Speculative fiction is full of stories about people who've lost their identity – AMC just gave us a dreamlike remake of The Prisoner in which Number Six forgets who he really is, and Dollhouse returns Friday with more mind-erasing fun. But it's weird to see the trope of "fighting for selfhood" merged with that action-movie staple, the entertaining killing spree.

Recently, I was re-watching chunks of X-Men: Origins: Wolverine and thinking about that movie's insane body-count — both before and after Logan starts trying to regain his elusive humanity. In Wolverine, the mutant known as Logan is caught between his bestial nature and his dignity as an individual. For a hundred-odd years, he is a slaughter machine for the military, and then he joins a super-secret mutant taskforce. But in mid-atrocity, he suddenly starts questioning orders, and then he goes… rogue. (No, he doesn't bleach part of his hair and start talking in a Southern-girl voice. He just wanders off the reservation.)

The point is, Wolverine is just as much of a killing machine after he starts asserting that he's not just part of the machine, or not just an animal. He never makes the connection between the sacredness of his own personhood, and the sacredness of human life in general. I get that you have to fight for your freedom sometimes, but the movie makes a big point of showing Wolverine killing when he could just as easily disable his opponents — one of the movie's few great fuck-yeah moments involves cold-blooded murder. (Sure, he's killing scumbags. But he was just as much of a scumbag twenty minutes earlier.)

Likewise, Terminator Salvation (newly on DVD) gives us Sam Worthington's tormented cyborg Marcus, who discovers that he's basically a reanimated corpse with metal parts — and he makes the choice to be human, slaughtering several of John Connor's men in the process. (During his heroic escape from the resistance compound.) But it's okay, because Marcus' emergent selfhood is more important than any sense of self all of those dead people might have possessed. (Actually, I might need to — shudder — rewatch this sequence. I know a bunch of the rebels die, but some of them die due to hydrobots that attack afterwards. Does Marcus actually kill anybody directly, or just cause their deaths by tearing apart their security?)

And then, of course, there's District 9, in which Wikus also fights to regain his humanity — by putting on a battlesuit and shredding people with alien weapons. This film at least subverts this trope a bit, by having Wikus use alien weaponry that he's only able to use because he's losing his humanity — and the film doesn't exactly reward Wikus for his mass murder.

This odd combination — the hero who devalues human life in the process of exalting his own — has been around for ages, but seems to be on the rise. RoboCop and the Universal Soldier movies give us cyborg heroes who struggle to re-humanize while killing lots of other humans. Michael Bay (surprise!) gave us The Island, in which a clone grown as an organ donor kills his "original" self, along with a number of other people, on the way to becoming a full-fledged person.

For almost as long as there have been action movies, there's been the high body count: watching a Rambo movie in the 1980s, you don't stop and think that everyone of these bodies flopping to the ground is another person who won't come home to his/her family. It's one of the conventions of action movies that we accept that this carnage isn't really happening – even as the movie expects us to suspend our disbelief about a guy falling out of a helicopter on fire and surviving, it asks us to maintain full disbelief that mass murder is taking place in front of us.

On some level, too, we stop thinking that those people dying in front of us are really people – especially in a movie with tons of bad CG (like Wolverine). We can watch the corpses piling up because we know they're not human.

But the action-movie body count and the "search for identity" plot are great separately — I love a good John Woo bloodbath — but they sit uneasily together. The more people we see your cyborg or mutant kill — and the more casually they're killed — the less we can identify with our hero's quest for selfhood. The whole thing starts to feel more like a first-person shooter, and the main character more like a video-game avatar, rather than an individual who Deserves Human Rights and all that stuff.

If life is so cheap, then who really cares about Logan's quest for self? Not to pick on Wolverine, but these questions keep coming back as you watch the movie, as if they have a mutant healing factor.

How do you square the contrast, between the hero's inalienable uniqueness and everyone else's disposability? Maybe it's because Our Hero is a Nietzschean ubermensh, whose will to power makes his individuality more precious than everyone else's? What do you think?

This is just my own personal list of what I'm thankful for — feel free to add your own things you're thankful for in the comments.

