Here's this year's standout Cthulhu for president shirt. Every election season, you've got to vote for the creature who does not represent the "lesser evil," but this tee takes it one step farther. Love the "Ia Ia America Fh'tagn" slogan here — it makes me think that somewhere in the ocean deep, slimy tentacled creatures are singing the praises of the U.S. government. It's good to have allies!

For those who are tossing their lot in with Admiral Adama, leader of Battlestar Galactica, there's always the swag available through AdamaforPresident.org. There's this poster (at left, available in larger sizes obviously), and a simple "Adama 08" tee. No word on his running mate. May we suggest Helo? Anybody who can mutiny against Starbuck can certainly hold his own against Adama. Plus, he has that hybrid baby which makes him totally plugged into the next generation.

Reynolds/Washburn tee [Ziraxia]

Cthulhu 2008 tee [Zazzle]

Achenbach's point is smart, if unsurprising. His thoughts on why American politicians tend to avoid the subject of the future are especially clear-headed:

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially "hard science fiction" that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. "If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong," she says. "But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong."

That's exciting — and a little scary. We want the blessings of science (say, cheaper energy sources) but not the terrors (monsters spawned by atomic radiation that destroy entire cities with their fiery breath).

Eric Horvitz, one of the sharpest minds at Microsoft, spends a lot of time thinking about the Next Big Thing. Among his other duties, he's president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He thinks that, sometime in the decades ahead, artificial systems will be modeled on living things. In the Horvitz view, life is marked by robustness, flexibility, adaptability. That's where computers need to go. Life, he says, shows scientists "what we can do as engineers — better, potentially."

Our ability to monkey around with life itself is a reminder that ethics, religion and old-fashioned common sense will be needed in abundance in decades to come (see the essay on page B1 by Ronald M. Green). How smart and flexible and rambunctious do we want our computers to be? Let's not mess around with that Matrix business.

Every forward-thinking person almost ritually brings up the mortality issue. What'll happen to society if one day people can stop the aging process? Or if only rich people can stop getting old?

It's interesting that politicians rarely address such matters. The future in general is something of a suspect topic . . . a little goofy. Right now we're all focused on the next primary, the summer conventions, the Olympics and their political implications, the fall election. The political cycle enforces an emphasis on the immediate rather than the important.

Photo: IMDB

As you can see, Trek's crews have always treated the Prime Directive like a speed limit on the Interstate. But the high point of Prime Directive violations was the late 1990s, which surpassed even the late 1960s of Kirk's cowboy-ism.

At the same time, the United States was reducing its troop presence around the world. Why did Starfleet start interfering more, even as America was throwing less of its weight around? The late 1990s was an era of military spending cutbacks and base closures, when the U.S. seemed to be less influential without the threat of the Soviet Union to rally our own citizens, let alone our allies.

I know what you're going to say: It's all down to Star Trek: Voyager's Captain Janeway and her "anything goes" approach. But first of all, Janeway's not the only culprit. Ben Sisko on Deep Space Nine also played fast and loose with the Directive more in the late 1990s than in its earlier seasons. And the Federation also threw its non-interference principles out the window, in different ways, in both 1998's Star Trek: Insurrection and 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis.

But also, consider that Voyager is a metaphor for the U.S.' more confusing situation after the Cold War. Instead of being one superpower facing another (like the Klingons, Romulan or Borg) suddenly the Voyager is isolated in a quadrant full of independent players, each of whom has its own agenda. Just as the Soviets were replaced with Bosnians, Serbs and Kosovans and the U.S. had to form alliances to deal with messy situations, Voyager faces a bunch of warring races and Janeway has to strike deals with different races to escape in one piece.

All of which makes us wonder: If Star Trek were on the air as a television show now, and it took place during an era where the Directive applied, would we see fewer violations? After all, U.S. troop levels in other countries have rebounded, and we're once again involved in a massive confrontation overseas. Would a 24th century Trek step more lightly around the galaxy, to counterbalance the United States' greater use of force?

Illustration by Stephanie Fox. Additional reporting by Nivair H. Gabriel.

National Defense Magazine reports that Niven offered his advice while in a public discussion with his longtime collaborator Jerry Pournelle:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

"The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren't going to pay for anything anyway," Niven said.

