Right now, SGU is on a break after its midseason finale two weeks ago, and leaving us all with a giant cliffhanger. The first season will pick back up in April. And now that Syfy has announced that they will be ordering another 20 episodes, the second season of SGU will take off in the fall of 2010.

Sanctuary has also been given another 20-episode order for its third season, thus keeping Friday nights happily full of new SF television.

But will SGU begin to treat its female characters better? There appears to be hope, judging from a new interview with Executive Producer Robert Cooper, who owned up to the fact that the women on SGU are completely underutilized and underdeveloped. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cooper addressed the show's female problem, and while he focused more on the sexualization of Stargate, we're happy he at least copped to keeping the women aboard Destiny in the back rows for far too long.

There's been criticism about the female characters. Some of it seems to suggest that having characters who are at all sexual automatically makes a show sexist, that anything less than a neutered "Star Trek" ideal is somehow bad.

Cooper: I think our female actors are playing strong female characters and they are proud of the characters they're playing. We didn't do a good enough job establishing them early on, it took too long for those traits to come to the forefront, and I think people are recognizing that in the later episodes. But that's the other big hot button — whether sex belongs in sci-fi. It's a huge deal with our fan base and I think its bizarre to ignore sex as a part of translating the human condition to fiction. If we're going to try and tell a more realistic character story we need to include those things.

Also, one comment, as a fan: a little bit of Kino-vision goes a long way.

Cooper: It's part of the language of TV now, that reality TV point-of-view that you're just sitting with those people and it helps bring reality to sci fi. I don't think we over-use it; I directed the Kino episode.

So hopefully merely realizing this problem means that they will make a conscience effort to tell us all who T.J. actually is, along with all the other background women aboard Destiny. So our final question, will you tune in for another season?

[THR]

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.

He must escape or die.
. . . Almost instantly the shrill sound of a whistle broke to his right and a street guard stepped from a doorway, struggling to free her rifle from her garments.
"Male Pig!" she screamed. "Halt!"

Keith flees underground, literally and figuratively, where he meets Angela, a boot-wearing resistance fighter hottie. Luckily for Keith, while women on the outside reject all males, Angela and other female members of the Subterraneans resistance movement are "attached to the men with arm-clinging closeness." Soon he and Angela are working (arm-in-arm, of course) to assassinate the President, and reclaim gender supremacy for men.
The Feminists had about as much to do with the women's movement as Cheez Whiz does with a sharp Wisconsin cheddar but it probably simultaneously terrified and titillated readers threatened by the very thought of those uppity, "bra-burning" libbers. At least one person was thrilled by the vision it presented—don't miss the editorial comment scrawled on the front cover!

Sadly, it probably isn't. This is a clear case of male self-oppression, guys designing their own avatars to be so physically imposing that they are pretty much useless. One day, though, I hope to hear that there is a secret hacker army of female game developers who have infiltrated Blizzard Games and started designing male characters to look as ridiculous as possible. They would be a combination of ninja warriors and culture jammers. And they would all look like this:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder [WOW Insider]

According to Times reporter Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, who has the interview on tape:

He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".

Should we let this guy's foolish remarks undermine our admiration for the science he pioneered? Yes. There has always been a strong element of racism and sexism in the study of genetics, a field whose history is deeply bound up with the eugenics movement (which was, after all, a "scientific" movement). Leaders in the field like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson routinely make comments about how people are "hardwired" to behave in certain ways based on their genetic heritage, which is often linked to their racial backgrounds or sex. Genomics and evolutionary biology studies on the genetic inferiority of female intelligence are what motivated former Harvard President Larry Summers to claim that there are so few women in science because we just aren't smart enough. Back in 2003, I saw Harvard professor Steven Pinker give a lecture at MIT where he speculated that perhaps Jews are just genetically more intelligent than other groups.

These guys give science a bad name, and they derail good work that might get done in their fields by bringing sex and race bias into the lab. I'm glad that Watson has finally gotten a good spanking for a lifetime of asswipage. Too bad it didn't happen earlier.

Here's the article from the London Times where Watson stuck his foot in his mouth for the last time.

The "honey, I'm home...and you're dead" trope is getting rawther tired, isn't it? Didn't I read this book three years ago?

Mister Miracle walks in on the corpse of Big Barda, surrounded by groceries, in Death Of The New Gods #1, out today. She was going to cook him a nice meal, and now she's splatted. At least this time, Barda is a superheroine in her own right, not just a civilian casualty. But if they were going to kill off one of the most badass superheroes, they should have shown us how she went down fighting. Image from Scans Daily.

Almost Peed My Pants Reading This [Occasional Superheroine]

He could totally patch that suit up with his ring. He chooses not to.

The story continues in this week's Green Lantern. Another Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, emerges from the fear-eating monster Parallax totally naked. His fellow hero, Guy Gardner, uses his power ring to clothe poor Kyle — but only in a pair of tight-fitting boxer shorts. That's the kind of team spirit we like to see.

This Week's Haul [Living Between Wednesdays]

Actually, The Brave One did way better than Kevin Bacon's competing revenge flick Death Sentence. Maybe the problem is with War-On-Terror gun porno?

You can spend hours dissecting Robinov's idiocy, but the fact is it's bad for science fiction. As Slashfilm points out, the danger is that we'll end up with characters like Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four movies, who's a bride and not much else. Science fiction needs well-rounded, interesting women in challenging situations — not just mindless fluffers for the male hero.

Warner Bros. Says "No More Female Lead Characters" [Slashfilm]