People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we're slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney's position as the Times' science columnist gives him more authority than Will's as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he's also eager to buy into the hype whenever there's a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It's hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney's columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He's a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there's "some risk" that global warming will be a danger.) But he's given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he's done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney's world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who's been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own "authority in the political debate" and tarnish their opponents.

And Tierney implies that scientists sign on with the global-warming orthodoxy because that's where the money is. (One blog post is provocatively titled, "Global Warming Payola?".) And the idea that we're cooking the planet is sold to the public by taking advantage of natural disasters and tragic images of sad polar bears:

Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention - and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Recently, Tierney has also been pounding on the common conservative meme that the same scientists who now warn about global warming were warning, in the 1970s, that we faced a new human-made ice age. Since they were so wrong back then, and have changed their tune so drastically, the implication is, why should we believe them now? (The meme is massively overplayed, but even if it were true, so what? Smart people adjust their views when they receive new information. And when the data becomes overwhelming, only idiots and tools stay agnostic.)

You should definitely read Andrew Leonard's takedown (at Salon.com) of one of Tierney's columns, in which he basically claims that the more energy we use, the faster we'll solve any environmental problems — because we'll all get richer, and rich people demand clean air. (Shorter version: CO2 is odorless and colorless, so relying on wealthy people's distaste for smog won't do much good.)

I'm not just picking on Tierney because he's the science columnist at one of our biggest newspapers — I'm fascinated with him because while he paints global-warming concerns as pure hype, he's also one of the biggest boosters of the hype around the Singularity, as simplified by Ray Kurzweil and others. Reading Tierney's writing makes me wonder if the two things (skepticism on pressing, real problems, and wide-eyed enthusiasm for fictional, easy solutions) go hand in hand.

In fact, Tierney has explicitly pushed the idea of a technological Singularity, happening by 2030, as the alternative to neo-Malthusian warnings that overpopulation will result in starvation and environmental disasters. In one blog post, "Malthus Vs. The Singularity," Tierney cites a paper by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum saying that the Singularity could speed up our economic growth so much, our economy would double within a month. (Or even a week.) Says Tierney, this provides an alternative to that downer Malthusian view:

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I'd bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil's graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Here's a smaller version of the Ray Kurzweil graph he's talking about:

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, was a frequent touchstone in Tierney's column and blog posts in the summer of 2008, although not so much since then. And the idea that you can extrapolate from existing trends in computing power into the next century is a cornerstone of Kurzweil's prediction that machines smarter than humans are coming in the next few decades. (Actually, the graph maps "calculations per second per $1,000," which seems a tad arbitrary — and how do you measure how many human brains $1,000 will buy you?)

Tierney eagerly seizes on Kurzweil's predictions that rapidly accelerating technological advances will solve all of our problems — he's devoted a column and at least one blog post to Kurzweil's Law Of Accelerating Returns, which says that progress has been speeding up since the beginning of life on Earth. (There are more charts, which show the timeline between multi-cellular organisms and the development of mammals, versus between the Industrial Revolution and the development of the personal computer. Guess which took longer?) According to Kurzweil, the time between Paradigm Shifts has been halving with each decade, and soon our paradigms will be shifting constantly.

Among other things, that means we'll have unlimited clean energy soon, life expectancy will start shooting up every year "faster than you're aging," and all of our problems will be solved. In another blog post, Tierney addresses his commenters who doubt Kurzweil's Law. (Don't they realize it's a Law?):

In response to my Findings column about [Kurzweil] and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it's naive to assume exponential progress can go on - that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.

I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history, but before explaining why I like Mr. Kurzweil's theory more than theirs, let me grant them a couple of points. First, there is no guarantee that exponential increases in computer power will continue, or that the exponential growth in computer science will be matched in other fields. One of the most common mistakes of technoprophets is to assume that the the technology du jour will shape the future. When radio was invented, futurists envisioned locomotives powered by radio waves; when atomic power was discovered, there were predictions of nuclear-powered car in every garage.

Also, futurists tend to underestimate the social and political obstacles to progress, so they're often too optimistic about how soon people's lives will be transformed. Just because new tools exist doesn't mean they'll be used widely. Donald Norman, a technology expert profiled in my Findings column in December, says the chief problems to overcome in introducing new technologies involve people, not machines.

That said, after watching the impact of computers on so many fields, I share Mr. Kurzweil's belief that these tools are especially transformative and that change is just going to accelerate. Yes, there are physical limits to what can done with computer chips. But for a century now, each time computer engineers ran into previous physical limits - with the original electro-mechanical machines, with vacuum tubes, with transistors - they jumped to a new technology, and they're already working on successors to today's chips. It may seem naive to expect continuing leaps forward, but I think it's naive to ignore the trend of the past century - or the past 10,000 years.

The Cassandras have been warning of limits and resource depletion and population crashes for thousands of years, but as Julian Simon explained, we've kept exceeding limits and finding new resources and extending our life expectancy. The new problems lead to new solutions that leave us better off in the long run. Today's Cassandras are focused on climate change, which could bring real problems, but to think these problems are insurmountable seems to me as short-sighted as the prophecies of the 1960s ("overpopulation" leading to worldwide famines) and 1970s (the exhaustion of energy supplies).

If anything, climate change seems much more manageable than previous "crises" because the chief consequences are so far in the future. We have decades to figure out ways to deal with it: to find carbon-free sources of energy, to develop techniques for removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering the climate, or simply to adapt. These are all formidable challenges, but our tools for dealing with them are going to be improving exponentially, as Mr. Kurzweil argues.

So once again, you see the connection — even as Tierney says that we have decades to figure out what to do about climate change, he's also tremendously excited about a Singularity in which all our troubles will melt away and magic robots will carry us into the cyber-heaven on their shoulders. Rather than viewing the Singularity as a huge disruption, one which we can't possibly understand in advance, as many science fiction writers have done, Tierney buys into the hype that the Singularity will give us unlimited rice pudding.

You'll notice the mention of "geoengineering" in that last paragraph — it's another one of Tierney's favorite pie-in-the-sky themes. If it really does turn out that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing some problems, there's a potential fix that doesn't involve making any sacrifices:

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Possible ideas include lofting aerosol particles into the ionosphere to reflect shortwave radiation back into space, spraying seawater mist into low-lying clouds, to brighten them and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Scientists have pooh-poohed the idea of geoengineering because — wait for it! — they don't want to lose the prestige and money they've gotten from warning about carbon emissions. But there are real reasons to think that geo-engineering without reduction in carbon emissions would be worse than doing nothing — and that's if it even succeeds. Futurist Jamais Cascio, author of Hacking The Earth, writes in the Wall Street Journal recently:

To be clear, geoengineering won't solve global warming. It's not a "techno-fix." It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences. And without a doubt, the deployment of geoengineering would lead to international tension. Who decides what the ideal temperature would be? Russia? India? The U.S.? Who's to blame if Country A's geoengineering efforts cause a drought in Country B?

Also let's be clear about one other thing: We will still have to radically reduce carbon emissions, and do so quickly. We will still have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and adopt substantially more sustainable agricultural methods. We will still have to deal with the effects of ecosystems damaged by carbon overload...

[Geoengineering] would simply hold temperatures down temporarily, doing nothing about the causes of climate change, let alone ocean acidification and other symptoms of a carbon overdose. We can't let ourselves slip back into business-as-usual complacency, because we'd simply be setting ourselves up for a far greater disaster down the road.

Cascio explains further here:

I'm an optimistic person — but my optimism comes from a faith that we, as human beings, will figure out a way to change what we're doing before it's too late. I don't believe there are magical "get out of eco-hell free" cards lying around, or that the Singularity is going to solve all of our problems. The Singularity has given us some fantastic science-fiction novels by people like Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker and Charles Stross — but it's not going to come true, any more than the novels 1984 or 2001 were accurate descriptions of those years in real life. But even if computers did become smarter than humans in 100 years' time — for some values of "smarter" — I'm not sure that would save us from the results of our own fecklessness. For one thing, who's to say those super-smart computers would care whether the Earth was habitable for humans?

You can certainly look at our history, as a species, and see an unbroken line of progress. But you can also see many eras where we've driven ourselves into a technological hole (the Dark Ages come to mind) or engineered ourselves into mass starvation (China's Great Leap Forward was a purely human-made catastrophe.) There's certainly no guarantee that we get to have an unbroken upward progression going on for ever and ever.

We'll get a beautiful future — but only if we work for it. The idea that a wonderful, shining future will be handed to us, or that the awful dilemmas we're facing as a species will just go away, feels worse than foolish. It feels like sabotaging the future, for the sake of a bit more comfort and a false sense of security today.

If Tierney only used his bully pulpit at the Times to raise doubts about global warming, he'd just be one of many obstacles to saving our planet. But the fact that he's simultaneously guzzling the Kool Aid on things like Ray Kurzweil's Panglossian Law of Perfect Awesomeness and the mad-science easy fix for global warming makes him something much worse. His cheery outlook is actually helping to ruin our future.

The reason why I say that so emphatically is, there's a tendency to avoid watching a television show if you think it's already pre-cancelled. Why give your heart to a piece of ephemeral pop culture that won't even last the five-to-seven years that a successful show lasts? Why become fixated on a story you know won't end? Part of the answer is that we are science-fiction fans, and having our hearts broken is part of the deal. But you also have to keep the faith alive that it won't happen this time.

So in case you've missed our grindingly depressing coverage (mirroring everyone else's) of V's misfortunes, it's had a troubled ramp-up. First it was put on a production hiatus for a few weeks, then it was announced that showrunner Jeff Bell (who was showrunner on Angel's final season) was being demoted — he's still around as a writer, but he's no longer in charge. Then before the first hiatus was even over, a second hiatus was announced, and the show was on hold for at least a couple of months. And then the network decided to air only four episodes, this month, and then put the show on hold until after the Olympics, in March.

And today, there's the news that Scott Peters, the show's creator who replaced Bell as showrunner, was himself ousted. His replacement, luckily, will be Scott Rosenbaum, who's been a producer on Chuck and The Shield. Judging from the USA Today article, it sounds like the root of all these problems, including the production turnovers and delays, is the network's discontent with the show's creative direction. Here's USA Today's succinct explanation:

[T]he series remake has run into roadblocks. V's pilot episode was well-received by advertisers and critics, but ABC's late-summer decision to start the show two months earlier than planned – in part to dodge American Idol and the broadcast of the Winter Olympics, also in Vancouver – led to script problems, which forced reshoots and a five-week production break.

The first of three planned story arcs was condensed from six to four fall episodes. And the show will test viewers' loyalty with a three-month hiatus; remaining episodes won't surface until March. A promotional campaign that called for planes to skywrite red V's over national landmarks was scuttled after publicity over potential environmental effects.

And Thursday, in a response to the show's production problems, Peters (USA Network's The 4400) was replaced at the helm of the show by Scott Rosenbaum (Chuck, The Shield), though he is expected to stay aboard as an executive producer.

"We had a great pilot, then a couple of great episodes, but we had a disconnect on where we were going from there," says ABC Entertainment Group chief Stephen McPherson. Though no stranger to tinkering (he made extensive changes to the original Grey's Anatomy pilot), "I hadn't had the experience of that before." But McPherson accepts "a little blame for rushing them."

Mitchell, who plays hero FBI agent Erica Evans, says the resulting changes merely speed the pace of storytelling to pack a bigger wallop, including big cliffhangers in the Nov. 24 episode. Filming on that episode is set to wrap today, giving actors another unexpected 10-week break as the show is retooled. (Mitchell will trek to Hawaii to shoot new Lost episodes.)

So, yes. A troubled show, even before its first episode airs — and this does remind me a bit of similar behind-the-scenes stories about Bionic Woman, Dollhouse, Life On Mars, and countless other shows that had difficult gestations leading to troubled runs. But these things aren't fore-ordained, and a show can beat the odds.

Here are some reasons why I'm still cautiously optimistic about V in spite of all of the negative buzz:

1) The pilot really is great. From what I hear, the pilot that airs tonight is much the same one we all watched at Comic Con, and it's truly impressive. I went into the pilot expecting, at best, pleasant mediocrity or a watered-down tribute to the geek TV of our childhoods. And instead, I was surprised by what a cracking great piece of television it is. The story of the aliens who arrive promising great wonders, but quickly turn out to be a lot worse than we realize, is retold at a zippy pace and revamped for our wired, media-savvy culture. And it's provocative to have a show that says that despite all of our proud cynicism and air quotes, we're still suckers for the first super-advanced civilization that shows up offering us small-pox-infested blankets.

