makes us see Cavil in a new way:

It's not until fairly late in the series that we start seeing Cavil as a pivotal villain among the Cylons. He turns out to be the one who erased the Final Fives' memories and left them on Caprica to live through the genocide, and he's the one who wants to enslave the Centurions and exterminate the humans. The sudden Cavil-centric villainy at the show's end feels a bit surprising. So will we discover in the TV movie just how important Cavil was all along?

Says Espenson:

This is going back and saying, "Okay, if Cavil is such a big villain, what was he doing during seasons one and two of Battlestar Galactica?"... He was up to something. He had found himself in this situation where they didn't think they needed a plan, because the plan was "Everybody dies." And now he's got to make it up as he goes along.

And we talked to director Edward James Olmos, who said William Adama isn't really in the TV movie that much. And he says it was "fantastic" to go back and relive the moments from the early years of the show, because he could paint with a fantastic pallette. "It took me eight months to edit it." And he says we'll realize how bad things really were, in those dark early years. And Olmos really believes that more BSG TV movies are inevitable — if we can sell half a million units of "The Plan." You'll do your part, right?

At the Potter press conference, producer David Heyman and director David Yates filled us in on what we have to look forward to. Before the release in autumn 2010 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, with Part 2 coming in the summer of 2011 (at least that's what the producers said they had planned for right now).

Says Heyman: One of the things that's going to be on BluRay is that we've created some additional material in regard to the kids taking you around certain departments [behind the scenes], and interviewing people in those departments. Photographers and editing and [editor] Mark Day talking about [his work]. And that's in the 6th Blu-Ray. And other such things.

Adds David Yates: One of the things we've included I'm sure it will be on the DVD and Blu-Ray, we had all these photographs of [Horace] Slughorn taken for the movie. You know the photographs in Hogwarts move and Jim Broadbent who is a very gifted comedian as well as an actor did all these improvisations for us. We cut them together in a montage which is really fun and entertaining.

Harry Potter will be in theaters July 15th while the DVD is rumored to be out December 7th.

He talks a lot about his friendship with Francis Ford Coppola and their partnership to make THX-1138, and their fights with Warners over final cut on THX. And he unveils a deep-seated resentment: "Somebody who has the money, or as a result of the money, has the ability to make decisions that are out of their area. Becuase they have the power, because they have the money, they can make aesthetic, directorial, writing decisions, which they really have no business making. But in this country, the dollar is above the individual. A man's brain, a man's experience, a man's talent is below the dollar. The man with the dollar is the final say."

[Cinematical]

But he doesn't write huge synopses or character bios before he starts a novel. "For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next," he says.

Other stuff that's interesting: how politics creeps into his stories (by osmosis), how he writes about future technology (extrapolate from today's advances), and his earliest influences. Oh, and what it's like to be compared to Iain M. Banks and John Scalzi. Perhaps most surprisingly, Asher says science fiction books used to be way, way better than movies, but the movies have improved a lot in the past couple of decades. Definitely worth checking out if you're an aspiring writer, or a fan of Asher's books. [Sci-Fi-London]

In your first Doctor Who New Adventures novel, Timewyrm: Revelation, the Doctor spends a lot of time confronting all the people who have died on his watch. Do you think the similar moment in the latest Who season finale was a tribute to that book?

Apart from Russell never doing homages (because there's nothing worse than a homage, really, oh, wait, a pastiche, that's worse, and yes, I've done loads of them, but then I've lied and stolen too), and the fact that I'm not at all clear that's what happened, and... you know, that never occured to me. I think every now and then I see bits of the New Adventures popping up in the new show (in many ways the new show *is* the New Adventures by other means) but I can't quite get my head round that one. Usually it comes down to Russell having digested every approach and theme of Doctor Who in all its forms, and using it as he sees fit, and having not only the right but the duty to do that, as the show has always done. Another one of those mainstream show tropes which can come as a shock to those of us who grew up in the niche.

In your "Scream Of The Shalka" webcast, you showed a bitter older version of the Doctor, who's full of self-loathing and tired of saving the universe. I asked Steven Moffat about it, and he said we'd never see that version of the Doctor on TV. Do you think he's right?

