And here's your spoiler warning. Spoilers ahead!

So in Avatar, Jake Sully is a marine who's suffered a spinal injury (someone "blew a hole in my life," as he puts it) and his life is going nowhere. Until he gets a chance to go to the far-off Pandora and take his dead brother's place, piloting a genetically engineered "avatar." Built out of alien DNA, the avatar allows Sully to walk among the Na'Vi, the giant blue natives of Pandora, and look like one of them. Because Sully is a warrior, like the Na'Vi tribespeople, he finds acceptance in their ranks — even as he knows his fellow humans are preparing to relocate the Na'Vi by force, to get at a rich supply of a rare substance called Unobtanium.

As Jake learns to use his new alien body, leaping from treetops and clifftops, romancing the chief's sexy daughter (Zoe Saldana) and bonding with a flying dragon for life, you'll discover your new favorite escapist fantasy. Jake falls in love with the excitement and the nobility and yes, the biodiversity, of Pandora, and you're right there with him. Avatar's journey really does feel magical and transformative, for Jake and for the audience.

It's hard to imagine a movie where medium and story are so closely married. Even as Jake Sully climbs into a coffin and abandons his human body for a spry alien one, Cameron is hoping to pull you into his alien world to a much greater degree than the usual movie immersion. Cameron has spent untold millions of Fox's dollars to make you forget you're really in a movie theater, instead of on an alien planet. The whole exercise is a metaphor for the experience of watching any movie, with Cameron's camera lens represented by the beds that transfer people's minds into alien bodies.

And the film's 3-D, CG and motion-capture really are all they're cracked up to be. The scenes which look trifling on your little computer window become etched on your mind's eye, when you see them on the big screen in 3-D. The transition from live-action to animation feels like a costume change, and when live-action people are on the screen with CG characters, it's miles away from Roger Rabbit, or even from Andy Serkis' Gollum.

Cameron is clearly saying: Look what technology can do. It can tight-beam your consciousness into a totally foreign time and place. And just maybe, like Jake Sully, you'll find yourself going native.

There's only one problem with this notion, and it nearly wrecks an otherwise nearly perfect movie: The further we venture into Pandora's heart, the more unconvincing it is. At first, the forest moon is heart-breakingly beautiful and well-realized, and every weird creature on the planet stands out in its own way. When Jake gets chased by big dinosaur-like monsters, it's tons more thrilling than your standard Roland Emmerich/Michael Bay CG spectacle. But once Jake gets himself embedded among the alien Na'Vi people, the illusion starts to fall apart.

This is partly because once you're surrounded by Pandora's fantasy-land, it starts to get just a bit too pretty, and certainly too rich. About the time hundreds of glowing tree-spirits land on Jake's blue avatar body, the animation starts to feel a bit... cartoony.

But more than that, we never really see the Na'Vi as a convincing society — instead we see a ludicrous "noble savage" stereotype, that only gets cruder and more ridiculous the deeper into it we go. When Jake is only interacting with Saldana's character, Neytiri, their interaction feels natural enough. But once you're in the middle of a Na'Vi crowd scene, you have a harder time believing in these people. And that, in turn, may pull you right out of the movie.

Cameron has clearly thought endlessly about every aspect of this movie's worldbuilding, but it never seems to have occurred to him that populating his planet with Pocohontas/Tarzan ooga-booga people would be a mistake. The Na'Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they're good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

By the time the Na'Vi's matriarch is leading the whole tribe in a hippie ritual, with lots of swaying in front of the sacred tree, you'll be rolling your eyes so much, it may interfere with the 3-D stereoscopy.

(When I mentioned the term "forest moon" a little while ago, it may have created an association in your mind. That association was not entirely unintentional.)

In a way, Cameron's strengths work against him a little bit here. The humans' world feels completely lived-in. Pandora's soldiers could have stepped right out of the first reel of Aliens. Cameron is in love with all of the toys, from the Huey-helicopter-inspired flying machines to the "avatar" chambers. His human characters are mostly well-worn archetypes, from the weaselly evil corporate guy (Giovanni Ribisi, channeling Aliens' Paul Reiser) to Stephen Lang's brutal Col. Quaritch (bringing the George C. Scott) to Sigourney Weaver's tough scientist with a heart of gold. The human world isn't as original as Pandora, but it feels a lot more fully inhabited. The contrast doesn't do the dragon-riding, hissing, deeply spiritual tree people any favors.

It's likely that if the Na'Vi felt as real as the human society — if you could feel the dirt under your fingernails after a day's bow-hunting and chafe under the patriarchal tribal leadership — then the escapism of running off to join the clan might not seem as alluring. In his earlier movies, Cameron never had to try and make us fall in love with Skynet, or the Alien queen. So it's not surprising that he stumbles when he tries to create an "other" that's lovable rather than scary.

The movie's other big problem is somewhat related: It gets preachy about environmentalism, to an extent that may grate on your nerves. Early on, when Jake is learning about the nature-loving ways of the Na'Vi, he grumbles that he hopes this "tree-hugger crap" won't be on the final exam. And it totally is.

But like I said, Avatar is otherwise a nearly perfect movie. (It's up to you whether stereotypical native peoples or eco-lectures are a deal-breaker.) As an action-adventure movie, it's vastly superior to pretty much any you've seen in the past few years. As science fiction, it's thrilling, because it's pro-exploration and its most unambiguously heroic character is Weaver's character, Dr. Grace Augustine. It shouldn't feel so refreshing, to have a smart, heroic scientist whose scientific explanations are cool and important to the movie, but it is. Weaver has lost none of her fire, and is a joy to watch.

Sam Worthington, as Jake, does a great job of selling his slow transformation from cynical wise-ass human to a warrior of the Na'Vi people, without overplaying it. Worthington has that rare gift, of seeming totally down-to-Earth even when he's in the middle of a totally outlandish scene, and it keeps him completely relatable even as he's embracing a totally alien culture. He really does carry the movie, in both his human and alien bodies.

And you have to admire a movie whose central message is that only by becoming a wholly artificial life form can you touch something true and natural. This contradiction is at the heart of the movie — a luddite fable made with technology so advanced, Cameron had to create it from scratch.

Cameron deliberately avoids any of the usual cop-outs you'd see with this kind of story. The natives know from the first time they lay eyes on Jake that he's a "dream walker" (their word for alien meat-puppets operated by sleeping humans. And they call humans the "sky people.") When they come to accept Jake as one of them, it's with the knowledge that he's actually a tiny pink-skin in a tank somewhere. And the movie's arc isn't the standard one, of Jake realizing that he's "really" a human and should stop trying to pretend to be one of the aliens. Rather, becoming a genetically engineered, and hence synthetic, creature allows Jake to discover who he really is.

So, to sum up, everything you've heard or thought about Avatar is true. It's one of the most vivid, visceral movies you've ever seen. It's cheesy enough for ten Swiss villages. It's James Cameron delivering an action thrill ride, at the top of his game. It's a schlocky Dances With Wolves rip-off. It will transform the way you think about movies forever.

The 1990s were really the heydey for wonderful but not-quite-convincing space skirmishes. We used to see tons of ships flying around our screen, often too many to count. Unlike Battlestar Galactica's quick cuts and weird handheld camera footage, these 1990s space wars were usually filmed with an unflinching eye or a slow pan, letting you see every computer-generated line and explosion.

And it's totally awesome.

You can compare these massive space shoot-outs to video games, but it's not entirely accurate — because the absolute best of these TV shoot-em-ups have more sensory overload, and you can't even imagine trying to interact with them. (I have seen a few video game cut scenes that approach this level of overload though.) You get ships flying in every possible direction, or a hundred individual starships on screen at once, and all you can do is sit there and drool. It doesn't look real, but your imagination fills in the gaps, which only makes it better.

That's really the key — these space battles are super elaborate and over the top, and that helps them draw on your imagination.

