Here're 100 of our favorite comic covers from the last decade. We tried to hide our biases slightly by only allowing one pick per series (Otherwise, you'd get a Fables and 100 Bullets gallery, most likely), and limited our choices to books that fall squarely into io9's wheelhouse (Thereby missing such great covers as Ryan Kelly and Brian Wood's Local, many things from DC's Minx line or Jock's Losers covers), but if you're still not getting a visual feast from everything below, we advise you to go and see a specialist immediately.

(Covers are in something approaching alphabetical order, and not in order of how much we love them, before anyone wonders.)

Covers 1 - 10:

Covers 11-20:

Covers 21-30:

Covers 31-40:

Covers 41-50:

Covers 51-60:

Covers 61-70:

Covers 71-80:

Covers 81-90:

Covers 91-100:

We're sure we've missed some obvious choices; tell us what we should've picked in the comments below.

In today's morning spoilers, we linked to eating class's analysis of the new trailer. Here's our shot-for-shot breakdown and speculation on what it means.

We know so far that DiCaprio is playing a CEO-type who enters people's dreams to steal information from their heads and Page plays his assistant. In the trailer, we get some moments inside the dream worlds as well as hints at how you wake a dreamer from their sleep.

In the first shot above, we see Leonardo DiCaprio spinning a top with great concentration. What is the purpose of the top? Later, we see several shots in which the laws of physics appear to be altered. Is the top some sort of test of the physics of a place?

His voiceover asks, "What's the most resilient parasite? An idea."

Now we see DiCaprio and his assistant Ellen Page staring at something with interest, but without fear.
And now we see what that is: the city is folding up and in on itself. But despite the folding, there is no destruction; nothing is breaking, no cars or people are falling, and no one is afraid of the change.

"A single idea from the human mind can build cities."

The water in the glass is shaking. Water does actually seem to indicate the physics of a place, as we'll see later in the trailer.
A man looks out the window at a fire in the street (eating class notes that this man is probably Luke Haas, who plays the character Nash). As the fire erupts into an explosion, it looks like the people an the street might be briefly reacting, suggesting this scene might take place in the real world instead of a dream world.

DiCaprio's voiceover continues, "An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules."

Inside what looks like a makeshift hospital, several people sleep on cots. It looks like wires or tubes lead from several bodies toward the ceiling. They could be suffering from some sort of illness, or they could be subjects in some sort of dream harvesting or research program. The man at the desk overseeing these people stands up to acknowledge someone who's just entered the room.

Dicaprio surveys the city from the roof of a building.

"Which is why I have to steal it."

Walking through a restaurant kitchen, DiCaprio pulls out a silencer for his gun.

A freight train barrels through the middle of a street, pushing cars out of the way.

Now Page is walking down the street while DiCaprio shouts advice at her. As we noted yesterday, it's a moment very reminiscent of The Matrix. DiCaprio is the mentor and Page travels through this strange world with us, learning the rules as we do.

DiCaprio tells her, "Never recreate from your memory. Always imagine new places."

The pair sit at a brasserie while groceries explode into the air next to them. Neither seems to particularly notice.

DiCaprio stares out the window of his car while Haas is being forcibly taken away by two men.

DiCaprio is talking to someone (Cillian Murphy?), saying, "He's hiding something and we need to find out what that is."

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's badass character and Tom Hardy have commandeered a cab and it looks like they get involved in some kind of car chase/shootout.

Now we're back to the glass of water. Although from our perspective, the table and the glass are in the same position, the water is now at a slant. Perhaps this indicates that, if the laws of physics were working properly, the glass and the table would be at a slant as well.

We get our first look at Ken Watanabe's villain, rising from bed, gun in hand. An ambush, perhaps?

A voiceover says, "We gotta break out of here."

A motorcycle chases a van through the fog.

Now we see the person talking is Gordon-Levitt. He shouts, "Give him the kick!" We know that people can enter other people's dreams through injections. Perhaps "the kick" is a way to wake the dreamer up and escape the dream.

Haas lets DiCaprio, who appears to be unconscious in a chair, fall back toward something.

A masked man walks into a room where two men in suits are being held prisoner.

DiCaprio screams, "This was not part of the plan!" Is that the same taxi from before?

Shots of DiCaprio continuing to fall into the tub are interspersed with shots of two men fighting. The water apparently wakes DiCaprio. He appears to have something around his wrist, and eating class noticed something coming out of his hand. Perhaps this is related to the wire/tube-like things we saw in the infirmary scene earlier.

We hear a woman, perhaps Page, screaming, "Wake me up! Wake me up!"

Two men approach a door, guns raised.
And we end on another fine water shot, with DiCaprio standing in the middle of a room as streams of water burst in overhead.

To begin with: welcome to Indy Comic Book Week. Even though Diamond Distributors aren't shipping new product to stores this week, a collection of small press creators have teamed with a collection of stores nationwide to offer some counterprogramming for the week, from scifi comedy What Planet Is This? to epic mouse fantasy (No, really) The Osward Chronicles. The entire list of books is available on the website, along with a list of participating stores. Go and check it out.

For everyone else, don't think that you're going to be completely devoid of new books. Marvel has a preview of their next big storyline, Origins of Siege, that'll bring you up to speed on recent events and the origins of some of their big name characters.

But DC trumps Marvel with the embargoed sixth issue of Blackest Night. For those following the DC series, you'll know that the last issue ended with a pretty big cliffhanger (SPOILER FOR THOSE READING IN TRADE: Oh, look: Superman, Wonder Woman and countless other DC superheroes are dead after all, and now they're working for the bad guy), so calling this issue "anticipated" is a slight understatement. Here's hoping it offers up more surprises and things going very wrong for the good guys.

Next week: Back to normal, lots of new books and the start of Marvel's Siege, just to make sure that the real Avengers are back together in time for their movie...

As you can see, the chances are very slim. As slim as the chances of the new security rules having any real effect in preventing any new attacks, sadly.

[Data collected by Nate Silver]

If you've read Vertigo titles like Hellblazer or Lucifer in the past decade or so, you're already a fan of Carey's writing. In particular, his epic run on Lucifer kept the intrigues of Heaven and Hell constantly surprising, with a shifting set of loyalties and fascinating characters. Not to mention, Carey wrote one of my all-time favorite miniseries: My Faith In Frankie, the story of a girl and her personal god.

But for the past few years, he's been putting out a number of novels featuring Felix Castor, a London exorcist who sometimes helps the police untangle particularly baffling murders. He's put out five of them so far, and he seems to be doing a great job of ratcheting up the tension and weirdness. I've read a couple of them, Vicious Circle and Dead Men's Boots, and have found them addictive enough to drag me away from the other books I'm supposed to be reading.

Like Supernatural, they're dark and witty, and feature otherworldly monsters that want to run rampant on Earth. Their mixture of cleverness and heart reminded me of Eric Kripke and Sera Gamble at their cracklingest.

In the books, Felix Castor is an exorcist, someone who can see the ghosts that lurk around London and banish them by playing on his tin whistle. (And yes, the whistle thing does get a bit cheesy at times. But run with it.) There have always been ghosts, and people who could deal with them, but for some reason the 1990s saw a huge surge in the number of dead people refusing to go quietly. (The reasons for this change are a bit mysterious, but apparently relate to something called the Great Project in Hell.)

So now exorcism has become a valid career path, for those who have the talent — but besides ghosts, there are also zombies, loups-garous and demons roaming around causing trouble. Castor, the perpetually down at his luck ghost-hunter, also has to contend with a fringe group that argues that ghosts have human rights and shouldn't simply be exorcised, even if they're going all polter. There's even an ominously pending law that would ratify the legal status of the deceased.

Castor's pretty much your classic sad-sack P.I., as well — he's constantly getting out of his depth and tangling with opponents way beyond his weight class. His cases involve rogue exorcists whose powers are beyond his, or gangsters who've found a way to live forever by transplanting their souls into new bodies after death. There are occasional moments of genuine horror as well as traditional detective work, piecing together odd clues until something comes together.

He survives a lot of scrapes by his wits alone, or through pure luck, and his main superpower seems to be knowing when to tell a clever lie. His allies are rarely terribly reliable, including Gary Coldwood, the cop who often seems to hate his guts, Nicky, a zombie information broker, and Juliet, a former succubus who's just barely reformed thanks to the love of a good woman. His best friend Rafi is possessed by the demon Asmodeus (thanks to Felix's blundering), and his ex-girlfriend Pen won't forgive him for it.

I think the main thing that keeps me obsessively reading these books is Carey's dark, smoky narrative voice. It's very much in line with the Jim Butcher novels, Kadrey's Sandman Slim, and some other vaguely pulpy urban fantasy that's come out lately — I am trying not to overuse the phrase "noir fantasy" but there's definitely a smidgen of noir in the way that Castor's first-person narrator always seems world-weary and a bit of a bastard. But he's less of a bastard than most of the other people he meets, and he has a kind of struggling nobility to him. And there's definitely something a bit noirish about narration like this:

I was starting to get the picture now: it was a bleak and sad one, executed mainly in grays, but then I don't get to see many that are in bright primaries.

Or this, from later in the same book, after a spirit contact goes disastrously wrong:

I fished out my flask of I-can't-believe-it's-not-cognac and unscrewed the lid with shaking hands. The first sip was medicinal: I swilled it around my bitten tongue, trying not to wince, rolled down the window, and spat out the blood. The second sip was for my jangled nerves. So were the third and fourth.