Yes, I think he's hugely right. That's pretty obvious, isn't it? None of the onscreen Doctors have been sad for more than ten minutes before something fun comes along. And I'm really tired with the idea that 'dark' is adult. If anything, as an adult I've come to cherish really stupid comedy as possibly the highest achivement of mankind.

Because it's the thing we do that most points away from death. I'm increasingly unafraid to say that 'A Matter of Life and Death' has been replaced as my favourite movie of all time by 'One of our Dinosaurs is Missing'. Dum dum dum dum de de dum de dum dum! Just humming the theme tune.

Last year, you adapted your own novel, Human Nature, into a two-part storyline, "Human Nature/Family Of Blood." I was really struck by a couple of differences. First, having Martha instead of Benny forced you to talk about race and class in a way that the book version totally avoided. Was this a bonus, as far as you were concerned?

Very much so. We just touch upon it, and the audience get it, and then we move on. But it makes it an ordeal for Martha in a whole different way than it was for Benny, who was grieving. It's Martha's big chance to be courageous and sensible and fab, and sets up loads of what happened with her later.

And secondly, in the book version, the Doctor doesn't know the Aubertides are after him. He just wants to be human, so he can feel human emotions and lay down his burden for a while. In the TV show, he becomes human to escape the Family without hurting them, which turns out to be a really, really bad decision given how many people die as a result.

Many many people die because the Family kill them. It's their fault. And it's really only a tiny mischance that stops the Doctor's plan from working. And if he hadn't done that, they'd have chased him across the universe, killing people everywhere they landed.

Do you feel like we lost something because the Doctor no longer had this grand motivation for becoming human? Also, why would he go to such lengths in this one instance to avoid hurting his enemies when he's perfectly happy to hurt his enemies in other situations?

Not something that could have been done on mainstream TV. The motivation is never actually spelled out in the book, so that's a best guess, really. I loved being obscure then. Now I can see how much that was the cowardly choice.

So what are you working on now that you're most excited by?

At the moment, I'm most excited by the fact that I've got a story in all three continuing original SF short story anthologies (non-themed, that is). It's a complicated boast, but I like it. Two of the stories are in a series, the "Jonathan Hamilton" stories, which are in the style of Ian Fleming (the books, not the movies) and are vicious espionage tales set in a world where... well, I know what the difference to history is, but I haven't told the audience entirely yet. At any rate, the 'great game' of political balance in Europe continues, and the great European nations have colonised the solar system, while continuing a delicate cold war against each other.

Those two stories, 'Catherine Drewe' and 'One of our Bastards is Missing' are in Fast Forward 2 from Pyr and the Solaris Book of New SF 3, respectively. The other story, 'Michael Laurits is: DROWNING' is in the second Eclipse collection, which is I think is going to be launched at Calgary this year. I love SF short stories, and I'm hoping to get into doing more.

The other great fun thing is the radio play, an adaptation of Iain Banks' "The State of the Art" for BBC Radio 4, which should go out early next year. We've recorded it, with Sir Antony Sher as the Ship (he's exactly what you expect one of Banks' ships to sound like), Patterson Joseph (who's probably best known for Neverwhere) as Linter, and Nina Sosanya as Sma, and the BBC production job is terrific. I can write 'we feel the presence of the Ship floating beside the car' and they can actually do that! Iain's approved the script. I really want to do some more SF for this lot. Good people.

So what's going on with the characters you introduced in your Wisdom miniseries for Marvel Comics, which came out last year? Are we going to see more of what the Skrull Beatles were up to in the 1970s, during that long waking nightmare that was the Beatles' solo careers?

Unfortunately, they're now the ex-Skrull Beatles, so we'll never learn if they managed to become the Skrull Monkees as they elected to at the end of Wisdom. I would have liked to have seen that.

I know you wrote one episode of Primeval in season two. How involved are you in the upcoming third season?

Not at all.

Meanwhile, you're also writing a Captain Britain comic for Marvel. Are you going to add any more classic characters, now that Black Knight and Blade are both on the team?