2) The cast is terrific. This matters a lot. You know who they never replaced during Bionic Woman's behind-the-scenes dickering? Michelle Ryan. You could have swapped in a dozen different producers, and it wouldn't have made Ryan watchable. In V, Elizabeth Mitchell is proving that her sparks of versatility on Lost weren't just illusions — she's really great as the show's heroine. (And how great is it that we actually have a female lead on a network show, who's not Michelle Ryan?) Given time, Mitchell could be as great as Lena Headey as Sarah Connor. Also, Whedonverse alums Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin are also just as great as you'd hope — and Baccarin is so natural as a smarmy alien leader, you'll almost forget Inara.

3) Maybe all the tinkering really will make it a better show in the end. Rosenbaum coming on as show-runner is actually great news — and if he can bring a bit of The Shield to V, then we'll be doing great. Also, I'm not entirely sad to hear they're tightening the pace. When I hear that six episodes were compressed to four, or that a show is going to cut to the chase faster, I often secretly rejoice — the biggest pitfall with a show like V is that the mysteries will be sustained for too long, that characters won't figure stuff out until long after the audience has, and that we won't get to see people fighting aliens until season three. As the SF Chronicle's Tim Goodman points out, this sort of molasses-slow storytelling has already overtaken fellow ABC show FlashForward (which might get renamed "inch forward" soon) — so it would be a shame if it happened to V as well.

4) We sort of owe it to ourselves to support any show about alien invaders. It's not as if we have a bevy of alien-invasion shows to choose from, or really a bevy of shows about aliens period. American television seems to have abdicated the territory it once owned, of first contact, alien attackers, galactic imperialists, and so on. I am prepared to apologize for mocking the boring alien makeup on shows like Star Trek: Voyager, if it means that we'll get aliens on TV once again. But for now, if there's even a hope of getting a show about meeting people unlike ourselves on television again, we need to grasp it with both hands.

5) I'm hoping that the creative stew of influences will still yield something really subversive and interesting. Peters, who created The 4400, is still on board as a producer according to USA Today, and Angel's Bell still seems to be in the mix as well. And the pilot definitely contains a huge dose of the paranoia and concerns about selling out that those earlier works were all about. (There's the journalist who's willing to ask only softball questions of the alien leader, as well as the religious figures who hitch their wagon to the aliens' star.) So maybe if those things remain part of V's DNA, and they aren't part of what gets sacrificed in the network's headlong dash to create soft and mushy enough for the general public to chew and swallow, then we'll still get a show that challenges us and reminds us that science fiction, even on television, can be a thing of amazement.

So yes, it's worth risking another disappointment. V is on ABC tonight at 8.

I have to confess, it's very hard for me to watch horror movies. It's not that I don't enjoy the occasional scare, and it's not that I'm worried about ghosts and monsters following home (although I will confess to a mild fear of zombies). No, it's just that when the body count starts rising, I start feeling, well, sad. I don't come out of the theater pumping with adrenaline; I'm too distracted thinking about the people who died and the loved ones they've left behind.

The plots of several pieces of horror are discussed below, so be warned there may be spoilers.

The movie that really hit this home for me is not a science fiction movie, but Wes Craven's Scream. In the movie's opening sequence, Drew Barrymore is terrorized by a knife-wielding serial killer one night while she's home alone. As the killer is chasing her down, her parents pull up in the driveway. For a brief moment, it looks like she's saved, but in the next shot, we see the parents, happy from a pleasant evening out, and their daughter pulled down by the killer before she has the chance to cry out for help.

How horrible. It's a suspenseful moment to be sure, but one that evokes horror more than terror. Horrifying that she was so close to salvation only to meet a brutal end, and horrifying that her parents will find their daughter mutilated on their lawn and spend the rest of their lives wondering what would have happened if they have come home just a little sooner. It's a scene tinged with more tragedy than terror.

Horror is a genre that picks and pokes at our deepest anxieties. It's a reminder that we live in an unstable world, and that no matter how careful or good we are, we could at any time be struck with death, disfigurement, or madness. A lot of horror movies appeal to our limbic systems, to that part of our brain that wonders what lurks in the shadows and triggers a happy release of hormone every time someone shouts "Boo!" And there is undeniably an artistry to that, to the sort of jumps and thrills so frightening that, weeks later, you're still checking under the bed for demons from Hell. But often the horror that still lingers for years afterwards are the ones that play on the less primal — but still very human — fears of losing the ones you love and being left alone in the world.

When Heartbreak Drives the Horror

Horror protagonists don't always make the best choices. They insult powerful witches, run up the stairs when they should run out the door, and try to capture the man-eating alien instead of killing it. And when Louis Creed buries his son Gage in the Micmac burial ground in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, we know it's a bad idea. He knows it's a bad idea. But he so desperately hopes that he can repair his wounded family that he is willing to make a terrible and utterly wrong decision. And when Gage comes back only to murder his mother, Louis too easily manages to talk himself into burying his wife in the same graveyard.

It should be a forehead-slapping moment, but it's depressingly relatable. That Gage comes back as an undead monster is pretty horrifying (he did make our list of scariest characters in film), but what's more horrifying is what grief can drive Louis to do. His grief is so potent, so unbearable that he's willing to make monsters out of his loved ones in the hope that seeing them again will mend his heart.

It's an idea that harkens back to WW Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," that famed exercise in truly depressing horror. After the Whites receive a wish-granting monkey paw, they wish for money, only to lose their son in an accident and receive compensation for his death. In that moment, they understand the nature of the monkey paw: it grants wishes, but in a perverse way. Still, the husband defers to his wife's terrible, maddening grief and wishes their son back to life. But, like Louis Creed, Mr. White must make his son dead again — knowing what comes back couldn't possibly be right — doubling his guilt and grief.

There are reasons why stories like "The Monkey's Paw" endure, and why its ideas find its way into so many other works of horror. They force us to access our fears of losing those closest to us, asking us how far we would go to keep them with us. Perhaps the most frightening thing about these stories that many of us will face terrible grief in our lives — and perhaps even guilt at the deaths of our loved ones — and we could be capable of making the same terrible decisions as the people in these stories, even if we don't get the opportunity to act on them.

When Losing Someone Makes Things That Much Worse

Even when grief and loss aren't the focus of a horror story, a moment of terrible loss can have more impact than even the most terrifying monster. 28 Days Later adds a frightening bit of realism to the zombie apocalypse, but it never forgets that the fear of losing your life is little match for the sadness that comes in a world suffused with death. When Jim discovers that his parents committed suicide in the face of violent death (leaving a note begging him not to wake from his coma), it's a bright spot of pain in a movie already filled with terror. But when our merry band of survivors becomes something of a family, with Frank playing the wise and protective father, the apocalypse seems survivable, almost manageable. Then Frank becomes infected with the Rage virus, and it's not just another zombie movie death. It puts a lump in your throat and reminds you that the zombie outbreak isn't all fun and killing the Infected — it's actually horribly sad.

This threat of loss adds dimension to other horror movies as well. Take The Ring, a film already terrifying in its J-horror weirdness. That The Ring turns a VHS cassette into an object of terror is incredibly impressive, but it's when Rachel's son Aidan watches the tape that the clock really starts ticking. Faced with the death of her son, Rachel must not only save herself, but survive long enough to keep Samara from killing her son as well. It adds a deeper, driving motivation to an already scary movie.

Joss Whedon is perhaps the master of this particular brand of horror. Though the series was filled with man-eating monsters, death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is often random, senseless, and poignant. Few moments in the show stand out as clearly as Joyce's death from an aneurysm, or Tara's from a stray bullet. The central theme in Buffy is that family and friends make life grand, even when your life is filled with mayhem and violence. In such a world, few things are as horrifying as losing part of your family, and such deaths always left the characters unbalanced, even psychotic with grief. Even the show's most calculated death, Angelus' slaying of Jenny Calendar, is designed to maximize heartbreak. It's not enough that Angelus kills her; he also has to place her in Giles' bed with a trail of roses leading up to it, in a mockery of romantic seduction. And that heartache, far more than fear, drives Giles to hate and try to destroy Angelus.

When Your Loved One Turns Monstrous

This is a staple of vampire and zombie movies, when you find you must destroy the creature wearing your loved one's face. Buffy tried this in the very first episode, turning Willow and Xander's friend Jesse bloodsucker and forcing Xander to kill him an episode later. It's not the strongest instance of this particular trope (I'm not sure if Jesse is even mentioned later in the series), but it's a solid introduction to the horrible nature of vampires. Zombie movies are stronger in this regard. Even Shaun of the Dead, a movie mostly devoted to the funny side of the undead, goes suddenly tearjerker when we learn Shaun's mother has been bitten by a zombie. This bit of sadness is then compounded by the ensuing debate over shooting Shaun's dead mother in the head. Even though everyone knows it has to happen, Shaun can't bring himself to let it happen, and even the normally logical Liz argues against it. And when his mother inevitably rises from the dead, Shaun is the one who must shoot her body, a shockingly tearful moment from the zombie romantic comedy.

It's another work from Stephen King, The Shining, that offers a more realistic view on why this concept is so horrifying. Jack Torrance is a man so driven to drink that he gives his soul over to the hotel for alcohol. In the movie, it's played more as slasher horror, with Jack Nicholson gleefully hunting down his wife and child, but it's a grim reminder that the people we love could become the people we fear, or that we ourselves might be capable of inflicting terrible harms on our loved ones.

When Hope Is Your Worst Enemy

Few genres are as relentlessly obsessed with death as post-apocalyptic fiction. In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, death abounds; most of the world is dead, bands of rapists and murderers prowl the road, and the protagonist's wife has killed herself. The protagonist is not concerned for his own survival — he's already dying — but for his son's. He's confronted with the wrenching knowledge that he might have to kill his son to save him from an even worse fate. But he hopes for something better, hopes that he will find good people with whom his son could make a future. The whole book is a dirge for civilization, but the father's hope might only leave his son open to future horrors — and tragically, the father dies without knowing his son will fall in with good people after all.

In The Walking Dead, zombies are less agents of fear than they are death incarnate, and the comic often plays on themes of hope and how we cope with loss. Hope is tragic as much as it is necessary for survival. A farmer keeps his undead family in a barn by his house, hoping there will someday be a cure. The survivors hope to rebuild some semblance of civilization, but lose some of their number every time they think they've found peace. And as brutal and horrible as death is for the ones who die, the grief of the survivors is far more powerful and frightening.

The Fear of Dying Alone

It's telling that the very first episode of The Twilight Zone , "Where Is Everybody?" deals with loneliness, and the human need for companionship. It's a theme that inspired one of the more unnerving episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In "Remember Me," Dr. Crusher sees the her son and everyone else aboard the Enterprise disappear, until she's the only one left (of course, it turns out that she's the one who has actually disappeared, in this case into a static warp bubble). The episode has a Twilight Zone quality to it, but it's especially bleak that Crusher is at the center of it. Here is a woman who has already lost a husband to the hazards of Starfleet, whose closest friends routinely put their own lives in danger, and whose son is joining the very military organization that took her husband. "Remember Me" is, more than anything, a metaphor for the very real possibility that she could end up alone. Even Garfield, of all things, played with this idea in its surprisingly depressing 1989 Halloween run, where the orange fat cat wakes to a future where his house is abandoned and he never exists.

Even the episode of The Twilight Zone that was most optimistic about the apocalypse, "Time Enough at Last," deals with loneliness. After a nuclear attack wipes out everyone around him, Burgess Meredith is about to commit suicide until he realizes there's a library full of books to keep him company. It's only when he breaks his glasses that he feels truly alone, and that loneliness is more frightening than anything that goes bump in the night.

(Thanks to Graeme for suggesting "Remember Me").

So now that you've seen it, what do you think? Worth creating a huge public apocalypse and humiliating poor Moon Bloodgood over? I didn't think so either.

