There are more advantages to bringing in Showtime and PRI's Ira Glass to star in the John Simm role of the original British version than you may think at first. Not only would he make a welcome change from the overly familiar male leads of most TV dramas (either quirky and cocky or haunted and dark), but he could bring his familiar This American Life opening style to give the show its very own distinctive, Rod Sterling-esque beginning in lieu of a title sequence. Each episode would open with Glass walking onscreen from just off camera, and talking directly to the audience:

A young couple, walking along a busy Chicago street in the early evening. They're going on a date, going to see the first 'Rocky' movie, when they take a turn down a darkened side street, unaware of the dangers that lurk therein. From ABC Television Network, this is This American Life On Mars. Tonight's episode in five acts. Act one: Oh my God, he's got a knife. Act two: Ira gets involved, in which I visit the young couple in hospital after the stabbing. Act three: How does a radio host end up involved in so many murder cases anyway?, where the titular question gets asked by my character in a metatextual awareness of the weakness of the show's premise...

More importantly, going in such an unusual route in terms of casting would free up the show's creators in terms of direction: outgoing remake producer David Kelley made his name by taking dramatic concepts and slowly reducing them into uncomfortable, awkward sentimental comedies by introducing ever-more unlikely characters the longer his shows continue (See Boston Legal, The Practice, Chicago Hope and, well, almost everything he's ever done), and this format could give his successors the space to go as weird as any "He's in a coma/No, he's thirty years in the past" idea needs without smothering it with frowning and police procedural cliches (Bring in Barry Sonnenfeld to direct and play up the sentimentality as much as the humor, and it's Pushing Daisies in polyester). Also, by taking the show away from the cop genre, you not only differentiate the show from the British original (as the creators of the original show would like) while keeping the time-travel idea complete, but you also provide the high concept hook that every US detective show needs: "he's a radio host who fights crime" is gimmicky enough, even before you add in that whole time travel thing.

There is, however, one small problem with my plan. Ira Glass isn't interested.

I got in touch with him earlier this week, and pitched the whole idea eagerly. Surely, I figured, if I could go to ABC with Ira attached, they'd definitely see the potential and greenlight the whole thing there and then. Sadly, Ira didn't agree with me:

I have no interest in this project. I think I'm not skilled enough a performer to appear in any show requiring period costumes.

Luckily, I have a Plan B: Does anyone have Terry Gross' email address?

(Many thanks to Ira Glass for having a sense of humor about everything. Yes, that really was a quote from him above.)

Just think about the era Bertie Wooster comes from for a sec: the automobile, the telegram and the telephone are both incredibly new, and they massively boost his ability to travel and communicate across vast distances. The first Wooster and Jeeves collection, The Man With Two Left Feet, came out in 1917. He's an early adopter, and the car and the phone (and later the airplane) play a huge role in setting up his imbroglios with his various aunts and suitors.

But all this technology doesn't make Bertie wiser or cleverer — the ability to talk to anyone, access any piece of information, travel anywhere — it just enables him to make more of an idiot of himself than ever. More gaffes, more misunderstandings. Wooster's propensity for tooling around the countryside in his newfangled car gets him into lots of scrapes. And then there are the cryptic telegrams and cables that launch many of his storylines. Like this one, from "Jeeves And The Impending Doom":

"A telegram, sir," said Jeeves, reentering the presence.
"Open it, Jeeves, and read contents. Who is it from?"
"It is unsigned, sir."
"You mean there's no name at the end of it?"
"That is precisely what I was endeavoring to convey, sir."
"Let's have a look."
I scanned the thing. It was a rummy communication. Rummy. No other word.
As follows:
REMEMBER WHEN YOU COME HERE ABSOLUTELY VITAL MEET PERFECT STRANGERS.
We Woosters are not very strong in the head, particularly at breakfast time, and I was conscious of a dull ache between the eyebrows.

So what makes us think our posthuman descendants (or us, if we're lucky) will be any luckier? According to the internet's own disinformation campaign, "posthuman" refers to people who have extended their capabilities so far, that they no longer meet the strict definition of humanity. Enhancements could include neural connections to the cyberverse, artificial intelligence grafted onto our own, cyborg limbs, nanotechnology, mind-enhancing drugs or biotech, and unlimited rice pudding.

But extending our capabilities also means expanding our ability to make jackasses out of ourselves. It will be a jolly nuisance once we start receiving encrypted instant messages directly into our brains. We'll be stuck, in the middle of backing up our consciousnesses, trying to figure out exactly who tunneled that animated video directly into our visual cortex. And how to deal with that attractive but misguided young person who may have mistaken the grace and liveliness of those who have transcended ortho-bodies for flirtation.

The fabric of society will rend and fray, like our old blue jeans the first time we try to fit our new cyborg legs into them.

Our most private internal monologues will accidentally go out on an insecure channel for our brother-in-law to pick up. Our canniest plans to escape from social gatherings, or help our less-suave friends find romance, will dash to pieces because we were wearing the wrong pelvis, and sent diametrically the wrong signal. Or you'll forget to tie up your spare exo-body, and it'll stagger in circles around your favorite local bar, convincing everybody that you've finally succumbed to utter dissoluteness.