"Do you know how politically incorrect you are?" Pournelle asked.

"I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work," Niven replied.

Other authors in SIGMA include Greg Bear (Darwin's Radio, Eon), Sage Walker (Wild Cards), and Eric Kotani (Between the Stars).

Science Fiction Mavens Offer Far-Out Homeland Security Advice [National Defense Magazine]

What pleases about BSG, for a mainstream audience not necessarily inclined to freak out over spaceships, is the careful way the show's creators David Eick and Ronald Moore have created an entire political system for the characters to inhabit. We aren't just motoring from battle to battle. Instead, we watch as the human president fights with political pretenders and the military for power over the few thousand people left after the Cylon attack. There are press conferences and elections, worker strikes and Cylon sympathizers. The humans even become suicide bombers at one point.

This isn't a show that gives us a simple, Star Wars-style good vs. evil fairy tale. Everyone, even the steely Cylon, are ambivalent and ethically fungible. With next season concluding the epic tale of the human and Cylon battle to reach Earth and colonize it first, the action is sure to be intense. But don't expect the meaty political allegory to fall by the wayside. Things are just starting to get interesting.

We'll be watching characters dealing with a legal battle over who is to blame for last season's witchhunts, where accused Cylon collaborators were summarily executed without trial. And the Cylons have started having children with humans, raising the question of whether the us vs. them, human vs. machine binary really makes sense at all.

It's possible that what allows BSG to be so overtly political, complete with subplots about suicide bombing, is precisely the fact that it's set in a science fictional world. There is a narrative comfort zone for audiences: We don't have to worry that what we're watching is about ourselves because it takes place in a fantasy world. And yet there's no mistaking the fact that the characters in BSG are us. And I don't just mean the humans. We are the Cylon too.

The new season of BSG starts airing Friday, April 4 on the Sci Fi Channel.

Jericho seems to have gone from being a pretty conservative narrative to a much more radical one. The first season revolved around a vision of the American heartland pulling together after the cities vanished — plus a "clash of the patriarchs" among mayor Johnston Green, his rival Gray Anderson, and Phil Constantino, the sheriff of neighboring town New Bern. And now, in the second season, the rival patriarchs have vanished and the show is much more about the younger characters and their distrust of all authority. And the over-arching plot arc seems to revolve around an arch-conservative government that's lying about the reasons for the nuclear explosions, to cover its own involvement.

So I asked Barbee whether there had been a conscious shift in the show's politics between the first and second seasons.

Barbee responded that "We don't talk politics in the writers' room. We talk characters." The main reason there's less focus on rival patriarchs this season is because Johnston Green, the main characters' father, died in the first season finale. "Johnston Green was always meant to die," Barbee said, calling the show a remake of The Lion King. "Johnston Green had to die so that Jake could step up," and his generation could be faced with having to live up to Johnston's legacy. But there was no intention to change the show's politics, she insisted.

Still, it's no coincidence that the show is alluding to the Iraq war during an election war. "We read the papers," said Barbee. "We are influenced by what goes on."

Because the season is only seven episodes instead of the 22 Barbee and her fellow producers had planned, things move at a much more breakneck pace and "there's no time for treading water." She gave a bit more detail about what a 22-episode second season would have looked like, with storylines taking place in Cheyenne, WY (the capital of the new government, which controls the Western U.S.) and New York City. One character would have left New York to travel across the country to Jericho, and we would have seen more of the country through that character's eyes. The three storylines would have come together at the season's end in Cheyenne. But now there won't be any New York stuff.

Barbee also repeated what she'd said before, that the first season was about saving the town, the second season was about saving the country, and the third season (if any) would be about saving the world.

Oh, and Lennie James, who plays badass CIA agent Robert Hawkins, said his character could kick Jack Bauer's ass

They're called Homo hadalis. Get it? They're from Hades, "the planet within their planet," as Long calls it - where their refers to the military men who now find themselves confused by this brand new enemy that confronts them from below.

Soon enough, finding more and more of these literally hellish non-humans pouring up from the bowels of the Earth, killing thousands before disappearing again into unlit caverns, the militaries of every nation in the world plan a subterranean invasion. Armed with machine guns, hydroponic agriculture, UV lights, and lots of instant concrete, they head downward. They begin the descent.

