Gill, who's executive editor at Harper Collins imprints Morrow/Avon/Eos, writes over at Harper Library:

Urban fantasy (and its cousin paranormal romance) is the easiest gateway to the genre-since it takes place in a world that is very much our own, only with magic. Not coincidentally, it's also the hottest thing going, between the phenomenon that is Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga to the incredibly popular True Blood tv series. Urban fantasies are an easy way for readers to try the genre, and there are a lot of great ones out there.

With urban fantasy consuming an ever-greater market share, it's hard to argue with Gill's point. But it makes us wonder if science fiction isn't suffering partly because it lacks such an easy, newbie-friendly first hit. Or rather, that stuff exists, but it's not necessarily leading people to science fiction.

You have adventure stories set in the present day, but with fantastical gadgets, but those are generally marketed as "techno-thrillers" rather than SF. And when a science fiction giant like William Gibson does novels that are set in the present or very near future, featuring unusual technology, they're frequently marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF. Meanwhile, writers like Charles Stross are proclaiming that you literally cannot write near-future science-fiction at all, because the future is so unpredictable, and many of the genre's most celebrated works take place thousands, or even millions, of years from now.

Do we need someone to invent the genre of "urban science fiction" to reach out to people who want to read SF stories set in the present day, in a familiar setting? Or just a return to "five minutes into the future" as a standard setting for stories?

Top image: cover to Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty.

Writer Mark Charan Newton (Nights Of Viijamur) cites some reasons why "science fiction is dying and fantasy is the future," including the movie popularity of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings, the predominance of female readers, and fact that real-life science is now as full of "sensawunda" as science fiction.

But game designer Andrew P. Mayer has a different explanation — fantasy is more relevant to our near future than science fiction:

Steampunk is the most obvious example. While it is generally considered to be a genre is fascinated with the past, it is, in its own way, truly futuristic. By telling stories of transformed ancestors it allows us to redefine our vision of ourselves from the other end of the telescope. It is a kind of pseudo-fantasy for a world that is clinging onto the real as it moves beyond the virtual. They are tales of a reality where humanity may on the cusp of truly becoming magicians, capable of transforming the physical world in more radical ways than we ever imagined possible.

And fantasy seems oddly predictive in other ways as well. The threat of global warming seems to be something out of Tolkein rather than Asimov, although without the convenient anthropomorphic villain to slay in order to solve our problems and set the world "right". Our solutions may have to come through acceptance of our abilities rather than an attempt to fight against them...

By populating our modern urban landscapes with creatures of myth, we could be giving ourselves metaphorical stories for the kinds of radical choices that may soon be coming for the human race. And for a generation that will have far more control over their own biology than any that has come before, it may well more helpful to have grown up with those of fantasies as opposed to rocket ships and space aliens.

What do you think? Could fantasy be providing us with more touchstones for our troubling future than science fiction right now? It's an intriguing argument, to say the least.

Robot dragon photo from Coated.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design and layout by Stephanie Fox.

I don't want to spoil Hunter Prey for you too much, but suffice to say it's a twisty thriller that will remind you a little bit of Enemy Mine and (surprisingly) of Treasure of Sierra Madre. There is no "treasure" per se, but Collora's tale of shifting loyalties among a group of aliens and their prisoner - stranded after a crash on an alien world - brings to mind classic movies about desperate, selfish men in who would rather die than work together to survive.

Shot on a microscopic budget in Mexico, the film's concept design is fantastic. Collora's greatest strength lies in creating settings of rich depth and designing characters who simply kick ass. It's easy to forget you're watching what is basically a labor of love when the design is so stunning and cool.

Hunter Prey asks a question that has preoccupied a lot of recent science fiction, from Doctor Who to the new Star Trek movie: When somebody has exterminated your whole planet, what do you do? One of Hunter Prey's characters is the only remaining member of his species, and a large part of the film is about whether he's justified in trying to exterminate the species that committed genocide against his own.