Union Jack is popping up in issue five, and we'll continue to cameo British Marvel characters as and when. Working with editor Nick Lowe and artist Leonard Kirk has been a bit of a dream, really. We all egg each other on, pushing to make the best possible book, to the point where we get quite demented about the little details. It's the exact opposite of "Aww, who cares?" and it's great to do that every four weeks, to be involved in that sort of team energy.

Was it better or worse to start the comic off with a Secret Invasion crossover?

Oh, better, of course! All those lovely sales! Now we have to keep them! And it gave us a huge war movie opening, a thread which we'll continue. What we are is this widescreen 'espionage/superheroes vs. the supernatural' book, which gives us lots of genres to play with. In issue six, for example, a demon arrives in Birmingham with a very specific agenda, takes over a tower block, and our heroes pile in, with the military onside. It's a bit like a UNIT story in Doctor Who. Only then our heroes discover, of course, that the enemy was rather ready for them. And that the enemy (who's called, ahem, Plokta, in homage to the British SF fanzine) talks like the actor Leslie Phillips. That's what we'll be doing with this book.

People have been comparing your miniseries Fantastic Four: True Story to Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels. Is this an intentional homage?

You can't really avoid that if you're doing metafiction, which is why I give Jasper a namecheck in the first issue, but we also nod to Bill Willingham (in issue two), Neil Gaiman and the Doctor Who story 'The Mind Robber', all of which trod this ground previously.

How do you think it's different having the Fantastic Four enter the world of fiction, versus Roberto Aguirre Sacasa's comics where he introduced himself as a character who was chronicling the FF's adventures? Why do the FF lend themselves to metafiction so readily?

I think because, if you're talking Marvel, they're the founding group, the first family, so you want to work with them. Also, they have a history of exploring other worlds, and that suits metafiction. It's been great to use those voices, which I grew up with (my Mum is very pleased I'm writing for "Mr. Stretchy Man") to comment on the worlds of fiction. And there is, of course, an ancient Marvel villain behind the whole thing.

So there we go — alongside three TV projects of my own that I can't really talk about yet, and a new novel I'm in the middle of, that's everything I'm up to.

We asked Browder if he'd ever appear on Stargate Atlantis, and he hauled producer Brad Wright over to help answer the question. Wright wouldn't make any promises, but did say he hoped to feature Browder in another direct-to-DVD Stargate movie soon.

When we asked Browder how he feels embodying heroic archetypes like Farscape's Crichton and Stargate's Mitchell. He was super modest: "I let someone like Brad write it, and I just say the words. My job, in a lot of ways is the easy job... my job is just the fun part. I get to go out and do the boy stuff and do the fun stuff, I don't think I think about the heroic archetype. That's something the writers take care of, and the directors and the editors."

Browder had some practice being villainous when he was being mind-controlled by Scorpius in Farscape. Would he like to play an out-and-out villain sometime? Yes, he said. "I think it'd be a lot of fun. Now, wearing prosthetics on a full-time basis — that's not fun."

We asked Tapping about the difference between the gadget heavy Stargate and the more low-tech setting on Sanctuary, and she said Sanctuary is much more "steampunk." Actually, the making of Sanctuary is much more high-tech, because it's entirely shot in greenscreen. But there's less technobabble and fewer gadgets, because her character is 157 years old, and she borrows from all different eras. She said it's a bit weird to be shooting in greenscreen all the time, and she gets a "green chromakey headache." But the good news is that the show's art department shows the actors a really good representation of what the scenes will look like when they're done, so they know what they're reacting to.

In Sanctuary, Tapping plays Dr. Helen Magnus, who protects the "abnormals" (the mutants that society has deemed deviations, but who may actually be the next step in human evolution.) So she's sort of like Professor X from the X-Men, except not bald, "and hopefully prettier," she said.

And she confirmed that she'll be in at least a couple more episodes of Stargate Atlantis this season, plus a third direct-to-DVD Stargate movie.

Apparently Maya (and brother Alejandro, probably) will soon be meeting up with the other serial killer on Heroes: Sylar, better known as the Unibrow bomber.

Dania Ramirez: Wonder Twin [Entertainment Weekly] [Image by Getty Images]