The formerly comics-focused Wondercon was much more about movies and TV this year, especially with DC being tight-lipped, Marvel skipping it and Image canceling at the last minute. And many of the most popular narratives had to do with war and political upheaval.

Conspiracy theories: Anti-establishment paranoia is back, and X-Files 2 is its harbinger. We still don't have a clear sense of what the new X-Files movie will be about, but writer/director Chris Carter said the show's conspiracy-mania had gone out of fashion after 9/11, but now it was making a comeback. We already know the movie won't be about the show's overarching "mythos," but that doesn't mean it won't feature government cover-ups and conspiracies. After all, it'll be competing with the new Indiana Jones movie, which apparently is about Area 51 and Roswell. Cover-ups are cool!
And then there was the Jericho panel, where producer Carol Barbee said the show's writers "don't talk politics" — and then proceeded to talk about politics for an hour. Besides the way Jericho's evil government contractor Ravenwood was a direct metaphor for Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq, Barbee also talked about the ripped-from-the-headlines terrorism plots and Homeland Security paranoia on her show.
The war machine: And meanwhile, the direct-to-DVD Starship Troopers 3 turned out to be a satirical war movie, in which weird government propaganda for super-bombs jostled with Fleet recruiting ads, in a war that's gone on too long and lost public support. (Sound like anything in real life to you?) And speaking of war movies, the new Iron Man film keeps the comics' backstory about Tony Stark being a high-tech weapons merchant who has a crisis of conscience after he's taken prisoner. And Iron Man is serving as a metaphor for the military-industrial complex in the comics as well, according to Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics. Wolk dropped some science about how World War Hulk and Civil War are metaphors for the backlash against the government crackdown after 9/11.

So where were the right-wing narratives, about evil terrorists, weak left-wing governments and cultural elites repressing everybody else? We didn't run across them as much. My guess is, wait until year two or three of an Obama or Clinton presidency, and suddenly you'll have all the conservative space fantasies that you could ever want, from the likes of Frank Miller. We can't wait!

New York Must Be Destroyed

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

The Surveillance State is Watching You

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

The Terrorists Are Everywhere!

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

Department of Homeland Security is Plotting to End the World

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

Desert Planets are the Source of All Unrest

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