So when can you see it? Collora has just completed the movie, and is working out details on a distribution deal, but hopefully you'll have a chance to look at it in 2010. For now, revel in these exclusive stills from the movie.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

This time around, we're not sticking an hyperlinks in the PDF version of this calendar, because that makes it way harder to make corrections to the calendar when people point out problems. Instead, here's a list of all the conventions in November, with URLs:

Friday the 6th:
Aki Con
Neko Con (thru Sun) Convention
Pacific Media Expo

Saturday the 7th:
Zenkaikon
King Con Brooklyn
Cincinnati Comic and Anime Convention

Sunday the 8th:
Seattle ComiCard Convention
Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention

Friday the 13th:
Dotcon
Izumicon
New England Fan Experience
Windycon

Friday the 20th:
Anime Crossroads
Anime USA
Another Anime Convention
Bishie Con
Daisho Con
Yule Con
Philcon
Zona Con

Saturday the 21st.:
Boston Super Megafest
Virginia Comic-Con

Friday the 27th.:

Tomodachi Fest
OryCon
Chicago Tardis 2009

Saturday the 28th.:
Atlanta Anime Day

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design by Stephanie Fox.

Sorry it took us so long to get a corrected version up — Stephanie is on the road, and I was too swamped this week to sit down and go through the calendar before it went up, as much as I shoudl have. Next month's calendar should go much, much more smoothly. We think.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here. And I'll be making changes to it on the fly, so if there are any inaccuracies or omissions, please comment or ping me via email.

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here. And welcome back Stephanie Fox on calendar design duties!

Research by Alexis Brown. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - with hyperlinks to books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.

"It's easy to dismiss sci fi flicks as clumsy and loud, but the critiques miss a key virtue. Unlike other genres, fanboy blockbusters are a constantly innovating form, with an important message about the present even as they outline visions of our future. In romantic comedies, the scene can shift from the Civil War to the Los Angeles real estate market as long as boy meets girl amidst the bayonets or billboards. Horror movies can switch weapons with no fall-off in audience long as there are coeds to dice. Come Oscar season, World War II films are such a reliable source of nominations that Kate Winslet's turn as a sexy Nazi became a simultaneous joke on the genre and a lock for the Academy Award.

"Science fiction and superhero movies don't have the luxury of simply finding the latest neighborhood where attractive singles are settling or the flashiest car on the market and plugging those accessories into a formula. By nature, those films have to imagine the future, to put something on screen that audiences would never see in their everyday lives. Sometimes, those visions are farfetched, unrealistic, paranoid, immature, or deeply cheesy. Of the four major sci-fi movies being released this spring and summer, two feature vengeful giant robots. Another centers on a guy who metalizes his skeleton, and the fourth plants spaceships in Iowa cornfields. They'll vary in quality, and plausibility, but at least they have something to say about the perils and opportunities of the future.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first of these movies, is a perfect example of the power of a bad fanboy movie. The film is far too full of cheap-looking special effects and dialogue that seems ludicrous outside a cartoon bubble to be really absorbing. But Wolverine has far more to say about its chosen subject, the scientific manipulation of the human body, than, for example, the romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has to say about relationships between men and women." — Alyssa Rosenberg, writing in The Atlantic.

There's always an element of time travel involved in the io9 calendar - we're bringing you the future of science fiction entertainment! - but this time around, you'll have to travel back in time to late April, when this calendar should have gone up. Blame computer problems that turned my Apple computer into an expensive brick, and left me having to reinstall every piece of software from scratch.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF - now with hyperlinks for books and conventions - by clicking here.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.

"There's probably an element of snobbism," McClatchy said, adding that other members may not share his taste for "thrillers, detective stuff, hard-boiled noir stuff."

"I don't know, but it may simply be unfamiliarity, that people here don't sit around reading science fiction. They're rereading Flaubert, or they're rereading Richard Price. There's a man who has raised the underworld to Parnassus."

- American Academy Of Arts president J.D. McClatchy, explaining why the Academy has never elected a science fiction author to its membership, when T.C. Boyle and Richard Price have just been elected.

As always, the whole shebang is online as a printable PDF here.