The actual plots of the novels, judging from the two I've read, are insanely complicated and usually involve tons of different strands weaving together. I often found myself having to flip back 100 pages to try and remind myself exactly who a particular character was, when we hadn't seen him or her in a while. There are a lot of random characters, or entities, who show up and do something, then vanish for hundreds of pages only to resurface when the plot(s) needs them. The overall effect is one of whirling corruption and soul-deep chaos, and it's not at all a bad thing that Carey's spiritualist London feels fully populated.

The major supporting characters, though, are quite memorable and a big draw of these books is following Juliet, Pen, Rafi and the others through their evolution. Carey seems fairly determined to keep his status quo from becoming too quo, and all of the major characters seem to have actual arcs planned out, making the books worthwhile just to see how they turn out.

And there are plenty of hints, tossed here and there, about infernal politics. Something bigger seems to be coming down the pike, and every case Castor takes on, especially the ones which seem to be too hot to handle, increases the lingering sense that we're just seeing the tip of the supernatural iceberg. In any case, Castor's the type of fantasy hero we need more of — he's a good man in a bad world that's getting worse, and he defeats evil through a mixture of raw cunning and having friends in low places. Until Sam and Dean come back, it's definitely worth spending some time getting to know Felix Castor.

From Fringe to FlashForward to V, with sidesteps into Dollhouse and Warehouse 13, the FBI were all over 2009's science fiction television (And yet, none of these activities make their list of top cases of 2009. I smell cover up). But why are so many of today's heroes working for The Man? And the same Man, at that?

Positive media portrayals are nothing new for the FBI; since its creation, the agency has actively participated in various projects, including 1935 radio show G Men and the wonderfully-titled This Is Your FBI. We remember Special Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks, or Mulder and Scully from The X-Files, but this year's federal fetishism seems to have hit a new high. Part of it could be put down to a mix of comforting the audience while pretending to ramp up the excitement at the same time: They're risking their necks to make your life a safer place like the cops... But more extreme!

There's something to be said for the post-9/11 wish-fulfillment aspect of the new rash of FBI heroes; it plays directly to the idea that, even when the threat is literally unimaginable on a human scale, the people charged with protecting us will (in whatever small way) be able to recognize it first, and mobilize to stop it even if said threat is internal, which it so often seems to be. In fact, today's FBI dramas seem a particularly backhanded compliment, if they're meant to reassure; in most of the shows our new G Men and Women idols appear in, they're faced with an institution that's against them and, in some cases, implicit in the "bad stuff" that's going on around them. How many times, after all, has an FBI agent turned out to be an undercover bad guy (V, Fringe) or mentally unstable in some way (FlashForward, Fringe, Dollhouse because, let's face it, Ballard has problems) this year?

Besides the apparent ease of infiltrating the FBI, the new wave has also produced other 21st Century FBI cliches: Apparently, emotionally distant blonde women advance up the ranks easily, especially when paired with joking-yet-caring male partners. Department heads are often African American and gruff, yet ultimately caring. And new taskforces will be created at seeming random, but have to answer for budget overruns just before important breakthroughs happen. Are these really things that happen all the time in the real FBI? If so, I think someone in HR needs to find the moles immediately (Here's a clue: They're probably the ones from an alternate dimension).

Maybe the FBI-zing of science fiction is just a way of making everything into a procedural, making it easier for non-genre fans to get to grips with the new shows, turning everything into a CSI: Aliens or the like, and we're reading way too much into it. Perhaps it's a fad, and next year, every new show will have firemen. But for whatever reason, 2009 has been the year when only one kind of government employee could save the world, and we were happy to have them. Viva la FBI.

Many don't realize that Alda has a geeky side. Known for his 11 year story arc on M*A*S*H, the actor has always been fascinated with science. He's been lucky enough to entertain that side of his life by serving on the board of the World Science Festival and hosting the now defunct Scientific American Frontiers for 12 years.

While he hasn't starred in any science-based films (yet), Alda did act the part of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in the play QED in 2001. Explaining his lack of science fiction on his resume, Alda tells io9, "Nothing's been offered to me that looked really interesting." Are you listening, Hollywood?

"I used to read science fiction a lot and I still like it if it's a model of how we really are, so we can see ourselves from another perspective," Alda continues. "The thing is that I read so much science, much more than I do fiction, because to me, science in itself is a great detective story that's happening in front of us. I don't get as involved with science fiction, except as it tries to help me understand who we are, because the greatest frontier in science is to understand humanity itself."

In a quest to learn more about that very subject, Alda and the folks at PBS take a look at what makes us human in a three-part series premiering on January 6th. The Human Spark, a three-part miniseries, sends Alda to three continents as he talks with archaeologists and scientists about our evolution and how we differ from Neandrathals, apes, and other animals.

"We often start off with these great divides," Alda explains. "We say, we're the only ones that cry. We're the only ones that laugh. We're the only ones that build skyscrapers. And little by little, as we've explored this, I've begun to see some of these lines blur and disappear in certain cases. What my interviews with scientists, being out in the field with these animals, and taking part in these experiments has done, is I've personally started to feel more connected to these other animals and see some of the roots of my behavior."

Alda went so far as to have his brain scanned at MIT's McGovern Institute, but it wasn't the first time he's done so. Turns out the producers at Scientific American Frontiers have made Alda get his head examined a few times already. While the brain scans in this instance were done to show what areas scientists think are uniquely human, technicians at MIT noted that they wouldn't have been able to guess Alda's age based on his brain scans — his noggin looks a few years younger! "I've carried that along with me for a while now," Alda laughs. "It cheers me up."

Alda's big question, which has yet to be answered involves our future as a species. "Scientists have told me that the average lifespan of a species is about two million years. We've only been here a fraction of that so far. Do we have a chance of having an average existence on earth? Can you picture us here a million years from now. What would we be like? What destruction will we be capable of? I hope we learn more about ourselves and that this series makes its own small contribution to that."

The Human Spark premieres on January 6th on PBS. Check local listings for times.

Monday

A surprisingly strong start to the week comes in the form of a couple of marathons. Discovery has a day of Mythbusters starting at 9am and finishing with a brand new episode, "Mini Myth Mayhem," at 9pm, while Syfy takes the Doctor Who route and runs with a Sarah Jane Adventures marathon from 10am through 3pm.

For those seeking more high-brow, independent movie thrills, IFC is showing 1995 Australian ecology alien movie Alien Visitor at 9:45pm. Here's the synopsis:

A beautiful alien is sent from the planet Epsilon to pass judgment on the shameful way in which humans have mishandled their planet. Set in a near future in which humanity has made great strides in cleaning up the Earth, it begins as a grandmother tells her granddaughters a story from the past. Her tale begins in the desert outback during the dark times when people were actively ruining their planet. The naked alien is placed upon the desert where she eventually meets a surveyor who quickly gives her some clothing. As the two travel across the land, the alien constantly admonishes him for his race's carelessness and greed. She informs him that other intelligent life forms consider humans hopeless failures. Using her ability to travel instantly to any of Earth's locales, she takes the bewildered surveyor on a whirlwind tour to prove her point.

(Also, pretty much entirely off-topic, but there's a two hour block of Community reruns on NBC at 8pm, for those who wonder where Chevy Chase is these days. It's not SF, but I recommend it nonetheless)

Tuesday

With the exception of ABC's Better Off Ted at 9:30pm - the first of two episodes this week - it's all about the movies today. You can go for camp horror thrills on AMC with Jack Nicholson werewolf movie Wolf (at midnight) and the two Ghostbusters movies at 11am and 1:30pm, respectively, or else some classic anime with Howl's Moving Castle on IFC at 6:50am. Set your TiVo.

Wednesday

Unless you're looking for the 11pm AMC showing of Aliens, it's pretty much up to ABC's Eastwick at 10am to keep the flame of television alive with new episode "Magic Snow and Creepy Gene":

When the women make a pact never to reveal what they did to Jamie, they realize they must go their separate ways — and abandon their powers. A guilty Joanna tries to help Penny find closure; sparks fly between Kat and her hot new neighbor, single dad Colin, who has come to Eastwick with his young son Gene and a dark secret. Just as Kat and Joanna are moving on, things get complicated for Roxie when Darryl returns to Eastwick with the truth about his mysterious past.

Thursday

As if knowing that you're very unlikely to be watching television today, there's a scarcity of great programming available... Although, we have to admit, we love the perverseness of Syfy's Twilight Zone marathon, which starts at 8:30 in the morning today and runs until Saturday morning.

Friday

See in 2010 with as much David Tennant as you can stand: At midnight, BBC America starts a rerun of the entire Russell T. Davies Doctor Who run, leading up to Saturday's "The End of Time, Part Two." Yes, the whole thing, over what's pretty much two days. It's kind of awesome.

If you're not a Doctor Who fan, though, there's always another Mythbusters marathon on the Discovery Channel (9am through 3am Saturday).

Also, there are new episodes of Batman: The Brave and The Bold (7:30pm) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (9pm, and it's a double bill of "Grievous Intrigue" and "The Deserter") on Cartoon Network. And there's an all-new Better Off Ted on ABC at 8:30pm (along with a rerun of the first episode of the new season at 9:30).