And yes, maybe our implanted artificial intelligences and neural networks will be wise and all-knowing. But that could just make them the Jeeves to our Woosters. I picture the A.I. in your head trying to advise you of the correct spoon to use at dinner, or help you navigate a tricky nest of social relationships. You'll get more and more dependent on the sagacious A.I. in your head, and thus more and more helpless if your neural link ever goes down. And whenever you disregard your A.I.'s advice because you know best, total disaster will result.

Not to mention, posthumans will have bizarre fads that make Wodehouse's weird affectations seem like nothing. There will be cyber-pants. You will sport hats emblazoned with the rudest thing your subconscious is thinking at any given moment. You will try backing up your consciousness and restoring it in a sentient aquarium, with some disastrous consequences due to incompatible hardware. It will seem like a terribly amusing idea to play tennis using your own head as the ball — until it suddenly isn't.

And then there are the aunts and suitors. If you think Bertie had a hard time getting away from his relatives and would-be relatives in the Woodhouse stories, just imagine how hard it'll be when everybody can ping him all the time. Our bally relatives will always know exactly how to get a hold of us, and our every move will be trackable by someone who knows how to track the IP addresses your brain piggy-backs onto. Your alibis will be futile!

So I'm hoping someone will take up the challenge and write the Wodehouse/Varley mashups we deserve. Give us the incredibly advanced, yet clueless demigods who may, if we're lucky, replace us on this planet eventually. And make sure there are lots of cocktails involved!

Sure, it's basically an "X...in space!" idea. And it could be difficult writing forensic mysteries with tricorders and ship's computers involved. And I know some of you would gnaw your own arms off to escape watching any TNG episode featuring Wesley Crusher. Still, the idea of Captain Crusher and his Oberth class starship investigating murders, thefts, temporal discrepancies and bizarre engineering puzzles is very appealing.

Why Wes Crusher? The link to the past is an obvious benefit, and leaves plenty of room for cameos by old friends. But more importantly, today's Wil Wheaton is not the Ensign Crusher you once knew and hated. If you've followed his post-Trek career at all, you know that he has a certain everygeek quality and self-effacing awareness of his somewhat annoying role in sci-fi history that is pretty charming. You can check out his blog for proof (he's apparently an io9 reader!). There's a little bit of Wil in each and every one of us - he's the nerd who got to actually be on Star Trek. In my mind (this idea literally came to me in a fever dream), Wil could convey a mature version of Wesley's wide-eyed enthusiasm, a captain who loves solving problems with science and never loses touch with that "Wow, this stuff is really cool" attitude.

Oh yeah, about that whole resigning from Starfleet and tripping around the universe with that space-hippie, The Traveler? One word: retcon. Photo by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com.

Images by Goodnight London.

Extrapolate from current trends...

Certain things happening now will probably carry on, and even accelerate, over the next two decades. The icecaps will keep melting, natural disasters will probably come more often, and droughts may affect more regions. Rich countries will become fortresses of the elderly, with fewer young people who aren't immigrants. Corporations will probably keep becoming more powerful and diversified, unless the next economic meltdown actually weakens their power somehow. There will be less oil, and more fighting over oil. Food prices will keep going up for third-world countries. China and India will be economically resurgent, unless they fuck up. Some forms of social deviance will be marginally more accepted, within wealthy societies at least.

...but don't be their bitch.

Don't assume that every current trend will continue in a straight line — it's never worked that way in the past, and it's unlikely to start now. New technologies will help stem some of the negative trends we're dealing with right now. And unimaginable disasters will spark new cycles of misery that will sweep us all down. Nobody in 1988 could have predicted 9/11 or the girl who hanged herself because her MySpace friends turned out to be mean grownups. (How would you even explain the "MySpace hoax" to someone in 1988?)

The technologies of tomorrow already exist.

Nanotechnology is already turning up in socks and medical devices, and everyone's predicting it'll replace basic circuitry and lead to miracle cures within a few years. People are already chuffed about home robotics, and robots are already helping us fight our wars. There's a lot of talk about amazing replacement limbs that will use nanotech, and even be able to interpret signals from your brain. And there's a lot of reason to be optimistic about gene therapy.

Don't just pick one technology to update.

One of my pet peeves is the near-ish future story where everything's more or less the same, except that there's one miraculous new technology that is transforming the world. It's way more likely that there'll be half a dozen semi-miraculous technologies that will be nudging the world in different directions. (And we can't discount the possibility that things will go to shit so badly that none of those amazing new technologies will come to fruition.)

The story comes first.

We're not writing a white paper here, we're creating LITERATURE. (And yes, it has to be all in block caps, because that's how you know it's serious. John Updike agrees with me.) It's impossible to be "accurate" in depicting the future unless you're a precog or a time-traveler. So the second most important thing is to create a future that's fully alienating and puts the right amount of future-shock on your reader's sushi-like bits. The most important thing is to have it all be in the service of your story, so that all the little details bolster your character and help make the characters' actions seem plausible in context.