1. That maybe, just maybe, movie audiences are developing some good taste.

I know, I know. Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen made about $833 million. And New Moon just had the third biggest opening weekend ever. Not exactly strong arguments for the intellect of the filmgoing public. But even so, both of them still came up short when compared to The Dark Knight, which set all manner of non-Titanic box office records. And for all the financial success of Transformers 2 and New Moon, I think there's a solid argument to be made that neither really compares to the cultural impact of The Dark Knight.

The Twilight franchise has its extremely devoted fanbase, but almost no crossover appeal. To be sure, tons of people saw Revenge of the Fallen, but how many people now remember doing so? The Dark Knight, on the other hand, launched a ton of memes, established the definitive version of the Joker for years to come, and won a ton of awards, assuming you care about that stuff. (I don't particularly, but evidence is evidence.)

And let's look at all the movies that aren't sequels. District 9 made $200 million on a $30 million budget thanks to a clever viral marketing campaign, strong word of mouth, and the fact that it was actually a good movie. All the standard industry reasons to assume a movie like District 9 wouldn't make money — it's too political, it's too violent, it's too South African — turned out to be completely wrong, and I'm just going to be a ridiculous optimist and assume that the quality of the movie was the reason for its success.

Finally, there's Star Trek. If anything, the fact that it was the eleventh movie in the franchise just meant it had more baggage to overcome, and yet it was the first bona fide hit of the summer, making $384 million. The fact that it did all that while gleefully reveling in the very same continuity that had sunk so many previous revival attempts, all because the movie was just so damn fun... well, yeah, I'm pretty thankful for that.

2. That Dollhouse somehow, against all odds, got a second season.

Sure, it's a shame that Dollhouse is coming to a close, but that show had no business making it past season one. Hell, it probably should have, by rights, been canceled about six episodes in. The show wasted its first five episodes on variations on the personality-of-the-week theme before launching into the master plot — admittedly because of network interference, but still — and then proceeded to unfold its convoluted, off-putting mythology that left the show without a clear central hero and a whole lot of really uneasy questions the audience had to answer. And it did all this while comfortably settling into #132 in the ratings, bringing in a paltry 3.73 million viewers per episode.

And then, thanks to favorable internet numbers, some decent critical buzz, and maybe some lingering Fox guilt about the fate of Firefly (nah), it got a second season, and Joss Whedon went full tilt at making it the craziest, most nerderiffic show ever. I mean, look at all the guest stars. Jamie Bamber! Michael Hogan! Alexis Denisof! Keith Carradine! Summer Glau! Ray Wise! More Alan Tudyk and Felicia Day! Not to mention the fact that the show is, if anything, even better, crazier, and more gleefully off-putting than last season. Dollhouse might be going out, but under the circumstances, you can't really say it isn't going out on its own terms.

3. That Doctor Who and Futurama are coming back, and everything will be (never) the same again.

It's a been a long year, with so little new Doctor Who to get excited/thrilled/confused/conflicted about. But now "The End of Time" is coming to close out David Tennant and Russell T. Davies's tenures with the show, and it clearly promises to be the most bonkers thing ever made. And then the Steven Moffat and Matt Smith era officially begins, and I really can't wait.

I got into Doctor Who in 2003, back when the show was still very much in the wilderness and the closest thing to new Who were a bunch of audios starring Paul McGann. (Sure, they were pretty good, but they were also pretty far from the real thing.) As such, I'm probably one of the very last people who can even somewhat legitimately call themselves "old school" fans of Doctor Who, and though I can't exactly claim a long memory of the time before the series returned, I remember just enough to be eternally thankful that the show is simply back at all.

Meanwhile, Futurama is finally completing its long road back. It's survived one cancellation, come back for four direct-to-DVD movies, at least two of which were pretty good, gotten picked up by Comedy Central, and muddled through one hell of a tense negotiation with the voice actors. A decade after it began, this show has even less business than Dollhouse still being on the air. Yet...here it is. With lots more crazy stories coming! And the original cast back! And maybe a decent budget to work with! Honestly, at this point, it's all gravy anyway.