This month's conventions include Middle Tennessee Anime Convention, WillyCon, I-Con 28, Cinema Wasteland, Norwescon, Minicon, JordanCon, Xanadu Las Vegas, FX Show, Star Fest, Chiller Theater and Conestoga.

Notable books include Ballistic Babes by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem, Other Earths edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake, WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer, Contact with Chaos by Michael Z. Williamson, The Immortality Factor by Ben Bova, The Oracle Paradox by Steve Antczak, Of Wind And Sand by Sylvie Borard, Genesis by Bernard Beckett, The Grand Conjunction: Astropolis by Sean Williams, The Moonpool: A Novel by P.T. Deutermann, Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi and Marionettes, Inc. by Ray Bradbury.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.

It's easy to overlook this basic fact about the series because most of the action took place in outer space, and involved a population of ship-bound humans in constant and miserable war with a frighteningly advanced species of biotech creatures called Cylons. But BSG was not about space and robots. It was about what set of circumstances could rid humans of their cravings for war, hierarchy, and slaves. And it was a thought experiment about what would happen if you tried to reboot the human race from a tiny remnant of the population.

Looked at from this perspective, it's obvious why so many critics talked about how BSG had an appeal that stretched beyond the confines of science fiction fandom. It was a drama about the building blocks of human society: Government, defense, family, home, science, and religion. Yes, science was in there, but it wasn't the focus. This also goes a long way toward explaining why BSG's spinoff series, Caprica, will take place entirely planetside, in a very Earthlike city, during the decades leading up to the catastrophic events of BSG. This is a series that asks questions about the future of our social relationships, and you don't need spaceships to answer those.

I'm not saying BSG did a bad job with the spaceships and robots. The show had some amazing space fights and cool ideas about biological robots. But its representations of future tech were in the service of an overarching preoccupation with social development.

So what exactly does BSG predict about the future of human culture? In some ways it simply extrapolates from our world today, which was made a little too obvious by the show's finale where we see proto-Cylons in the dancing figures of Sony bots. Humans never do overcome their desire for servants who will do all their tedious, dangerous and physically taxing labor. Even as scientific innovations evolve, spawning self-aware cyborgs and faster-than-light travel, human culture remains tangled in an ancient feedback loop of master vs. slave.

But the roles of master and slave have changed a great deal from what we see today on Earth. Though there are still class divisions (we know that some colony planets have fewer resources than the wealthy Caprica), men and women have achieved what appears to be total equality. We see this in little ways - women share the same barracks with men in the military - but also in big ones. Women like fighter pilot Starbuck, the female cylons, and President Roslin are leaders. There was a brilliant scene in the TV movie Razor where a rescue mission is comprised of a weapons expert, a pilot, and a tactical expert who all just happen to be female. Women are simply everywhere in this universe, in positions of power and bravery as well as positions of debasement and perfidy. **

With women and men standing side-by-side as equals, however, somebody else has to bear the burdens that women did traditionally. Someone else has to be the hard-working but non-voting members of society, the group who cleans up after the people with power but never says a word. And that would be the Cylons. So future humanity has cleaned up its act when it comes to gender - and to a certain extent race - but it has not lost its drive to enslave.

Interestingly the most memorable and important Cylons in the series are all women, and they are all obsessed with what amount to futuristic reproductive rights. They want to be able to have babies when and how they want, just the way twentieth century feminists did. But the Cylons are hardly like downtrodden human women of yore, pressing their noses against glass ceilings and bemoaning the feminine mystique. They have nukes, and they use them.

So if you consider BSG an example of hard social fiction, then the cultural McGuffin that sets its narrative ball rolling is this: What if an historically downtrodden group suddenly, in one generation, became smarter and stronger than their oppressors? What every single woman became smarter than the smartest male physicist, and stronger than the strongest male rapist? What then?

There's a limit to my comparison between Cylons and women here, because of course BSG isn't about a bunch of men hiding in tin cans from angry women. Instead the show poses a more universal question, about what might happen if a group of slaves suddenly evolved much faster than their masters.