So here are a couple of near-future writing exercises.

Writing exercise #1

Let's take a fictional character, we'll call her Betty January, and she has some kind of future job. Like she'll wipe an hour of your life out of the corporate transaction/surveillance databases, or she'll hack your new nanotech/biotech artificial limb to get around the DRM that prevents it from playing the piano like Stevie Wonder. Whatever.

So here's your exercise: Betty goes on a date, with some guy she met online. And it's a really, really bad date. The guy is a pompous dung-wad, and he keeps asking her annoying questions about what she does for a living. Describe Betty's bad date in detail, including how she traveled to the restaurant, what kind of food and drink they have, and what the guy is lecturing her about. Think about details, like how farming might be different in twenty years, or how ettiquette might change if everybody's got internet-enabled crap implanted in their heads. What are cosmetics like in a nanotech/biotech era? But all of the details shouldn't just be random world-buildy lego blocks — they should all be in the service of building the mood of Betty's bad date. And then, as a side effect of portraying her shitty night out, give us a dose of culture shock. (Feel free to post your writing exercise in the comments, if you don't mind random people critiquing it.)

Writing exercise #2

Everything goes to shit. Now that you've done a night-in-the-life type exercise, try writing the day when Betty's world falls apart. You never notice a lot of the technology around you until it fails, so some kind of technical failure should be part of this scenario — but not necessarily all of it. Maybe some corporation finds out what Betty's been up to and has her fire-walled. So suddenly her internet access doesn't work, and her extra arm, unable to download updates, starts turning into dead weight attached to her side. (She doesn't have to have an extra arm, I just threw that in there.) Or maybe there's a natural disaster, like an earthquake, which takes out the phone lines and cellphone towers. The main thing is, write the first five or ten minutes after Betty's world falls apart and everything stops working the way it should. What's the worst she imagines? What desperate measures does she try to get things working again? What does her living space look like to her when she's freaking out and feeling unsafe?

Larry Young's trilogy of books (illustrated by Charlie Adlard, with Matt Smith providing some art in the first book) - Live From The Moon, Space: 1959 and One Shot, One Beer - is much less space opera than space rock'n'roll, three books in a shared universe concentrating on the simple thrills of adventure, space travel and good old-fashioned storytelling. Each book involves a crew from Channel 7 News getting mixed up in some space-related plot courtesy of bad guys who are easily identifiable and easy to root against; Space: 1959 sees the news team take on Communists who are racing to put the first man on the moon... and are willing to kill to make it happen, for example. Who needs more of a high concept than that?

When asked about the possibility of an AiT movie last year, Young danced around the subject:

There's always something going on with the astronauts. Who doesn't think embedded reporters on mankind's return to the moon isn't a going concern? The thing's been optioned three times, and I'm sure it's out there in the consciousness. I sure do get a lot of atta-boys on that subject. Meetings are being held; the moon is being discussed.

It's time to fix that, Hollywood.

Astronauts in Trouble [AiT/PlanetLar]

(The image above comes from William Shatner's reality TV show Invasion Iowa, which staged an "alien wedding" in an Iowa church.)

It's interesting that the current flavor of the month in science fiction TV is Battlestar Galactica, which is all about a clash between two religions rather than religion vs. atheism or humanism.

I haven't read any written science fiction in ages that shows a super-scientific culture squaring off with a super-religious one... except maybe Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, where the scientific, humanistic Culture often squares off against a more religious and traditional civilization. Also, many TV shows — especially Doctor Who — frequently feature religious cultures that have created a kind of "cargo cult" around a piece of half-forgotten technology, and in the case of Doctor Who's "Meglos," the hyper-religious Deions (cute name) are opposed by the hyper-scientific Savants.

The tricky part of creating a future history of religion coming into conflict with science is not stereotyping either side. Especially if you happen to be an atheist or opposed to organized religion yourself. The best handling of religion I've seen in a science fiction book was in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow — where the Jesuits were intimately involved with space exploration, so there was no conflict.

So here are some ideas — I hesitate to call them rules — for creating a future narrative of science clashing with religion:

Find the flashpoint. What's the specific issue that causes tensions to rise between the scientific and religious worldviews? It could be the rise of a more dogmatic strain of fundamentalism, similar to the rise of the Religious Right in the U.S. of the 1980s and early 1990s. But it's probably likely to be some new scientific advance, instead. Something like stem cell research, but more inflammatory. Raising people from the dead, without Jesus? A new kind of nonpolluting car engine that harnesses your orgone energy (by making you have an orgasm while you drive)?

Religious people are technologically sophisticated (unless they're Amish). One of the hilarious things about the portrayal of religious people in cheesy scifi stories is the way they gawk at high-tech items, or start worshipping them. "All hail the mighty Wiimote!", that sort of thing. But you may have noticed that in the real world, religious groups are just as tech-savvy as everybody else who isn't a major geek. They use the Internet for mobilization and outreach, and they're better at using mass media than most secular groups. Think about it this way: has there ever been a useful invention that religious people have refused to use? (Except a few fringe groups.) What would it take for religious people to shun an invention that was genuinely helpful?