To refresh your memory, back in February, McG made Bloodgood stand up (fully clothed) in front of a crowd of Wondercon fans and shouted, "Who wants to see Moon's boobs?" until the crowd roared. McG explained that the studio wanted to cut Bloodgood's topless scene, to keep the movie PG-13. In the roundtables afterwards, they talked up the scene and how great it was:

Afterwards, at the roundtable, McG told us he saw Moon's breasts as expressing the human softness that's what we're fighting the machines for, and they're like the opposite of the hard machine world, but on the other hand maybe it's just a gratuitous juvenile scene that drags down an otherwise serious movie, and that's what he's debating with the studio right now. And Moon herself told reporters the scene is very tasteful and she felt very comfortable with it. And the scene is about knowing you could die soon and wanting to be close to another person, without any barriers in the way. Including clothing.

Did you get all of that from the above clip? No? Then you're obviously an ingrate, who cannot appreciate the subtleties of McG's film-making process. In any case, I'm probably the last person who would object to a little gratuitious nudity or extra trashiness — especially in an already cheesy apocalyptic film, where it mixes in with the shouting and the ridiculous stunts and the nonsensical dialogue. In fact, if Christian Bale had spent the entire movie nude, it might have been the one thing that would have salvaged his performance. But especially after having seen the rest of the film, the auteur-ish temper tantrums over this brief snippet of "Moon's boobs," and the grandiose boob exegeses seem a bit overplayed. Just a tad.

It seems to me that there are five basic characteristics of a scare fail, though I'm open to the idea that there may be more. Humiliation knows no bounds, after all. Allow me to elaborate.

Failure of the Monster
An ill-conceived or shabbily-constructed monster is perhaps the most common source of scare fail. Possibly the worst offender - at least in recent memory - is The Happening, a monster movie whose "monster" was basically wind in trees. Pretty trees. Not "I rape you" trees like in Evil Dead, or "I eat you" trees like in Poltergeist. No, just nice, leafy New England trees that you want to climb in or laze underneath. Nothing reeks of fail more than the moments in this film when director M. Night Shyamalan builds up the tension, shows you a zillion suicides, and then zooms into the monster - which looks like a bucolic scene from a Hallmark card!

Other monster failures can be traced to a lack of imagination, which certainly plagued the zombie/disease things in I Am Legend, as well as unmemorable beasties from the flick Boogieman and Stephen King's worst scare fail novel, Cujo. I should caution that a cheaply-constructed monster does not always equal scare fail. The partially-glimpsed yuck monster in The Descent may have been a fairly ordinary Gollum-like creature, but it scared the crap out of audiences because of the scary things it did. Meanwhile the giant monster robots in Terminator 3 were awesomely (and expensively) done, but completely unscary. In fact, the instant I saw those harvester Terminators I had to restrain myself from yelling SCARE FAIL! right there in the theater.

Of course no discussion of monster fail would be complete without mentioning the completely disappointing dragons in Reign of Fire (is Christian Bale a glutton for monster fail or what?), as well as the utterly pathetic Godzilla from Roland Emmerich's Godzilla. The best part of Emmerich's Godzilla is that he's totally creamed by the REAL Gojira in recent Japanese flick Godzilla: Final Wars. That G vs. G fight was totally meta, and totally rectified the fail.

Failure to Build Tension
Exhibit A for the failure to build tension is the haunted spaceship fick Pandorum. The characters are walking, walking, walking down those long, dark corridors, and then the monster LEAPS out. Yes, it probably made you jump because you'd almost fallen asleep during the build-up. Pretty much any movie that relies entirely on jumps and shocks is basically admitting to suffering from scare fail. Several entries in the Friday the 13th franchise, most notably the much-hyped Jason X, suffered from this problem.

Movies like The Shining, Paranormal Activity, and 28 Days Later make excellent use of tension, showing you bits of terror in between moments of nerve-wracking waiting for something to happen. Tension fail is sort of like blowing your wad too soon, or maybe too late. Think of how disappointed you were when the big reveal about the once-scary Borg from Star Trek was that they were controlled by a greasy torso with an English accent. Or when you realized the entire Saw franchise was about a guy in a stupid mask. Just as fear and intrigue reach their peak there's a giant "blah" instead of a scream.

Failure to Make Me Care About Characters Dying
When the headless horseman stabbed little kids to death in Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I really did not care. It's not that I don't think kids are nice little creatures; it's that I didn't care about these particular kids at all. Kill 'em for all I care. How about spooky Halle Berry in Gothika? Do you really care if she's having sex with the devil or crazy or trapped in an alternate reality? No, you don't. You just want her to shut up.

Even though 2012 isn't out yet, I'm already filled with torpor by the trailer. While I care abstractly about the destruction of my home state of California, I don't give a crap about whether the main characters are able to outrun that earthquake. Of course the worst is when you actually dislike the characters so much that you want them to die. Like the annoying, whiny medical students in Flatliners. Go ahead and have your damn near-death experiences UNTIL YOU DIE, people. And the snotty teens in I Know What You Did Last Summer? I actually think they deserve to die.

I should add that some soon-to-be-dead characters are intended to be loathsome, like the hipsters in House of 1,000 Corpses (including a snacky Rainn Wilson). You're supposed to be amused by watching these kids die, so that's not a fail.

But when fear turns to a kind of bored, satisfied schadenfreude, that is major scare fail.

Failure to Engage in Diverting Quippery
How many movies have you seen where the intrepid heroes are trying to have amusing banter, with each other or the monsters, and you begin to clutch your head in pain? This happens a lot in the movie version of Doom, as well as all the Blade movies. (In Blade, one character actually says to the vamps, "Go ahead... Bite me.")

Or how about this amazing quip-off from the tragically unscary Van Helsing:

Anna Valerious: We Transylvanians always look on the brighter side of death.
Van Helsing: There's a brighter side of death?
Anna Valerious: Of course. It's just harder to see.

Huh?

And another fail moment in quippery, from Hannibal Rising:

Petras Kolnas: What did I ever do to you?
Hannibal Lecter: Aside from eating my sister? Nothing.

Cannibalism jokes! In a movie about a cannibal serial killer! Fail. You want good horror quippery? Just watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or one of the scarier episodes of Doctor Who.

Failure to Create A Scenario That Scares A Broad Range of People
Like monster failures, the failure to create a broadly scary scenario is probably at the root of most scare fail. For example, there is an entire subgenre of scary stories, like the Left Behind franchise, which is only scary for religious Christians. Stick an atheist Jew like me in the theater, or your typical J-horror fanatic from Tokyo, and you get a whole lot of fail. Same goes for movies like Reefer Madness or even a 1970s drug scare flick like Altered States. If you don't think drugs are a Scary Bad Thing, these movies will fail to fill you with The Fear.

But then there are other scenarios that fail because they are too murky to really bring on the shivers. The Mothman Prophesies is like this, with its nebulous alien/moth guy visions. Vagueness is almost never terrifying. Then there are haunted house flicks like 13 Ghosts and Amityville Horror. Some people are scared of old houses, but most of us feel pretty ho-hum about them. Is Satan in the basement? Really? Well, why don't you just call the Ghostbusters or Buffy or something? There are, of course, ways to do hauntings brilliantly - witness the haunted housing project in Candyman, which couldn't be more mind-blankingly scary.

The scary scenario fail also tends to creep up on formerly scary movies over time. Movies that are over 20 years old start to look campy rather than scary - witness the once-terrifying monster movies of the 1930s, or pretty much any slasher made in the 1980s. Still, there are some scary movies that stand the test of time, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 50s version), The Shining, or (maybe) The Exorcist. I'll leave unanswered the question of whether we should deem a movie guilty of scare fail simply because it hasn't stood the test of time, or whether we should evaluate it within its historical context.

One scenario that clearly fails the fear test is the "real life alien abduction" story, which is returning to haunt us next week with The Fourth Kind. Unlike Close Encounters, an emphatically fictional flick which made abduction seriously terrifying, Fourth Kind is in the same subgenre as Communion (Whitley Strieber's autobiographical tale of being anally raped by aliens when he was a kid). It's supposed to be scary BECAUSE IT'S REAL. But what if you don't think aliens are real? Fail.

Fear can be highly personal, dependent for its effectiveness on your beliefs or experiences. But in order to avoid scare fail, it must transcend highly specific shocks and rain terror upon the masses.

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

It's not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It's the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we'd get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.

That was the idea behind this chart – I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that's to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war's popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.

Predictably, the human-made apocalypse is a perennial favorite. The way we go about it, though, is always changing, as you can see on the chart, where I've broken up the "human made disaster" into subcategories.

The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.

The easily spotted trends make the patterns' total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there's a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.

That's an overly simplistic way of looking at it, though. It's not that the moment of destruction is boring; it's that it doesn't even matter anymore. There are an increasing number of books and films, like The Road and Zombieland, which pick up after the catastrophe and sometimes don't bother to explain what happened at all.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

Preceding victory with annihilation disguises how dizzily optimistic some of these narratives are. Stories about the End are so beautifully paradoxical; they are some of the most powerful affirmation stories we have. They can hardly be classified as optimistic, but no matter what happens, even if the End came by human hands, in most stories we are fixable. For the most part, we have faith that though we may screw up, and very badly, we will learn from our mistakes and the world will be better for it.

When the survivors wander around, they're looking at a burned-out shell of a world, but it's still a clean slate. A clean slate full of radiation and cannibals, maybe, but still. I think everyone's had that feeling of wanting to just heave everything out the window and start over. That's what is at the heart of apocalypse stories: the opportunity to rebuild the world in a radically different way.

During the pilgrimage through the wasteland, the survivors – and the readers – are left feeling ostracized from reality. The characters are probably more concerned with where their next meal is coming from, but the reader sees how they are cut loose from the anchors that previously protected us from being overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence. The only way to fix it is to find new ways of looking, new patterns to create meaning in the new world.

Destroying the world in books about apocalypse is one way we can entirely take ownership of it. We can only see the world the way we have been raised to, the way our parents saw it, so we need to raze the old world and build a new one in its place in order to have a world that is really and entirely our own. The story of the End, after all, is not nearly as compelling as the story of the Beginning that comes after it.

This is hardly the final word; more a collection of observations and theories. I won't claim any more than that, because if there's one thing I learned while researching apocalypses, it's just how much humans like to see patterns in things – and that when patterns start getting too neat, you've done something wrong. There are still some things about the chart I don't understand – the three points where the natural apocalypse overtakes the human apocalypse, for example – and it doesn't take into account the effect that movies or television had on books. As will any discussion of a large genre, there are some necessary overgeneralizations. But it's a starting point – have at it.

Chanda Phelan just graduated from Pomona College, where she completed a thesis on post-apocalyptic literature. You can read her blog at phnuggle.wordpress.com.

Chart by Stephanie Fox!

Syfy president Dave Howe explains to the Hollywood Reporter:

"We've always been keen on vampires and werewolves, and we loved the originality of Being Human, the fact that the fantastical creatures in it are very young, accessible and charming."

They loved the originality of it so much, they decided to remake it.

Syfy has ordered 13 episodes of a remade Being Human, which could appear on screens as early at next fall. Across the pond the original Being Human gears up for its second season this January. Howe promised this won't be a poor recreation of the series, seeing as most Syfy watchers probably have seen the original, but we've been burned before.

I was one of the loudest haters of the American-ized Office before it aired, because British humor and sensibilities don't translate well in the States. But the show hired good writers, invested in the production and found a wonderful cast. It's engaging, even though it lacks that dry British wit that made me fall in love with the original, and despite the lack of Ricky Gervais and the arguable fact that the American version has been around for far too long, it's still funny. (Though I shudder to think of Jim and Pam, "the baby years.") That said, for every successful Americanized show, there are many dismal translations, such as Life on Mars, Coupling, and a host of other terribly translated or poorly copied series.

Being Human is a completely different show from The Office. You can not translate the kind of dark humor that parallels the main characters lives, without the flippant British style that manages to just slip in a turn of phrase here and there. That humor is what makes the whole idea that a ghost, vampire and werewolf all living together in real life believable, the whole casualness of it all.

The writing is woven together so perfectly. Take the shocking weirdness that comes when we see one character's vampire porno, in which one person cannot be recorded because they're a vampire. The vampire porno itself becomes a whole other plot point, which I won't ruin here. But it's a good example of how Being Human blends darkness and humor together so perfectly. I highly doubt we can make these kinds of jokes on the Syfy Channel, with American writers and actors.