Remember when you used to imagine what a whole fleet of Federation and Klingon Starships flying into battle would look like? And then Star Trek: Deep Space Nine finally gave it to us, and it was completely unreal looking, yet amazing:

It wasn't really until the 1990s when you could have tons of ships flying in formation, like these SA-43 Hammerheads from Space: Above And Beyond:

Possibly my favorite 1990s CG space battles came from Babyon 5, however. They were even cheaper looking than Trek's battles, but even more ambitious. Look how much stuff they pack into every frame of these battles. And every penny they don't have for CG effects is more than made up for by the conviction of the actors:

For people who grew up on space battles as shown on the original Trek, Space: 1999, Blake's 7 or even the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, these dogfights are revelatory. If space battles in the late 1970s and 1980s were all about trying to match the dog-fighting feel of Star Wars, then 1990s space battles were all about massive fleets going at it, sustaining massive casualties and fighting on. And yes, the massive casualties are a big part of why these battles rock so hard — you don't ever quite believe that each of those Federation starships has hundreds of crewmembers aboard, dying every time there's another flare on your screen, but it's still kind of horrifying and exciting to think so.

It really is all about suspension of disbelief — these battles ask more suspension of disbelief from you, but they give more back as well.

Here's some amazing battle footage, showing crowds of ships swarming, in this snippet from Andromeda as well. (Skip the first minute or so of this video):

And some awe-inspiring Farscape action:

And then there's Doctor Who's fake but oh-so-lovely Dalek fleet:

I suspect that we'll see a wave of nostalgia for these 1990s-style fleet-on-fleet battles, one of these days. Just like today, geeks feel nostalgic for guns that went "pew-pew-pew" and models roaring around fake starfields, in another decade everyone will be discovering the beauty of computer-generated space mayhem.

For now, though, the only place you can get this kind of star-fighting (in the United States, anyway) is on Syfy:

We interviewed creature designers Wayne Barlowe and Neville Page, plus concept artists James Clyne, Ryan Church and Daphne Yap, about creating a whole new universe from scratch. Plus we've got some stunning concept art, from the new book The Art Of Avatar. In a year that's seen some amazing books of movie concept art, The Art Of Avatar features 106 pages of lush full-color paintings, interspersed with the industry's greatest design minds geeking out about every little aspect of Avatar's creation.

So here are a few things you didn't know about the design of James Cameron's Avatar:

Avatar Started As A Four-Month, Late-Night Jam Session At James Cameron's House

"[We'd be] working late at Jim's house, and having him come back after a three week spell of being down at the freaking Titanic, and having him tell us a story [about being on the ocean floor]." Read the rest of the story.

Pandora's creatures were partly based on cars

Early on in the process, James Cameron "mentioned the core idea" of having Pandora's creatures be "superslick and aerodynamic, and be like a race car with racing stripes," says creature designer Neville Page. Read the rest of the story.

Those crazy color schemes are from the ocean floor — and Art Nouveau

"In the real world, we didn't invent these colors. They exist on animals today. We didn't invent a whole new palette. I think the problem is — the challenge is — you don't often see large creatures with this much color on them." Read the rest of the story.

The human hardware, including those crazy battlesuits, is all based on real stuff

"One thing I worked on big interior for the mech suits, and the whole interior had to have a reason and function for why the suits were lined up the way they were, and how they could work on them like a pit-stop at an F1 race. It had to have that functionality." Read the rest of the story.

Avatar concept art from The Art Of Avatar (Abrams 2009)

Artist Chris Foss is known for his visionary presentation of future technology and weird vistas. He illustrated many book covers in the 70s, 80s and 90s including the Lensman series, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and Jack Vance's Demon Princes novels. His covers frequently feature spaceships that are sturdier and chunkier than the usual sleek space rockets you see on many other book covers of the time.

His cool vision of the future led him to be asked to work on production designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky's uncompleted Dune movie, in the mid 1970s, and later on Ridley Scott's Alien and Superman: The Movie.

As Alejandro Jodorowsky said in 1977:

And thus were born the mimetic spaceships, the leather and dagger-studded machines of the fascist Sardaukers;- the pachydermatous geometry of Emperor Padishah's golden planet; the delicate butterfly plane and so many other incredible machines, which I am sure will one day populate interstellar space. Chris Foss knows that today's technical reality is tomorrow's falsehood. Chris also knows that today's pure art is tomorrow's reality. Man will conquer space mounted on Foss' spaceships, never in NASA's concentration camps of the spirit. I was grateful for the existence of my friend. He brought the colours of the apocalypse to the sad machines of a future without imagination.

He has a website, ChrisFossArt.com, where you can see more of his work and buy signed prints of all of these images. And he has a group on Facebook, where you can keep up with his projects.

Pirate Ship, From Jodorowsky's Dune.
Harkonnen's flagship, From Jodorowsky's Dune.
Spice transport, from Dune.
Emperor's palace, from Dune.
Guild Tug, from Dune.
Breaking the Light Barrier
Awesome space image.
Awesome spaceship.
Image for ConceptShips blog.
Awesome spaceship.
Amazing space image.

Part of what's really cool about looking at concept art from remakes, revamps and rethinks of classic space sagas is seeing how designers reinvent the classic shapes and original images. But another huge part is seeing how designers add new ships and create new concepts to graft onto the existing lore, and try to make it all fit together. So you have Spock's Jellyfish ship and the Narada in Star Trek, and a host of new ship designs in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. And sometimes, like in Lost In Space, you just have to start from scratch if you want to create something really cool looking.

Here are the revamped spaceship concept art pics (plus a few other goodies) that prove remakes may be drek on the whole, but they do give us some amazing art to drool over:

Star Trek: Reinventing the Enterprise and creating other new classic ships.

Superman Rebooted: spaceships and a Kryptonian space battlesuit.

Stargate Universe concept art: inside the Destiny

Doctor Who: redesigning the TARDIS interior, circa 2005.

Lost In Space: a weirdly awesome space fighter.

Planet Of The Apes: Awful movie, but amazing spaceship design.

Battlestar Galactica: bringing her back out of mothballs.

Star Wars prequels: the concept art is better than the movies. Really.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was watching Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II TV movie. I was wondering why this post-apocalyptic story of tyrannical dominatrices and mutants was less interesting than Star Trek, and I couldn't escape the conclusion: Genesis II was less interesting because it was less fun — and especially less escapist. Instead of cool people on an awesome spaceship packed with fantastic toys, like Communicators and Tricorders, you had a guy trapped in Planet Of The Apes without any apes. And with an extra helping of Roddenberry's signature preachiness.

And I started thinking about escapism, and why we tend to look down on it. We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They're automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world's unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.

Escapism is the candy-coated pill, the sedative designed to lull you away from realizing quite how messed up things are — and how much culpability you, as a no-doubt middle-class person, have for the situation. Escapism is opium, soma.

The distinction between escapist and "realist" fiction isn't even a matter of utopian versus dystopian narratives — after all, much escapist fiction is dystopian, and plenty of realistic fiction has an utopian impulse at its core. But when movies or books depict someone escaping from the world's unpleantness, or just offer a vision which allows the watcher or reader to escape through their imagination, then we deplore the cowardice of anyone who seeks to run away from their problems in this way. Most of all, escapism is inherently just not serious.

Escapism: pulpy and tacky

Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case against escapism very potently in her essay "Escape Routes," gathered in the collection The Language Of The Night: Essays On Fantasy And Science Fiction:

What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured — like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always towards an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail.

And inside the padded cell people say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest.

They don't care if nobody outside is listening. They don't want to know there is an outside.

Because the most famous works of SF are socially and culturally speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Capek, Stapeldon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American SF, while riding on the tradition of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism.

That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all of the "relevant" problems.

She was writing this back in the 1970s, so the specific accusations about SF are outdated. But as a summation of the "escapism is childish and not literary" viewpoint, it's pretty much perfect. And as you can tell, a big part of the hatred for escapism comes from a desire to be literary, and to be taken seriously by the upper echelons of the (supposedly monolithic) literary world. Writing in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1976, Barry N. Maltzberg raged that the literary/cultural establishment "either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids."