Scientific people aren't, as a rule, anti-religion. For every Richard Dawkins, there are tons of scientists and science-zealots who will sort of mumble that studying the wonders of the universe has given them a new appreciation for the possibility that there could be some superior intelligence out there... After all, the existence of a supreme being/first cause/creator is a hypothesis that can be neither proven nor disproven. Even Richard Dawkins admitted that aliens could have "intelligently designed" life on Earth.

Both religion and humanism are fluffy. Most religious people I know are pretty tolerant of other worldviews, and a lot of religious people seem to have only a vague, well-meaning belief in some nebulous (but benevolent) force in the universe. (I'm looking at you, Episcopalians!) Meanwhile, most secular people aren't die-hard pancreas-spitting atheists, but rather humanists, who have a sort of nice, non-threatening belief that people are lovely, and that we're going to keep improving ourselves and getting lovelier. And that eventually, maybe we'll get over our baser instincts and also learn to conquer space.

Atheists can be fanatics too. And then there are the Dawkinses and Christopher Hitchenses of this world, who are just as dogmatic and fundamentalist in their belief that you can prove a negative as the most cross-eyed Cotton Mather wannabe. If a major conflict did strike up between scientific and religious outlooks, it would be as likely to start with the radical atheists as with the radical theists.

Think dystopian. The religious and scientific approaches to the world can coexist reasonably well on a comfy, room-temperature planet with more-or-less adequate resources. But if we see massive ecological disruption in the coming century — as many experts predict — and our planet becomes a much less nice place to live, people will become a lot more desperate. Scientists and religious leaders may have very different ideas on how to handle the wave of disasters and shortages to come — and who's to blame. (Think religious leaders blaming immorality for Hurricane Katrina, for example.) Science, on the other hand, may propose some pretty stringent, if not morally questionable, solutions to the crisis.

I could see the world eventually turning into two blocs: a humanistic superpower that tolerates religion but won't allow it in politics or government, and a quasi-theocracy, where religious leaders hold a lot of sway. Not unlike the Cold War, except the humanistic bloc might be less oppressive than the Soviet Union was. The only real question in my mind is, which of those blocs would the United States align itself with?

First, a little bit of history of the Superman/Batman teamups. The two first joined together in 1952, and quickly learned each other's secret identities. Their monthly teamup comic, World's Finest, lasted until the mid-1980s. They were best friends, and their stories often had a sort of boys' clubhouse feel, with Robin along for the ride. Occasionally a girl like Supergirl or Batgirl would want to join the club. Or either Superman would get a new "best friend," leaving Batman to feel sad and rejected. Or some mean boys, like the Composite Superman or Anti-Batman and Anti-Superman, would show up and ruin everything. But the stories would always end with the club intact again.

And then in the mid-1980s, Frank Miller and John Byrne came up with the idea of making Superman and Batman uneasy allies, who didn't trust each other. Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns ends with the two slugging it out, and Byrne's Superman: The Man Of Steel has the young Superman meeting the unsavory vigilante Batman for the first time. Batman thinks Superman's a callow boy scout, and Superman disapproves of Batman's violent methods. This is the one where Batman tells Superman that he's implanted a deadly bomb in "an innocent" that will go off if Superman tries to grab Batman... and then it turns out the bomb is actually in Batman himself, which means Batman is an innocent. I keep waiting for Superman to pat Batman on the back or brush against him accidentally. (Why couldn't Batman have just implanted the bomb in a chihuahua? Chihuahuas are people too. But maybe Batman doesn't believe chihuahuas are ever innocent.) In fact, there are approximately 1,000 DC comics from the late 1980s where Superman says that he disapproves of Batman's methods, before teaming up with him.

Now, the two are back to being friends, more or less, although Superman/Batman always shows that they have very different perspectives by giving us thought captions from both of them. Superman is bright and optimistic, Batman is dark and brooding. So occasionally, Superman will think to himself, "Wow, Bruce is so dark and brooding." And Batman will think, "Oh Clark, I could never be as optimistic and bright as you are." (It's all about the first names nowadays.) And now DC is working on a weekly Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman team-up comic, written by Kurt Busiek.

So in a nutshell, the dynamic between Batman and Superman has always been a tad cartoonish and oversimplified, based on whatever the prevailing version of Batman has been at the time. (Fun caped crusader, grim 'n' gritty avenger, or paranoid-but-brilliant member of the superhero family.) Superman hasn't changed nearly as much as Batman has.

So here's how I'd make the dynamic between Superman and Batman more interesting: I'd turn them into Lethal Weapon.