And if even that isn't enough, then AMC would like your attention: They're showing Voyage to The Bottom Of The Sea at 9am, Alien Resurrection at 11:30am, and all three Matrix movies starting at 2pm. Of course, there's also 24 solid hours of Twilight Zone on Syfy, as well...

Saturday

BBC America keeps running Doctor Who through to 8:30pm's US premiere of "The End of Time, Part Two," which'll hopefully be better than the first part.

BBC America also has the US premiere of Demons, the short-lived UK Dracula-related supernatural series. Otherwise, the day belongs to Syfy's horror movie marathon: 9am Venom, 11am Shallow Ground, 1pm Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, 3pm, Timber Falls, 5pm Flu Bird Horror , 7pm Splinter, 9pm The Midnight Meat Train, 11:00pm See No Evil, 1am Sunday Death Tunnel, 3am The Shaft.

Sunday

Syfy has another movie marathon today, with a focus on monsters. It starts at 9am with Boa Vs. Python, before continuing with 11am's Manticore, 1pm's Beowulf, 3pm's Savage Planet, 5pm's The Bone Eater, 7pm's Swamp Devil, 9pm's Sea Beast, and ending with Eye of The Beast at 11pm... which just so happens to be the time that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen starts on AMC. It's almost like it was planned that way!

Get The Nostalgia While The Nostalgia Getting's Good
The failure of Jennifer's Body at the box office punctured the myth of Megan Fox, but in doing so left Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen's epic success even more inexplicable. You mean that everyone who went to see that genuinely wanted to see giant robots fighting for the right to appear in a story that made sense instead of Megan Fox's ass? Really? (To be fair, maybe it was John Tuturro's ass they couldn't resist.) Of course not; they wanted to relive memories of their childhood/the first Transformers movie/the Go-Bots by proxy. Same reason that Star Trek was such a hit, and the dismal Terminator Salvation made money at all. The problem with this for movie studios is that there's only a limited number of things to be nostalgic about, and they're burning through them quickly (Next year's Tron Legacy and The A-Team show that we're already up to the mid-'80s); when there're already plans to reboot Battlestar Galactica as a movie franchise months after its conclusion as a (rebooted) television show and restarting the Fantastic Four movies from scratch just a few years after the failure of Rise Of The Silver Surfer, you can tell that there's nervousness. With good reason; the lawsuit over the rights to Superman show that nostalgia could get more expensive for filmmakers in years to come. Maybe one day, Disney's $4 Billion buyout of Marvel Entertainment's IP will look like a bargain.

Find A Voice With Something To Say, Then Let It Speak
2009 was a year of extremes when it came to the creation of movies and television that didn't (entirely) rely on IP graverobbing. On the one hand, it was the year when the phrase "production hiatus" became widely known as code for "The Powers That Be don't like what's being done and are about to 'fix' it" as the trains seemed to come off the usually-smoother-running TV production track more often, and more publicly, than usual (See: Dollhouse, FlashForward and V, which has had two such hiatuses, and "coincidentally" switched showrunners twice, as well). On the other, it was the year when smaller movies like District 9 and Moon garnered critical acclaim - and, in the case of D9, a pretty amazing box office haul - for being individual, unusual and something other than generic production line blockbusters. Avatar, too, is being hailed for being the singular vision of James Cameron and, maybe most importantly, that being a good thing. Maybe this was the year that started a renaissance in an appreciation for the auteur theory after all?

On Television, Burying The Lede Will Kill You
We've said this more than once recently, but the fact that Dollhouse's second season was promoted to critics with its lackluster first episode may have damaged the show's chances irreparably. You can't blame the promotions people, because it makes sense to sell something based on the product itself; the "blame" lies with those making the show, who thought that they had the time and space to ramp up the season slowly, reiterating the central concept of the series with episodes that (sadly) repeated the rhythm of the first season. As the creative teams behind V (Put on hiatus after its first four episodes, and before we'd even seen a complete lizard reveal and/or any rodent eating) and the upcoming Day One (Restructured from a full season to a four episode mini-series to test the waters for a regular show) can attest to, there's no time for a slow build on network television anymore. Both Fringe and FlashForward sped up their timetables to try and meet demand for near-instant gratification, and both are still dogged with rumors of cancellation. Remember, television people: Put your best foot forward immediately.

Goodbyes Should Always Be Brief
Yes, yes: We loved Russell T Davies' run on Doctor Who as much as anyone, but the year of special episodes seemed weighed down by a sense of its own self-importance that reached epic proportions during this weekend's "The End of Time, Part One" (On the plus side, Now we know that Barack Obama will save the world with his economic announcement or something. Not that that'll seem horribly dated, oh, anytime after February 2009). Battlestar Galactica, too, approached epic levels of pomp and pretension during its final days. It's not that we would rather have rushed either show offstage unfinished, but there's something to be said for brevity and not getting too wrapped up in your own ego. Lost, consider yourself on notice.

Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
One word: Watchmen. Yes, we get it; we have the technology to make Doctor Manhattan look like he exists in a particularly shiny version of reality. But, months after all the hype, hoopla and multiple versions on DVD, it's still worth asking: Did Watchmen gain anything from the transition from comic to movie? Besides Zack Snyder's bank account, did anything? Sometimes it's okay to leave the original alone.

As we've discussed before, there are really two Russell T. Davieses. There's the clever, twisted screenwriter who gave us Doctor Who episodes like "Midnight" and "Turn Left," and the Torchwood miniseries "Children Of Earth." And then there's the crazy bombastic throw-everything-at-the-wall-twice storyteller who gave us "Journey's End" and other idiotic extravaganzas.

Actually, I've generally liked RTD's Christmas specials, because they let him tell a larger-than-life story without getting too bogged down in mythos and nonsense. But this time around, bogged down is exactly what we were.

But first of all, the nice moments. I think that somewhere in the alimentary canal of this misshapen beast, there was a story about male friendship lurking around. The Doctor has two male friends in this story: Wilfred Mott, who's an "old soldier" and the grandfather of the Doctor's former companion Donna. And the Master, who used to be the Doctor's best friend and is now his arch frenemy. In the RTD era, the Doctor's main relationships have always been with women, except for Captain Jack, with whom he's had a sort of flirty-but-wary relationship. So it was nice to see the Doctor having more real conversations with other men, without anything overtly sexual to them.

The cafe scene between the Doctor and Wilf, in particular, was marvelous. I could have used another five minutes of those two just sitting and talking, and acting like real people. They're not quite equals — Wilf insists on calling the Doctor "sir," and the Doctor condescends to Wilf a fair bit — but the Doctor seems to be able to open up to Wilf in a way he can't to any of his younger companions. It's really great stuff.

And likewise, the Doctor and the Master get one great scene together, where the Doctor realizes the drumming in the Master's head is "real" because he can hear it too when their heads press together. But more than that, they get to talk for a moment about what they used to have when they were Time Lords together, and what they've lost.

Much of the rest of the story, though, is a bit of a muddle. The Doctor arrives in the far future, where the Ood are dreaming about events in the early 21st century that could rip a new arsehole in the the space/time continuum, and somehow every moment the Doctor hangs around in the far future, it's getting later in the early 21st century. So he runs and jumps back in time, only to arrive... too late. The Master has been resurrected, but it went wrong and now he eats disgustingly and chews with his mouth open. Not to mention all of the crazay roaring — see the video above.

But let's ask an expert. What did you think of John Simm's performance, Saul Tigh? Did you like it?

(A side note: what is it with Time Lords and gross mouth action all of a sudden? We have the Master's mastication on screen for far too long. And apparently the phrase "Timothy Dalton spittle" has been a trending topic on Twitter.)

So the resurrected Master is a total mess — but luckily, someone drops a handy "take over the world" technology into his lap, all tied up with a pretty bow. Because it is Christmas, after all. My favorite bit with Joshua Naismith was when he says "I'm not an idiot," a mere ten minutes after Timothy Dalton's "narrator" voice has called him an idiot. If the narrator says you're an idiot, then you're an idiot. Sorry. Anyway, somehow Naismith spotted a tiny blur on a security camera at a women's prison, and deduced that this means the Master is back from the dead, and he can fix their mysterious bit of alien tech. But first, he's in bondage, yay:

Oh, and I didn't even get into the weird bits about the "Books Of Saxon" and the formula and the anti-formula and the sassy cactus people and the idea that a bit of technology designed to heal an entire world would let you program it with just one genetic template. It's all a bit flimsy, and even less thought out than Davies' other giant brainsplats.

And what was with the Obama obsession? Are people in the U.K. really obsessed with our president? If Obama actually did give a speech about the economy on Christmas, I think about three people would watch it in the United States. Was this meant to be a sneaky message about how the awesome politicians you adore always turn out to be evil megalomaniacs, or something else? It was a bit jarring, in any case. Plus, since when are real-world politicians in charge in the Who universe? We saw the U.S. president die in "The Sound Of Drums" and it was some random guy. Plus, we've seen at least four fictional U.K. prime ministers, including Harold Saxon and the Slitheen acting P.M. But Obama is president now?

So yeah, mostly it was silly in a bad way, and seemed to have been padded out with lots of scenes of the Master chewing in our faces and grunting endlessly about how people eat too much at Christmas. I can't imagine how that would have gone over for people watching it right after their Christmas dinners. Is RTD trying to make us ill? Most of all — and this is the shocker — it was a bit boring. There was lots of talking, interspersed with lots of shouting, but RTD mostly seemed to be concerned with shoving all of his plot devices into place for part two, using brute force for the most part.