One more quote. In his book On SF, Thomas M. Disch characterizes escapism as a "security blanket," and adds:

There are times when all of us would rather flee our problems than confront them head-on with the heightened awareness that genuine art forces on us. For such times, nothing will serve but escapism.

He goes on to say that certain trashy SF authors are as bad as Star Trek or Magnum P.I. (even though the latter show constantly bombarded us with Magnum's Vietnam War flashbacks.)

If you read these quotes carefully, a few things jump out at you. First of all, there's the equation of escapism with "pulp" traditions — which was obviously a big deal for authors like Le Guin and Maltzberg, who were trying to escape (sorry!) from the "pulp" label and prove that they deserved a higher grade of paper stock. And then there's the idea that escapism prevents your SF from being "relevant" or commenting on real-world issues — when, in fact, the most escapist narratives are often the most topical. (Just watch the original Star Trek.) There's the idea, which was way more prevalent in the 1970s, that explicit social commentary automatically made your work better or smarter.

There's also a certain feeling of disapproval, even dismay, that people are having too much fun. If I hadn't read tons of books by Le Guin and Disch, and discovered first hand how enjoyable (and frequently, how escapist) their work can be, I would think both authors wrote dry Socialist Realist works, in which their protagonists were born and died in the same gutter.

There has been a move to re-embrace escapism in recent years — Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay was about the fictional creation of a Golden Age superhero who was actually called The Escapist. And Chabon shows us exactly how The Escapist's real-world origins reflected the political and social trends of the 1930s and early 1940s, and how much his adventures reflect the struggles and traumas Sammy and Joey are going through in their real lives — everything from Sammy's secret homosexuality to Clay's family trapped in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe becomes part of the secret backstory of the Escapist and the League of the Golden Key. In Chabon's novel, backstory is the story — when you try to strip the League of the Golden Key and the other details from the Escapist's origin, you chip away at what makes the Escapist who he is, and the reasons why he does what he does.

It's no coincidence, of course, that Chabon has also been a champion of bringing the pulps back into the sphere of the literary — he edited two anthologies of mock-pulp science fiction stories for McSweeney's a few years ago, chock full of literary and genre superstars doing pastiches and homages to the plot-heavy stories of the past. Authors like Chabon and Dave Eggers are able to celebrate the pulpy and retro in a way that Maltzberg never could back in the 1970s, because they're already assured of their literary status, and need not fear being marginalized. (And meanwhile, the "new space opera" and posthuman SF novels that throng on our shelves are the very picture of escapism, with their heroes who live for zillions of years and can port themselves into new customized bodies whenever they feel like it.)

But in any case, we're now far enough from the pulp era that the "pulpy" label has lost much of its sting, even as unabashedly pulpy urban fantasy heroines in tight pleather pants are eating science fiction's market share for lunch. So maybe it really is time to reclaim the word "escapism" and transform it into a paean to works that liberate and illuminate us.

A theory of escapist art

So I promised you an explanation of why escapism is the highest form of art — and yes, there may be a slight amount of hyperbole involved there. At the same time, escapism has given us some of our greatest speculative art works, and has the potential to spawn even greater ones in the future, if we recognize it for what it is.

First of all, let's dispose of this false dichotomy between "escapism" and "realism." Neither of those things is ever entirely pure, and each always contains elements of the other. Any time you have a flight of fancy, or a grace note, or an elivening metaphor, in a "realist" work, you are engaging in escapism. Because whenever you invoke the imagination, or suggest another world (made out of thought, or images) beyond your protagonist's "real" world, you're allowing the reader a brief escape. And in fact, if you look at "real life," some of our "realest" experiences involve escape.

Think about that old literary standby, the "coming of age" narrative — it is the most pure escapist story you can have, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending. (More on happy endings later.) The "coming of age" tale is about someone outgrowing his or her childhood, and casting off the stifling restrictions of parents, school and conformist expectations. It is a story about reaching escape velocity, and bursting out of childhood's gravity well. This is never a tidy process in real life, nor is it often in literature. But it's the original escapist tale, and in many ways, it's the template on which all other escapist tales build.

The reverse is also true — escapist elements don't automatically make a work less realistic. Just as the "coming of age" story is about escape in the "real" world, it's more than possible to tell a realistic story about a world that repesents an escape from our reality. We've all accepted, by now, that you can tell a realistic story about that ultimate avatar of escapism, Batman. (Batman is in many ways a more escapist figure than Superman, because Batman is just like us — except that his amazing training and gadgets turn him into an unstoppable force.) Look at Paul Pope's amazing, stark graphic novel Batman: Year 100. And if you want SF that comments on real-world issues, it's hard to get more topical than the first few seasons of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

And that leads to another point — escapism can be incredibly dark. I said earlier that many escapist works are dystopian, and it's clearly true. The "last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world" story is full of escapism — for one thing, you're one of the chosen few, and you're incredibly special and wonderful as a result. You no longer have to pay taxes (like Le Guin's heroes), and you live in a world where the worst has already happened. And many escapist films are show someone escaping from an incredibly dark world, even if it's only through the power of the imagination. Think of Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, which is at its core a work about the escape into fantasy. Even if both the real world and the fantasy are dark and disturbing. Or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which takes place in a dystopian world and shows us Sam Lowry's flights of the imagination as well as his attempts to escape in real life. Did I mention that escapist works don't have to have happy endings?

At the same time, who says that realism is the best thing a literary work can aspire to? It really is true, as many SF writers have said lately, that we live in a world that's changing so quickly, that any attempt at pure realism will become historicism instead. And then there's the subjective nature of "reality." But most of all, realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can't show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that's happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions. We've all lived through historical moments where a new meme or phenomenon seemed to "come out of nowhere," only to look inevitable in retrospect, once we see all of the early indicators that we ignored at the time, because they were outside of the narrative we were telling ourselves about "reality."

If the goal of a literary work (and remember, "literary" is not synonymous with "good." More on that here) is to reflect "reality," then "realism" is one tool among many for doing so. And escapism is another.

I already suggested, above, that metaphors are inherently escapist because they take us away from the strict view of what the thing "is." And the reverse is also true: escapism is a metaphor. TV shows like Lost In Space and Star Trek are so transparently metaphors for the hopes and fears of the Space Age that it's impossible to watch them now without thinking about what people were living through at the time. You get as revealing a mirror into the Space Age, Cold-War psyche from Star Trek as you do, say, from John Updike's Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. The stuff Star Trek tries to say about the politics of the 1960s is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the stuff that it says without meaning to, about Manifest Destiny and the post-colonial project of redeeming the Third World.

We tend to think of escapism as a childish impulse, but that's by no means always true — like Brazil, or The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, many great escapist works are about adults, who are trapped as only adults can be, in prisons partly of their own making, and look for a way out.

Escapism also shows what we're trying to escape from — this seems like an obvious point, but it's one that often seems to be overlooked. This changes over time, and also varies from creator to creator. Some escapist works are concerned about breaking out of a totalitarian, oppressive state, others are more concerned with running away from middle-class American life. There's escapism from war, from conformity, from individualism, from failure, from success. Whether or not an escapist work explicitly shows us what we're escaping, it's still always there, revealed by what the escapist elements aren't. Escapism always reveals what we're escaping, and serves as a mirror of whatever the artist (or corporate overlord, as the case may be) views as the most horrendous elements of current reality. It's convex where dire reality is concave, like a plaster cast mold. If your goal is to get the clearest possible picture of "reality," looking at that reflection may be your best shot.

And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.

Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Returning to the Le Guin quote, it strikes me that what she's describing as escapism is actually better described as "weak story-telling." Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad.

If escapism is frequently tawdry and dull — if our culture gives us Transformers 2 instead of Superman II — blame the creators, don't blame escapism itself. In fact, holding a low opinion of escapism (and saying things like "It's just a movie about explosions and robots, don't expect too much from it") lets the Michael Bays of this world off the hook too easily.

Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"

Last year, we predicted Humanity's End would be the B movie of the year, and now that it's out on DVD, it seems like we underestimated it considerably. Featuring crazy-ass CG space battles that look fully video game identified, and some amazing dialogue (like the kickass female pilot says, "We keep flying. And they keep dying.") And great character development, like then the last true human alive tells his girlfriend that if she's got a rash, she must have gotten it elsewhere because he's clean. All wrapped up in a blanket of Firefly and BSG influences.