Superman is the cautious one, the straight arrow who does everything by the book despite (or because of) his almost limitless power. Batman is the crazy, out-of-control risktaker who keeps dragging Superman into situations he's not equipped for. Batman is the guy who sends Superman and himself diving into a black hole on a spaceship with one dud engine. He's the one who drags Superman and himself into a nest of trolls, whose magic weapons can hack Superman to pieces. He seems to make impulsive, rash decisions, but always turns out to have a plan. Sort of.

And yes, I know that since Grant Morrison's JLA Batman has been portrayed as the uber-control freak who always plans twenty steps ahead in every situation. But he's also the non-powered guy who dresses up in a bat costume, with his face unprotected, and jumps off rooftops into gunfire every night of the week. He's the crazed, half-suicidal Mel Gibson to Superman's Danny Glover.

Every Superman/Batman storyline should start with Superman being totally on top of things as usual, crushing a rogue giant robot with one hand while using his heat vision to stop a falling satellite from crashing on a populated area. And maybe using his super-breath to avert a tsunami at the same time. And then suddenly, Batman comes zipping up in his Bat-plane and is like, "time to go, boy scout!" Superman starts to protest, but he knows Batman only resorts to asking for his help when it's a serious problem. The next thing he knows, he's lost control over his superpowers and Batman is sending the two of them in a tailspin into a magical soul-eating volcano. "This volcano is connected to a crime that happened in Gotham City, which means it's MINE," Batman explains helpfully.

Instead of looking at Batman and thinking, "I don't approve of his methods," or "He's my pal," or "Bruce, why are you so grim and dark?" Superman should be shouting "Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce! What have you gotten me into this time?" at the top of his super-lungs, while Batman cackles.

I wouldn't claim to be an expert on short fiction writing, but I have written over a hundred of the little fuckers, a large proportion of which have been science fiction-y. Here are a bunch of do's and don'ts, that I discovered the hardest way possible.

World-building should be quick and merciless. In a novel, you can spend ten pages explaining how the 29th Galactic Congress established a Peacekeeping Force to regulate the use of interstitial jumpgates, and this Peacekeeping Force evolved over the course of a century to include A.I.s in its command structure, etc. etc. In a short story, you really need to hang your scenery as fast as possible. My friend and mentor d.g.k. goldberg always cited the Heinlein line: "The door dilated," which tells you a lot about the surroundings in three words. Little oblique references to stuff your characters take for granted can go a long way.

Make us believe there's a world beyond your characters' surroundings. Even though you can't spend tons of time on world-building, you have to include enough little touches to make us believe there's stuff we're not seeing. It's like the difference between the fake house-fronts in a cowboy movie and actual houses. We should glimpse little bits of your universe, that don't necessarily relate to your characters' obsessions.

Fuck your characters up. A little. Just like with worldbuilding, you can't necessarily devote pages to your characters' childhoods and what kind of underwear they wear under their boiler suits. Unless your story is really a character study with a bit of a science fiction plot. I used to have a worksheet that included spaces to fill in in info about each character's favorite music, hatiest color, etc. etc. Never filled those out. If I'd tried to force myself to come up with a favorite color for every character, I would have given up writing. But do try to spend a bit of time giving all of your characters some baggage, just enough to make them interesting. Most science fiction readers are interested in characters who solve problems and think positively, but that doesn't mean they can't have some damage.

Dive right in — but don't sign-post your plot in big letters. When I started writing stories, my early efforts meandered around for pages before something happened to one of the characters to make him/her freak out. And then the rest of the story would be the character(s) dealing with that problem. And then, as I got more practiced, I found the foolproof map to awesome storytelling: introduce whatever it was that was freaking out my characters in the very first sentence of the story! And then the story could be about them dealing with that problem, until they solved it in the very end. It was so perfect, how could it fail? It took me another year or two to realize that plunging the characters into the story's main conflict right away was just as boring, in its own way, as the ten pages of wandering in circles. The best short stories I've read are ones which start in the thick of things, but still keep you guessing and let you get to know the characters before you fully comprehend the trouble they're in.

Experiment with form. Short fiction isn't one form, it's a whole bunch of forms jammed together according to their length. Short stories include your standard 3,000 word mini-odyssey thru the psyche. But they also include flash fiction (sometimes defined as under 100 words, sometimes under 500 or even under 1,000.) And those wacky list things that McSweeney's runs sometimes. In fact, for a while there, postmodern short fiction was all about the list, or the footnotes, or the krazy monologue, or the story told in office memos. Try writing super-short stories of only 10 words, or mutant essay-stories written by a fictional person. Also, if you always write third person, try first person. Or if you're always doing first person, try third.

Think beyond genre. Often the best genre fiction is the stuff that cross-germinates. Pretend you're actually writing your story for the New Yorker, and try to channel George Saunders or even Alice Munro. See how far you can go towards writing a pure lit piece while still including some elements of speculation. Or try writing your story as a romance. Or a mystery. Imagine it as a Sundancey indy movie.

Don't confuse your gimmick with your plot. You may have a great idea for a piece of future technology, or some amazing mutation that turns a whole bunch of people into musicvores who survive by eating your memories of rock concerts. Maybe you have the most original basic premise evar — but that's not your plot. Your plot is how your new widget changes the people in your story, and how it affects their lives. Or what decisions your people make as a result of this new technological breakthrough.