Indeed, organized and state-funded, the militaries "approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago, as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics."

Vast caverns are mapped. Tunnels stretching clear across the Pacific seafloor are discovered - and, from there, cobwebs of subsidiary tunnels, weaving off into an abyss:

The abyss beneath the Pacific is basalt, which gets attacked every few hundred years by huge plumes of hydrogen-sulfide brine, or sulfuric acid, which snakes up from deeper layers. This acid brine eats through the basalt like worms through an apple. We now believe there may be as many as six million miles of naturally occurring cavities in the rock beneath the Pacific, at an average depth of 6,100 fathoms.

As one of Long's characters says:

"Where it goes, we're not quite sure... A profusion of tunnels shoots throughout the Asian plate systems, giving access to the basements of Australia, the Indonesian archipelago, China, and so on. You name it, there are doorways to the surface everywhere."

Soon the Army Corps of Engineers gets involved. "They were tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots - three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves."

It takes days at a time to get anywhere; people move between underground base camps and vast instant cities further on, full of klieg lights, ringed with landmines, thriving behind walls of sandbags and fortified machine gun nests. There are outbreaks of "tropical cave disease" and claustrophobia - and there is something else down there, that enemy twin of the human race.

Everywhere the descending soldiers find "evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels," down amidst overwhelming pressures beneath continents and beneath the sea.

Of course, surface-dwellers want to explore; they want to see where the tunnels lead, to go out to the edges of the Earth by going into the Earth. "Into Hell?" some characters innocently ask. No, not Hell: into "an upper lithospheric environment," we read. "An abyssal region riddled with holes."

Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It became a time to look inward.

There is a rich vein of subterranean adventure in science fiction, from Jules Verne, of course, to Neil Marshall's recent horror film The Descent and the unwatchably bad The Core - or even the Bible, where we read about the harrowing of Hell, which the Catholic Encyclopedia describes as a "triumphant descent" into the planetary abyss.

I'm tempted to quote Nietzsche. After all, with all this talk of entering into unexplored realms of pressure and darkness, looking into a void that perhaps looks into us in turn, the obvious final question is: Are we prepared for what we'll find?

As Jules Verne himself wrote: "Look down well! You must take a lesson in abysses."

New York Must Be Destroyed

One of the most obvious ways that scifi echoed the events of 9/11 was to destroy New York, over and over again. The collapse of New York, via time traveling shenanigans or giant sea monsters, continues to obsess scifi creators. In the incredibly terrible A Sound of Thunder (2005), a time traveler who steps on a butterfly during the Jurassic Age changes the present and turns New York into a savage jungle. New York is made into a less-savage jungle by an inexplicable disease in I Am Legend (2007). Aliens with giant world-destroying Tripods smash New York and everywhere else in War of the Worlds (2004). And of course we've already talked a lot about how Cloverfield (2008) is basically a direct allegory of 9/11, with a giant monster standing in for scary terrorists who came out of nowhere and bashed the city.

The Surveillance State is Watching You

Although Minority Report (2002) technically came out after 9/11, and certainly took on new overtones thanks to the passage of the USA-Patriot Act, it was probably conceived and mostly filmed before the attacks took place. Still, another Philip K. Dick-inspired movie, A Scanner Darkly (2006) is clearly an homage to the surveillance state that the current Bush Administration built — and that John Poindexter tried to make even more science fictional with his Total Information Awareness program (now called Terrorist Information Awareness). Fear of computer surveillance — or resigned acceptance of it — permeates countless scifi creations of this era, including Vernor Vinge's superlative near-future novel Rainbows End (2006), which focuses in part on a biotech terrorist attack that's being stopped by intelligence experts who work entirely within vast computer networks.

The Terrorists Are Everywhere!

Australian Max Barry published Jennifer Government in 2003, a novel where corporations stage fake terrorist attacks to get publicity for their new shoes. But other tales were less satirical. Mark Millar's Civil War comic book series (2006-7) dealt with what happens to the superheroes of the Marvel universe when Congress passes the "superhero registration act" and forces all heroes to be tracked in the name of fighting terror. Hero fights hero in this response to the Bush Administration's efforts to track Muslims and other "undesirables." Battlestar Galactica dug deep into politically incendiary terroritory in 2006 when some of the humans become suicide bombers in order to fight the Cylon in occupied New Caprica. Even Star Trek: Enterprise had a terrorist plot arc with the Xindi in 2003. In books, Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel (2007) dealt with high-tech terrorists in a surveillance state.