Oh, and before anyone else says it: Sure, Doctor Who is a children's show — in the same way Star Wars is a movie for kids. Like Star Wars (and, I'd argue, much of Star Trek), Doctor Who is designed to appeal to kids with smart, engaging storylines, while also pulling in adults and appealing to the adult viewers who grew up watching. If everyone over the age of 18 agrees never to criticize the Star Wars prequels again, I will happily stop expecting Doctor Who to contain a modicum of sense. Okay? Great.

Want a second opinion? Here's Doctor Who skeptic Charlie Stross:

I mean, WTF? We are deep in the grip of attention-deficit plotting here, veering wildly between disjointed lectures, Ancient Prophesies (always a bad sign), and bad dreams foreshadowing the return of respawning enemies. Our narrative viewpoint is all over the road, round the bend, and driving with one foot floored on the accelerator while guzzling a bottle of Bucky. I headcrashed painfully during the seamless chase (on foot) from a scrapyard to a shipyard (paging Continuity, Continuity to the white courtesy phone): but the coup de grace was the re-invention of The Master as a bizarre cross between Sauron, a Bond villain (of the more psychotic variety) and I. R. Baboon in the Disease Fiesta episode of I Am Weasel. (Which is not on YouTube, and the Cartoon Network ain't running repeats right now. Why is I Am Weasel not on YouTube? Bring me my Cow and my Chicken! Now!!)

Ahem. There is also the small matter of fifteen minutes of infodump in a forty-two minute slot, narrated by Timothy Dalton as, er, [SPOILER], and a spavined nag of a pantomime horse of a plot (that sagged in the middle) to consider. SPANK.

That said, I did find the episode's ending fairly hilarious, with everyone on Earth turning into the Master. John Simm is so much better when he's getting to be fun and triumphant, rather than grunting about pork chops.

And I'm not made of stone — of course I'm excited for the return of the Time Lords, despite Timothy Dalton using my TV screen as a spitoon. I'm wondering exactly how the Master destroying the human race brings the Time Lords back, though. I guess all of the future stuff that humanity is supposed to do no longer happens as a result, including the Mars base thing but also including all of humanity's wars against the Daleks. So maybe there's a domino thingy. Anyway, I'm intrigued and hoping for something a bit more awesome and less shouty.

Even though this first clip from next week's episode does fill me with a bit of dread:

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!

In a season full of swollen special effects blockbusters and annoying Christmas stories, badboy Brit director Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes is a welcome respite. It's a simple whodunnit with Victorian flourishes and a lot of incredibly hammy acting from star Robert Downey, Jr., playing Holmes as a badass Hunter Thompson type. When he's not solving crimes or using his powers of observation to kick bad guys in the nuts, Downey's Holmes mopes in his rooms, taking drugs and testing new kinds of explosives. Jude Law plays Watson with tweedy aplomb. Downey and Law have such incredible chemistry together that every scene featuring the two of them crackles with homoerotic zing and makes you fall completely in love with these two masters of logic who can also fight like Irish wrestlers (did I mention the great Irish wrestling scene? oh yeah).

The movie isn't based on any particular novel in Arthur Conan Doyle's celebrated series about the detective whose superpower was minute observation and deductive logic. It bears some resemblance to Hound of the Baskervilles, in that there's a rash of seemingly supernatural events that Holmes works to reveal as perfectly-explainable elements of a conspiracy. In the case of this film, the "supernatural" occurrence is that a hanged murderer has turned up alive and is attempting a hostile takeover of an ancient Illuminati-style group of aristocrats who believe in black magic.

Holmes gets involved in the case when he's hired by old flame Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams, looking spicy in her tweed ladysuits). Adler, an extremely minor character in the novels, emerges in this film as a wily and formidable third member of the Holmes-Watson team. The only thief who ever outwitted Holmes, she's working for a mysterious man who wants Holmes to investigate the murder of a chemist whose life turns out to be intertwined with the mysteriously resurrected murderer.

It's a perfectly serviceable plot, which reaches a very steampunk scifi conclusion. But this film will not win you over with storytelling - it will seduce you entirely with individual scenes and scenery. As I said earlier, every moment with Holmes and Watson crackles with manic energy, whether Watson is trying to convince a very stoned Holmes to stop experimenting on flies in his rooms, or Watson watches in horror as Holmes alienates the doctor's fiancee by observing that the pale stripe on her ring finger suggests she discarded her previous beau for "someone better."

Sherlock Holmes is, more than anything else, a feast for the eyes. The sets are sumptuous, the costumes will feed your erotic tweed fantasies, and the CGI backgrounds recreate a rich, believable Victorian London of hulking industrial projects and factories. Director Ritchie deliberately stages this world to feel like steampunk: This isn't the quaint, twee land of Victoriana; it's a modernizing urban world of science and steamships and laboratories. Even when Holmes is fighting, we watch through the lens of rationality. In a couple of truly great fight scenes, we hear Holmes planning the trajectory of his punches in voiceover before he executes them perfectly. Though it's a little hard to swallow this asskicking version of Holmes, it's still amusing to imagine that his great mind allows him to plot out the perfect way to knock out a thug.

Unfortunately, if you aren't a sucker for hard Victorian concept design, Sherlock Holmes is going to feel like a lot of style and not much substance. There are long, meandering chase sequences that lose their steam after a while, and the central premise of the conspiracy plot makes almost no sense. There are moments when the action becomes downright boring just as it should be picking up, like when Holmes and Watson are fleeing the bad guys on a half-built steamship - or when the resurrected murderer is executing his nefarious plan.

These flaws are particularly grating when you add in Downey's over-the-top acting and an accent that caroms all over the place. There's an obvious setup for a sequel here, and one hopes that somebody can tamp down Downey's prancing a bit before Sherlock Holmes 2: Steamy Boogaloo gets underway.

But if what you want is some goofy diversion and epic steampunkery, then Sherlock Holmes is going to satisfy you like nothing else. When it works, this flick is like a brilliant and well-oiled machine - and those moments are almost enough to make you forgive its failings.

"Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live."
- Dorothy Parker

Dorothy, you didn't live in comics-land. In this world, actively seeking your death isn't just a great way to have an adventure. Under the right circumstances, it could be profitable. Within the pages of our favorite floppies lie a thousand jobs that can help you shuffle off this mortal coil at a decent rate per hour. Today I take a look at suicide-by-job-application.

Asylum or Prison Guard:
First of all, I have to ask; what kind of person actually considers this job? Just applying should be grounds for an intervention. Doctors at an asylum might be part of a hostage situation or a tense stand-off with the inmates, but guards are just there to make the inmates look intimidating by being ripped apart as they impotently try to protect the doctors.

Mostly the prison or asylum guards in comics are jerks, especially if a hero is temporarily locked up. This is an attempt by the writer to make their horrifically gory deaths less tragic. Within the story, though, I think the reader can look at this behavior as part of a self-destructive cycle, and take pity on the characters. Not that that will make a difference.

Benefits of the Job: Not many. I assume that asylum guards are given astoundingly good life insurance. If a guard survives for a year, it's possible that they could quit and write a best-selling memoir. Asylums in comics being what they are, though, it will probably only lead to them and their new trophy wife getting murdered by an escaped inmate. The only possible plus these jobs offer is the ability to always have interesting stories.

Survival Strategy: None. None whatsoever. It's over.

Amusement Park Worker:
Put on the mouse costume. What can happen at Happy Fun, Safe Fun, Fun For All Ages, Fun World?

Let us remember that many people's definition of fun differs widely from our own. What might seem like fun for the hundreds of deranged criminals who, for some reason, flock to amusement parks like seagulls flock to an overturned hot-dog cart, is not going to be fun for everyone.

Benefits of the Job: I guess they'll let you ride the roller coasters for free.

Survival Strategy: Be out before dark. The criminally insane only go to amusement parks when it is dark. As soon as the sun touches the horizon, sprint for the car. Just be sure to check the back seat and the trunk.

Bank Manager:
It's a desk job. It's mid-level, meaning no direct contact (like the tellers) and no targeting (like the bank president). Seems like a safe-ish bet.

Seems wrong.

In comics, Bank Manager should be amended to read Bank Manager/Hostage Crisis Negotiator, because whenever a criminal takes over a bank, the poor shmuck of a manager is brought on to stammer out the criminal's demands through a walkie-talkie. Suddenly the requirements for that desk job go from crunching numbers to having SWAT team training. And when negotiations hit a snag, which in comics they always do, it's much more dramatic to murder the person talking than it is to shoot someone cowering in the background.

Benefits of the Job: Good salary, unlike the prison guards. Getting to sit down, again unlike the prison guards. Relatively long shelf life, again unlike the guards. Also, I bet if the bank manager were crafty enough, they could manage to get a room in the bank filled with gold coins and tunnel through them like Scrooge McDuck. At least, that's what I would do.

Survival Strategy: Open the vault and run, my friend. Open the vault and run.

Research Scientist:
Following a passion through the dry, dusty levels of academia and into endless tomes detailing scientific minutia can really pay off. Not only is ‘Research Scientist' an undeniably cool title, it lets its bearer do really awesome random things, like sending stuff into space, or using lasers to make glasses for a fly.

