Talking to AMC's Jennifer Vineyard, Oswalt explained what appealed to him about science fiction as a genre:

That you can do things in the genre that you can't in a straight-ahead movie or TV show, like arguments about God and abortion. But in Battlestar, because it's the end of the human race, they can. All of that hidden stuff, I love it.

And I love the part about what happens to human beings. Ray Bradbury pointed out that Star Wars is not science fiction, it's an adventure story set in space. Singing in the Rain is a science fiction film, because you have the world as it is, then sound is introduced. What happens to people now that this new thing is there? That's all science fiction is.

Q&A - Patton Oswalt on How Hard It Is to Be a Big Fan [AMC]

In this week's episode, "Implosion," we finally see Warehouse 13 break out of its artifact-of-the-week plot, even as we see it continue to scramble to try to find its footing.

We know from talking to actor Saul Rubinek that his character, Artie, has a deep, dark secret, and tonight we finally got to delve into Artie's past, a past that includes espionage charges and a stint in prison. But first, Peter and Myka have to steal a Japanese sword (one that, incidentally, can make its bearer invisible) and replace it with a fake, when an implosion grenade goes off in the Japanese agency, apparently taking the artifact with it.

This week's episode had its share of great moments. For one thing, the artifacts were more gadgety and less mystical this time around: the implosion grenade, the mesmerizing Ice Flower firecracker, the gun that vaporizes people — the writers even attempt to give the Japanese sword's powers of invisibility a physical explanation, albeit a vague one. And the interactions between Peter and Myka and their fellow Secret Service agents offered some moments of levity while promising to make the series a little richer. Watching Peter and Myka try to explain their assignment (Myka smugly describing it as "archival") and convince the other agents that they've been hit with a gun that erases short-term memory when obviously the agents recall no such thing brings the show's absurdity a bit into the real world, and reintroducing their former boss Dickinson as the anti-Artie adds another dimension. I like the idea that it's not always the Warehouse vs. the artifacts and their abusers, but the Warehouse vs. the rest of the Secret Service vs. competing artifact hunters.

And we soon learn that there is indeed a rival artifact hunter behind the implosion grenade and the theft of the invisibility-granting sword. James MacPherson, Artie's professional and romantic rival, disapproves of the Warehouse's mission, and uses exactly the sort of technology Artie and company want to keep from the public. James adds a nice bit of intrigue to the episode and brings us out of the weekly drudgery of finding some havoc-wreaking device. And, from the title of the season's final episode "MacPherson," he could function as the season's Big Bad.

But there's also a great deal about this episode that's strangely abrupt. For one thing, the absence of Claudia (which is mentioned, but never satisfactorily explained) feels like a step backwards and an excuse for alienating Artie from the rest of the cast. And too much of Artie's past is revealed too quickly — we meet James, who is a character from Artie's past, as well as the woman who once chose James over Artie, and get the handle on Artie's criminal record all in one episode. Also, when it comes to Myka and Peter's respective relationships with Artie, previous episodes haven't led up to this episode in a satisfactory way. Myka complains that Artie treats his field agents like redshirts (and Peter is adorably too excited that she understands the terminology), a feeling supported by their trips to the hospital, though we haven't seen this sentiment bubbling nearly enough. And Peter's sense of betrayal at learning about Artie's past doesn't hit home as much as if he'd developed more paternal feelings toward his new boss.

I keep waiting for the relationships between the characters to gel into something a bit more familial (as well as a more distinct role for aura-reader Leena who feels too much like a mere social balm). I suspect Claudia could be the glue to bind the team together, and the new developments with the rest of the Secret Service and James could push and prod the team into shape. I'm encouraged by the new plot elements, but I do wonder if, in just five more episodes, Warehouse 13 can get where it's trying to go.