We've featured some terrible Star Wars knockoffs in the past, but Star Virgin may actually be the worst. (It's probably not fair to compare a porno with "serious" space opera films anyway, but even as porn, Star Virgin is very, very bad.)

So the blonde Barbarella wannabe, who's "played" by a Hustler Centerfold of the Year, is learning about sex from Mentor, her robot companion. And he does this by showing her a series of truly awful porno vignettes, the worst of which is in black and white and has captions, like a silent movie — and it features a Dracula motif, except that Dracula is wearing a Richard Nixon mask for some reason. Yes.

In between each vignette, the blonde and her robot have further dialogue about the mysteries of sex, and why humans like it, etc. etc. And the blonde gets more and more worked up, until the robot finally has to give her a space dildo, which shoots white stuff everywhere, covering pretty much every surface. The movie ends with a voiceover suggesting that this means the human race will be repopulated after all, and we will once again rule the cosmos. Or something. Bleh. [IMDB]

Antennae
The Pathetic Rationalization: Snails are already kind of alien, right? They're French, which is like being from another planet. And you can sort of imagine them twitching — which they never do, since they're glued to a guy's forehead. But if you squint, they sort of twitch. And back in the day, there was something kind of meta about using a television with an antenna to watch a guy with an antenna on his head.
The Reality Check: Sadly, those are the only nice things we can say about the antennae. They're totally silly looking, and your head will hurt trying to imagine a species that evolved looking just like us, except for the funny antennae.

Weird Ears
The Pathetic Rationalization: They're sharp. They're classic. We wouldn't find Spock nearly as slashfic-worthy without them. And hey — maybe a lot of species just evolved with extra sensitive hearing because there were a TON of really quiet predators on their worlds? And the pointiness or crinkliness makes the ears extra-sensitive? You know it makes sense.
The Reality Check: Ummm... They're just glue-on fake ears. Actually, Spock gets a free pass, but everyone who's sported potstickers or omelettes stuck to their ears since then has no excuse. None. It's unoriginal and cheap-looking.

Corrugated Foreheads
The Pathetic Rationalization: When the Klingons first started getting knobbly on their heads back in 1979, it was a step above the weird engine-grease-on-face look they had before. And it's definitely a step towards putting the "oid" in "humanoid." And think about it — all of those lumps probably provide amazing protection against getting head-butted, or hit on the head with an anvil. Befitting a warrior species, really.
The Reality Check: So let's just give Klingons a pass, Why not? Trying to sort out their cranial discrepancies gives us something to do on long evenings (even with the Manny Coto retcon.) But everybody else who's gotten the cornfield-on-head thing has to find a new gimmick, stat. It's gotten so there's an infinitely diverse cosmos full of different head injuries. Trek is, of course, the worst offender — but by no means the only one. Let's just agree that a head blob is not a species marker.

Body Paint
The Pathetic Rationalization: Who would want to diss the green women? After all, they're a staple of science fiction, with their Shakespeare appropriating, sexy-dancing ways. And if it wasn't for greasepaint, how would we ever have learned not to hate the half-black, half-white people? Plus, it makes total sense: On other planets, the sunlight is probably harmful at other wavelengths besides UV, and so people need to have green pigment to protect themselves against the UltraLime rays. Right? Right?
The Reality Check: Okay, come on. Any alien whose face looks like a five-year-old who got to go to the face-painting tent at the county fair is not passing muster.

Extra Heads Or Limbs
The Pathetic Rationalization: We all love Zaphod Beeblebrox (and we were deeply saddened when the long-awaited movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy didn't even try to give us a proper, convincing two-headed President Zaphod.) And the book makes it clear the extra head and arm are just a prosthetic decoration that Zaphod decided to try out, so it's not strictly an alien biology thing anyway. Plus, why wouldn't humanoids have an extra redundant bit here or there?
The Reality Check: In practice, it just looks ridiculous — just look at the TV version of H2G2.

Random Mythological Drag
The Pathetic Rationalization: Oh wow. It turns out all our myths about Kali/Shiva/Santa Claus/Satan/Patient Zero are based on a real being, who visited our world at some point in a time when people were easily impressed by fake horns. Dude, it actually makes total sense. It's not just an alien who happens to look like Papa Smurf, it's the alien whom all the Papa Smurf legends are based on. Can you not see it?
The Reality Check: Cheap Devil costume looks cheap. Also, the aliens-gave-us-our-mythology storyline is almost as tired as the humans-visit-prehistoric-Earth-and-become-Adam-and-Eve thing. Mostly, though, it's just a cheap gimmick for recycling terrible Halloween costumes as aliens.

Funny Glasses/Weird Contact Lenses
The Pathetic Rationalization: Umm... well, maybe they're really kind of reptilian but they're disguised as humans, except for the eyes. See above, about UltraLime radiation — maybe you need weird eyes to see in UltraLime light. (Not to be confused with ultra-limelight.) Plus who doesn't love the alien who looks like us, until he takes off his Ray-Bans? Communists and Anti-syndicalists, mainly.
The Reality Check: Umm... contact lenses? Silly glasses? Is there any way for that not to look cheap and ridiculous? That's actually not a rhetorical question — we'd like to know.

Biker Gear
The Pathetic Rationalization: Okay, so it makes total sense for aliens to come to Earth disguised as bikers. Like maybe their physiology is really really different than ours, but they just put on leathers and helmets so they'll fit in. That totally makes sense. Also, if you think about it, motorcycle gear looks a lot like a spacesuit. I bet you never thought of that. It only just occurred to us, actually.
The Reality Check: There's really only one question that applies here: Is your alien named Lobo? No? Then you just lost your only justification for making him/her/it look like a biker. End of story. Seriously, it looks cheap.

Crazy Hair
The Pathetic Rationalization: Well, a lot of species evolve to look kind of similar, except that they don't evolve the same kind of styling foam we do. Or maybe the water on their planet is more impure, so shampoo doesn't work the same way it does here. Did you ever think about that?
The Reality Check: Okay, really? Silly hair? That's all you've got? Manic Panic is a gateway to a strange new world? Let's just agree that a little dab will not do a whole new species. Our personal favorites are Doctor Who's Movellans — granted, they're robots, but we're supposed to think they're aliens at first, and what makes them an alien species? Silver Bo Derek hair. Yay!

Baldness (with Optional Buttcrack Attachment)
The Pathetic Rationalization: Maybe this species never evolved hair? Plus, it totally makes sense, if you ponder all the totally bald people you know in your own life — they're all kind of aliens, aren't they? Their heads are so shiny! And have you ever noticed that a fully bald person can raise his/her eyebrows much higher than the rest of us? I witnessed a bald man's eyebrows hovering around the top of his head the other day. And if you ever meet a woman who's got zero hair on her head, it really is true that she's from a nymphomaniac species that kills with sex. It's not even a metaphor, it's just true. Follicles dampen your sex drive (in women, anyway.)
The Reality Check: This is the absolute worst. We can give you the elf-ears, the eventful foreheads, the snail feelers. But baldness? Really? Also, given how frequently bald aliens also have anuses on their heads... it's just not a good idea.

Seriously, VFX industry. You gave us Gollum. You gave us Spider-Man swinging through the city without looking arthritic or epileptic. You gave us Doug Jones. You even managed to make Kelsey Grammer-as-blue-furry-guy look kind of acceptable. What the hell?

Announced at this weekend's Comic-Con Chicago, Realm of Kings - a sequel to the recently completed War of Kings - is the umbrella name for series taking place in the Marvel Comics version of outer space, following on from the creation of something called The Fault. Realm writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning explained to Comic Book Resources:

The Fault - the hole in time and space - has far reaching consequences for the galaxy as a whole. It is a universal crisis that could either represent a fundamental threat to the whole cosmos or be the source of untapped power and resources... Whatever it proves to be, there are many factions in the Marvel Cosmic Universe who want to explore and exploit its secrets and mysteries.