4. That this happened.

Nothing like a little Nathan Fillion fan service to put a smile on my face. And hey, Castle isn't exactly bad! (It's not exactly good either, but that's besides the point.) I'd still gladly trade every show I've loved for the past seven years just for another season of Firefly, though. Yes, that includes you, Battlestar Galactica!

5. Starcraft II is coming.

So what if it's "just" a computer game? I'd happily argue Starcraft is at least one of the five best works of science fiction in the last twenty years. At least. And now it's got a sequel coming? I can barely contain my excitement, and it's still months away. I mean, just look at this:

You know, I'm going to really miss my productivity. But I'm thankful it'll be put to such an important use - helping the Terrans defeat the Zerg! (And then, once that is completed, helping the Zerg defeat the Terrans!)

6. That, no matter what Roland Emmerich does to them, I'll still have all my Foundation books.

You know, in a world of seemingly endless unnecessary adaptation and pointless remakes, this is probably a very useful thing to keep in mind.

Before really digging into my question, let me offer a few disclaimers. The "First Thanksgiving", as it is popularly known, is a mix of real history and folklore, and most accounts gloss over the complex nuances of early relations between the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony and the Pokanoket Tribe. And even if the First Thanksgiving does help promote an image of peaceful relations between Europeans and Native Americans, it's hard to ignore that centuries worth of disease, war, and oppression were to follow that idyllic scene in 1621.

But even so, for all these complications, it's surprising how rarely media science fiction has been willing to consider first contact between humans and aliens that is premised on peaceful settlement and coexistence, rather than invasion and occupation, as depicted in the popular conception of the First Thanksgiving.

By my count, five films this year deal with human-alien relations — the pleasantly diverting Monsters & Aliens, the vaguely didactic Battle for Terra, the awesome District 9, the kinda stupid Planet 51, and the, um, Avatar-ilicious Avatar. Oh, and I guess I shouldn't forget television's V.

Beyond suggesting that no one is willing to depict aliens in full live action anymore, these six works all have similar conceptions of how aliens and humans would interact: One is going to invade the other. (District 9 is the only exception, but then we never do learn what the aliens' original goals in coming to Earth were.) Indeed, in most cases, the invasion is militaristic in character, whether it's General Hemmer in Battle for Terra or SecFor in Avatar.

There are some recent works of popular science fiction that fit the pilgrim archetype, but only imperfectly. The inhabitants of the Outer Rim in Firefly don't just act like Pilgrims; they also dress and talk like them. Indeed, Joss Whedon has famously described the "River almost gets burned at the stake as a witch" episode "Safe" as "The Crucible in space."

Malcolm Reynolds talks a lot about moving just a little bit further into space to escape Alliance oppression, something meant to recall the pioneer spirit of the 19th century that just as easily fits the ethos of the Plymouth colonists, who fled first to the Netherlands and then to the New World in search of religious freedom. The Pilgrims might be there, but with the exception of an upside down cow fetus, there weren't any aliens to complete the setup.

It's the same problem with Battlestar Galactica. The 50,000 survivors of the destruction of the Twelve Colonies were fleeing a rather more tangible threat than the religious policies of King Charles I, but the opening titles always made their real objective clear: they were looking for a home. Again, that's a decent fit with the Pilgrims' goals, and the on-ship tensions that led to the creation of the Mayflower Compact recall the factional tension that formed a key part of BSG's dramatic backbone. (And that's not even mentioning all the religious zealotry.)

But again, since the Cylons remained fundamentally tied to their human origins, the humans never really encountered any aliens. Well, unless you want to get into some rather tedious arguments about the humans in the finale. But that part was over with in about thirty seconds.

So what's left? Even an old warhorse like Doctor Who hasn't really explored the notion of peaceful coexistence between humans and aliens. Last year's "The Doctor's Daughter" at least ends on a hopeful note, but a lot of Hath had to be slaughtered to get there. Probably the best example of this sort of idea is 1971's Colony in Space, in which humans fled the polluted, overcrowded Earth in favor of Uxarius, where they eke out a living as farmers and live in an uneasy truce with the planet's "primitive" indigenous inhabitants.