He's written a little bit about himself, and what he's looking for, here. If you're in the area, and want to help out, you can pipe up in comments here or on his blog. As someone who loves good science fiction, Lovecraft-style flicks, and the indie spirit, I'm hoping to see a film in a year that started here on io9.com.

via Gorehound's blog

Talking during an interview to promote Knowing, Cage expressed a rethink about violence in film:

At this point in my life I have made a series of movies with a hieroglyphic of my face and a gun. I had a serious look at a couple of movies, one that I pulled out [of], because I felt, at this point, I didn't want to kill a person on camera... I was trying to think about ways I could entertain you, hopefully give you some sort of escape, which I think in this day and age is very important, without having to resort to gratuitous violence. Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

Does this mean that Cage sees science fiction as a gateway drug to take audiences into indulgently abstract movies? I hope so, if only because I'd love to see just how abstract the man behind Ghost Rider, Bangkok Dangerous and Adaptation can get when he puts his mind to it.

Nicolas Cage wants sci-fi career [Press Association]

As the site's "about" column explains:

This blog combines discussion about beer, science fiction, utopian dreams, movies, and tall tales with activism and social art.

And indeed, the posts are a mixture of science fiction criticism and discussions of microbrews and stuff. (I've been checking back for a week or two, and haven't yet seen a single post about both science fiction and beer.) Recent topics include the impossibility of utopia, smart science fiction films, Portland, OR breweries, and a local Portland "superhero" who clothes the homeless. It's a heady brew, check it out! [Beer And Scifi]

A decade, after all, is a sociocultural as well as a calendrical phenomenon. Think of the Sixties, which - pop-culturally speaking - began optimistically in '64 with the release of Meet the Beatles, and ended tragically in '73 with the death of Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy (the comic book's cover even announced a "TURNING POINT," i.e. the end of the Sixties). Still not convinced? It would be tedious to argue about my crackpot scheme here, but I've written plenty on the topic elsewhere.

If my survey of SF novels published between the beginning of the 20th century and the so-called Golden Age of SF stops short of the Thirties (1934-43), it does so with good reason. It was during the mid-1930s, after all, that "science fiction established itself, separating with a slowly increasing decisiveness from fantasy and space-opera," as Kingsley Amis approvingly put it in his 1958 critique, New Maps of Hell.

SF's Golden Age, in this analysis, didn't wait for Campbell to start buying stories from Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but instead gave birth to itself in the years 1934-37, a transitional period or interregnum that saw the advent of the campy Flash Gordon comic strip, E.E. "Doc" Smith's pseudo-scientific Lensman series, and innumerable post-King Kong Hollywood "sci-fi" blockbusters. These escapist, fantastical, wildly popular phenomena helped disentangle literate, analytical, socially conscious "speculative fiction" (Huxley's Brave New World, which appeared in '32, had helped jump-start the trend) from mere sci-fi, a genre now understood by the public to concern itself exclusively with adventure yarns set in the future and populated with Bug-Eyed Monsters. Not that there's anything wrong with BEMs, you understand.

By the early 1940s (i.e., the midpoint of the Thirties), as SF chroniclers of a certain age never tire of crowing, the grown-up Campbell Revolution had decisively overthrown the eternally sophomoric Gernsbackians. For the next couple of decades, American genre writers born in the Oughts, who were too young to contribute to PGA SF - e.g., Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Andre Norton, Fredric Brown, Clifford D. Simak, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore; and their immediate juniors, born in the Tens, including Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Leigh Brackett, James Blish, Frederik Pohl, Frank Herbert, and Theodore Sturgeon - would rarely mingle SF and Fantasy in the promiscuous, innocent fashion of PGA-ers like William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or David Lindsay. Unless, of course, they did so as a deliberate experiment in what came to be called (yuck) "science fantasy."

In his introduction to a 1974 collection titled Before the Golden Age, Asimov would note, condescendingly, that although it may have possessed a certain vigor, in general PGA SF "seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive." This is certainly true of much SF from the Pulp Era, and of Hugo Gernsback's own fiction in particular. (Amis on Gernsbackian SF: "Neither culture not dreams warm it; it exists as propaganda for the wares of the inventor.") However, what I find so appealing about PGA SF is the ability of its best authors to bring thinking and dreaming (also known as the "Hmm..." and the "Oh!") together in a fraught, negative-dialectical state of productive tension. If this means that PGA SF is somehow less sophisticated than GA SF, more adolescent or immature, then we need to rethink what it means to be sophisticated and mature.