You can also bet that any and all edge will get stripped away, in hopes of garnering more viewers, so kiss the amazing sex scenes goodbye, along with violence, blood and realistic humor.

Plus you will never, never, never be able to recreate the chemistry and timing the trio over at Being Human have. It is by far one of the better ensemble casts working today.

In short, this is a disaster. The worst case is, we'll end up with just another CW-esque dramedy show about pretty white kids and their magical issues. To me, this is on a par with an Americanized Doctor Who, — it's not needed, and all but impossible to adapt properly.

How can this be saved? If Syfy decided to spend lots of money on hard working writers and producers that can actually Imagine Greater. Even then, they'd have to attempt at translating the dark humor without throwing in a green screen, adding reality-show components or trying to make it any darker than it already is. Then they have to cast three people who can sell this crazy premise. But they could always take that money and create new material, and just air the original Being Human along with said new series, instead of butchering a great UK show. Because if it ain't broke...

If this makes more people watch the original, then that's one thing this new reboot has going for it. Still I honestly just don't think it can be done. And now with the internet making foreign shows more accessible to the masses, I think there will be a surprising amount of push-back from U.S. fans.

I can't help it; I know that zombies are/were the big thing, but there's something about the current trend for undead superheroics that leaves me more than a little bored. I've got nothing against genres mixing and matching, but the original Marvel Zombies - with its horror movie logic and sense of humor, and its lack of need to have to deal with regular continuity allowing it to actually act as a complete story as opposed to something that pretty much needs to reset to the status quo by its conclusion - aside, there's something disappointing about this particular take on the walking (and flying, and running at superspeed) dead. Namely...

None Of Them Are Real Zombies
Again, Marvel Zombies excepted, the reanimated in Blackest Night and Necrosha aren't really zombies, exactly (Something that Blackest Night's creators, to their credit, keep saying in interviews. Even so, calling them Black Lanterns feels like a dodge, because they're dead characters come back to life as undead monsters - They're so clearly zombie-influenced that the actual name doesn't matter). They're magically animated by the power of death itself, or by a psychic vampire (Don't ask), or whatever, and they don't conform to what we'd consider zombie rules: They're not slow, they don't eat brains, they're intelligent - and, in fact, generally have the personalities of their living selves - and they're all under the command of some central intelligence or leader with a specific mission. What kind of zombies are that organized, you might ask yourself? Which brings us to...

We've Seen This All Before
The dead being brought back as pawns to use against our brave heroes? Old hat for superhero comics - In fact, Marvel even has multiple characters based around this concept (the Grim Reaper, the Black Talon... You could even argue that Brother - now Doctor - Voodoo would have some familiarity on the subject). The only thing that's new about this latest wave is the overwhelming scale of the risings... which is one of the few things legitimately taken from zombie culture. Which reminds me.

Enough With The Magic Cures Already
Zombies should be pretty easy to beat. If Simon Pegg and Nick Frost can take care of some, after all, how hard can it be? But not these superhero zombies; no, they're not only gifted with magical regenerative powers that somehow don't take them to a fully regenerated state, but they also have very specific ways to be defeated, apparently: Blowing their heads off? Not going to work, it seems. Setting fire to them? Well, it keeps them busy for awhile, but otherwise... Nah. But keep calm and show no signs of emotion and they shut down (All of that from Blackest Night, which, in its defense is not only a fun superhero story but, in Blackest Night: Superman and Blackest Night: Batman has some really great examples of superhero comics ripping off some well-known horror movie cliches - If you've not seen Martha Kent be chased through a cornfield at night by an undead Lois Lane, or Commissioner Gordon use a double-barreled shotgun against an army of the undead while carrying his crippled daughter over his shoulder, you've missed out on some wonderfully enjoyable over-the-top moments of recent comics). Seriously, comic creators: what's that all about?

Death Is Never The End In Superhero Comics, Anyway
Ultimately, the problem with superheroic zombies is that the rules of death don't work the same way in superhero comics as they do in almost every other fiction. We're used to resurrection in superhero comics, and that works against the story from the very beginning; Blackest Night, for example, has to not only make the reader believe that the dead rising is not only a horrific thing, but also an unusual one - Which, considering that Superman, Green Lantern, Flash, Green Arrow, Hawkman and Robin have all "died" and been resurrected at some point in their careers, is a pretty tricky thing to do; Necrosha takes place in the X-Men series of titles, which has become so full of resurrected characters that characters within the story joke about the pearly gates having been replaced by a revolving door. Without the belief that death is the end - that it means that the person or character is gone and will never be seen again - the very idea of an army of the undead is weakened, because the possibility of a return is always there, and in many cases, expected to happen.

Mixing zombies with superheroes doesn't automatically mean failure - Despite all my "I know you've said they're not zombies and they're not acting like zombies, but come on, they're weird zombie-esque creatures, just admit it" problems with Blackest Night, it's full enough of melodrama, derring-do and humor to make me kind of love it - but of all the horror genres to bring superheroes into, it's one of the most problematic. I can get why comic publishers would want to jump onboard the bandwagon, but... Aren't there other horror monsters better suited to this kind of thing? I mean, Marvel: Paul Cornell gave you Dracula on the moon. That's a great gift right there...

While naked women are used to infuse alien planets with exotic allure, naked men are almost always associated with dystopia. In fact, it sometimes seems like the only time we get to see naked men in science fiction is when they're in prison.

Take Twelve Monkeys, for example. Here we get a nice butt shot of Bruce Willis (looking nice and firm!), but of course it has to be in the context of a psychotic near-future dystopia where Bruce is imprisoned. We only get naked Bruce when he's forced to do it in this awful way.

Even worse is A Clockwork Orange, where we first get a glimpse of nudity when our anti-hero rapes and kills a nice lady. Then he's sent to prison and forced to strip in this weird scene. Again, an otherwise nice example of nudity (even with a bit of peen!) is only given to us in a context where we're really not in the mood to scope out Malcolm McDowell's skinny Brit boy bod.

One of the main ways that men bare their butts in science fiction, however, is a little less disturbing. Let's call it the "I'm in some kind of futuristic device and have to be naked" excuse.

That's how we get this incredibly great shot of Jeff Goldblum looking snacky in his teleportation pods from The Fly. You can almost always rely on director David Cronenberg to get a little nudity out of his male leads, which is why we love him so. (Seriously - that naked steam room knife fight scene with Viggo Mortenson in recent Cronenberg flick Eastern Promises? Wow.) Here's Goldblum:

We only get this statuesque sculptiness after Goldblum's been ripped apart at the genetic level and turned into a horrific mutant. So you get a naked guy, but unfortunately he's a proto-monster.

And then there's the best nakedness excuse ever, which is "well for some reason time travel requires you to be naked." Makes perfect sense. That's why we got to see Arnold's butt in every Terminator flick. Unfortunately, this isn't the frisky, sexy goodness you get from naked SF ladies - it's more of a menacing badass thing. Plus, naked Arnold couldn't really float anybody's boat.

Another great excuse to show a guy naked in science fiction is if you stick him in some kind of goo pod. Seriously, how many freakin movies and TV series have naked men covered in goo? I'm not kidding - it's not just Keanu in The Matrix. Here are just a few.

There's Anders in Battlestar Galactica, whose nakedness is just hinted at:

You wouldn't want to show a man without his clothes on if he wasn't somehow part of a machine or being experimented on. That there is functional nudity, not something fun to look at! And in case you wanted to gaze in adoration at this desirable boy object, forget it. He's going to be covered in some kind of industrial solvent or weird polymer that makes him look gross.

Then there's the naked homoerotic goo pod scene from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yes, that's a goo-covered Robert DeNiro, recently reanimated in a steampunk goo tank, showing off his shapely form.

And how about the scene where Wolverine emerges from the goo, his Adamantium bones freshly installed, and rips the shit out of everything while also showing off his utterly shapely buns? Seriously, we want to see naked Wolverine but not like this! Keep his clothes on when he's fighting, and then strip him down later in a more friendly setting. But no - because Wolvie is manly, he can only be naked when he's penetrating steel walls with his mega-claws.

How often have you said to yourself that you'd like to see Russell Crowe - especially a delicious, young, version - totally naked? He has a seriously sweet bum, and now you can see it for yourself, with a little dancing action. Except of course you only get that when he's a virtual serial killer (in Virtuosity) who has managed to climb out of VR and into a nanobot android body that immediately sets to work killing everybody. Why can't we have peaceful, happy naked men in our science fiction? Couldn't he have ended that sexy little dance by doing something other than chopping off his own finger?

Well, maybe we can get a few peaceful naked men. Once we get away from the goo thing, we've got another class of male nudity in SF: The "I just got a body so I have to be naked" subgenre of bare-assery. The problem with these nudie moments? Too innocent. Nobody wants to leer at somebody who just grew a body! They're almost like kids or something. Except, of course, they really aren't.

There's nothing better than seeing bare-butted Jeff Bridges in Starman. He's come from far away and borrowed the DNA of Karen Allen's dead husband to make himself a body. Later, we actually do get to see him in sexed-up mode, but this "being born" scene gives us the full buttal deal. Forget full frontal. That just never happens.

You can also be naked if you've just regenerated, like Captain Jack did in this episode of Torchwood. Even though Jack is the sexiest guy in the universe, he only gets to give us a double bun when he's feeling completely awful and is covered in dirt. Couldn't we have gotten a little of this naked Jack in a scene with his boyfriend Ianto?

The much-missed show Kyle XY started with a fully naked moment, when the vat-grown Kyle awakens in a forest with an adult body and the brain of a computer. There's something so sweet and innocent and utterly hot about this moment.

When men aren't birthing themselves into nudity, they use nakedness as a way of showing their true selves and scaring the crap out of people. That's one way to read this bizarre and sad sequence in cult film The Man Who Fell To Earth, featuring David Bowie as an alien who has been hiding among humans. At last, he decides to show his girlfriend his true (naked) self - intercut with his memories of having sex back on his homeworld.

When Dr. Manhattan has sex with Silk Spectre in Watchmen, the whole thing quickly devolves into something creepy. Even though we get to see lots of glowing nakedness, and even get a few CGI penis glimpses, the body of Dr. Manhattan is anything but erotic.

So you can tell I'm pretty critical of male nudity as it stands in science fiction. Are there any examples of good, friendly nudity that isn't about deathtripping and mad science?

We got good eye candy on Star Trek Enterprise when it turned out that nudity is required in the decontamination chamber. This is what I'm talking about, people. Even though sadly there is underwear involved, this is a perfect example of male nudity reaching the gratuitous, just-there-to-be-looked-at-ness of female nudity in science fiction. No killing, no scary vats of goo, no "innocent newborn" crap. Just good, old-fashioned erotic nudity purely to make you feel tingly.

Wouldn't you know that Charlton Heston got there first with this whole frisky, friendly version of male nudity? The gun-lover's first-ever nude scene was in science fiction classic Planet of the Apes. He and his astronaut pals decide (totally randomly) to take a naked dip in the water. Why is this scene here? For the same reason all those nude scenes with ladies are there in every other movie. Just so we can take a nice break and check out old CH's sculpted buns.

My point, other than to share pictures of naked men with you on a Friday night, is that something is wrong with the way science fiction deals with male bodies. Male beauty is always being undermined by violence, defaced with goo, or attenuated by its association with birthing. I'm not saying it's wrong to show men engaged in action, or in ugly situations. But I do think it's odd that lovely male bodies are almost always put on display in contexts where we are made to feel uncomfortable or upset by seeing them.

There's something almost schizophrenic about male nudity in science fiction. We see glimpses of men's allure, only to have it erased. It's as if these scenes are titillating you, only to slap you in the face.

As somebody who appreciates the male form, I'd like to be given a few more options in my science fiction, please. Nudity should not have to end (or begin) in tragedy.

Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan pointed out this weekend all the unhappy SGU fans at Television Without Pity saying that SGU is getting fairly sexist with their female characters...

The thing that continues to astound me is that this is the same network which has seen its best ratings ever for Warehouse [13], a show which appeals to a broader set of demos, particularly bringing in new female viewership to the network & yet can't get its head around the fact that those same female viewers are also the most potentially likely to be offended by SGU.