Department of Homeland Security is Plotting to End the World

One of the conceits of post-nuke apocalypse series Jericho (2006-2008) is that the Department of Homeland security may have been behind the attacks that flattened most major U.S. cities with nukes. 28 Weeks Later (2007) has U.S. security forces ordered into London to "protect" citizens being repatriated after a plague has wiped out most of England. Turns out of their orders is just to shoot everybody — innocents and monsters alike — if the situation gets out of control. In The Mist (2007), a secret military experiment unleashes extra-dimensional killer beasts on a small town. And in Serenity (2005), Joss Whedon's film spinoff from the Firefly series, a government obsessed with quelling uprisings in its satellite colonies is hunting one of the main characters, River, an escaped experiment who would have become a mind-reading weapon under government control.

Desert Planets are the Source of All Unrest

Two new Dune miniserieses hit the bigtime on the SciFi Channel: Dune: The Miniseries (2001) and Children of Dune (2003). Both are true to Frank Herbert's novels, which are thinly-veiled allegories of Middle Eastern politics — complete with Jihads and desert planets which produce a chemical that enables rapid transportation. ("The spice must flow" = "The oil must flow".) New Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert's son, came out in 2002, 2003, and 2004 and dealt directly with Butlerian Jihad that created the world of the first novels. Clearly, Jihad was on SF writers' minds. People who tuned into the Stargate TV series throughout the last ten years were treated to another desert planet full of nasties and insurrectionaries: Abydos, whose inhabitants are basically space Arabs.

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I love the look on the forklift operator's face. Says scriptwriter/comics artist Kang:

I wanted to maintain the grace of the original film and to overcome the difficulties and limitations a sequel could have. And I wish to show more action with multiple monsters.

The Host 2 takes place in 2003, six months before the first movie. Once again, our sympathies are with the regular people. We follow the street vendors displaced by the renovation and the demolition workers and police involved in it. Supposedly a line in the movie actually mentions Lee pushing for the river project so he can run for president. The project disturbs horrible creatures that live underground, and you can guess the rest. Monster pile-on! [Scifi Japan, via MonsterFest]

Virus Freakouts
The US was just coming out of the 1980s AIDS horrors, and a big theme of Clinton's first term was the need for universal health care. Science fiction of the era responded with countless tales of viral decimation and health care run amok. In 12 Monkeys, a Terry Gilliam film, a guy who has become unstuck in time is trying to stop a deadly virus from wiping out most of homo sapiens. In Greg Bear's novel Slant, everyone has gotten high-tech brain implants to prevent them from falling prey to crippling depression and other health problems — a virus destroys the implants and people go nuts. And in Gattaca, the health care system goes wild, producing a completely genetically-engineered human race where disease is bred into non-existence. Except our hero is a wild type, born without any genetic engineering. Can he fight the medico-industrial state?

The Liberal Happy Place
Clinton's theme song was Fleetwood Mac's groovy "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," and his presidency ushered in an era of unprecedented economic growth during peacetime (well, if you forget about a little bombing in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia). Several popular works of science fiction celebrated the idea happy liberal tomorrows, such as Contact, based on Carl Sagan's novel about first contact between humans and nice, glowy aliens who just want to help us. Liberal icon Jody Foster stars as the atheist astronaut who meets the friendly alien. Star Wars I was also notably warm and fuzzy, focusing on the out-in-the-country boyhood of Annakin. And in bookstores Ursula LeGuin's Four Ways to Forgiveness focused on characters who have left war behind and are adapting to peacetime.