Amongst those factions, former X-Men aliens the Shi'Ar, and former Fantastic Four supporting characters, the Inhumans. But the B-list nature of the characters is one of the draws for Abnett and Lanning:

[F]or us, to actually be writing these characters and contributing to their stories, is our ideal gig. It's also given us a chance to reintroduce some classic characters back into the MU - folks like Starlord, Rocket Raccoon and the like, characters who aren't considered mainstays or vital to ongoing Marvel continuity, but that we've always loved. And because they're not primary Marvel characters, there's also a real sense of threat and danger to the stories we can write for them, as we are afforded a great deal more latitude to do whatever we want with them — within the bounds of reason and good taste, of course!

Realm of Kings launches in November.

DnA's "Realm of Kings" [Comic Book Resources]

We look at science fiction from the Cold War era with a certain bemusement, with all those allegories about Communist aliens, valiant colonizers and suburban/corporate conformity being challenged. But it's a safe bet that our onslaught of cookie-cutter movies, TV shows and books will look just as quaint, and reflect our out-of-date obsessions just as much, in a decade or two. And (we can hope) a whole new bunch of soon-to-be-dated genre standbys will be bursting out of our screens and pages, in masses and masses of sameness.

Every science fiction cliche reflects the obsessions of the time that created it. The stories that we feel the need to tell over and over are, in a sense, both wish fulfillment and metaphors for our technological progress, as well as the fears that progress have given rise to.

When mainstream science fiction comments more directly on politics and our social anxieties, it often feels jarring and/or preachy. There are exceptions — Battlestar Galactica talked overtly about the War On Terror, with its storylines about torture and suicide bombers, and its enemy who can look just like us. And it paid off, with acclaim and awards. But often, science fiction hits home when it's discussing our fears and excitement about progress and politics from one or two removes.

So how do our current crop of overused story ideas reflect today's preoccupations? Here are some stabs at identifying the roots of our fantasies. As always, feel free to disagree:

Superheroes

As we pointed out a while back, today's biggest superhero narratives are all war stories. For a while there, every big Marvel crossover had to have the word "war" in the title, and the prevalence of crossovers, in itself, is a preference for war stories over minor battles. Superhero stories used to be about crime, and even godlike characters like Superman were called "crime-fighters," making the world safe from urban malcontents.

But now? Look at movies like Iron Man (about a munitions maker who confronts the cost of war), Incredible Hulk (about a military experiment who doesn't want to work for the army), Watchmen (about the heroes who, among other things, won the Vietnam war) and Wolverine (about a super-mutant who fights in every war before joining a secret army squad.) As for The Dark Knight, it was so clearly about terrorism and the lengths to which you must go to suppress it, including that whole "civil liberties versus safety" conundrum, that it became a parable of our times.

So-called "realistic" movies that try to deal with the Iraq War and terrorism, like In The Valley Of Elah or Stop-Loss, tend to vanish without a trace. But spandex-and-superpowers films deal with the same issues, they make billions.

Zombies and vampires

Every time we see another show like Vampire Diaries or yet another first-person zombie romance novel hitting the stands, we have to wonder: what is going on here, and when will it end? And yet, we can't help but wonder if it's just a coincidence that the hordes of the undead are swarming in every story at the exact moment that human lifespans have gotten so much longer that everyone is obsessed with the demographic crisis of the elderly. Old people aren't dying as early, or as cheaply, as they used to — instead they're hanging around, eating up all our resources, in many cases even after dementia has taken away their reasoning powers.

The movie which encapsulates the zombies-as-older-relatives idea most clearly is probably Peter Jackson's Braindead, or Dead Alive, in which the hero's mother gets bitten by a "Sumatran rat-monkey" and turns into a zombie-like monster — who, at one point, hosts a dinner party with a group of respectable society people, even as her body literally falls apart.

And if zombies are about the downside of conquering death and living on and on, vampires are about the weight of history. They may be eternally young and glamorous, and full of glib sexuality, but they're also constantly going on about their past lives in the 19th century and all the huge historical events that they took part in. It's hard not to feel like vampires are the upside of life extension?

(In other words, zombies are your loved ones living to be 100. But vampires are you living to be 100 — hence the added glamour and wish-fulfillment.)

And yet also, vampires represent the weight of history, the baggage we thought we'd let go of, which insists on hanging around. Wasn't history supposed to have ended around 1990?

Cyborgs and robots

This summer, Terminator and Transformers clashed over the "giant robot movie" crown, and this Friday's G.I. Joe is bringing us (minor spoiler, sorry) evil nanomachines and cybernetic "accelerator suits."

It's not hard to see what these fantasies are about — Terminator Salvation director McG summed up the themes pretty concisely in his thousands of interviews about that film: we watch movies like his (or not, as the case may be) because we're uneasy about our creeping dependency on computers and gadgets generally. We fret about at what point we are so integrated with our iphones and our assistive technology, that we stop being human. (And Dollhouse is basically about the fact that we've subsumed our identities as people into Twitter and Facebook, so that our personalities exist as much in the computer world as in our heads.)

On the one hand, it's liberating and awesome to feel as though we have masses of knowledge and memes and ideas within easy reach of our brain tendrils. On the other hand — we're like cyber-inter-junkies! Cut us off from our devices, and our brains start to deflate like bad pastry. Writer Stephen Elliott spent a month without using the Internet, and had a week of bad withdrawal.

And it's hard to watch Transformers without thinking about our dependency on cars, how much like our best friends they are, how heartbreaking it is when they let us down.

Space opera

In books, space opera has lately been prone to massive, aeon-spanning sagas that take into account the vast distances between star systems and the large amounts of time required to traverse them. (Not to mention the time dilation and cognitive dissonance that happens when you travel at relativistic speeds.) But mass-media space opera tends to assume quick-and-dirty faster-than-light travel, and zipping from Alpha Centauri to Betelgeuse is as easy as a road trip from Albuquerque to Vegas.

As a result, mass-media space-opera becomes a veiled comment on globalization, and the feeling that our world is shrinking.

In the 1990s, we had the endless parade of Star Treks and their ilk, in which every planet you visit looks much the same as the last — with minor variations. And each new alien is only slightly differentiated from the previous dozen. It's not that different from going to Bulgaria and realizing that there's a Starbucks and a McDonalds and Budweiser on draft everywhere you go. The excitement of seeing that things are the same wherever you go ("exploration") is tempered by the guilt that you're ruining all these places just by visiting them ("the Prime Directive.")

Now, we're seeing a newer, even guiltier, run of movies about space and aliens — ones in which humans are clearly the bad guys, and aliens are the victims. The biggest example of this is James Cameron's Avatar, in which the naughty, naughty human race comes to despoil the pristine planet Pandora, so we can build strip malls on it. There's also District 9, coming next week, in which alien refugees come to Earth, and we force them into ghettoes. (And as I mentioned yesterday, a number of the stories in the awesome new anthology Federations also feature humans paving paradise and putting up a parking lot.)

If 1990s space opera was the happy-but-queasy view of globalization, then the new breed is just pure misanthropic "we're crushing the third world" bleakness.

Post-apocalyptic yarns

This one is the most transparent of them all — we're terrified it's all going to fall apart, thanks to swine flu and global climate toiletness and so on. And yet there's something liberating about casting off the shackles of history — no more metaphorical vampires! — and we love to fantasize that we'll be among the few who survive after everyone else is sleeping with the mutant fishes.

So what's next?

Want the flood of superheroes, apocalypses and zombies to stop? Then you should root for us to get a whole new brand of progress, and a whole new batch of anxieties to go with them. (It's true, of course, that Hollywood will keep greenlighting the same movie over and over again, no matter what, but only as long as the latest iteration of that movie is making money.)

So here are a few ideas about the next up-and-coming obsessions, and how they could translate into science fictional genres:

• Biotech. We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with gene-splicing, stem cells, cloning and smart drugs. How will these treatments change who we are? What kind of new life forms could we create?