Don't fall into the character-based/plot-based dichotomy. People, especially in writing groups and workshops, will try to categorize stories as based on either plot or character. This is a poisonous idea that will turn you into a cannibalistic freak wearing a belt made out of human spinal cords. There's no such thing as a character-based story or a plot-based story, because every story has both. Even the most incident-free Ploughshares romp or the most twisty thumpy space opera tale. If you start thinking that stories can be categorized into either pile, you'll end up writing either eventless character studies or plot-hammer symphonies starring one-dimensional nothings.

Doomlord started life as a photo-strip in 1982's relaunch of the weekly comic Eagle; the plot was surprisingly simple: Shape-changing telepathic alien comes to Earth armed with a magic ring that allows him to teleport and fire disintegration rays, to judge whether humanity should live or die. Of course, he decided that we should all be killed - which, really, is the decision you'd expect from someone calling themselves "Doomlord". Luckily, a plucky young reporter managed to kill him with a deadly virus that somehow never managed to leak past a locked door, and the world was saved. Or something.

Of course, this being comics, it turned out that Doomlord was only one of a number of Doomlords, and over the course of the next nine years, various aliens came to Earth to try and carry out the judgement only to meet similar ends. Not all of them wanted to kill us all, though; the second one decided that he liked his landlady and became a superhero until he saw the light and realized that Doomlord wasn't just a title, it was a calling. He ended up wanting to destroy humanity as well, in the end. The only reason we're all still around? Eagle was cancelled in 1991, and the character disappeared into limbo.

But in this post-Lord Of The Rings (He has a magic ring, people), post-Battlestar Galactica era, is there any one character that sums up the pop-cultural zeitgeist as an alien disguised as anyone who wants to kill us all for just being human? With a magic ring? I think not. And that's why I'm asking whichever movie producer happens to be reading this post to at least consider these four words: "Doomlord. Coming Summer 2010."

Doomlord [International Hero]

It's in your toothpaste!! "Highly evolved nanostructures" such as Bucky balls are already being used in toothpaste and face cream, among other household products. What if your exfoliating, revitalizing beauty cream suddenly turned eeeevil? The possibilities are as infinite as the spaces between molecules. Maybe the nano-structures aren't just passive, but actually contain tiny nanites that start eating your face? You could have a rash (so to speak) of corpses with melty faces, and our heroes have to figure out why, before...

...the awful countdown. There has to be some horrendous clock ticking down to N-day, the day the rogue nanites bust out and consume everything. Maybe the melty-face people are just the first wave, or maybe some evil nanomachines got activated prematurely by mistake. (Or maybe it's just an excuse to have some smooshy faces, which who doesn't love?) But there's a monster computer that plans to release all of the nanites at the same time, which isn't just immediately for some reason. (Or the nanites just get released by accident — but an evil AI is more fun.) Our heroes have to rush to stop it, but... they're too late.

The gray goo is consuming everything. It expands exponentially, so the more it consumes, the faster it spreads. In Wil McCarthy's Bloom, it only takes a few hours for gray goo to swallow up Earth's ecosystem. Similarly, in Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, the "nants" manage to swallow up the entire Earth within about a day. So the gray goo starting to be released should probably be the "break" between the second and third acts of the movie or TV show. (At the same time, our heroes should have an important personal realization, and confront something or other about themselves, blah blah blah.)

The nano-ooze should have a catchphrase. Nobody is ever going to care about nano-gunk that doesn't have a swagger in its voice. Maybe the nan-ooze speaks through your computer speakers, or grows a giant mouth, which says something like, "You Are Our Raw Material." Or something catchier, like "Your Biosphere Will Be Disassembled." (We'll save the truly dumb catchphrase, like "The Goo Will Be You," for the movie poster.)

So there's a program that can deactivate the gray goo, or maybe a firewall that it can't pass for some reason. But in order to deploy this magic-bullet code, our main character has to face his/her greatest fear. Or confront a mistake he/she made long ago. Or maybe our heroes discover that another batch of nanomachines can neutralize the first batch by altering their function.

We see the face of god in the heart of the goo. Once our heroes come face to face with the wall of goo, there really ought to be some sort of 2001/Sunshine-y moment of confronting the vastness of the micro-world and maybe coming up against the divine in everything. Maybe the nano-machines teach us an important lesson about what it means to be human, or the soul, or something. Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, who always turn into spiritual guides when you least expect it. Everything gets all rhapsodic and we break out the wobbly lens so the gray goo can teach us some important lesson before it vanishes into a haze of mystification. That's your awesome gray goo movie right there. And they said it would never work.

Here are some of the story ideas I'd love to see science-fiction stories dealing with:

Alternative fuels. I joked about "Chevron Extra Unleaded is people," in that poll about social problems a couple of weeks ago. But I could easily imagine equally crazy attempts to replace oil, no matter what the cost. Maybe we could genetically engineer creatures whose bodies secrete oils that we can burn. At the very least, you can expect to see more dependence on nuclear power, meaning more Three Mile Islands and terrorist targets. Or maybe you could write a utopian novel, about a society that manages to harness the solar winds for clean, sustainable energy.