Know what? I don't even have to pretend none of us have thought about the death rate for research scientists in comics. Getting caught in an experiment gone awry, being betrayed by a partner, or just being murdered by some crime boss for designs specs, anything and everything kills research scientists. I'm forced to assume that in comics it only takes a high school diploma to become a research scientist, because if it took ten years of study, there's no way they could keep the position filled.

Benefits of the Job: Unlike reality, comic book research projects always work, even if they're being done by some loser in a basement. The more stripped down the lab, the better they work. The crazier and more far-reaching they are, the better they work. In comics, it is possible to construct a time machine out of toothpicks.

More importantly, instead of being generic cannon fodder, like other jobs, research scientists often get cool powers out of their ruined experiments. Sadly, this generally makes them turn evil.

Survival Strategy: Turn evil. What has good ever done for anyone? Oh sure, turning evil is generally seen as the death of the victims ‘self'. Other characters often talk about how the good character is ‘gone' or ‘dead', with sad looks on their faces. But what is death? Let's compare turning into a many-armed supervillain with idiotic non-laser-made sunglasses to getting ripped to pieces by a crocodile man.

I think we have a clear winner.

(Note: some of these scenes contain spoilers and / or some serious violence. Beware!)

Serenity

Serenity is Joss Whedon's sort-of-final-chapter for his much beloved television series, Firefly. But it's also a stand-alone story, offering any new viewers a chance to discover the crew and the world of the show anew. And what better way to throw a new audience into the world than a wandering tour of Serenity herself. In the opening shot of the movie, Whedon uses a long-take to fully draw us into his world. You can watch the first minute and a half of the six minute masterpiece here.

X-Files - Triangle

In this episode of the X Files, most of the on-screen action is depicted in a series of long takes and uncut sequences. There are some edits, but they are disguised to make the whole episode feel seamless. And the effect is pretty impressive.

Oldboy

It's not strictly sci-fi, but the action-filled, vengeance-fueled martial arts epic, Oldboy, has garnered a lot of praise for its unflinching take on violence and anger. That's pretty evident in this fight scene. It includes a hallway, a giant gang, and an enraged man with a hammer. And it's visceral impact is heightened by the fact that it all takes place in one seamless take.

Children of Men

Children of Men is a movie that relies on the long single take for a couple of breathtaking scenes, including the particularly moving one from which the picture above comes. But the one that is most impressive is the roadway assault scene. Watching it, its brilliance isn't immediately clear. It's not until you realize that there's no way a camera could fit inside the car that you realize the casual scene took enormous innovation and patience to pull off.

Contact

The introduction to Contact serves as a quick reminder that the universe could be an empty place that is entirely indifferent to humanity. It's almost like a counterpoint to the rest of the story that follows. And it's accomplished with a tracking "shot." It's technically a visual effect, but the purpose is clear, and it's accomplished relatively seamlessly.

Battlestar Galactica

As with Serenity, Battlestar Galactica needed to find a way to draw in the audience and show them the characters and the world they would be a part of for the rest of the series. In one of the earliest scenes in the miniseries, we get just that: a long tracking shot through the interior of the ship, showing us most of the important players of the rest of the series. A fitting beginning to a show that aimed to do things with space opera that were as-yet untried.

Cloverfield

Cloverfield's main conceit was that it was found footage, mostly untouched, from one long night of filming. As a result, most of the film is meant to look like a one-take sequence. You could choose any sequence from the movie, but this one is particularly terrifying, since being confined to one point of view makes the danger seem even more close and real.

Shaun of the Dead

The beauty of the long take in Shaun of the Dead is not the artistry of the camera movement or its length. It's that the same tracking shot was done twice, once before the zombie outbreak and once after. At the :40 mark in this video, you can see the two takes intercut with each other, showing just how carefully the two scenes were constructed.

This list is by no means exhaustive. What are your favorite long-takes in sci-fi cinema in television? Did we forget any greats?

Geoff Johns
Best known for his DC Comics work on titles like Action Comics, Green Lantern, The Flash and Blackest Night, Johns is more than just the man who's single-handedly changed the publisher's fortunes in the comic book direct market: He's also a movie producer and writer, working on a movie with the people behind Robot Chicken (He's also written for the TV show) and part of the brain trust behind DC Entertainment's movie development team alongside Grant Morrison and Marv Wolfman. Not lacking in talent or ambition, he's already many comic fans' Master. How long before he wins everyone else over?

J. Michael Straczynzki
The onetime Babylon 5 creator already has a lot of Master qualities down: Huge fanbase, creation of/showrunning-upkeep of epic weekly television series, a surprising amount of power within Hollywood and geek credentials from comic book work that includes a longterm run on Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man. With future projects including the movie version of World War Z, a remake of Forbidden Planet and DC's relaunch of the Man of Steel, Superman: Earth One, expect JMS to become an even bigger name in our world. But is it enough to be our new Master?

Mark Millar
After dominating comics for the last decade with critic-proof hits like The Authority, The Ultimates and Civil War, Millar's mix of high-concept and big action did the same to movie audiences with 2008's Wanted adaptation. Mext May's independently-produced Kick Ass movie is already seeming like a blockbuster waiting to happen, and alongside new comic series Nemesis (already getting interest from movie producers) and Millar's first all-original movie project reportedly being announced at some point next year, expect to see Millar's star rise even further in 2010. But how high is Master high?

Roberto Orci/Alex Kurtzman
They wrote Star Trek, both Transformers movies, and co-created Fringe; there's not denying the success of the Kurtzman/Orci team over the last few years, making sci-fi mainstream without upsetting the genre faithful (too much). Besides continuing producing Fringe, they're working on adapting Whitley Streiber's 2012: The War For Souls, fantasy comic Atlantis Rising and working with the Iron Man dream team of Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. on Cowboys Vs. Aliens. Is that enough to win your hearts over forever?

Peter Jackson
Yes, The Lovely Bones may not have been a slamdunk for genre fans' interest, but don't think that Peter Jackson has abandoned you just yet. Along with his much-anticipated collaboration with Steven Spielberg and Steven Moffatt (The two movie motion-capture Tintin series), don't discount his producing return to Middle Earth with Guillermo del Toro's The Hobbit movies. Oh, and don't forget his Weta Digital effects house, continually raising the bar on what our eyes can be fooled into believing. Maybe Jackson is already our behind-the-scenes, puppet-Master.

Russell T Davies
You could try and argue that the success of Doctor Who has more to do with David Tennant's "long streak of nothing" (Thanks, Donna) looks and charm than the writing, but all we'd do is point you in the direction of Torchwood: Children of Earth to prove that showrunner Russell T Davies is able to come up with the goods all on his own when he has to (Also, he's the one who chose Tennant, so there's that, too). Not content with not only resurrecting the BBC's longrunning SF series but turning it into the most popular drama on British television and a successful franchise, Davies has relocated to Los Angeles and turned his attentions to American television. With the adulation and respect of many in the industry already his, will mainstream audiences follow?

JJ Abrams
Maybe I'm biased, but with stewardships of Alias, Lost and Fringe on television, as well as Mission: Impossible 3, Cloverfield and Star Trek in movies, JJ Abrams feels like he's already taken the title of New Master. All he needs now is to wheedle his way into comic books to complete the media triumvirate (And, no; that Wired issue doesn't count).

Joss Whedon
Were we too hasty to count Whedon out? Sure, Dollhouse crashed and burned at Fox, but it lasted a season longer than anyone expected and was full of interesting ideas even when the execution lacked. With The Cabin In The Woods, his horror movie with Drew Goddard, upcoming as well as a new Dr. Horrible web series expected, amid rumors that he'll move into even more online content creation, will Whedon 2.0 prove that television is over once and for all? It's be an impressive comeback and reinvention, but maybe that's what we should expect from a former Roseanne scriptwriter who made himself into a television and movie powerhouse who liked things shiny.

What do you think? Vote below and share your thoughts in the comments.

Original image by Neil Crosby.

Update: I apologize, I haven't been online much due to the holidays. I realized that there was an erroneous data point for Andrew Stanton in 2009 that was never supposed to be there. I missed it when I initially looked over the graph, but it's been removed now.

As we've been reflecting on the last ten years, we've been asking ourselves whether any true "masters" of science fiction and urban fantasy have emerged, especially in film and television. It's certainly been a decade of highs and lows, of old masters who've begun to fade and bright new stars just cresting the horizon.

To that end, I've attempted to chart the relative "master levels" of various directors and television producers over the several years. This is an utterly unscientific chart; I looked at the projects these folks have had since 2000 and assigned each one a "master level." The number reflects my understanding of the projects acclaim, its ability to attract an audience (i.e. box office/Nielsen numbers), its awards, whether it succeeded in something unusual (such as a relatively popular foreign language film in the case of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or Dr. Horrible's status as a breakthrough web film), and the nebulous sense that it add or subtracted from the individual's "geek cred." The numbers themselves are largely subjective and, of course, you should feel free to nitpick.