  What kind of science fiction could we get? Well, there's the obvious cloning horror stories, like The Sixth Day or The Island. And there's the strange not-quite-human monster film — like Vincenzo Natali's creepy-looking Splice, coming later this year. OMG we're playing God — what's the SAG rate for that?

  But my hopes are pinned on a new genre of Charlie Kaufman-esque stories about people whose personalities or bodies are being altered by their new medications or new body parts. You can start out with unsettling little differences, and slowly build up to outright strangeness and horror, where people have hands coming out of their foreheads, by the end.

  I was chatting the other day with a friend who was writing about new Alzheimer's Disease treatments, and he mentioned that Maureen McHugh's collection Mothers & Other Monsters is chock full of stories about Alzheimer's — including ones where a cure turns you into a totally different person, with a whole new personality.

• Statelessness. The collapse of the modern nation-state may be one of the big stories in the next decade or two. On the one hand, you have multinational corporations getting more and more powerful, and global challenges like climate change will require stronger international responses. On the other hand, if our current econom-ick goes on for a decade, governments may become more impoverished, overstretched and weakened. Result: More countries will start to look like Afghanistan or Somalia, with governments that barely govern.

  

  What kind of science fiction could we get? Pirates! Please, let there be pirates! Preferably space pirates as well as futuristic ocean pirates in the style of Waterworld. And possibly there will be more stories about international hero squads, like G.I. Joe, where the war on evil has a new front line — and it's multilateral. (Maybe "This time, it's multilateral" could become the new action-movie catch phrase?)

  And maybe we'll see a new brand of space opera in which the dangerous, no-beings-land of deep space is populated by creatures with shifting allegiances and itchy trigger tentacles.

• Peak oil and the smart house I was going to do these two things separately, but they kept coming together in my mind. Oil forecasters are increasingly pessimistic about our oil supplies, and how much longer we'll be able to use up fuel on Traveling Pants-style roadtrips of self discovery. And meanwhile, everyone keeps saying that by around 2020, our houses will be brilliant. All our appliances will be talking to each other, and they'll all be plugged into our social network, so our friends can tell our refrigerators to make funny-shaped ice chunks. In other words: We'll never leave the house again, and our houses will do everything for us.

  

  What kind of science fiction does this give us? Well, there's the obvious trapped-at-home story, like E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or the upcoming movie Surrogates. But if you think of science fiction stories as talking about our advances and fears a bit more metaphorically, then maybe we'll get something a bit further afield: like, say, stories about claustrophobia or evil buildings trying to kill us. Or even better, a slew of "Earth is quarantined" stories, where aliens try to keep us from leaving our planet and infecting the rest of the cosmos with our naughtiness.

We caught up with Orci on the red carpet at the SyFy/Entertainment Weekly party, last Saturday evening, and we had a lot of questions for him.

First of all, we asked Orci about his statements the other day that Star Trek 2 and 3 might have a linked storyline — maybe with a cliffhanger, or a plot thread that continues from one movie into the next. Orci downplayed the speculation, saying he, writer Alex Kurtzman, director J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and producer Bryan Burk had had one meeting, lasting 15 minutes, and they had considered for a brief moment the idea of doing the next two movies as a linked story. But it's still way too early to say anything definite, and they're still in the phase of throwing ideas out there and seeing what sticks.

When we interviewed Orci and his writing partner, Alex Kurtzman, about Transformers 2, they pointed out that it's very common for the second movie in a series to feature the protagonist trying to quit the "hero" racket. (Think Superman II or Spider-Man 2.) Transformers 2 follows that pattern, with Sam wanting to go off to college and lead a normal life. So we were wondering if Star Trek 2 would follow that formula as well — would we see Kirk thinking about quitting the Enterprise and going back to Iowa?

But Orci says the formula isn't iron-clad, and it doesn't apply to every second movie in a series. In the case of Trek, he sees the Enterprise crew as being much more committed to their mission and to doing good in the universe, so that kind of "hero no more" story wouldn't fit.

Meanwhile, Orci says that the Fringe writing staff had originally wanted to wait a few years before unveiling the "alternate world" storyline — but doing it now forces them to be more inventive about what happens next, and to create an even larger world to explore. "Let us force ourselves to come up with a bigger world. So you get a little bit of both. We wanted to answer things and see where that leads.

As for Cowboys And Aliens, the movie with the world's most self-explanatory title, Orci says, "We're wrapping up another draft, and hopefully that one will be good enough."

We already know that Syfy is working on reboots for both Alien Nation and Quantum Leap, but why stop there? There are some fine dearly departed shows out there that could easily serve as the network's chance to get back into the space opera genre. Here're some of our picks - and why we think they could work.

UFO


What's that, you say? You don't think UFO is space operatic enough? Well, if you just duplicated the original series - where the secret organization SHADO worked to prevent alien invaders from harvesting human organs without anyone knowing - we'd agree... but what if you took the battle back to the aliens in addition to keeping the intergalactic Cold War going on Earth? We're seeing something not unlike Torchwood: Children of Earth mixed with BSG's silent space battles in our heads, a gritty, political take on the alien invasion idea... and we like it.

Blake's 7


Escaped convicts fighting for freedom against a fascistic government in the distant outer space future? There's nothing about the concept behind Terry Nation's 1970s BBC series that doesn't scream win, and as a plus for Syfy, the British Sky network is already working on a revival so they don't have to do everything from scratch. The potential for political allegory illustrated with impressive special effects rivals Galactica at its best, if done right, and there'd be less outcry from fans of the original - This one was always downbeat and depressing.

Farscape


Yes, we know that people have gotten mad when we suggested remaking Farscape before, and to them - and to those keeping the dream alive with the current Farscape comics - we'll suggest this: How about we don't reboot the series entirely, but relaunch it and find a new focus without undoing everything that's come before? If nothing else, that's got to be better than waiting for the perennially-forthcoming webisode sequels, right?

Lost In Space


It's a classic for a reason, people. Don't let memories of William Hurt and Matt LeBlanc put you off, Lost In Space is ready for a revival. What other show offers the chance for family drama, fantastic aliens and cowardly scientists hamming it up on a weekly basis? Take the Buffy route of using genre staples as metaphors for familiar problems, add a generous helping of humor, and voila: A Space Opera for all the family. Hell, just get Josh Friedman onboard as showrunner and you'll be set.

Star Trek


When you think of Space Opera TV, you can't help but think of Trek... and with the success of the new movie relaunching the franchise, and Bryan Fuller (under contract to Syfy's parent company NBC/Universal to come up with new shows) constantly talking about his desire to create a new Trek TV show, it almost seems like fate. TrekMovie even made the case for Syfy launching a new Trek, leading the network's Craig Engler to respond "A good, new, affordable Trek would be great on Syfy." Take note of "affordable," though; as we've pointed out before, the rights issues involved alone may make this idea financially a bad idea.

What do you think? Would you watch any of the above, or are you aghast at the very idea of yet another remake? Use the poll below to let us know just how wrong we are.

Four pieces of Pandorum concept art showed up over at DVD-Forum. This film is definitely looking like a lot of thought went into the designs, and it's a nice departure from the way-too-shiny Enterprise we saw earlier this summer. You can see the rest at the link. [DVD Forum via Dread Central]

Marc Guggenheim told MTV Splash Page that rumors about the movie would feature a guest spot from Clark Kent to establish a "universe," just like Robert Downey Jr.'s appearance in last year's Hulk movie, could still turn out to be true depending on the editing room:

Honestly, it changes on a daily basis. Whatever information I gave you today would be obsolete in a week, and maybe come back again in two weeks... I will say, all the Easter Eggs and the cameos that I put in, I couldn't even begin to predict at this point which ones will stay and which ones will go. I'll be as interested as anyone else to see what we end up keeping and losing by the time the picture is actually locked… and that's pretty far away from now.

Green Lantern is set for a late 2010 release.

A Superman Cameo In ‘Green Lantern' Movie? Marc Guggenheim Weighs In On Rumor [MTV Splash Page]

We spoke to Howe at a special event this morning, celebrating the new spelling of the channel's name, and it's brand new slogan, "Imagine greater." After Howe reassured us the channel wasn't abandoning its core audience of science-fiction fans with its new rebranding, we got a chance to talk about the future of this new Syfy Channel.