Globalization without travel. We could see an era, within our lifetimes, when it's easy to communicate all over the world thanks to the Internet. But it's harder and harder to travel anywhere. So culture may be global, with Ukranians and Nigerians posting their lives on Youtube and Myspace. But goods and services may be increasingly local. You won't be able to get imported Japanese food any more, but you'll be able to watch Japanese television. Local cultures might even make a comeback, if it gets harder for multinationals like Starbucks and McDonald's to transport their crap around the world. Would we get more fascinated with other cultures? Or just turn insular?

It's a test. Maybe every planet that sustains intelligent life also has a layer of hydrocarbons sufficient to allow its inhabitants to expand off-world and start harvesting the resources of the solar system. And it's an intelligence test that most species fail: Will you figure out this one-time chance to create a solar-system-wide civilization, or will you use the resources to build shopping malls and fight bigger and better wars? Maybe there's a select club of alien races who were smart enough to make the correct use of their planets' hydrocarbon layers, and they're waiting to see if we qualify.

Aliens engineered the fossil fuels. And maybe deposits of fossil fuels in easily accessible locations don't come standard with habitable worlds. Maybe they're actually a very nice gift that somebody left for us. What if an alien race went around seeding planets with fossil layers that would help any intelligent races to jump-start their space exploration? And then the aliens come back once they spot the first signs of industrialization on our planet? It might take them a couple hundred light years to see our factories and engines and then make the trip here. Would they be pissed to see what we did with their gift?

Waiting to invade. And maybe aliens are just waiting until we use up our easiest power source, so they can come in and take what remains. Without fossil fuels, our global civilization will quickly disintegrate, and our science may regress considerably. It'll be much harder to share technological advances. Scientists could still collaborate online, but might not be able to travel, and might have a harder time getting access to resources. So we could find ourselves in the position of having drawn lots of attention to ourselves, with radio waves, probes and satellites — and then leaving ourselves defenseless. In a couple hundred years, we could be a very tempting target for aliens who managed to get out of their own solar system and notice that we're no longer as advanced as we used to be.

These crimfighters have their own MySpace pages, an online costume shop that builds their custom wear (whatever happened to people sewing it themselves, like Spidey did?), and are seriously into the gig, including the long hours of doing nothing. Like "Superhero" who patrols the highways of Florida in his 1975 Corvette, ""What I do is 80% boredom punctuated by 15% helping and 5% terror."

So you've got your crazy characters who try to fight crime on their own, deluded by the existence of comic books and heroes in the movies. Give them sort sort of baddie to go up against, like the couple who were inspired to become criminals by their goth books, have them go toe to toe. In the end, someone learns a heartwarming lesson about life, and that everyone is a hero on the inside, yadda yadda yadda, and bang, there's your movie.

Actually, we're surprised none of these people have ended up dead in an alley somewhere and splashed on the local news. Then the studios and comic book publisher could just brace themselves for the slew of lawsuits that would inevitably pop up with people saying, "Gee, Batman did it in a movie, so I copied him and lost my arm in the process! You owe me a million bucks!" So beat 'em to the punch already, Hollywood. Put them in your movie.

"Real" Villains In Need of A "Real" Superhero [Hardcore Math User]

First, and most importantly, keep it simple. You've got seven heroes and at least one villain. Each one of those characters has enough backstory for a hundred movies. But remember that each of these characters started out with a simple concept, before the comic books added decades of sprawl. A superpowered alien raised in Kansas. A guy who runs super-fast. An Amazon princess. Etc.

We don't need to know that there has been more than one super-fast running guy called the Flash. (Not to mention Wonder Woman's backstory. Was her mom Wonder Woman before her, back during World War II? Or was that the Wonder Woman of Earth 2? Or did it just not happen? It's best ignored.)

Next, feature just one villain. It's bad enough when movies like Batman Returns or Spider-Man 3 have the villain smorgasbord. But with seven heroes, there just isn't time for us to get to know more than one villain in a meaningful way. We want to know what makes our bad guy tick: his hopes, his dreams, his Barry Manilow collection. (Or hers.)

Give the JLA a mission statement. There has to be a compelling reason for the seven most powerful heroes on Earth to come together, and it's not to get a cat out of a tree. Don't waste our time with Lex Luthor or the Joker or Max Lord, or any problem that Superman could solve in five minutes on his own. This is a bigger challenge with JLA than with the Avengers, because no Avenger is remotely as powerful as Superman. (Sorry, Marvel fans.)

Don't do the "investigating separate cases that turn out to be related" thing. It's a tired device, and it strains our credulity a bit that everything our heroes are working on turns turns out to be parts of the same problem.