As for SF novels published in the years 1901-03, there's a sound argument to be made for overlooking them, too. Here it is: The 20th century saw the prose style of H.G. Wells, father of SF in the English-speaking world, turn increasingly didactic and shrill; however, The First Men in the Moon and The Food of the Gods, the last of Wells's "scientific romances" that are actually fun to read, appeared in '01 and '04. As Brian Aldiss laments, in Billion Year Spree, Wells's many 20th-century novels, with the exception of the two named, "do not recapture that darkly beautiful quality of imagination, or that instinctive-seeming unity of construction, which lives in his early novels, and in his science fiction particularly." This suggests that the late 19th century which Wells did so much to invent didn't expire until '04-ish - a proposition that is, I submit, six years less outlandish than Virginia Woolf's claim that the 20th century (I'm paraphrasing) didn't begin until "on or about December 1910." For the purposes of this survey, then, the handful of SF novels published from 1901-03 can be safely disregarded.

Fine! But mightn't ignoring the years 1901-03 and 1934-37 do a disservice to important, even critical SF novels published during those periods that belong - by virtue of their style and worldview, their negative-dialectical whatchamacallit - neither to the Wellsian 19th century nor to the Campbellian Golden Age?

Not so much, actually. In fact, by my count only five such novels exist. So I'm going to cheat, and include in this survey: M.P. Shiel's gorgeously written apocalypse, The Purple Cloud (1901); Joseph O'Neill's Land Under England (1935), a hollow-earth fable of telepathic totalitarianism; Olaf Stapledon's Homo Superior novel, Odd John (1935), without which David Bowie couldn't have dreamed up Ziggy Stardust; Karel Čapek's War with the Newts (1936; 1937 in English), in which Nazi-like intelligent salamanders demand Lebensraum from the human race; and Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), which defies description in a few words.

Science fiction's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33) is a cruelly neglected era. It's almost as though SF historians and scholars don't want us to read the SF of, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Karel Capek (who gave us the word "robot"), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and Philip Wylie. They'd like us to jump straight from the late 19th century (Edward Bellamy, William Morris, HG Wells, Jules Verne) to the Golden Age. Why? Let's find out!

Two final notes:

(1) Each post in this series will be devoted to an enduring SF theme, from Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Scenarios to Artificial Life, Lost Worlds, Utopias and Dystopias, and Homo Superior, among other things.

(2) Want to get your mitts on the novels I'll be reviewing or mentioning? Bison Books and Penguin have reissued dozens of 19th-century and PGA SF novels, while some other titles are fairly easy to find at new and used booksellers. PS: In the 1960s and '70s the now-defunct New English Library reissued some PGA SF titles as part of its SF Master Series, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. In the mid-1970s, turn-of-the-century SF scholars Douglas Menville and R. Reginald republished 62 SF books from before the Golden Age with the Arno Press. Also in the mid-70s: Lester del Rey republished a half-dozen PGA SF novels under the aegis of The Garland Library of Science Fiction; and Sam Moskowitz republished 23 "classics" of late 19th- and early 20th-century SF with Hyperion Press.

Alas, a few of the books I'll mention are impossible to purchase for a reasonable price, or even locate. Useful websites for collectors are AbeBooks and the bookseller L.W. Currey. If the full text of any of the PGA SF novels reviewed or mentioned in this series is available online, and I neglect to link to it, please post the URL to the comments on that entry.

READ THE WHOLE SERIES:

Introduction to Science Fiction's Pre-Golden Age (1904-33) | The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels | The Most Amazing Book Covers | The Coolest Robots | More TBA

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

Go ahead and put your questions in the comments and we'll pose them next week at Comic-Con. And let's skip who's the final cylon question, because you know they're not going to answer that.