They seemed astounded that women watched BSG and loved the female demo's for Warehouse 13 and yet for SGU we have - boob shots and shower shots and so far every women seems to be defined in some way by a male, either through sex in a closet, or needing some guy for comfort or apparently a prior affair . Oh except for Ming Na, our lesbian character who we've only briefly seen acting like a bitch before she left again. There should have been or should be a strong female character in every single episode and virtually all scenes but we get Eli and Rush and Young and Scott and of course dear, helpless Chloe. Honestly, in a weird way SGU seems very 'dated' in it's viewpoints and set ups for the female characters; I almost feel like I'm watching scifi from the 70's.

The message board is flooded with negative opinions about the practically mute female cast aboard the Destiny. Ming-Na's much-hyped openly lesbian character has all but said three words along with equally quiet T.J., while the hapless Senator's daughter wanders about the ship never far from the crook of a protective man's arm, even though she so doesn't need it.

To be honest I agree and disagree. And I too am a bit dismayed but the complete lack of screen time for the female characters. Especially since I feel like a few of them may be interesting, but I just don't have the slightest clue who they are. That being said, even the men themselves, while getting a lot more screen time are horribly stereotyped. There's the quiet stern one, the crazy one, the nerd, the hot adventurous white guy, and the angry black guy. Do we really want the women getting more screen time, if they will only be subjected to this type of stereotyping?

But, the series still has hope. Even though I was loathed to see this weeks big moment for the one talking female character, the Senator's daughter, ended up with her in the shower while the leering nerd PG-ly panted nearby. Right here this scene is both everything that is wrong and is right with SGU.

For one, Eli was being forced to interact with people, not just blurt out unfunny zingers for no reason. It was in this moment where we got to see real human interaction that wasn't Rush screaming or forced comedy. Eli's conundrum along with a few other gems give me great hope for the series, because when it hits it's fantastic. Too bad it was sandwiched between two very annoying characters — the Senator's daughter who whines constantly and needs to be surrounded by men at all time, even while showering, and the "other one" soldier lady who was apparently put on screen for gratuitous "I have large breasts" camera angles [anyone else catch that moment?]. In fact, I've even forgotten this character's name, I honestly know her as the soldier with larger than average boobs, which makes me sad inside.

The series desperately needs to learn how to mesh the world of Stargate and "gritty scifi" together. And perhaps giving the women more screen time could help. After all, this is the franchise that brought us Samantha Carter. Past females on the show proved that the series knows how to write a strong female character who can stand toe-to-toe with fellow soldiers and talk. Look I'm not asking for much, I don't need a heroine just a slightly strong speaking female will do.

Let's hope that the silent female characters, like the medic TJ and possibly fiesty Ming-Na, will give the women something else to do. Which may not be the case for TJ, since the show is all too happy to point out, continually, that she is a PARAMEDIC not a REAL Doctor, which by now sounds less like "these people are ill equipped" and more like "she is ill equipped" when repeated over and over. Please note that none of the other main characters are ever really subjected to this constant "you're not good enough" attention that she likes to lump on herself. Eli gets a few, "you're a drop out" comments but again, he's quick to point out that it was MIT he left. So what's with TJ, we don't know yet, but the "just a medic" routine is starting to grate. There may be something more to this character, if only we could get her to, ya know, talk.

So let's hope the SGU episode brings TJ and Ming-Na out to do, well hell, something.

With slick horror movies hitting theaters this horror-tastic season, it's important that you know how to recognize true, authentic made-in-my-basement chills. You know it's an indie horror movie when . . .

. . . the steadycam makes you barf more than the chopped up guts do.
The only way you know a movie was made by real people instead of the Hollywood machine is if the cameras all look like they were mounted on the backs of interns who were looking at porn on their smart phones while running to catch a bus. Shaky cameras mean you'll feel shaky inside!

. . . snot is running out of somebody's nose.
Blair Witch is pretty much the final word on this. What was more poignant than that bubbly booger, throbbing urgently in Heather's nose as she whispered to the camera about how they were lost in the woods after being total dicks to everybody they interviewed and acting like your basic private school kids sneering at the townies? Without money for sets or costumes or anything, you can still get your actors to expel a little snot just by beating them or forcing them to sit really close to an open fire.

. . . special effects were purchased at the butcher shop.
One of the masters of indie horror, Herschell Gordon Lewis, made incredibly bloody movies like Wizard of Gore and 2,000 Maniacs. And all the guts came straight from his local butcher, who gave him cow and pig innards to play with. You'd think this would add to the realism of his gore scenes, but nothing looks more fake than wilted cow guts gobbed onto a nubile actress' stomach.

. . . a former metal rock star is involved.
Some of the greatest recent indie horror flicks, like Rob Zombie's House of 1,000 Corpses and Dee "Twisted Sister" Snider's Strangeland, were superlatively awesome. Metal gods know how to bring on the crazy using just scary makeup and giant, shiny shoes. And the soundtracks are awesome.

. . . there is some kind of unexpected political message.
Tales from the Hood is about scary ghosts and monsters - and how the black man is destroyed by gang life in ghettos. Night of the Living Dead is about brain-eating zombies - and the evils of a media-saturated society ruled by corrupt politics and militia-style law enforcement. Ginger Snaps is about werewolves - and the horrors of puberty for young women. Hollywood shaves the edgy edges off its horror movies, but indies stay spiky.

. . . you never see the monster - or you see too much of it.
We all really wanted to just catch one glimpse of whatever turned those Blair Witch bitches into little balls of teeth and hair. And holy crap who wasn't dying to see the creature in Paranormal Activity who left those three-fingered footprints that were about the spookiest shit since those kids' ball rolling out of nowhere in The Shining? But you know what else? We could have really seen a lot less of the guy in the sheep suit in classic 70s indie Godmonster of Indian Flats. And the CGI dinowormgator in DMX-Carnivorous? No. Just - no.

Of course this indictment of LARPing in the USA is itself an exercise in role-playing. "Kalle" is Viennese performance artist Johannes Grenzfurthner, who loves to mix geek culture with bizarro art and strange scholarly endeavors.

via Larpen Tumblr

The hullabaloo is over an anonymous essay about the "feminization of science fiction" published on a conservative "men's issues" site called The Spearhead. The author writes, in part:

What has happened is that science fiction on television has for the most part become indistinguishable from most other television shows which are written for women filled with moronic relationship drama. Sure the moronic relationship drama is in space, but . . . its not science fiction anymore, and men are not interested in moronic relationship drama in space . . . As we know science fiction has inspired boys to pursue careers in science, engineering, and technology as men. With women killing science fiction on television, the current generation of boys won't have this opportunity to be inspired to work in these fields. There is still a great deal of written science fiction that is real science fiction so all is not lost. However, many boys who would have gone on to make scientific discoveries and invent new technologies will not do so since they will never be inspired by science fiction as boys.

The author singles out the new Battlestar Galactica as a prime example of feminized SF, and adds that this trend has led to the glut of paranormal romances filling science fiction aisles in bookstores.

Science fiction author John Scalzi had the right idea when he responded:

What? An insecure male nerd threatened by the idea that women exist for reasons other than the dispensing of sandwiches and topical applications of boobilies, mewling on the Internet about how girls are icky? That's unpossible!

Indeed there is nothing surprising about the fact that you can find hardcore sexist commentary on a site devoted to "men's rights." Give me a break. Unearthing this post and then pointing fingers at it is just as silly as when conservatives find a radical leftist site, link to an essay on it, and crow about how there are people who actually believe America should be destroyed. Congratulations: You found extremist ideas on the internet.

The thing about this guy writing on The Spearhead is that he's not the problem. He's not a science fiction editor or producer; he's just a guy writing his extreme opinions on a tiny blog. He has no ability to influence the course of science fiction publishing and broadcasting, and in fact that is precisely what he's complaining about in his commentary.

People are piling onto this guy in a giant hatefest not just because he's an easy target. He's also a safe target. And that's what worries me. Because sexism still exists in the world of science fiction, but it is just more politely masked than this guy's overt outlier opinions. Anthologies of "great" SF are still routinely published without a single woman's contribution included. Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing. Even among so-called enlightened SF literati it is not uncommon to hear people say that women can't write hard SF.

The weird thing is that Spearhead guy is right in some ways. The movement to "feminize" SF has resulted in an attenuation of what science fiction means. The SyFy channel is planning to air a cooking show and tone down the spaceships. Fantasy publishing is exploding partly because it's one of the genres where women authors are valued by the publishing industry, and so women interested in speculative writing are fleeing to fantasy when they find the SF clubhouse doors locked. Where are the great new female hard SF writers and space opera directors and showrunners? We aren't hearing from them because the SF community doesn't believe that women truly love SF. And so people with power - unlike Spearhead guy - aren't publishing women or giving them development deals.

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's though the back door. Let's not start patting ourselves on the back because we can recognize rank sexism when we see it written by an anonymous guy on a radical right wing opinion blog. We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies. And when the next big, blow-em-up spaceship movie is written and directed by a woman. Until then, we have a lot of work to do. Work that involves challenging people who actually have the power to alter the course of SF as a genre. Work that is a lot harder than ridiculing an anonymously published blog post.

With a horror heritage that includes a Bram Stoker novel (The Jewel of Seven Stars, released just six years after Dracula) and a string of Bela Lugosi movies, the good ol' Mummy should be up there with all the other horror classics getting Twilighted and revamped for the CW generation. So why are we in a Mummy recession? Here're some potential problems for the bandaged ones:

The Comedy Aspect

Whether it's the admittedly-silly name, the visual of a slow-moving figure wrapped entirely in bandages or too many appearances in Scooby Doo (See above), it's kind of hard to take Mummies seriously as any kind of threat recently. Nowadays, you're as likely to see a Mummy as comedic McGuffin in Eureka (or, yes, subject of a Scooby Doo direct-to-DVD movie) as anything that's really going to try and spook you. Seeing Mummies as sources for comedy isn't anything new, of course -


- but somewhere along the line, that's all they became. For Mummies to live again, someone would have to come along and treat them with the fear and respect they deserve.

The Mummy Trilogy
...And that person wouldn't be Stephen Sommers. Don't misunderstand; as sub-Indiana Jones wannabes with the focus firmly on kid-friendly adventure and giving John Hannah a chance to overact at every opportunity, the three Mummy movies are actually pretty good (Well, the first one, at least). But as movies that make Mummies something to be spoken of in the same breath as vampires or werewolves...? Not exactly the greatest.

Part of the problem with these movies is, in my opinion, we knew too much about the Mummy; by nature of its story, the Mummy ceased to be an unknowable, unstoppable threat but was, instead, a flawed human who just happened to have been resurrected millennia later with supernatural powers. Considering this trilogy has shaped the mainstream perception of the Mummy as much as anything else since its release, it's frustrating that this route was taken instead of the producers' original idea to let Clive Barker create a low-budget modern day movie about a cultist looking to reanimate an army of Mummies...

Zombies
There's no way around it: Zombies have completely stolen Mummies' thunder... and their whole schtick. Just look at the evidence: Undead? Check. Slow lumbering around? Check. Killing people? Check. Zombies are naked Mummies, except they're wearing clothes. It's not hard to see why zombies have come into ascendance while the popularity of the Mummy has declined: They offer all of the threat without any of the baggage; they can be contemporary, of any nationality, and don't have a particularly defined look. But is the overly-populated Zombie Bandwagon really enough to derail the Mummy Train permanently? If nothing else, I'm surprised that someone hasn't tried to get a bigscale Mummy movie made by pretending that it's a historic take on the zombie idea (Hollywood producers: You can send my fee care of io9.com, thank you very much).

Don't think I don't get it; Mummies seem silly and old-fashioned (literally, considering that whole Ancient Egypt thing) in a world where Vampire Diaries and Twilight show their horror peers to be filled with pouting teenagers who listen to Muse all the time. But all it would take is one well-made project from someone who really cares about the concept to put the Mummy back where it belongs, as a Horror Icon worth more than toilet-papered Hallowe'en costumes. Anyone got Guillermo del Toro's phone number... and a way to clear his schedule for the next couple of years?

Complicated is probably underselling it, though. In every one of Joss Whedon's projects, the central romantic relationship is really deeply messed up. His romantic leads use each other, delude themselves, and often end up in tragedy. But through all of the complexity, these twisted relationships end up feeling more real than any simple rom-com example ever would.