Our first question was: What's going to replace Battlestar Galactica? Clearly, Caprica is not the same type of show as BSG, so what's in the pipeline to replace this much-loved space opera? Howe replied that, thanks to Mark Stern and the development team, not only is the channel aiming to greenlight a pilot in the next couple of months for a new series (mums the word on the title) but "we're actively looking into developing the next space opera hopefully for the next year or the year after."

So after Howe dropped this stunner, we hunted down Creative Director of Original Programming, Mark Stern, to find out more about the next big Syfy space opera. Will it have alien puppets?

So you're the guy we want to talk to, the future of what's to come on Scifi. Our readers can't wait to hear from you.

They don't want to come after me with pitchforks?

Science Fiction fans are tough, you know that. They're the best, and they're loyal. I'm sure you've gotten your share of emails?

Indeed I have.

I'm sure this isn't the first time either?

Not at all.

What was worse: rebranding, or canceling Stargate Atlantis?

Canceling Farscape. Which, by the way, I had nothing to do with. That was my first day at the job and all of a sudden it was, "Mark's cancelled Farscape." No, I didn't. I love Farscape!

The fans are loyal.

I love all that, and I'm one of those people, so I get it. I take ownership of all that stuff too. I think the difference with the brand is, there's a fear that they're not going to do the programming. I think as soon as people realize that because we now have a brand that is broader, and not as niche, it allows us to be a little more scifi-specific and it allows to put shows on...I think our big frustration with a show like Battlestar Galactica has been, it's a great show. Because it's on the science fiction channel it's kept people away, that we felt like would come in and love that show. So it's made us a little more hesitant about going too hard scifi. Because hard scifi on the scifi channel is almost like this double whammy. Now that we have a brand that is a little broader and we're embracing a lot of things we're already doing. I think it also gives us a lot of freedom to do more hard scifi.

The next thing that I really want to do is find the next great space opera it's been a long time. And we have Stargate, but that's really not that show. And Caprica isn't really that show. So where's the next Star Trek or Farscape? Let's find one of those.

So what are you looking at to replace the channel's missing space opera?

You know it's so early days, I don't have anything really specific. We're talking to a lot of people that we already work with, about ideas. We don't want to do something that is the same old. You don't want it to feel recycled. So that's the challenge of doing that. I'm a huge fan of Firefly, and shows that take that idea and take that part of the genre and reinvent it in a whole new way. I'd love to find our version of, not specifically Firefly, but similar to what Joss [Whedon] tried to do with that in terms of, "lets recast the Western in space." Love that idea, and I love that show. What's another way to approach that? We're talking to a number of people about that, but at this point honestly it's about getting Warehouse 13 on its feet, getting Caprica on its feet, getting Stargate Universe going. This is a really big time for us, we haven't really had time to think about next year.

The setup for the show is immediately intriguing. The Phaeton is a spaceship on a ten-year voyage to the nearest star system with a habitable planet, in search of alien life. Its crew of 12 are funding the voyage by filming their adventures for reality TV, and their only escape from each other is into hyper-realistic virtual reality programs. So even as they try to capture the gritty reality of ship-board life for "Edge of Never: Life on the Phaeton," their sanity depends on an ability to escape the ship via immersive VR fantasies.

It's the kind of meta-meditation on technology that Ron Moore loves, and which he explored via the cylons' synthetic-but-real identities in Battlestar. Virtuality is dark like Battlestar too, but in a much more intimate way. The ship's counselor Roger Fallon is also the producer of the reality show, so he has a vested interest in keeping his patients neurotically off-center. After all, perfectly mentallly healthy people do not create good drama. While his wife sneaks off to have sex with the ship's captain in virtual reality, Fallon is left to lecture the reality TV audience back home about how everybody "plays a role" in a crisis situtation and therefore all the roles they play on ship are "as real as it could possibly be."

The ship's crisis, at least in the pilot episode, is whether or not there will even be a ten-year mission at all. Captain Pike must decide when they reach Jupiter whether they'll slingshot out of the solar system using the gas giant's gravity (along with several nukes), or return to Earth. Given that new research has revealed Earth will be going waterworld in less than a century, finding a possible new home for humanity is more important than ever. As millions tune in to find out whether it's "go or no go" for the Phaeton, Pike has to consider whether his tiny crew is ready to endure ten years together in deep space - especially given that the doctor has just discovered he has Parkinson's disease, and their virtual reality program is starting to act really weird.

Although the "go or no go" dilemma is solved in this episode, we get a potential season-long arc in the VR bug plot. A strange man starts appearing in the crew's VR fantasies, beating them and killing them before they have a chance to take off their interface goggles. It's not as if the VR fantasies can harm people physically - this isn't a Matrix deal where dying inside means you die outside - but there is still something psychologically scarring about being murdered no matter how it happens.

Much of the pilot episode, directed by Peter Berg (who is also directing an upcoming film version of Dune), simply introduces all our characters. There's the girly hacker who also serves as host for the reality TV show; the gay couple of astrobiologists who cook for the rest of the crew and complain that they come across as "bitchy queens" on TV; the sick doctor; the lonely ship's designer; the creepy counselor and his biologist wife; the tough-but-fair captain; his irascible second-in-command who manages to turn a wheelchair into his macho accessory; and the ex-military pilot who is a smart-mouthed, tomboy maverick. It's a cool group, and you'll definitely wind up wanting to know more about some of them.

It's unclear whether FOX will turn Virtuality into a series, but this two-hour premiere is certainly not a self-contained story. As I said earlier, the "go no go" plot is resolved, but so many lose ends remain at the end that it feels unsatisfying as a stand-alone TV movie.

Virtuality spins a lot of balls into the air with this pilot, and it's not clear that Ron Moore can keep them from crashing down. Is the show really going to be able to balance the reality-TV storyline with our crew's virtual reality adventures (and their real-life dramas)? The reality TV angle brings a much-needed cynical subtlety to the show, which rescues it from pure space psychodrama. But Moore isn't exactly known for his cynical storytelling, and I worry that this prickly aspect of the series will get smoothed over by Fantasy Island morality tales set in VR land.

Still, I would like the chance to find out where Virtuality might take us. Moore was willing to deliver quite a shock at the end of the pilot, which set the stage for a show unafraid to take risks. And I have to admit I'm intrigued to see what will befall the crew next, in a watching-a-trainwreck-on-Livejournal way. Creepy mind games mixed with media weirdness in space? Yeah, sign me up. Let's hope the show goes on.

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

The worst space operas are not just campy or silly. They're idiotic and braindead. They're so intent on cramming the cliches of Westerns or adventure serials into an outer-space setting that they not only leave behind even the most basic space science, they actually strip the danger and excitement out of space travel itself. They're usually derivative of better works, and have little undigested chunks of pilfered greatness floating around... like a debris field.

So here are the dumbest space operas of all time, according to us:

Battlestar Galactica (original series.) Sorry. Ron Moore pretty much summed it up when he explained why this version of BSG had so much wasted potential: You have the destruction of an entire civilization in the first episode, and then in the second episode they go to the casino planet and par-tay. Plus the dorky helmets. And the daggit. And Boxey. To be fair, though, this wasn't the dumbest space opera Glen Larson gave us. That honor must go to...

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. Oh man. We rushed out and bought this on DVD as soon as it came out. And it is just unbelievably atrocious. Like the original BSG, it features a post-apocalyptic setting... which is forgotten right after the first episode. There's Twiki the penis-headed robot, who goes around getting into one hilarious scrap after another, and Princess Ardala, who's always trying to collar the tight-pantsed Buck so he will be her husband/boy-bitch. But mostly, this show is known for its amazing disco set pieces, including this bizarre rock band, Andromeda:

Guardians Of The Galaxy (the original comics). Marvel Comics' answer (sort of) to the Legion of Superheroes, Guardians Of The Galaxy charted the adventures of Vance Astro, who spent 1000 years in suspended animation before arriving at Alpha Centauri and realizing that humans had long since discovered faster-than-light travel. In the mean time, Earth has been invaded, first by Martians and then by the cruel Badoon. So Astro gathers a team of interplanetary misfits to free the Earth. In a typical later storyline, they find Wolverine's metal skeleton still intact (even though Wolverine is long dead) and Wolverine's great-great-granddaughter fights Doctor Doom for it. But Doctor Doom can control the metal skeleton with his mind. Snikkt!