Battlestar Galactica: Tricia Helfer, James Callis, Katee Sackhoff, Michael Trucco, Ron Moore, David Eick

Stargate Atlantis: Joe Flanigan, Robert Picardo, Brad Wright, Jewel Staite, Chris Sanaugustin

Sanctuary: Amanda Tapping, Martin Wood, Robin Dunne

Eureka: Colin Ferguson, Sallie Richardson-Whitfield, Joe Morton, Jamie Paglia, Charlie Craig, Tony Optican

[TV Spoiler]

Miranda

Mongo

Vulcan

Naboo

Zanak

Ring World

Tollana

Krypton

Fyrine IV

Camazotz

Trion World, the network teaming up with Scifi to bring us the new television/online gaming series claims that "a Stargate MMO developed by Trion World Network and the SciFi channel is going to be integrated with the Stargate TV series sometime in 2010." Presumably like other Stargate games, the MMO would let you visit other worlds, and maybe choose to settle on them. But with the ability to have your actions in the game influence the meta-story on the TV show, will viewers choose to bring Jack O'Neal and Samantha Carter together at last?
[Massively]

Collect them all:

Star Wars Light Saber
Firefly
Master Chief
Nuke
Phaser

Transformers T-shirt is Bad Idea at Airport [via Hide Your Arms]

Killers From Space is pretty much the zaniest classic scifi movie not to be subject to MST3K treatment. Directed by W. Lee Wilder, brother of Billy Wilder, it features aliens who kidnap a U.S. scientist and brainwash him into helping with their invasion plans. But then he regains control over his faculties after this whole truth serum incident, and manages to destroy the aliens by disrupting their power supply. You can watch the whole thing online for free at the Prelinger Archive. [Archive.org]

Here's the official plot synopsis:

When a $5 billion NASA probe disappears into an intergalactic wormhole, the agency recruits Ham III, the grandson of the first chimpanzee in space, to help retrieve the wayward craft. But Ham is a free-spirited circus performer, more interested in in zero gravity hijinks than living up to his illustrious heritage. The simian slacker becomes a reluctant hero and and learns the true meaning of courage as he and his crewmates, the fearless Lt. Luna and their uptight commander, Titan, risk everything in an effort to save the peaceful inhabitants of a distant planet from an evil dictator.

Special Note: We have tried to list as much as possible here, but there are always things that will get left out. If you want to know every single book coming out this season, check out Locus magazine's exhaustive and ever-expanding list. And if you want to know about more cons, check the user-generated list at ConFinder, as well as the Ansible Events List (mostly UK). If you know of sites that list European and Asian cons, let us know in comments so we can add it here.

Image above by Redandjonny.

April

Books
Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End
Orson Scott Card, Keeper of Dreams
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces

Movies and Television
April 4
Final Season of Battlestar Galactica begins

Conventions
April 4-6
I-CON 27 - Stony Brook, NY - $55 registration at the door
Odyssey Con VIII - Madison, WI - $45 registration at the door
WillyCon X-Treme - Wayne, NE - $20 registration at the door
April 11-13
CoastCon 31 - Biloxi, MS $40 registration at the door
April 18-20
Conglomeration 2008 - Louisville, KY - $40 registration at the door
EerieCon Ten - Niagara Falls, NY - $35 registration until April 8
New York Comic Con - New York, NY - $45 registration
Penguicon 6.0 - Troy, MI - $45 registration at the door
April 24-27
Nebula Awards Weekend - Austin, TX - $50 registration
April 25-27
RavenCon 2008 - Richmond, VA - $35 registration until
UberCon - Edison, NJ - $65 registration
Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention - Lombard, IL - $35 registration
April 26
Uni-Con 2008 - Rindge, NH - $25 registration at the door
April 26-27
Fantasticon 2008 - Copenhagen, Denmark - 15 euro

May

Books
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Ellen Datlow, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (stories)
Greg Egan, Incandescence
Nancy Kress, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls (stories)
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Steampunk (stories)

Movies and Television
May 2
Iron Man
May 9
Speed Racer
May 22
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Conventions
May 2-4
DemiCon 19 - Des Moines, IA - $45 registration
May 9-11
LepreCon 34 - Casa Grande, AZ - $40 registration through April 15
May 15-18
Eurocon-2008 - Moscow, Russia - $100 registration at the door
May 16-18
Chronicling Mars: The 2008 Eaton Science Fiction Conference - Riverside, CA - $110 registration until April 14
KeyCon 25 / CANvention 28 - Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada - 55 CAD before April 30
May 23-25
CONduit XVIII - Salt Lake City, UT - $35 registration until May 1
Oasis 21 - Orlando, FL - $30 registration until April 30
May 23-26
Balticon 42 - Baltimore, MD - $59 registration after April 1
Timegate: Regenerations - Atlanta, GA - $35 registration until April 30
WisCon 32 - Madison, WI - $45 registration through April 30
BayCon - Santa Clara, CA - $70 through May 10
May 30-June 1
ConCarolinas - Charlotte, NC - $25 registration until May 25