Of course, that extends to sexuality in the context of these relationships. Whedon likes to put his characters into weird sexual situations as well. Sex tends to have unexpected consequences in reality as well as fiction, but in Joss Whedon's world, those unintended consequences are often unimaginable or even disturbing.

Here are a few of the best examples of Joss Whedon's propensity for weird, convoluted romances. (Spoilers for Dollhouse, Buffy, Dr. Horrible, and Firefly!)

Buffy and Angel

In a lot of ways, the Buffy-Angel relationship is Joss Whedon's prototype for messed up relationships. For starters, their story is essentially a supernatural Romeo and Juliet. In a dangerous and deadly way, Buffy and Angel are very much star-crossed lovers. Buffy's sole task is to kill vampires, and Angel is... well, a vampire.

Of course, things are more complex than that; Angel is not just a vampire, but a vampire with a soul. This is what draws Buffy to him. He's got a troubled past and a dark edge, but deep inside, he's essentially as human as her.

And then we get our first very Whedonesque sexual experience with a twist. When Angel and Buffy finally go at it, it is precisely this act of love that causes Angel to lose his soul and revert to the demon he once was. Buffy's feelings for him go from complex to downright wrong (and very dangerous) in a matter of moments.

It's a sophisticated metaphor for the terrible versions of themselves people sometimes become after sex. But it's also a quintessentially Joss Whedon touch: when the couple is at their happiest, things take a turn for the darkest.

Buffy and Spike

And let's not forget Buffy's even more mixed up relationship with Spike. She is repulsed by him for a very long time, seeing him as a symbol of the destructive nature and blood lust inside of herself.

But in Joss Whedon's mind, this man as symbol of self-loathing may as well be a symbol of self-loving; Buffy embarks on a twisted, self-destructive romantic fascination with Spike. The sex scenes between these two always feel a little dirty and more than a little self-destructive on both ends.

And that's not even counting the feather in the demented cap that is Spike and Buffy's relationship: Spike tries to rape Buffy in an attempt to prove to her that she really does love him. It's a strange, dark, twisted scene, but what makes it even more twisted is that this attempted rape really is the first step on the road that eventually leads to Spike's transformation into someone Buffy does love.

This arc is also steeped in metaphor. The two of them, at their darkest moments, turn to each other, and they even help each other become the people they want to be, but not before they help tear each other down to the saddest, most broken people they can be.

Captain Malcolm and Inara

Interestingly, the relationship between Malcolm Reynolds and Inara Serra is probably the most normal of Whedon's leading romantic stories, despite the fact that the two never get beyond meaningful glances and playful flirtation.

From the get-go, Malcolm disapproves of Inara's profession. She's a "companion," which, in the world of Firefly, is a specially trained, deeply spiritual individual who creates meaningful sexual and emotional bonds with their clients. Captain Mal disdainfully refers to this as "whoring."

In fact, the Captain makes it clear over and over that he doesn't respect her profession. But he makes clear, after famously punching out another man who calls her a whore, that he does respect her. In fact, his disapproval of Inara probably stems mostly from jealousy.

I imagine that if "Firefly" had continued, Joss Whedon would have leveraged this hot-and-cold romance into a much more destructive story-line. Whedon and crew have indicated that Inara was on the path to dying if the show had continued, which shouldn't surprise anyone... anything remotely romantically stable isn't destined to last in the Whedonverse.

Dr. Horrible and Penny

While Dr. Horrible remains pretty light throughout its three parts, it does offer us a pretty twisted little romantic storyline.

Billy is a meek man, but his alter ego, Dr. Horrible, seems to count impressing the cute laundry buddy Penny as one of his main goals as a world-dominator. Billy seems to think that he, as Billy, will never impress her, but Dr. Horrible certainly will.

In the end, though, when Dr. Horrible makes his big debut, he accidentally contributes pretty directly to Penny's death. With her last breaths, Penny reaches out to Billy, not Dr. Horrible, and calls instead for the Doctor's nemesis.

It is at this moment that Dr. Horrible realizes that he never had a chance with Penny, that the only way he could connect with her was as Billy. But Billy is gone now, replaced by the villain he thought he needed to become.

In Joss Whedon's hands, a sci-fi musical blog with rom-com elements still ends up a pretty dark romantic tragedy.

Pretty Much Everyone On Dollhouse

Finally, in Whedon's most recent creation, pretty much every romantic relationship has it's twisted, destructive side. For starters, the first real romantic relationship we get is the one between FBI agent Paul Ballard and his neighbor Mellie.

Just when we see Ballard getting comfortable with this woman, Whedon hits us with the revelation that she was only there to spy on him, that the personality that loves him was concocted to do just that and nothing more. The woman he loved is just a shadow in an empty room.

Needless to say, this distorts Ballard's relationship with her. Soon after the revelation, Ballard, frustrated by the fabricated nature of Mellie's love, has some angry sex with her, then runs out on her. She's devastated, yet Ballard knows it's only because she's programmed to be devastated. His relationship with her is a symbol of the depravity he's fighting in trying to shut down the Dollhouse.

But Dollhouse doesn't stop its experimental romantic stories there. The show asks what would happen when the shadows start to linger in the empty room. Could the unimprinted dolls start to develop romantic interests, despite their supposed lack of personality or libido?

The poster-children for this concept are Victor and Sierra. These two gravitate towards each other in their unimprinted state, and they also seem to feel a residual pull towards each other in some of their imprinted states.

By far the most dark and twisted relationship on Dollhouse, though, is that between Sierra and her original handler. Her handler, on multiple occasions, took advantage of the preternatural trust programmed into the otherwise blank Sierra to take advantage of her innocence and rape her.

It's one of the most twisted sexual events Whedon has yet crafted, and it further proves his fascination with strange, unconventional, or even downright disturbingly messed up romantic relationships.

What Does It All Mean?

It's clear that Joss Whedon loves complicated romantic and sexual relationships. Both love and lust are unabashedly large motivating factors for his characters, and this provides a springboard for the most interesting story-lines on his shows.

But it also makes what can sometimes be fanciful and unbelievable circumstances seem much more real. When we see a "happily ever after" story, we sometimes think, ok, but for how long can someone be so uncomplicatedly happy? Joss Whedon's stories provide us with some answers to that question.

More to the point, Whedon uses supernatural and science fictional elements to take complex, realistic romantic and sexual tension and inflate them to near mythic proportion. At the risk of going too far with the Whedon love, it's the kind of thing that Shakespeare so excelled at. In his works, gods and ghosts often became the engines for deeply affecting tragedy, helping his stories bridge the gap between intimate realism and giant mythology.

Whedon's stories do the same thing for his fans. We know life isn't simple, that there's something disingenuous about a television show that portrays all romantic stories as cut from the same simple cloth. Whedon offers us all the intricacies of our own romantic and sexual development writ large. It's the kind of thing that appeals very strongly to a select audience and will hopefully someday get the wider appreciation it deserves.

Though there are probably precedents for the dragon sex fetish in the pages of kinky horror pulp Weird Tales, I think it's safe to say the phenomenon was popularized by McCaffrey and her Pern novels. These books, published starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the present, focus on a civilization of humans who evolved from the crew of a spaceship of colonists who landed on planet Pern. Using biotechnology, the humans genetically modify the local firelizards to be giant, flying steeds that the "renewable air force" rides. The genemodded dragons also have psychic links with their riders, which forms when the dragons are hatched and select humans "impress" themselves onto the creatures.

Dragonriders aren't warriors; they are protectors. Pern experiences a seasonal weather pattern called "threadfall," where deadly spores from a neighboring star fall to the planet, destroying everything in their paths. Unless, of course, the dragons can zoom around and burn the threads before they hit the ground. Guided by their trusty humans, the dragons protect all the people of Pern from the terrible thread.

They also have sex. And when dragons have sex, their riders - in constant psychic connection with their mounts - have sex too. This means a lot of "whoa I didn't want to have sex with you but now that our dragons are having sex damn let's do it" kinds of stuff. In addition, the most common types of dragons, the blues and greens, only get impressed by gay boys (and occasionally straight girls). So: Lots of gay psychic dragon sex. This strange scenario has meant that Pern's large and talkative fandom has spent many years debating the sexuality of dragons in discussion forums and at conventions like the Weyrfest at Dragon*Con.

In her infamous essay on Pern's renewable airforce, McCaffrey responded to fan speculation by talking a little about how dragon/human sexuality works:

In the Beginning of Dragonriders of Pern™, females rode green or gold. Males rode blue, brown or bronze. (I made it easier for myself in the beginning by remembering that Boys impressed Brown, Bronze or Blue, and Girls impressed Gold and Green.)

Since greens are females and tend to be 'loving', they mated with any dragon they fancied. When not enough girls elected to stand on the Hatching Grounds after the first disastrous Plague, males with feminine personalities Impressed green dragons. Blue riders, not to mince words, tended to be gay with masculine temperaments. Browns, who were not so inclined to mate with a green's rider, made an arrangement so that two pairs of riders were involved in a green's mating.

The dragons act in the way they were bio-genetically designed . . . While the main and most important application of the [telepathy-enhancing substance] Mentasynth was to increase mental function and innate empathy in the 'dragons,' a secondary use was to allow the newly hatched young dragon recognize the most suitable symbiotic partner. At hatching, the dragon recognizes by the sweat pheromones the appropriate sexual partner. Therefore the dragonet, just out of its shell, would approach only the male or female candidates exuding the proper pheromones for its basic sex type.

The green dragons are particularly sensitive not only to the mental empathy of possible candidates but also to pheromones.

McCaffrey's dragon sex scenario is probably the most highly developed in the world of science fiction, but it's not an aberration. Jane Yolen's young adult Dragon Pit series explores the dragon reproductive cycle in great detail, and the psychic human-dragon bond does involve romance. Similarly, Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series explores dragon sexuality and romance. Main character Eragon's dragon Saphira is the last female dragon alive, so the issue of mating and reproduction is unavoidable for her. There is even a psychic dragon sex subplot in the recent Captain Marvel Annihilation series.

Several years ago, dragon sex became one of the most hotly-debated topics at the book-oriented World Fantasy Convention when a publisher handed out excerpts of Janine Cross' Touched by Venom, the first book in her intense, harrowing Dragon Temple Saga. The excerpt, which describes a dragon-keepers' ritual on an alien planet, includes a scene where young adepts are beaten with dragon-venom laced whips. Because the venom has aphrodisiac properties, the result is a bizarre parade where young dragon-keepers are marched through the streets covered in blood and brandishing giant erections. Unfortunately, it wasn't the greatest excerpt to hand out: Con-goers found it laughable when they read it outside the context of the rest of the series, which is about a peasant revolt in an oppressive monarchy.

So why does dragon sex inspire such passionate debate? Why, indeed, does dragon sex even happen at all in science fiction?

There is one obvious answer, which is that dragons represent sex because they are enormous, fiery, beautiful, uncontrollable creatures of fantasy. The urge to have sex is one of those giant, burning desires that is particularly difficult to slay. It's also an urge that is fueled by our fantasies. So there's a kind of no-duh analysis of dragon sex, which is nevertheless true, that says simply that dragons are metaphors for sexual desire. This certainly explains the zillions of pages of Otherkin slashfic on the internet.

But of course everything is always more complicated than that.

Let's consider the role that dragon sex plays in books like Yolen's series or Pern - both of which have large young adult audiences. In his book Killing Monsters, comic book writer Gerard Jones talks about why kids are drawn to stories about monsters. He says it's because kids identify with what it's like to exist in a world ruled by the whims of giant creatures and megapowerful humanoids. Though Jones focuses on why kids like to watch monsters engage in violence, I think a similar thing might be said for why young adults might also be fascinated by giant creatures having sex. Sex belongs to the exotic world of adults. It's something that young adults are aware of, possibly in internet-enhanced detail, but it's also not something most of them are experiencing firsthand. So it makes a certain amount of sense that young people might identify with characters for whom sex is something they're connected to mentally, via the acts of creatures more powerful than themselves.

Philip Pullman explores this idea in young adult trilogy His Dark Materials too. When his young adult characters finally have sex at the end of the series, they begin by petting each other's animal daemons. These daemons follow every person around, acting as external representations of their feelings and desires. The same way McCaffrey's characters sometimes express the sexual feelings of their dragons. In both cases, the smaller creatures act out the desires of larger ones.