The greater purpose was to offer a watercolory sense of whether any "masters" have emerged from this crowd. Certainly, the last year has brought low some of the genres' promising potentials. Joss Whedon entered into the decade riding high on a Buffy/Angel cocktail. Though his name wasn't enough to overcome Fox's confusing treatment of Firefly, but the show's eventual cult popularity led to the Serenity feature film, and the Whedon brand helped make Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog an important moment for web-based content. Perhaps this all made Dollhouse — which has been, by turns, frustrating and brilliant — all the more disappointing, its impeding demise fairly readily accepted, even by Whedon's fanbase. Similarly, Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, despite being regarded by some readers as the most overrated scifi of the decade, was regarded by many as a turning point for smart, politically savvy space opera. But a rocky final season punctuated by finale filled with dei ex machinae left a lot of folks sour on the entire series. And the Wachowskis, while doing a solid (though Alan Moore-enraging) bit of cinema with V for Vendetta, never quite lived up to the promises of The Matrix.

But there have been plenty of masterful bright spots as well. Bryan Fuller gave us some beautiful urban fantasy with shows with Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, and Pushing Daisies, even if many of his efforts (including the truly amazing The Amazing Screw-On Head) were prematurely axed, or shafted before ever getting off the ground. Guillermo del Toro brought us to great heights with Pan's Labyrinth, even if his other eye candy films didn't hit the same heights.

So have we seen any masters? Peter Jackson has certainly come close. Granted, The Lord of the Rings movies are high fantasy, but they showcased Jackson's ability to handle a difficult epic in a way that not only pleased JRR Tolkien's fans, but also won him mainstream accolades. And his remake of King Kong, which should have been automatically anathema, proved both profitable and well-reviewed. The Lovely Bones has been his blip, earning him his worst reviews in 20 years. But it's more likely that 2009 will be remembered as the year Jackson introduced the world to filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, demonstrating that he has a good eye for new talent and the Hollywood cache to bring that talent to light. It's not for nothing that he made this year's power list.

Another power list member, JJ Abrams, has also given us a good spate of fun and thoughtful science fiction. While he didn't give us the decade's best monster movie, he did manage to reboot the Star Trek franchise in a way that was respectful to what came before and drew in folks who never turned into the TV shows. Of course, we still have yet to see as Lost will end and whether Fringe will survive.

Chris Nolan is on the list of promising possibilities for eventual masterhood. Although Memento wasn't science fiction, it took a "what if" concept (here, what if a man searching for his wife's killer had no short term memory) and portrayed it in a thoughtful, suspenseful, and ultimately heartbreaking way. And he not only shot fresh blood into the corpse of the Batman franchise, he made it Oscar-worthy. And now he's continuing the science fiction thread with Inception.

And, of course, there's the question of whether James Cameron will prove the kind of science fiction as much as he claimed to be the king of the world. His foray into science fiction television, Dark Angel, never fared particularly well in the ratings; it was eventually canceled in favor of Firefly, and it never achieved the posthumous popularity of the later show. But perhaps Avatar is the reinforcement of his previous scifi successes, proof that he can still be relevant where other long-time directors have started to fade away. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another 12 years to see his next installment.

Personally, though, after seeing the delightful Monsters Inc. followed by the superb The Incredibles and WALL-E, I have my fingers crossed for Andrew Stanton and Pixar Studios. Here's hoping that John Carter of Mars is something phenomenal.

Still, singling out directors and producers as possible masters might be missing the point entirely, even when we're talking about movies and TV. Alan Moore might well be your science fiction master, not just because he has written so many fantastic books, but also because those books have captured the imagination of so many directors in the last several years — albeit with varying results. And in the coming years we'll see how comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan — who has been working on Lost as well as the Buffy Season Eight comics — translates to the big screen when Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways hit theaters.

So who, if anyone, do you see as your science fiction master? Someone from the list above? Perhaps Russell T. Davis for reviving and expanding Doctor Who? Or maybe writers like Jane Espenson, who have worked on so many of the shows we love? And, with filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp and Duncan Jones arriving on the scene, who might prove themselves master of the genre in the next ten years?

Graph by Steph Fox.

Here's a bonus chart, with more data:

Episode I: The True Meaning of Life Day

Last month, some friends and I agreed to hold a traveling holiday party in our picturesque burg of Jersey City, with each person hosting a different type of holiday celebration in his/her home. It'd be like a wholesome 1950s progressive dinner but with less green bean casserole and more Night Train.

All the good winter fetes went quickly. My pals immediately called dibs on Saturnalia, druidic Solstice, and Festivus, and I was left with few palatable options. Hanukkah? Christmas? No way. I was moments away from signing up for Taiwanese Constitution Day, when an idea struck me like a bolt from the blue.

"Guys, I'm going to host a surprise Life Day party."

"Life Day? What the hell are you talking about?"

"It's from The Star Wars Holiday Special. Life Day is, uh, like Chewbacca's Christmas. All the Wookiees put on red bathrobes and, um, watch a stoned Princess Leia sing a song or something."

"Well, that's a wanting explanation."

Yes, for all my years of jaded fanboy aspersions cast towards the Holiday Special, I didn't actually know the true meaning of Life Day. Maybe I'd lost sight of an emotionally rich yuletide parable interwoven between scenes of Bea Arthur waltzing with Mos Eisley's scum and villainy and Harrison Ford delivering most his lines with a constipated grimace. It was time to give the Holiday Special another go.

Fortunately, the entire special is available on Google Video. Unfortunately, it took only 5 minutes of viewing to feel as if I was being skull-diddled with a lightsaber.

The Star Wars Holiday Special is guilty of the worst sin kitsch can commit – it's hella boring. Case in point: the opening 15 minutes are mainly devoted to Chewbacca's family yowling in their Wookiee tongue. Hell, most Z-grade scifi flicks are worth the slog for a fugitive glimpse of nudity. The most titillation the SWHS gives us is an interlude in which Chewie's father Itchy ogles VR porno starring Diahann Carroll. Ooh la la.

It wasn't until the 99 minute mark that my Life Day epiphany dawned on me. At this point in the special, Han Solo – who has eluded Imperial forces long enough to drop Chewbacca off on the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk – turns to Chewie's clan and (without a whiff of that trademark Solo rakishness) gushes, "You're like family to me."

Normally this kind of Lucasian sincerity would've made me lose my shit, but I empathized with Han. The Empire had been chasing him all day; our favorite rogue was so hopped up on adrenaline and fatigue that it made perfect sense that he'd start doddering like a Hallmark Card. Likewise, I was so gonzo from 1.5 hours of Holiday Special that I became nostalgic for such banality as tile grout, riboflavin, and The Phantom Menace.

It was then that my Life Day miracle hit me – The Star Wars Holiday Special was such a train wreck of existential horror that it made my boring-ass life seem like a cornucopia of wonders, and Life Day was simply the gnarled track, the tetanus-soaked philosophical underpinning that caused this prime-time disaster to run off the rails.

Now I knew the true meaning of Life Day. It isn't a day for family, friends, or fellowship. It's a day to dive into that oubliette you call your soul and almost asphyxiate yourself on the darkness. The Star Wars Holiday Special had taught me this, and after my Life Day party, my pals would never take the other 364 days of the year for granted ever again.

Episode II: No Blue Milk At This Party

Of course, if you're going to put your mates through psychological duress, you need a suitable sop so that, y'know, they talk to you again someday. My sop was free booze.

According to Star Wars lore, the traditional Life Day foodstuffs are Hoth Chocolate and Wookie-ookies. Sadly, the official recipes I found online were ho-hum, so I deviated from canon and dubbed this potent NY Times cocktail "Hoth Chocolate" (Absolut Peppar is a suitable proxy for Tauntaun blood). My roommate Jenny was dear enough to donate "Wookiee Coconut Rhombi."

I also added two new bromides to the Expanded Universe. To commemorate Boba Fett's debut in the Holiday Special, I made him a microbrew by relabeling some mediocre beer "Mandalorian Panther Piss." I always pictured Boba as a light-beer-swilling douche, so I added Twi'lek babes and Boba bleating drunken frat boy threats to the bottle art.

The second cocktail I invented was "Salacious B. Crumb's Rancor Gamete Extract," which was a 3:1 ratio of Hawaiian Punch to chilled Spirytus Rektyfikowany (i.e., 192 proof Polish rectified spirit). It tastes like the Death Star exploding in your mouth.

Episode III: Like Eyes Wide Shut, But Hairier

If I was going to make my pals truly miserable, my decorations and party favors would have to tease out the creepy sexual dynamics of the Holiday Special, such as Grandpa Itchy's erotic interlude, the hirsute androgyny of Wookiee society, and, according to Wookieepedia, the wholesale celebration of procreation.

In order to fissure the bedrock of my guests' sexual identities, I first printed out 20+ genderless Wookiee masks. Hopefully these disguises would force my friends to question not only their sexuality, but their very humanity.

Next, I labeled my bathroom "Grandpa Itchy's VR Experience" and hung a blacklit mural of his leering mug on my shower curtain. It would've made sense to play Diahann Carroll's "This Minute" (her song from the SWHS), but I instead opted to play Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" on infinite loop. The shrieking techno and soulless gaze of Grandpa Itchy will scar my guests psychosexually and invoke pee shyness.

Similarly, I put on an annoying loop of unsexy Star Wars themed disco. My guests' primordial id would command them to dance, but their super-ego would stop them – after all, it's impossible to look sexually attractive if you're bebopping to a remix of the Ewok chant. Their libidos will be confused, and they will despair.

Here was my playlist:

1.) The Max Rebo Band – Lapti Nek (Club Mix)
2.) Bea Arthur – Good Night, But Not Good-Bye
3.) Meco – Ewok Celebration (the rapping C-3PO kills me every time)
4.) Koto – Jabdah
5.) Meco – The Empire Strikes Back
6.) The Cantina Theme. Six times in a row.