And the answer is the entirety of this television series, which is at times utterly brilliant in answering this question. Not only would those slaves destroy their masters' worlds, but they would also force those masters to rethink what it means to be human. Those humans would have to come face-to-face with what it means to structure a society around masters and slaves, and if they were very, very lucky they'd eventually figure out some way to create a hybrid culture where nobody enslaves anyone because the very idea is horrifying.

As BSG came to its conclusion a little over a week ago, humanity has in fact reached a point very like this. Humans and cylons are living together as families, creating a new civilization among proto-humans 150,000 years ago on Earth. They have no slaves, and they have shed the last vestiges of a centralized government. They are about to create a society so different from our own that it is barely imaginable.

Unfortunately, they make one crucial mistake: The human-cylon hybrid people also shed their technologies, their cities, and their memories of the lessons they learned from the slaves who evolved. And so the people of our present day, who are slowly moving beyond the era of human slavery, are once again trying to create a new breed of robot slaves.

Still we are left with the hope that humanity won't make the same mistakes this time around. We haven't built sentient robots yet, and we haven't yet enslaved beings whose consciousness is comparable to our own. We haven't yet denied our equals the vote; we haven't trained our high-tech progeny that their only roles in our eyes are those of gunfodder, ditchdigger, and whore. And this is where it's useful to think about the role of science fiction in the human future.

People who create hard science fiction hope that their work will inspire new inventions and scientific discoveries. And those who create hard social fiction hope their work will lead to discoveries in the cultural realm. Perhaps BSG can serve as a memory, lost long ago, about what happens to a society that clings to the roles of master and slave.

If any invention arises from BSG, maybe it will be a society that understands not just what is wrong with being a slave - because we all know that, in our bones - but a society that understands what is wrong with being a master.

** One could make this argument to a lesser extent about people of color on BSG as well. The show's highest ranks are filled by people who are all shades of brown, often biracial, as if at this point in the future there has been so much intermarriage that traditional racial categories are barely in existence (though notably there are still plenty of unmixed whites). Unfortunately, the showrunners failed to cast a racially-diverse group as the show's core characters, so it's hard to convince us as viewers that this is a future where power is truly multicultural.

As always, the fantasy book market is stronger than the SF market, and fantasy has a healthier midlist. And the overall trend in SF book sales, over the past several years, remains one of decline - but there's no evidence the economic shitstorm has hurt SF. (In fact, somewhat the reverse, perhaps because people need more escapism and looks into a more distant future.)

Hoffman, whose science fiction movies include Sphere and Outbreak, has told friends that he's tired of the "silliness" of most films in the genre. He thinks movies can have an entertaining plot and present real science at the same time, according to an anonymous Friend Of Dustin quoted in the Australian newspaper.

An associate said: "Dustin thinks you can make entertaining movies which also get a message across without slowing down the action. He enjoys comic book blockbusters but if they go over the top and don't care about getting it right, why should the audience care?"

Hoffman, who was a chemist at the Maxwell House coffee company before he became a movie star, has teamed up with a group called the Science And Entertainment Exchange, which aims to play matchmaker between scientists and film-makers. Weirdly enough, the Exchange, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, was founded by Naked Gun director Jerry Zucker, Hoffman's neighbor. (Besides Hoffman and Zucker, the Exchange's officers include Gregory Benford, Lawrence Kasdan, Rob Reiner and Craig Venter.)

Will the group actually help to increase the accuracy of science in most movies? Probably not, but if it leads to even one or two more films that are actually focussed on real science, that would be a major boon. [The Australian]

Book highlights include William Gibson's Spook Country in paperback, Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God, Allen Steele's Coyote Horizon, Alastair Reynolds' House Of Suns, Peter F. Hamilton's The Temporal Void, and Walter Jon Williams' This Is Not A Game. The Real Ghostbusters and Voltron come to DVD, along with the unfortunate Howard The Duck. And in theaters, there's Watchmen, Witch Mountain, Knowing and Monsters Versus Aliens.

As always, a printable PDF is here.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.

As always, a printable PDF is here.

Research by Alasdair Wilkins. Design by Stephanie Fox. Layout by Charlie Jane Anders.