Dragons are a simple metaphor for sexual desire, and they may also evoke the way young adults feel about sex. But those assertions still don't entirely explain way dragons function in the venom cock scenario from Janine Cross' Dragon Temple Saga.

I would suggest that the dragons in Cross' novels are something like the worms in Dune. Cross' dragons don't have much of a psychic connection to their riders - they are more like animals, and so to the extent that they communicate telepathically it's not much of a conversation. Not only do these dragons provide a drug that fuels a thriving black market economy (like Spice but less useful), but their eggs are a major source of nourishment to the people of the kingdom. And the fastest way to get around is by riding a flying dragon. So dragons are a cornerstone of the kingdom's economy, crucial for food and transport. That's why Cross depicts dragons as being hoarded by the ultra-rich. A major part of the peasant revolt involves redistributing access to the dragons.

Cross is doing something tricky with her dragon sex. She's talking about those uncontrollable, giant forces that I mentioned earlier in connection with Jones' book. But instead of her dragons standing in for adult sexual relationships, they stand in for the often-abusive relationships between aristocrats and peasants. She uses weird scenes of these dragons jabbing their venom-laced tongues deep inside our heroine's special spot to show us how peasants are debased by their aristocratic overlords. At the same time, the peasants are made complicit in their degradation because they crave the high they get from the dragon venom. So Cross' dragons stand in for the overwhelming desire people have for power over each other. Power that gives them the right to enslave, rape, and rule over other people.

Of course, sometimes a dragon is just a dragon. But dragons and sex often go together in science fiction because it's an inherently metaphorical genre. SF stories about fantastical monsters are often fables that contain messages about our own world. A perfect alloy of beauty and violence, the dragon is an enduring figure for the power of sexual desire - and for the way power often finds its most brutal expression in sexual acts.

Top image by Boris Vallejo. Fan art from Dragonchoice.

If you somehow managed to exist within the American mediascape and miss the ads for Jennifer's Body, count yourself lucky. Nearly all of them featured Megan Fox (and her title-inspiring body) in a sexy pose, as if we were about to watch a teen sex comedy where boys slaver after the unapproachable cheerleader. Tease campaigns about the movie emphasized that there would be a sexy lesbian kiss between Fox and Amanda Seyfried, the film's nerdy, point-of-view character. In short, the ad campaigns were aimed at straight young men, who are the core audience for most movies starring Megan Fox.

But the problem is that Jennifer's Body is not an ejaculatory explosion movie like Transformers 2. It is a horror movie, which means its built-in audience is already predominantly female (stats show that horror movie-goers are often over 60 percent women). Megan Fox is also not the main character; and she's not the boy hero's plucky sidekick (there are no boy heroes in this movie). Instead, she's the toothy, gory, puke-soaked object of repulsion and disgust. In short, she is the monster.

And she's a very specific kind of monster, too. She embodies one of the scariest demons who haunts girls' dreams: The popular, pretty girl who pretends to be your friend while secretly trying to steal your boyfriend, your pride, and your life. Written and directed by women, Jennifer's Body is a film made in a women's genre about women's problems. It's a movie about why women want to stab Megan Fox in the tit with scissors.

Marketing Jennifer's Body like it was another version of The Hangover or American Pie, with sexy ladies and dick jokes, meant it was doomed to fail. Women saw posters that emphasized Megan Fox as slick sex object, and thought: I hate that chick - why would I want to see a movie about her? And men who saw the movie said: What the fuck? I thought this was going to be tits and lesbian kissing, and instead it's about dysfunctional teen girl relationships? Why do I want to see Amanda Seyfried talking about her feelings for 90 minutes?

Reviews of the film seem to bear this interpretation out. Women and Hollywood's Melissa Silverstein points to a quick survey that Screen Rant did of critical responses to the film:

There were many more reviews by men (77) than women (26). The majority of these were culled from the Rotten Tomatoes site . . . Here's the breakdown: Male movie reviewers: 39% liked it, 61% disliked it; Female movie reviewers: 54% liked it, 46% disliked it.

Director Karyn Kusama told MTV.com:

I don't know if selling the film as a straight horror film and selling it primarily to boys is really going to do any of us any favors, frankly.

And indeed it didn't. Marketing attracted primarily men to the movie (including male reviewers), and a majority disliked it. Fewer women saw it, but of those who did, a majority (including myself) liked it.

I think it's clear that misguided marketing was a huge factor in what destroyed Jennifer's Body. As I said, the movie isn't Criterion Collection material, but it's a damn good genre picture. It's better than most other horror movies out there, with an original premise and a smart, fresh take on a very old monster story. If the marketing droids at Fox had just been smart enough to realize that the movie was aimed at women - not unlike most horror movies - they might have had a cult hit on their hands.

Back when this film was announced all we asked for was a return to the dirty, bloody, fist-fighting human-versus-alien action epic we know and love. And then we got news that the next addition to the slightly tarnished Predator franchise would feature a bad ass jungle fighting throw down. I was happy. However, today news broke that the team leader of the blood-thirsty murderers, so bad-ass they've been kidnapped from Earth to face the most feared alien monsters of all time, is Adrien Brody. Say what now?

Variety is reporting that Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, Walt Goggins, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, and Louiz Ozawa are all starring in the new Robert Rodriguez produced Predators film.

The movie will take place on a Predator jungle planet in which a crew of Earth's worst of the worst criminals and killers are shanghaied, and hunted down for sport. But that's not all, according to The Hollywood Reporter: Topher Grace is in negotiations to star as the unassuming serial killer in the bunch.

But before I rant even more, let's speculate on who each character is...

So that's a few seemingly formidable villains, and Topher Grace. And Adrien Brody. These are not the commandos we're looking for. I don't care if they tied up a stack of hookers in their dark basement, Topher and Adrien would die immediately face to hideous face with an actual Predator. Especially against the super steroid Predators we've been promised.

But you know what, I still like what I've heard about the script. Brody can act, and some of these other actors look promising. But I'm not really sure if inner turmoil and character depth is why I pay $10 to see a PREDATOR movie. So, make me eat crow Rodriguez. I'm begging you.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was watching Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II TV movie. I was wondering why this post-apocalyptic story of tyrannical dominatrices and mutants was less interesting than Star Trek, and I couldn't escape the conclusion: Genesis II was less interesting because it was less fun — and especially less escapist. Instead of cool people on an awesome spaceship packed with fantastic toys, like Communicators and Tricorders, you had a guy trapped in Planet Of The Apes without any apes. And with an extra helping of Roddenberry's signature preachiness.

And I started thinking about escapism, and why we tend to look down on it. We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They're automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world's unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.

Escapism is the candy-coated pill, the sedative designed to lull you away from realizing quite how messed up things are — and how much culpability you, as a no-doubt middle-class person, have for the situation. Escapism is opium, soma.

The distinction between escapist and "realist" fiction isn't even a matter of utopian versus dystopian narratives — after all, much escapist fiction is dystopian, and plenty of realistic fiction has an utopian impulse at its core. But when movies or books depict someone escaping from the world's unpleantness, or just offer a vision which allows the watcher or reader to escape through their imagination, then we deplore the cowardice of anyone who seeks to run away from their problems in this way. Most of all, escapism is inherently just not serious.

Escapism: pulpy and tacky

Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case against escapism very potently in her essay "Escape Routes," gathered in the collection The Language Of The Night: Essays On Fantasy And Science Fiction:

What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured — like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always towards an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail.

And inside the padded cell people say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest.

They don't care if nobody outside is listening. They don't want to know there is an outside.

Because the most famous works of SF are socially and culturally speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Capek, Stapeldon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American SF, while riding on the tradition of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism.

That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all of the "relevant" problems.

She was writing this back in the 1970s, so the specific accusations about SF are outdated. But as a summation of the "escapism is childish and not literary" viewpoint, it's pretty much perfect. And as you can tell, a big part of the hatred for escapism comes from a desire to be literary, and to be taken seriously by the upper echelons of the (supposedly monolithic) literary world. Writing in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1976, Barry N. Maltzberg raged that the literary/cultural establishment "either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids."

One more quote. In his book On SF, Thomas M. Disch characterizes escapism as a "security blanket," and adds:

There are times when all of us would rather flee our problems than confront them head-on with the heightened awareness that genuine art forces on us. For such times, nothing will serve but escapism.

He goes on to say that certain trashy SF authors are as bad as Star Trek or Magnum P.I. (even though the latter show constantly bombarded us with Magnum's Vietnam War flashbacks.)

If you read these quotes carefully, a few things jump out at you. First of all, there's the equation of escapism with "pulp" traditions — which was obviously a big deal for authors like Le Guin and Maltzberg, who were trying to escape (sorry!) from the "pulp" label and prove that they deserved a higher grade of paper stock. And then there's the idea that escapism prevents your SF from being "relevant" or commenting on real-world issues — when, in fact, the most escapist narratives are often the most topical. (Just watch the original Star Trek.) There's the idea, which was way more prevalent in the 1970s, that explicit social commentary automatically made your work better or smarter.

There's also a certain feeling of disapproval, even dismay, that people are having too much fun. If I hadn't read tons of books by Le Guin and Disch, and discovered first hand how enjoyable (and frequently, how escapist) their work can be, I would think both authors wrote dry Socialist Realist works, in which their protagonists were born and died in the same gutter.

There has been a move to re-embrace escapism in recent years — Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay was about the fictional creation of a Golden Age superhero who was actually called The Escapist. And Chabon shows us exactly how The Escapist's real-world origins reflected the political and social trends of the 1930s and early 1940s, and how much his adventures reflect the struggles and traumas Sammy and Joey are going through in their real lives — everything from Sammy's secret homosexuality to Clay's family trapped in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe becomes part of the secret backstory of the Escapist and the League of the Golden Key. In Chabon's novel, backstory is the story — when you try to strip the League of the Golden Key and the other details from the Escapist's origin, you chip away at what makes the Escapist who he is, and the reasons why he does what he does.

It's no coincidence, of course, that Chabon has also been a champion of bringing the pulps back into the sphere of the literary — he edited two anthologies of mock-pulp science fiction stories for McSweeney's a few years ago, chock full of literary and genre superstars doing pastiches and homages to the plot-heavy stories of the past. Authors like Chabon and Dave Eggers are able to celebrate the pulpy and retro in a way that Maltzberg never could back in the 1970s, because they're already assured of their literary status, and need not fear being marginalized. (And meanwhile, the "new space opera" and posthuman SF novels that throng on our shelves are the very picture of escapism, with their heroes who live for zillions of years and can port themselves into new customized bodies whenever they feel like it.)

But in any case, we're now far enough from the pulp era that the "pulpy" label has lost much of its sting, even as unabashedly pulpy urban fantasy heroines in tight pleather pants are eating science fiction's market share for lunch. So maybe it really is time to reclaim the word "escapism" and transform it into a paean to works that liberate and illuminate us.

A theory of escapist art

So I promised you an explanation of why escapism is the highest form of art — and yes, there may be a slight amount of hyperbole involved there. At the same time, escapism has given us some of our greatest speculative art works, and has the potential to spawn even greater ones in the future, if we recognize it for what it is.

First of all, let's dispose of this false dichotomy between "escapism" and "realism." Neither of those things is ever entirely pure, and each always contains elements of the other. Any time you have a flight of fancy, or a grace note, or an elivening metaphor, in a "realist" work, you are engaging in escapism. Because whenever you invoke the imagination, or suggest another world (made out of thought, or images) beyond your protagonist's "real" world, you're allowing the reader a brief escape. And in fact, if you look at "real life," some of our "realest" experiences involve escape.

Think about that old literary standby, the "coming of age" narrative — it is the most pure escapist story you can have, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending. (More on happy endings later.) The "coming of age" tale is about someone outgrowing his or her childhood, and casting off the stifling restrictions of parents, school and conformist expectations. It is a story about reaching escape velocity, and bursting out of childhood's gravity well. This is never a tidy process in real life, nor is it often in literature. But it's the original escapist tale, and in many ways, it's the template on which all other escapist tales build.