June

Books
Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Mercy
Stephen Baxter, Flood
Tanya Huff, Valor's Trial

Movies and Television
June 13
The Happening
The Incredible Hulk
June 27
Wanted
Wall-E

Conventions
June 13-15
DucKon 17 - Naperville, IL - $40 registration until May 1
June 26-29
Midwestcon 59 - Cincinnati, OH - $25 registration until May 25
June 27-29
ApolloCon 2008 - Houston, TX - $30 registration until May 1
June 28-29
ConRunner 2008 - Wolverhampton, West Midlands, United Kingdom - £35 registration until June 21

July

Books
Charles Stross, Saturn's Children
Greg Bear, City at the End of Time
David Louis Edelman, MultiReal

Movies and Television
July 2
Hancock
July 4
Love Story 2050
Jul 11
Meet Dave
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
Jul 18
The Dark Knight
Space Chimps
July 25
X-Files 2

Conventions
July 3-6
CONvergence 2008 - Bloomington, MN - $53.50 registration
Westercon 61: A Gathering of Fen in the Desert - Las Vegas, NV - $60 registration until April 28
July 10-13
Science Fiction Research Association 39th Annual Conference held jointly with the 2008 Campbell Conference: "Teaching, Reading and Creating Science Fiction" - Lawrence, KS - $140 registration until April 30
July 11-13
OSFest: The Omaha Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival - Omaha, NE - $40 registration until June 30
Polaris 22 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada - 50 CND registration until June 2
July 17-20
Readercon 19 with guests of honor Jonathan Lethem & James Patrick Kelly - Burlington, MA - $50 registration until June 30
July 18-20
Lazy Dragon Con - McKinney, TX - registration opens July 18
July 24-27
Dum Dum 2008 - Waterloo, IA - registration information available soon
San Diego International Comic-Con - San Diego, CA - daily registration from $20 to $35
July 25-27
Confluence 2008 - Pittsburgh, PA - $35 registration until early July (date TBA)
July 26-28
Finncon08 - Tampere, Finland - free
July 31-August 3
Oslo Science Fiction Festival - Oslo, Norway

August

Books
Ben Bova, Mars Life
Ken MacLeod, The Night Sessions
John Scalzi, Zoe's Tale
Tobias Buckell, Sly Mongoose
Judith Merril, Not Only a Woman (collection of four Merril novels, two co-authored with C.M. Kornbluth)

Movies and Television
Aug 15
Clone Wars TV series debut
Aug 29
Babylon A.D.

Conventions
August 1-3
Diversicon 16 - Minneapolis, MN - $30 registration until July 14
Fandemonium '08 - Nampa, ID - $30 registration until July 20
August 6-10
Denvention 3: The 66th World Science Fiction Convention - Denver, CO - $200 for full membership until July 10
August 15-17
Con-Version 24 - Calgary, Alberta, Canada - $60 registration
August 21-24
Gatecon - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - $135 registration
August 22-24
Bubonicon 40 - Albuquerque, NM - $30 registration until May 1
August 29-Sept. 1
Dragon*Con - Atlanta, GA - $65 registration until May 15, 2008

Additional reporting by Nivair H. Gabriel.

The image "Robo Atlas" is a sketch for a painting which will appear in the Grunberg romantic comedy, which Grunberg co-wrote with fellow Heroes star David Anders (Kensei/Adam).
Here's Joyner's artist statement:

I was born in the year 1960, in San Mateo, a suburb of San Francisco, CA. My childhood was fairly uneventful, doing the usual things most kids did, reading comics (mostly Mad, Creepy, Eerie & newspaper comic strips), playing sports, making gunpowder, and going to school, as well as drawing and painting. My father was atheist & my mother a Methodist...While my mother would bribe me with donuts to go to Sunday school, my father would take me aside & tell me 'Jesus is a crock of S_ _ _". Oddly enough they stayed together for over 50 years. I remember going to a huge Van Gogh exhibit as a child at the De Young in SF (and being very impressed) & taking painting lessons with my older sister at the local recreation center. Sometime in the first grade, classmates & teachers started to take notice of my work and eventually some of my paintings from the forth grade class, along with some other students work, were chosen for an extended statewide tour.