The only problem is that the serial is just as much about an evil mining company, ferocious reptiles, and the Master trying to get his hands on an ancient super-weapon, and as such the human-alien relations angle doesn't get to be developed quite as much as it deserves.

And even in Star Trek, where the complexities of human-alien interaction is at the franchise's core, that pesky Prime Directive keeps humans from just up and settling any already inhabited rock, vastly limiting the space pilgrim potential.

Perhaps part of the reason science fiction has eschewed this approach is that the Pilgrims don't feel terribly relevant today. The age of exploration and colonization is now in our past (and, if we're lucky, maybe our future), and in a world where pretty much all territory is already known and claimed, invasion and forceful conquest seems a far more plausible way for boundary lines to be redrawn between humans and aliens.

Well, maybe it's just the tryptophan talking, but I think science fiction is seriously missing a beat here. Recent works ranging from Battlestar Galactica to District 9 have intelligently explored how hoary old science fiction cliches might work when approached realistically, but all have pretty much assumed it would be impossible for all parties to approach such situations in good faith. After all, even when attempting to forge a truce with the humans, the Cylons always (allegedly) have a plan.

But since I'm pretty sure we're still supposed to be in a bold, optimistic new age, I'd like to see what happens when you take a bunch of human separatists, throw them in a rickety old spaceship, and have them try to coexist with those already living on the planet they choose to settle. I'm not saying it would end well - if history is any indication, it won't - but it would be interesting to see, just once, humans and aliens both start out with the best of intentions.

The Twilight series, whose second installment hits theaters tonight in the weird form of New Moon, has gone through a lot of changes in its journey from book to screen. This paranormal romance about a postgrunge girl from the Pacific Northwest and the monsters she loves isn't just a fictional world. It's a lifestyle. But what exactly is this lifestyle about? Is it about celibacy and traditional gender roles, the way its conservative Mormon creator Stephenie Meyer would have us believe? Or is it about rampant girl hormones, boys who strip at the slightest provocation, and otherworldly sparkle woodies?

Or is it, perhaps, about something else entirely?

I'll go with door number three. From the moment that Bella arrives for her first day of school and sees vamp Edward ambling toward her in slo-mo, his skin powdered white and lips cherry red, we're plunged into some kind of gender-bending satire of beer commercials. But instead of a busty blonde boob-bouncing her way towards the camera, we have the ridiculously made-up Edward, looking like something that got dunked in a Sephora store and then hurled through the stock room at Abercrombie and Goth. Once the two have kissed in extreme lurid closeup, wolfboy Jacob emerges literally from nowhere to show off his mega-muscles (which everybody comments on endlessly). As he gives Bella a hug, he explains that he likes the Reservation school way better than the white people's school. The scene is sheer comic genius, with the actors panting exaggeratedly as they kiss, and the lines wildly out-of-sync with the action (Jacob is constantly reminding the main characters how white they are in the middle of a "let's kiss" moment).

And it only gets better. Bella's human friends, represented incongruously as hipsters, are in on the joke. Their banter, possibly the best part of the whole movie, tips you off immediately to the fact that writer Melissa Rosenberg - whose main claim to fame is as a producer on ultra-dark serial killer satire Dexter - knows there is a significant audience who has come to watch New Moon just to laugh their asses off. And indeed, when I saw the film at a special sneak preview, loud laughter was as frequent as shots of Jacob's perky nipples.

It's almost as if the ostensible set-up of the movie - EDWARD: We can't be together; BELLA: Ohhhhhh [sigh] - is there just as a kind of blocky set in the background of the real story. A story about smart, snarky teens who think the entire premise of the film is stupid. There's a terrific scene when Bella starts to hang out with her old friends again after months of moping over the missing Edward, and she and her gal pal go to see a zombie movie. As they walk out of the theater, her friend launches into a long rant about how zombie movies claim to have some "deep meanings about consumerism" but that they're just dumb. Hello, moment that is way too meta for this movie.