The reverse is also true — escapist elements don't automatically make a work less realistic. Just as the "coming of age" story is about escape in the "real" world, it's more than possible to tell a realistic story about a world that repesents an escape from our reality. We've all accepted, by now, that you can tell a realistic story about that ultimate avatar of escapism, Batman. (Batman is in many ways a more escapist figure than Superman, because Batman is just like us — except that his amazing training and gadgets turn him into an unstoppable force.) Look at Paul Pope's amazing, stark graphic novel Batman: Year 100. And if you want SF that comments on real-world issues, it's hard to get more topical than the first few seasons of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

And that leads to another point — escapism can be incredibly dark. I said earlier that many escapist works are dystopian, and it's clearly true. The "last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world" story is full of escapism — for one thing, you're one of the chosen few, and you're incredibly special and wonderful as a result. You no longer have to pay taxes (like Le Guin's heroes), and you live in a world where the worst has already happened. And many escapist films are show someone escaping from an incredibly dark world, even if it's only through the power of the imagination. Think of Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, which is at its core a work about the escape into fantasy. Even if both the real world and the fantasy are dark and disturbing. Or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which takes place in a dystopian world and shows us Sam Lowry's flights of the imagination as well as his attempts to escape in real life. Did I mention that escapist works don't have to have happy endings?

At the same time, who says that realism is the best thing a literary work can aspire to? It really is true, as many SF writers have said lately, that we live in a world that's changing so quickly, that any attempt at pure realism will become historicism instead. And then there's the subjective nature of "reality." But most of all, realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can't show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that's happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions. We've all lived through historical moments where a new meme or phenomenon seemed to "come out of nowhere," only to look inevitable in retrospect, once we see all of the early indicators that we ignored at the time, because they were outside of the narrative we were telling ourselves about "reality."

If the goal of a literary work (and remember, "literary" is not synonymous with "good." More on that here) is to reflect "reality," then "realism" is one tool among many for doing so. And escapism is another.

I already suggested, above, that metaphors are inherently escapist because they take us away from the strict view of what the thing "is." And the reverse is also true: escapism is a metaphor. TV shows like Lost In Space and Star Trek are so transparently metaphors for the hopes and fears of the Space Age that it's impossible to watch them now without thinking about what people were living through at the time. You get as revealing a mirror into the Space Age, Cold-War psyche from Star Trek as you do, say, from John Updike's Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. The stuff Star Trek tries to say about the politics of the 1960s is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the stuff that it says without meaning to, about Manifest Destiny and the post-colonial project of redeeming the Third World.

We tend to think of escapism as a childish impulse, but that's by no means always true — like Brazil, or The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, many great escapist works are about adults, who are trapped as only adults can be, in prisons partly of their own making, and look for a way out.

Escapism also shows what we're trying to escape from — this seems like an obvious point, but it's one that often seems to be overlooked. This changes over time, and also varies from creator to creator. Some escapist works are concerned about breaking out of a totalitarian, oppressive state, others are more concerned with running away from middle-class American life. There's escapism from war, from conformity, from individualism, from failure, from success. Whether or not an escapist work explicitly shows us what we're escaping, it's still always there, revealed by what the escapist elements aren't. Escapism always reveals what we're escaping, and serves as a mirror of whatever the artist (or corporate overlord, as the case may be) views as the most horrendous elements of current reality. It's convex where dire reality is concave, like a plaster cast mold. If your goal is to get the clearest possible picture of "reality," looking at that reflection may be your best shot.

And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.

Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Returning to the Le Guin quote, it strikes me that what she's describing as escapism is actually better described as "weak story-telling." Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad.

If escapism is frequently tawdry and dull — if our culture gives us Transformers 2 instead of Superman II — blame the creators, don't blame escapism itself. In fact, holding a low opinion of escapism (and saying things like "It's just a movie about explosions and robots, don't expect too much from it") lets the Michael Bays of this world off the hook too easily.

Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"

Oh, and there are some spoilers for upcoming TV shows here.

We can't help noticing the odd religious moments in a lot of the fall's biggest SF TV shows, and how shoehorned-in the references to God or the Bible often seem to be. Unlike Firefly, which featured a man of God as one of its major supporting characters and naturally sparked theological discussions, or BSG, which took place during an apocalypse, the newest crop of shows seems determined to mention God even when it doesn't make that much sense.

Take the scene above from the season opener of Fringe, where FBI agent Amy Jessup goes through all of the Fringe Division's cases and compares them with Bible verses — it's all in the Book Of Revelation! (Thanks to Meredith for suggesting this one.)

Or FlashForward, whose pilot includes one character who randomly questions whether God gave everyone on Earth a glimpse of the future as a punishment. Leaving aside the fact that clairvoyance seems like an odd shape for divine punishment to take. There's also the fact that the slutty/Christian babysitter just happens to be making out with her boyfriend (while the girl she's looking after is asleep) and thus feels guilty — so she decides that God gave the entire world a future vision just to punish her for making whoopie on the couch. Make sense? Absolutely not. Unless you think that some studio exec in a meeting said, "We need a religious angle here. There oughta be one character who decides that this was all God's doing. Because that'll play well in the God states."

And then there's V, which — spoiler alert — has aliens visiting us and claiming to be benefactors, who've come to help us. Plenty of people are suspicious of these allegedly enlightened visitors, but then we meet a Catholic priest who's decided to preach that these aliens are "God's creatures," with the implication being that they're sent by God. And the priest tells his underling, Father Jack, that he must preach the aliens are divinely sanctioned — or else. It's even sort of implied (if I remember correctly) that the Vatican has made support for the aliens official policy. WTF? Why would the Catholic church come out in support of random aliens that we know nothing about? It's one of the few moments in the V pilot that literally makes no sense whatsoever, and it inspired much head-scratching when we saw it at Comic Con.

And then there's Stargate Universe, which — spoiler alert again! — has a character experience weird religious visions for no discernable reason in its second episode. (Or third, if you count the two-hour pilot as two episodes.) It's never entirely clear why one character, stuck on a weird, inhospitable planet, is having visions of being in church and talking to a priest, and it seems partly designed to give us a chunk of this character's backstory. But it also feels like a quick-and-dirty way of conveying that this character is having a spiritual wandering-in-the-wilderness thing, without actually having to create any real religious/spiritual content to go with it. It feels a bit cheap: he's in the wilderness, and he sees some churchy stuff. Oh! So that means it's deeply symbolic or something.

And of course, Dollhouse gave us the ultra-stereotypical "Christian cult with guns" in one of its first-season episodes — the one where Echo gets turned into a blind religious zealot with cameras in her eyes, and everybody's sorta Amish and sorta Mormon.

Honestly at times, watching current SF TV it's hard not to feel like someone watched too many early John Woo movies and thought "church with birds in it — deep!" Or maybe too many early 1980s New Wave videos, where Duran Duran dance around pews and it randomly turns black and white. (And yes, I know that those videos are directed by Highlander auteur Russell Mulcahy.) But it also feels like a bit of pandering to a Christian nation that's perceived as being a bit suspicious of science-y stuff.

The Genesis of religion in SF TV

Once, it seemed like religious iconography and rhetoric was rare in science fiction — the original Star Trek confronted Captain Kirk and his crew with Greek gods, as well as godlike aliens who just wanted to toy with our heroes. You might have a hysterical crewman babble something about "If God had wanted us to go into space, etc," and the Roman episode did end with Uhura staring at the camera and saying the rebels were worshipping "the son of God." But these were just grace notes. (We won't get into Star Trek V, since that was a movie, and it came much later, and it makes the head hurt.)

After Trek, you certainly had the occasional SF program where the good guys were confronted with bog-standard space gods, who were notably free of any religious dogma that people on Earth could recognize. In fact, one reason why space gods are so often ridiculous and campy is the fact that they're trying so hard to be ecumenical. One common SF trope, over the decades, was the "meeting the real-life alien behind the ancient Earth myth — but this was usually the creature who inspired the Aztecs or the Egyptian religions, not the Judeo-Christian deal.

But in general, when television SF did grapple with religion prior to recent years, it was to reveal religious icons as aliens, using high technology to impress the superstitious. It wasn't until the final couple of seasons of Stargate SG-1 that this "superstitious humans worshipping aliens" storyline seemed to be an overt critique of organized religion. The show suddenly introduced a new antagonist for our heroes, a set of "ascended" (non-corporeal) aliens called the Ori, who encourage humans to worship them and preach from the Book of Origin. Writes blogger Chris Bateman in his 10-part essay on religion in science fiction:

It is almost impossible not to interpret the Ori as a paper-thin parody of Christianity... Much of the shallow critique of Christianity occurs between Claudia Black's ex-Goa'uld host Vala Mal Doran – who takes over Richard Dean Anderson's role as comic relief in the later seasons and fulfills this role magnificently – and her Ori-worshipping husband Tomin. Vala and Tomin square off in debate after Tomin reads incessantly to her from the Book of Origin, with Vala accusing him of taking a bunch of stories about how to live well and using it as a justification for war and murder. The scene serves a narrative purpose – Tomin later witnesses a Prior blatantly distorting the meaning of one of the verses in the Book of Origin, causing him to question his faith – but it also reads as a clumsy attack on contemporary Christianity.

Bateman theorizes that the producers of SG-1 were aghast at the Bush Administration's war in Iraq and wanted to satirize what they perceived as a right-wing Christian crusade against Islam. To some extent, The 4400 also seemed to be taking jabs at organized religion on occasion.

But before SG-1 introduced the Ori, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took a huge leap forward in introducing religious themes to SF, with the Prophets, aka the "wormhole aliens." For most of DS9's run, you could choose to believe the secular theory that the Prophets were merely interdimensonal aliens, who lived outside space/time and saw future and past as the same thing. But towards the end of the show's run, the messianic overtones around Benjamin Sisko made it harder and harder to sit on the fence. And meanwhile, Babylon 5 won praise for including characters of faith (including a Catholic commander, and a group of Catholic monks who come to live on the station) as well as including religion in many of its storylines.

Most recently, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles included Agent Ellison, who's frequently shown to be a Baptist, and religious references became more and more predominant in the show (which is about the actual apocalypse, so it does make sense to bring it up.) Most fans of BSG would agree that the show's monotheist/polytheist divide made it a much richer experience than a simple robots-vs-humans show would have been otherwise — regardless of how you may feel about the Baltar Cult, and the hand-wavy "Starbuck turns into ZZ Top" ending. And it's pure blasphemy to suggest that Firefly would be better without Shepherd Book.

The rise of Space Jesus?

Lately, though, it's seemed almost required to have some kind of religious discussion among a TV show's themes — and it's more likely to be Christian rather than some kind of vague Space Religion (TM) or misty spirituality.

Religion is part of society, and including religious points of view makes your world seem more realistic and three-dimensional — it would seem odd if science fiction on television never included a religious viewpoint, just as it would if people never mentioned politics at all. At the same time, there are ways to include religion that make sense (Firefly and T:SCC come to mind immediately) and ways to include it that feel gratuitous and weird (the Vatican is endorsing the aliens!)

And yes, when you throw in religion in a nonsensical way, it either feels like you're going for a cheap effect, or like you're pandering to religious people. Add to that the fact that scientists and people who use pure empiricism to deal with problems are far and few between — Walter Bishop and maybe the twisted Topher on Dollhouse are our only real avatars of tech nerdhood that I can think of off the top of my head. It's become a taboo in televised science fiction to show people doing science.

The show that's handling religion in the most fascinating manner right now is Supernatural, which is modern fantasy rather than science fiction. In the last year or so, angels have joined the show's long-standing demon characters — and now Lucifer himself is roaming around. And there are lots of hints that we'll actually be meeting God this season at some point. Theological discussions over why God allowed all of the horrors of the 20th century to happen are automatically more fascinating when they come out of the mouths of actual Angels, and the fact that the Archangels believe that God is dead makes for fascinating viewing.

So consider this a plea for more thoughtful portrayals of religion in science fiction — and fewer random, thoughtless, kitchen-sink inclusions. People who watch science fiction are smart. We can tell when we're being pandered to, and when we're being spoonfed religious ideas just because it makes your show seem more "mythic" or "relevant." Religion can make your science-fiction story feel like it takes place in a world we can relate to, and it can deepen your characters and add another layer to your story — or, in the wrong hands, it can feel like a random piece of baggage, tacked on to your story for spurious, external reasons. We can usually tell the difference between the two.