Starslayer. I'm tempted just to say "look at the cover." But if you want more info, here goes. He's a Celtic barbarian, who's about to die in the distant past, but then his wife's descendant, in the distant future, summons him forward in time. Where he frees Earth from some alien invaders, reignites our sun, becomes a space pirate, and then dedicates a black hole to a Celtic goddess. Or something. Oh, just look at the picture.

Warlock. Another weird comic book hero. He's artificially created, his face is so radiant that only blind sculptor Alicia Masters can sculpt it into a human likeness. He gets hold of the Soul Gem, which sounds like the name of a mid-1970s R&B band, and goes around the universe fighting Thanos.

Space: 1999. Okay, I'm fully prepared for some pushback on this one. But even though I love this show, think about it for five seconds. The Moon is blasted away from the Earth at such high speeds that it visits a different planet every week. And somehow this doesn't kill everyone on the Moon, because of their protective Moonbase. Okay. Even though the Moon is hurtling through space at speeds much faster than the speed of light. Also, just how many Eagles do they have? And every planet is like a sillly horror movie or a crazy mind-trip. And then there was the crazy-browed shapeshifter.

The legion of Star Wars ripoffs. Not surprisingly, in the wake of Star Wars' success, a huge wave of incredibly vapid Wars knock-offs flooded theaters, from all over the world. (And we've presented many of them in our regular "found footage" feature.) There were the Italian Star Wars knockoffs, like The Humanoid, Star Odyssey, War Of The Robots and many others. You had your Japanese knock-offs, like Message From Space. There were animated Star Wars fakes, like Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin. And don't forget Galaxina. And of course, Turkish Star Wars. These knockoffs all have one thing in common: they borrow from the trappings of Star Wars, and completely skip over what made the original movie great. It's like a generation of B-movie directors watched only the Star Wars Holiday Special, snorted a mountain of cocaine and crushed Dilaudid, and then fired up the cameras!

Here's the whole thing of War Of The Robots in just ten minutes:

Cosmos: War Of The Planets. This Italian space opera, which came out around the same time as Star Wars, is just sort of brain-dead, with very little direction or originality. Our heroes drift through set-pieces ripped off from 2001 and Barbarella, before coming to a planet ruled by an evil computer. Which they overthrow, of course. It's all thanks to the positive power of red headgear with funny ear-circles. The whole movie is public domain and you can watch the whole thing (if you really want to) online.

Battle Beyond The Stars. It's Roger Corman's space opera, which is really all you need to know. Oh, there's an evil overlord, Sador, and he's going to destory a planet unless they submit to him utterly. And only one plucky young hero (and eventually, his girlfriend) dare to stand up to Sador, stealing an old spaceship and going off to hire some mercenaries to help. Actually, all you really need to know is that there's a spaceship-shooting babe with a ridiculous boob window:

Event Horizon. They travel to the aid of a long-lost spaceship, which turns out to have punched a hole into a universe of pure oatmeal... sorry, I meant pure chaos and pure evil. Not oatmeal, because a universe of pure oatmeal would make no sense whatsoever. Unlike a universe of pure evil, which makes perfect sense. Anyway, it makes them have wacky head trips. Mmmm... Oatmeal...

Supernova: I have to admit, any movie that features James Spader traveling through space naked can't be all bad... but the rest of it? Ugh. There's an alien artifact and a giant star that's about to (you guessed it) go supernova... and everything is messed up, until Spader gets naked again. Why can't he just always be naked?

Solaris (remake). We loved the original Tarkovsky film, but the Soderbergh remake? Just sort of navel-gazey and pointless, with just a few too many trippy moments for trippiness' sake. George Clooney explains it best in this video: "Uh, all sorts of strange things start happening."

Captain Eager. A recent direct-to-DVD British movie about an old space hero who comes out of retirement to save the day one more time, this film sort of rides the line between pastiche, homage and copy, trying to channel Dan Dare and falling a bit flat in the process. Although Tamsin Grieg is great, as always. And we love Scamp the Rocket Dog. Here's the trailer:

Space opera is best described as a genre of science fiction that is about adventure, often pitting the protagonists against powerful opponents, with broad themes, characterizations and actions throughout. The actual science that defines science fiction is not necessarily at the forefront of the story.

Military science fiction, on the other hand, is about conflict of the worst kind, involving all-out warfare. Oftentimes, the main characters are part of a military organization and are involved in conflicts much greater than their own parts, but they might be pivotal to the overal conflict to some degree.

To be very fair, there is a lot of overlap between the two different sub-genres. Stories that may fall firmly within the space opera side may also carry elements of military science fiction, whereas the opposite is very true, in a number of cases.

Of all the space opera stories that come to mind, Star Wars is right up there at the front, although that's not necessarily the first one out there. Physical flaws aside, the six films span a very epic story of the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker and his redemption. We see the fall of a massive government undermined from within, the rise and fall of an Empire and the rise and realization of new heroes and destinies, all set in front of a backdrop of a series of galactic wars. While combat is certainly one of the most intensive, exciting and interesting parts of the Star Wars saga, I've never really thought of it as a strictly military story.

The intentions and themes between the two genres are what often sets them apart. Military science fiction tends to attempt to provide commentary on real-world events, placing the conflict out of context for readers to pick on on themes that mirror those found in real life. Starship Troopers looked out of the Second World War, and examined themes such as facism and a society where all-consuming, total war was necessary. World War Two was the closest that the United States and the world has ever come to a total war, and it is unsurprising that these themes would be at the forefront of authors' minds. Beyond that, however, there is a larger theme that I've often found within most of the military science fiction stories that I've read, and it parallels the sort of mentality that is required in a military force - the Other.

For a military to function, there is an absolute requirement of cohesion, of uniformity and of discpline. During the 1300s to the 1400s, an event in Europe occured, now refered to as the military revolution, when European armies adopted rank and file formations, formalized and standarized training and uniforms, all stemming from the invention of the firearm. Armies seek to break up individuality and provide a group mentality, of teamwork. Otherwise, it would be unable to function correctly. In doing, so, enemies are vilified - just look at what enemy Japanese, German, Vietnamese and Iraqi soldiers have been called in recent conflicts - and in doing so, they are labeled the Other. They are against what you are against, and oftentimes, the others in military SF stories are portrayed as insectoids, an extremely alien figure, completely dehumanized. Protagonists often reconcile or examine these relationships and their role in any interactions, whether it's questioning whether their duties are right and justified, or even looking at this dehumanization and uniformity within society. Othertimes, such as in Timothy Zahn's Cobra books or Ender's Game, the central characters themselves are the others - changed by their training and/or enhancements, that place them at odds with society.

In contrast, Space Opera is about construction, inclusion. Where Starship Troopers looked at the world aflame after the Second World War, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy looked at the world rebuilt, watching as a society fell apart, and was restored through the actions of the characters. While military actions or simple melees have often been a part of these stories, they lack the central elements (although they might incorporate them) that define military science fiction. Other broad themes are incorporated as well - the swell of discovery, seen throughout the Ringworld stories, is another major theme that I would like to point to. In some of the more sophisicated modern stories, such as Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, we witness the efforts of humanity to rebuild under strict guidelines of the Singularity, with broad politicial overtones, punctuated by action and excitement.

Both military science fiction and space opera are about culture, but it is the methods in which they both approach their stories that helps to set them apart. space opera looks to culture through the eyes of construction, of vast worlds and the connections that hold society together, overall looking to inclusion, while Military science fiction examines what happens when those bonds break, and the disintigration of society, and seeking to examine the exclusions found in society.

Star Wars concept art above by Ryan Church.