In high school, I spent most of my energy dating, drawing, painting & working in a lumber mill to save up for school. After winning a few awards, I knew I'd be attending art school. So I left home (in Oregon) & attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco for four years. While there, I made a few friends & won some awards. Later, with influential teachers like Francis Livingston, Kazuhiko Sano, Bill Sanchez & Robert Hunt, my illustration skills improved & soon was getting a few advertising jobs during his last semester at the Academy (mostly pen & ink & school book assignments).

After Art school, I joined the San Francisco Society of Illustrators & participated in their annual shows, charities & Air force art programs. The clients were educational publishers, high tech companies, card companies, magazine publishers & advertising agencies. In 1989 I won two gold medals in the S.F.S.I. annual show.

During the recession of the early 1990s things were not going so good, not that they ever were really that great, in regards to my illustration career, So I took a computer animation assignment, not knowing mouse from a hole in wall...learning 5 programs at the same time & trying to meet deadlines may sound fun, but I don't recommend trying it. Anyway, after 3 months of torture, though the work was successful (Mavis teaches typing for kids) I chose not to pursue animation. The training was good though, & I still use some of the things I learned. A few years later, I took a job texture mapping for a CG movie & got to relive the learning/producing nightmare. The next job, doing backgrounds for Internet cartoons at Spunky Productions, for some reason, was not such a headache. I was prepared to do it the rest of my life, but like so many other companies of the dot-com phenomenon, the company folded.

In 1999 I started to enter various juried shows at Artisans Gallery in Mill Valley, CA. & the work was well received. Shows in other galleries, (usually group shows) were positive as well. In 2000, after years of visualizing other peoples ideas, I made the decision to only paint things that I liked. Four series of paintings of different subjects were started; they were: San Francisco urbanscapes, paintings of old newspaper cartoons characters, Mexican masks, and last but not least, Japanese tin (toy) robots. Though all four series of these subjects were enjoyable to do, I chose to focus on the tin robots, as they were the most popular & seemed to have the most possibilities.

So, armed with a small collection of tin robots & spaceships I began painting them in earnest. In attempt to bring them to life without losing their charm, I showed them where they belonged: outer space. By 2002 the paintings were looking good, but they still needed something to play off of... perhaps a nemesis. After a month or so of searching for a 'nemesis' I had an epiphany while watching the movie 'Pleasantville.' In one of the scenes, Jeff Daniels paints a still life of...donuts. With thoughts of Wayne Thiebaud's pastries always close at hand, it wasn't difficult to see the battle scene of robots retreating from 300-foot tall donuts when I went to bed that night. The rest, as they say, is history.

• Blade Runner: This movie has been sampled from everyone from Sigue Sigue Sputnik to Paul Haig, but it's Gary Numan who has a real love affair with it. He's used it in at least four different songs. It's been one of the most sampled movies used in music, particularly by electronica and punk bands. Wonder if the replicants would like this stuff.
• Star Trek: New Order and Jesus Jones have used lines from Star Trek in their songs, but the most popular song to borrow from Trek was "What's On Your Mind (Pure Energy)" by Information Society. Spock's voice repeating "Pure energy" over and over was the hook for this number, and they ended up having to put (Pure Energy) in the title so people would know what this was.
• Dune: Dark and moody electronica and pseudo-goth music is attracted to Dune like the Harkonnen clan is to the spice. The trippy speech describing what the spice does is has been used by trancepop bands like Aphrodite to Astral Projection, and it makes you wish that stuff was real.
• RoboCop 2: Probably not the first movie that would spring to mind when you you think about killer samples. Front Line Assembly seriously mined this movie for their song Mindphaser, and made a killer scifi video to go with it.
• THX 1138: Electronica group Front 242 tossed in ten lines from this movie into their "Operating Tracks" song, and hopefully helped expose more people to this movie. Plus, if it was good enough for Babyland and Nine Inch Nails, who are we to argue?