I blasted this exact same playlist – but five seconds off – in an abutting room 10 feet away. I did this for no other ulterior motive other than to confuse folks.

Episode IV: The Day of the Party

After weeks of anticipation, Life Day finally arrived! There was a blizzard outside, but that didn't stop me from donning my Life Day bathrobe and Wookiee beard. At 9:30 PM EST, the traveling partiers showed, and I was raring to stare into the abyss with them.

Here's a log from my party. As you can see, things didn't exactly go as planned.

9:30 PM – My first guests arrive. I hand them their Wookiee mask. The seeds of sorrow have been planted.

9:49 – The revelers have donned the Darth Vader masks I left out. Good. These should exacerbate any preexisting father complexes.

10:17 – A guest complains that the Rancor Gamete Extract burnt his esophagus. Taste the void!

10:33 – My apartment is jam-packed with 50+ people. Tensions should be running high. This place will be a Hobbesian state of nature in minutes.

10:52 – Someone unironically compliments me on "a great party." What is this shit?

11:10 – As a last ditch attempt to unleash the horrors of Life Day, I rally my guests to sing "Happy Life Day" in the key of Carrie Fisher, who was rumored to be bombed out of her brainpan when she filmed the SWHS. I pray that the cacophony will rouse the neighbors and we all get arrested.

11:15 – No dice. The guests shuffle off to the next party. All the Hoth Chocolate, Wookiee Coconut Rhombi, and Mandalorian Panther Piss have been consumed. Oddly enough, I am left with a full bottle of Rancor Gamete Extract.

Episode V: So What Went Wrong?

As I cleaned up the following morning, I ruminated on my total failure as a Life Day host. None of the guests appeared to be in the agony I was in when I watched the Holiday Special – in fact, most of the gang was convivial and laughing. Were they laughing to hide an inner sadness? I doubt it.

For next year's Life Day party, I plan on doing a few things differently. First, I'll definitely screen the Holiday Special – this will force my guests to wallow in the anguish of Life Day firsthand. Also, I'll only serve Rancor Gamete Extract – this beverage tastes the way Life Day should feel. Finally, I'll require all my guests communicate solely in Wookiee absolutely for no reason whatsoever.

In conclusion, Happy Life Day from io9. To you and yours, AUGHGHRUHGGHGGH.

Additional photography by Dave Digioia, Ian MacAllen, Laura Parry, and Lauren Rath.

People have been dreaming about loving giant women (or becoming giant women, for that matter) forever. But the Internet has fostered a really vibrant, creative community of people who've created artwork and lore. This fetish has a fancy name: macrophilia, according to this 1999 Salon article. There are actually two different types of macrophilia porn: There are women who've been hit with growth rays (or growth viruses) turning them into giants. And then there are men who've been hit with shrink rays or whatnot. The science-fiction origins of this fetish rest with movies like Attack OF The 50 Foot Woman and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

If you want to get the total awesomeness of giantess fetish, you have to go with artwork, which allows creators' imaginations to run wild. There are tons and tons of message boards and groups where people post their favorite art showing massive women and the doll-like men who love them. A lot.

And some of our favorite giantess art comes from Dream Tales, which kindly allowed us to feature a few images from their comics:

But adherents to this fetish also post tons and tons of homemade Photoshop collages, showing scantily dressed or naked women stomping across cities and trampling little men, including the one above, and these masterpieces:

There's even a giantess and shrunken men Flickr pool, where people post their own creations.

On the other hand, if you want actual professionally shot giantess porn, that exists as well. There are tons of pay porn sites that feature staged photos of women in their underwear, smashing model cities and stepping on toy soldiers. There's even HebrewGiantess.com, for those of you who just desperately needed "point of view" shots of a man looking up at a skyscraper-sized Jewish woman. Here are some of our favorite pay-site images:

But like many other niche fetishes, the love of giant women is (wait for it) big in Japan. Just check out this scene from a live-action video, featuring a man who's been shrunk to the size of a doll. The movie also includes scenes where the woman stimulates the helpless little man's tiny penis with a giant Q-tip. And the man climbs inside her vagina. But here's a nice scene where she licks his face and then he climbs onto her breast:

And then there's some amazing manga and hentai art from Japan, showing — among other things, a giant woman having sex with a giant robot.

Fans have also collected these amazing Kookai ads, featuring giant women and tiny men (via the defunct GTSFeet site):

So obviously, giantess porn, to some extent, is a fantasy about female power — women who grow to the size of a mountain are stand-ins for powerful women everywhere. But at the same time, you have to love the playfulness and sheer weirdness of the huge females crushing cities with the sheer force of their voluptuousness.

Mr. Incredible's trip down memory lane.

Verdict: Worth it. The art on the Incredible magazine covers is absolutely frame worthy.

2012 had crazy Woody and his pull-down chart of conspiracy. Planning to write about climate change? Whoops, you're now dead — see, he put a line through each scientist's name.

Verdict: Worthless, the wall of clippings and the crazy person blog was overkill. But then again this is 2012, so at least it's staying in its wheelhouse.

Mulder's office is papered with clippings and UFO sightings in the last X-Files film, thus hitting us over the head one last time with the fact that he's a BELIEVER.

Verdict: Worthless. Anyone going to this movie already knew all about Mulder's beliefs. They didn't need the "crazy obsession" wall, but they can keep the wrinkled poster from the original X-Files show.

In The Children of Men you get a quickie recap, not only of the Jasper character and his comatose wife but of the present day situation as well.

Verdict: Worthless. If Jasper's wife was indeed tortured by the oppressive new government regime, would they really keep the giant reminder posted on their wall of that horrible experience? Go on down the line, lovely pictures of friends, interesting and telling news clips of something they probably worked on, awards explaining their characters — and then a giant full-page story detailing the brutal torture your wife, thus making her completely unresponsive. Ah, memories.

Here's another newspaper moment in Children of Men that wasn't really used to portray obsession or honor, but it was nice that the production crew made sure all the headlines were relevant to the story.

Verdict: Worth it, even if it was just an aesthetic.

Halloween! Michael will never die, and neither will his victim's memory of him.

Verdict: Worth it. It's a horror movie, it's expected.

The Hills Have Eyes remake had a quickie wall of foreshadowing, and filled us in that the Hills were definitely full of mutant kid eyes.

Verdict: Worth it, it was great build up to the horrible nuclear family reveal. That little girl haunted me for days, and I needed a little build-up to the character, cliché though it may be.

Whip Lash's lair in Iron Man 2 is all about obsession.

Verdict: Worthless, for now. Until we see more. We didn't need the clippings to prove that Whiplash wants to kill Tony, because all he literally does, from the looks of things, is try to kill Tony. But maybe it will flesh out some backstory , although it's highly unlikely as all those clippings are pretty modern.

Mr. Glass' wall of destruction in Unbreakable.

Verdict: Worthless and Worth It. Samuel L. Jackson was scary enough in this as is, but it did help catch you up if you hadn't already called him as the bad guy hours earlier. Also, I believe there may be some flaws in these clips.

Original Nite Owl's den was a museum to Watchmen.

Verdict: Worth It. This is the kind of thing director Zack Snyder excels at. And when it's good it's very, very good. Everything on this wall has a back story. Even with its other shortcomings, Watchmen did have a very well thought-out set. Even if it was ripped from the novel, it looked good.

Willy Wonka's pops reveals to the audience that he didn't hate his son at all, because he framed all his newspaper articles. This was actually more creepy than exciting, but then again it is the remake of Willy Wonka, where Depp gives pale death face smiles for half the film, so it least it fits the tone.

Verdict: Worth it, since it fits in with the crazy theme of the film.

In the last ten years, researchers have discovered thousands of species, both living and extinct. We got dino-eating crocodiles and killer kangaroos; a fish with a transparent head and a demon duck of doom; a bright pink millipede and giant spiders. And previously named species, such as the tongue-eating isopod and the alien-limbed Magnapinna, made headlines.

A few of these species were observed before 2000, but were only named or recognized as species in the last ten years. And each has some wonderfully monstrous quality, be it their incredible size, arsenal of offensive or defensive weapons, or knack for survival.

A Big Cat With Bite: The Bornean Clouded Leopard, which was found to be a new species in 2007 (though it had been observed long before), may not look like much at first. It may weigh in at a mere 55 pounds, putting it on the small side for a big cat, but it has the largest teeth of any known cat alive. It has even been described as the modern answer to the Sabertooth Tiger.
The Largest Snake to Slither the Earth: If South America's giant Anacondas make you quiver, be grateful that Titanoboa cerrejonensis has been dead for two million years. This prehistoric constrictor grew up to 50 feet in length and weighed in at a whopping 2500, the largest snake ever found. And its favorite food? Crocodiles. I can only imagine the digestive system on that thing.

Incidentally, this decade also saw the discovery of the smallest known snake, the Barbados Threadsnake.

Fanged Frogs: 2009 was a big year for frogs with teeth. Fanged frogs turned up in the Mount Bosavi crater in Papua New Guinea, where strange and wondrous new species are being discovered all the time. But even more monstrous are the Limnonectes megastomias, recently discovered in Thailand. This amphibian has been known to use its fangs in deadly combat, dismembering its froggy opponents. On top of that, when a bird swoops near, L. megastomias will snap and turn it into a tasty feast.