And that's not the only meta moment. After the zombie rant, Bella and her pal run into a gang of motorcyclists who are catcalling and hooting at them, asking them if they want rides. As Bella stares at the men, Edward appears before her in a really bad Obi Wan-style apparition, urging her to "keep walking - danger." So of course, Bella walks up to the motorcycle guys and hops on the motorcycle, only to see the Obi Edward ghost go all after-school special on her, warning her again about the naughty man. This is the kind of pop culture reference that teens raised on "very special episodes" and old Star Wars movies will get, especially with the cheese larded on in such dramatic proportions.

Don't get me wrong: There are long, boring parts in this movie, mostly featuring the giant lack of chemistry that is Edward/Bella. But there are moments of subversion in between the emo globs that tantalize us into asking what Bella could become - if she would just exit the Twilight plot arc that will eventually propel her into marriage and babymaking.

In New Moon, that exit feels like a real possibility in a way that it won't after next year's wedding-oriented sequel Eclipse. The Bella of New Moon becomes "an adrenaline addict," seeking out motorcycle rides with shirtless Jacob and jumping off cliffs into the water, just so she can see Obi Edward again, telling her to be safe. She also starts cozying up with shirtless wolf boy Jacob and his pals - who cheerfully remind her that she's "not brown enough" to be clever. Again, Bella's friends (and writer Rosenberg) supply the ironic commentary that's running through everybody's heads anyway.

When a human boy with a crush on Bella asks her out to the movies and suggests a romantic comedy, she insists that they go see a movie hilariously called Face Punch, because she's "all about the adrenaline." First of all, Face Punch is now my new favorite movie title - New Moon cannot stop making jokes about teen pop culture. And second, I love the idea that Bella has this totally badass side that in no way matches the character's reputation as chaste romantic girly-girl.

The Bella of New Moon is a chick who fools around with vampires and werewolves, and then goes cliff jumping, "you know, recreationally," as she puts it later. And when this girl finds herself in the middle of over-the-top romantic scenarios, she's not exactly a swooner. In fact, she just wants to get her annoying boyfriend to turn her superpowered and vampy like him. When the boringly tormented Edward hints that he can't make her a vampire because she'll "lose her soul" and she looks kind of irritated and replies, "Well I don't believe in that."

So is this a movie about the glories of celibate romance? Not metaphorically, and not literally either.

Let's just take a quick gander at the much-vaunted symbolism of the series, where monsters stand in for humans and monstrous desires stand in for sexual ones. Edward's brother tries to eat Bella when she gets a paper cut; Jacob's brother also tries to eat Bella when she makes him mad. So: Sexiness is in the metaphorical air. But then things go literal. Jacob takes off his shirt and Bella tells him he's beautiful. Then when Jacob goes Total Wolf, he just stops wearing shirts altogether, spending most of the movie in tight denim cutoffs and running shoes. Edward also takes off his shirt in a scene where his pants ride so low that we see a little wisp of sparkling vampire pubes.

Nobody ever says anything about celibacy ever. Indeed, they spend more time arguing about race than they do about sex. As Jacob snarks to Bella, "Maybe I'm not the right kind of monster for you." All these teens ever do is jump into each other's bedrooms and kiss and pant heavily. This is not a movie about avoiding sex: The sex is just taking place offscreen. I guarantee that people the world over will be jacking off to memories of Jacob and Edward and Bella in their ruffled pink beds tomorrow night because this flick is packed so full of beefcakery. Basically, New Moon is training wheels for future Playgirl readers.

What's amazing about New Moon, and the whole Twilight series generally, is how easily it becomes self-parody. I think that's part of its appeal to teenagers, a group of people who cut through adult pretension and lies so incisively - and yet fall so hard for impossible fantasies. It caters to a youthful desire to watch a fairy tale, and then to see that fairy tale mocked mercilessly as the after-school-special bullshit it is.

I suspect that audiences for New Moon will sometimes choose to see Edward as genuinely romantic, while others will laugh at his makeup. Still others will - like the movie itself - vacillate wildly between romantic yearning and scornful laughter.

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.