So that's a lot of rules. But how would I plot a JLA movie? Sadly, because I am a huge dork, I have given this a lot of thought. Here are my thoughts:

I would try to find a way to bring the heroes together organically, and not bring together all seven at once. First of all, I'd bring the scifi heroes together (everyone except for Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman).

Say there's some kind of emergency in space. And Superman, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern all investigate. Green Lantern brings Flash along because they're best friends, and Flash can react faster than anybody. (I would make the friendship between Flash and Green Lantern a cornerstone of a JLA movie, and then let us see the other heroes through their eyes.)

These four heroes have to team up to stop some kind of alien threat to Earth. (Maybe Starro, or Brainiac. Or possibly (gasp) a totally new villain who's not from the comics.) At first, they seem to be succeeding, but then it turns out the alien attack was a ruse to distract the heroes, while the aliens planted some kind of advance guard on Earth. Maybe the aliens deposit spores somewhere. Or cybernetic probes, or some of Starro's mini-mind-controlling starfish.

To track down the alien items, our heroes need the help of the world's greatest detective, the mysterious Batman. He refuses to help at first, until some of the alien technology starts having a weird effect on humans in Gotham city. (Maybe there are hideous spores that start bursting out of people. Or people have silly starfishes on their heads. Everybody's afraid of starfish-head disease.)

Our heroes also try to recruit the world's greatest warrior, Wonder Woman, to fight the coming alien invasion. Meanwhile, one of the fragments has fallen into the ocean, and Green Lantern asks Aquaman to help look for it.

And then in the final act, all seven heroes need to work together to prevent a full-scale alien invasion. Somewhere along the way, they start acting more like a team, and the three characters who didn't go into space in the beginning learn to trust the other four. They're only able to save the Earth by combining all their abilities, and even then it's a near thing. They realize they'll have to develop their teamwork, or they might not managed to save the world the next time.

Okay, that's my Justice League pitch. What do you think?

The porn episode. I mean, come on. John Connor is a teenage boy. His mom has forbidden him to go near a computer, so he can't just surf to NoodMortalKombat.com or whatever. He's not supposed to leave the house without his bodyguard. Does he sneak away and try to steal some magazines? Does he order Summer Glau to flash him? The therapy episode. One of the things that made The Sopranos so great was Tony's relationship with his Lorraine Braco's therapist. And judging from the first couple of episodes, Sarah Connor really needs some hardcore Jungian therapy. Or maybe Adlerian, we're not picky. Could she find a therapist who'd keep her secret and wouldn't try to have her committed? She could bring Summer Glau and have her show off her cyber-bits. Or maybe she'd try online therapy. Or just order Summer Glau to be her therapist, which would be hilarious. Actually, in episode two, we already saw hints of Summer becoming Sarah's therapist.

The hacking episode. So John Connor isn't allowed to use a computer any more, which means his 1337 hacking skillz were out of date in 1999. And now that he's jumped forward to 2007, his skillz are even more out of date. We got a pretty strong hint of that when he didn't know how to clear his browser cache in the mall computer store. But what if it turns out his hacker abilities were part of why he becomes such a great leader in the future? What if Sarah is actually thwarting his heroic destiny by trying to keep him safe?

(Actually, that should be a theme of the show in general. Maybe she subconsciously wants to keep him from becoming that great future leader, so the robots will stop trying to kill him. Something she could talk about in therapy.)The gangster episode. Actually, the easiest way to make Connor like Sopranos is to have Sarah become even more of a criminal. We already saw that she has to keep dealing with gangstas to get fake IDs and other stuff to help her stay underground. What if she finds, over time, that she has to start running her own organized crime empire to stay one step ahead of the feds and the mean metal guys? After all, crime leads to more crime. It's a downward-spiral thing. We saw it on an after-school special once. Struggling to manage Sarah's own crime family be harder than dodging a Terminator's lousy aim. Which leads us to:

The betrayal episode. Sarah Connor should have a decent-sized supporting cast, with their own agendas and foibles. Not just the FBI agent and ex-fiance who are both obsessed with Sarah for different reasons, but temporary allies of Sarah's who will turn on her in a second when their interests diverge. And hey, here's a thought. Now that we know there are resistance fighters from the future hanging around in 2007 hanging cat posters, it would be interesting to meet them. What if some of them have gone native? Decided to give up on the fight and enjoy the spoils of their future knowledge until the end?

Before this neuro-remapping technique gets into the wrong hands, scifi creators need to write some stories that warn us about the dangers. Let's see a movie or book about how torturers are using nerve-remapping to re-route all nerve sensation to one area, which they then shock and beat mercilessly. Or maybe they would just map their victim's legs to their arms and vice-versa, essentially making them unable to control their limbs properly and crippling them with fear?

This nerve-remapping could also be rewarding in the scariest possible way. You could reroute the nerves responsible to orgasm into somebody's trigger finger, so that every time they fired a gun they would get a burst of pleasure. Sort of like the mind-controlling Tasp weapon that Larry Niven invented for Ringworld. In that book, a group of aliens use the pleasure-inducing Tasp to condition everyone around them to enjoy obeying their orders.