Dude, It's the Interwebs!
The World Wide Web was still young (people still called it "the information superhighway"!), and the Clinton White House was the first to have a Web site. Plus, as libertarian cyber-journalist Declan McCullagh never stopped reminding us, Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. Two of the greatest SF books of the era, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, managed to present us with plausible and brilliant visions of a future where the internet is thousands of years old — and in the second book, humans are given brain tweaks to turn them into human extensions of the Web (essentially, for you nerds, they become the top layer on the OSI model). In cinema, however, movies about cyber-serial killers such as Virtuosity, and cyber-what-the-hells in Lawnmower Man, did not get it right. It wasn't until Clinton was nearly out of office that The Matrix came along and finally gave us the internet-influenced science fiction we deserved.

Conservative Paranoia
All that crazy liberal "atheists bond with aliens" crap got the neoconservatives completely freaked out, and a counter-trend of Contract with America-influenced science fiction came into being. Though Clinton loved the X-Files, it was actually the perfect right-wing paranoia show, all about how a soft-hearted girly man is trying to bring down the government by discovering its secrets, cavorting with Native Americans, and loving the alien. Books from the Left Behind series, about the Christian apocalypse, gave evangelical scifi fans their fix. As for Independence Day, I'm guessing the cheers weren't about being glad the real-life president was safe. Keeping the Aliens in Line
Clinton may have kept the U.S. (mostly) at peace, but the strongly conservative Congress was making other plans. Those plans eventually bore fruit during the Bush Administration, but you could still see them reflected in scifi fantasies of the Clintonian variety. Stargate was the ultimate "let's shut our borders to the Middle East" movie, with a portal that opens to a world ruled by space Egyptians who would love to destroy our precious Western way of life. Men in Black outlined a new border policy with alien life — keep them monitored and tagged, and if they get out of line bring in the big guns. And although Armageddon wasn't about aliens, its muscular men with their big nukes and giant drills fighting a nasty asteroid certainly presaged the Bush Era to come. Plus, in Armageddon, all the nasty liberal cities in the world like Paris are destroyed.

In general, we noticed the Doctor is more likely to overthrow the government on alien planets, or in the distant future. When he visits present-day Earth or our history, he's an arch-conservative. (He ousts Harriet Jones as prime minister of England in "The Christmas Invasion," but that's not the same as destroying the whole government.) Also, the Doctor acted out way more during the Thatcher era than any other period. During the Blair/Gordon Brown eras, he's been quite well-behaved.

Methods: We counted the number of stories in each season where the Doctor overthrows the status quo. (For example, in "The Savages" and "The Happiness Patrol," he encounters a stable society and leads a revolution.) Then we divided that number by the total number of stories in that season, for a percentage. Then we included other events at the time that could explain the Doctor's changing politics.

• Every country attending the conference, including China, was willing to reduce its toxic emissions except the United States. China and the US are the world's biggest producers of airborne toxins that lead to climate change.
  
• The European Union pushed for widespread adoption of its own plan, which involves 25 to 40 percent reduction in emissions by 2020 and 50 percent or more by 2050.
  
• Scientists say that if the world's temperature rises more than 2 degrees Celsius, or our atmosphere hits more than 445 parts per million of carbon dioxide, we face environmental disaster, with coastal cities and island nations flooding, food shortages, and mass migrations away from areas that have become uninhabitable due to increased storms and water levels.
  
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out that global temperatures have already risen .7 degrees since the nineteenth century.
  
• Nevertheless, the UN now has an agreement with all parties involved, including the United States, to create a new treaty to limit emissions in 2009 that will extend Kyoto. By then, there will be a new regime in the U.S. that may be more sympathetic to limiting emissions.
  

The latest idea is too on the nose, because it's about a vice president who has a heart attack and dies, which is terrible, because he runs the country, and a kind of Karl Rove-ian character brings Herbert to the White House to revive him. All is well for a little while, and then, of course, havoc has its day. A lot of people they took the idea to didn't want to touch it. And, of course, the real power in it would be to get it out before they are out of power.

OK, why the fuck did Uwe goddamn Boll get to direct a gory political satire (the wretched Postal), but Stuart Gordon - who actually has a brain and some writing ability - doesn't? What the hell, people? I think the problem is that Hollywood doesn't want progressive politics in movies to offend the delicate white liberal sensibility. Politics should be sanctimonious, and no bodily fluids should be involved. Somebody like Michael Moore gets to make "funny" political movies because he's actually an irritating dogmatist who is boring to watch, but Gordon - who threatens to entertain us - is being told zombies are just too political for the B-movie crowd.