Sea Monsters of the Ancient Deep: Paleontologists digging in the Arctic Svalbard islands uncovered what they believe to be a new species of pliosaur, one with a skull twice as large as a Tyrannosaurus rex's. Its teeth were 12 inches long (with a bite four times as strong as T. Rex's), and is 15-meter-long body weighed an estimated 45 tons. That would make this Jurassic beast considerably larger than any pliosaur previously discovered.

Beware the Box: Giant jellyfish are a sight to behold, but it's the diminutive Malo kingi that you'll really want to avoid. The jelly gets its name, tragically, from its first known victim, Robert King, an American tourist swimming off the Queensland coast in 2002. Some researchers believe kingi venom is among the most toxic in the world.

A Rat as Big as a Cow: They just don't make rodents like they used to. Josephoartigasia monesi weighed around a ton — dwarfing the modern capybara — and had enormous incisors that rival a beaver's wood shredding teeth. Those incisors came in hand when fending off predatory birds and Sabertooth Tigers, though this largest of the rodents snacked on fruits and vegetables.

Mammal-Eating Plants: Pitcher plants are nothing new, but these large, rat-eating veggies added a few species in the last ten years. Naturalist David Attenborough was immortalized in Nepenthes attenboroughii, a new species found in the Philippines. Rodents are attracted to the liquid in the pitchers, then drown when they tumble inside.

A Bug Bigger Than You: In 2007, diggers found giant spiked claw belonging to Jaekelopterus rhenaniae in Prum, Germany. This sea scorpion, which lived 390 million years ago, was an estimated 8.2 meters long and ate anything it could get its claws on — including other scorpions.

Extreme Living, in Your Hairspray: Extremophiles can exist in environments that would kill lesser species — in extreme heat or cold, inside nuclear reactors, or in the void of space. Microbacterium hatanonis, discovered in 2008, chooses an odd environment as its home: in hairspray. It's not clear how the bacterium affects humans, but the discovery adds more information on where and how they can survive.

Bomber Worms: This year, a researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography discovered seven new species of sea worms that secrete small globs of fluid that act as biological flash bombs. These bombs glow, distracting predators while the worm slips away. It's only a shame that their defensive bombs can't be weaponized for bonus monster action.

This is not a list of io9's "favorites," or a compendium of people we think should have power. With this list, we've tried to reflect as accurately as possible who the movers and shakers are in the worlds of science fiction - the people who can command a big budget, or get a creative project produced just by signing their name to it. These are people whose tastes are setting pop culture fashion, and inspiring imitators across the globe. They're wheeling and dealing, controlling the kinds of stories you'll be reading, watching, and playing for years to come.

In addition, the list is not in order of power. All of these people are powerful in different ways, often in different industries.

JJ Abrams
Lost. Star Trek. Fringe. At this point, media polymath JJ Abrams can do no wrong on television or at the movies. He's rebooted Star Trek with a flourish, and even though FOX show Fringe may be flagging in the ratings this year, it's still garnering critical praise. Next up for Abrams: Two linked sequels to Star Trek and an untitled scifi/spy comedy series.

James Cameron
Whether you love or hate Avatar, there's no denying Cameron knows how to make science fiction into a rich, technically sophisticated storytelling genre. And he can command a budget of nearly $400 million, which is what many estimate Avatar cost. Next up for Cameron: More Avatar, and more technical innovations.

Lady Gaga
Like Cameron, Lady Gaga is another polarizer: You hate her or you love her, but either way she's unavoidable. With videos supporting her two latest releases, The Fame and The Fame Monster, she crafted an image of herself as a pop creation whose alienness rivals that of 1970s-era David Bowie. Dressed in outfits that belong on another planet, playing piano from inside whirling silver rings, Lady Gaga made sci fashion into just plain fashion. Next up for Gaga: Touring, mostly without pants on.

David Howe
Though he got a lot of razzing for the Syfy rebranding campaign, Howe has brought the once-marginal SciFi Channel into the mainstream with Syfy's blend of paranormal reality shows like Ghost Hunters, top-rated miniseries (Tin Man), and attention-grabbing series like Stargate Universe and Warehouse 13. Under Howe's watch, Syfy's ratings have gone through the roof, and the channel is now among the top ten most-watched channels among men ages 18–54, and women ages 25–54. Next for Howe: Several new series, including the much-anticipated Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica in spring.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Senior Editor and the Manager of Science Fiction at Tor Books, Nielsen Hayden is a kingmaker among American science fiction novelists. Under his watch, Tor has helped turn writers like Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, and Jo Walton into award-winning superstars of the genre world. Plus it doesn't hurt that Tor is re-releasing the mega-selling Wheel Of Time series. Next for Nielsen Hayden: More award-winning books.

Diane Nelson
A longtime executive at Warner Bros, Nelson was recently named DC Entertainment President, where she's going to take on the task of shuttling promising comic book properties into Time Warner's other media divisions - mostly movies. With properties like Batman, Justice League, and Wonder Woman under her watchful eye, Nelson is poised to set the tone for next decade's most anticipated (and, for some, dreaded) comic book movies. Our favorite Nelson quote: "I prefer to be known as an executive rather than a girl." Next for Nelson: Superman and Wonder Woman movies.

Warren Ellis
Ellis has long been a favorite among discerning comic book fans who have made his books Transmetropolitan and Planetary into cult hits. And his work on countless Marvel titles, as well as his novel Crooked Little Vein, have made him a critical darling as well. But Ellis' power extends far beyond the comic book world, and into the realms of subterranean fashion, philosophy, and trendsetting. He runs a very popular blog that routinely breaks news on the pop trends and weird news that feed the creative imaginations of writers, artists, filmmakers and fans. Ellis is one of the science fiction world's most influential tastemakers and opinion shapers. Next for Ellis: The movie version of his comic book Red starts filming in January, starring Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman.

Charlaine Harris
With her Sookie Stackhouse novels constantly on bestseller lists, and HBO's Sookie series True Blood a critical and audience hit, Harris is the queen of vampire fiction for adults. She's also a pioneer of the supernatural romance genre, which has propelled science fiction and urban fantasy stories into the hands of women - and helped turn fantastical genre fiction into a mainstream obsession. Next for Harris: Dead in the Family, a new Sookie Stackhouse novel, in May 2010.


Felicia Day
Day, creator of the cult hit web show The Guild, was the star of scifi's biggest web sensation to date: Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog. Now she's crossing over into the mainstream, with roles on House, Dollhouse, and Lie To Me. Day proves that web celebrities can be just as powerful as TV celebrities. Next for Day: Appearing in some of the final episodes of Dollhouse next year; The Guild season 4.

Audrey Niffenegger
With her mega-selling novel The Time Traveler's Wife now a Hollywood movie, it's no wonder that Audrey Niffenegger got almost $5 million for her latest novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, which came out earlier this year. Next for Niffenegger: An art exhibit at Printworks Gallery in September, 2010, and a third novel, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile.

Alastair Reynolds
Joining the millionaire science fiction author club along with Niffenegger is Reynolds, a British author whose space operas have netted him prestigious awards and fans the world over. Last year, he signed an unprecedented 10-book deal with leading UK SF publisher Gollancz, for £1 million. Next for Reynolds: A three-book cycle that the UK Guardian described as "an African-inflected trilogy charting how humanity might go on to conquer the solar system and the galaxy."


Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh
Jackson and Walsh have been writing and production partners on some of the biggest science fiction and fantasy epics of the last decade, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now Jackson is putting some of his muscle behind young directors like District 9's Niell Blomkamp, and it's paying off nicely; Jackson and Walsh have also been working with Guillermo Del Toro on developing two forthcoming movies based on The Hobbit. Next for Jackson and Walsh: Producing The Hobbit movies; a possible miniseries based on Naomi Novik's dragon warfare series called Temeraire.

Michael Bay
Bay exploded his way into some of the biggest box office cash in history with the incomprehensible yet lucrative Transformers 2. Call him a mindless detonation-whore if you want, but Bay's a money-making golden boy in Hollywood right now. Next for Bay: Transformers 3, set for 2011 release.

Ridley Scott
After blowing everybody's minds with his original visions in 1970s and 80s science fiction classics Alien and Bladerunner, Scott turned his attention to other genres, making incredible flicks like Thelma and Louise and American Gangster. But last year, to our delight, he set his sights on science fiction again. Next for Scott: He's got a prequel to Alien in the works, as well as plans to adapt Joe Haldeman's The Forever War and early SF classic Brave New World to the big screen.

Kevin Feige
As President of Production at Marvel Studios, Feige will control the vertical, horizontal, and asskickital on your movie screens for quite some time. Having worked as a producer on hits like Iron Man and Fantastic Four, Feige will continue his reign at Marvel with more films based on Marvel's characters. Now that Disney is putting its considerable weight behind Marvel Studios, we can only hope that the asskicking will get awesomer, not cutesier. Next for Feige: Producing movie versions of Thor, The Avengers, Captain America, Ant-Man, Deathlok, and more.

Image Metrics
When it comes to making science fiction look awesome, it's important to credit the power of a great tool and the people who make it. Image Metrics is an FX software package used for creating facial animation (often with motion-capture technology) and effects mavens love it. It was used to create effects for Benjamin Button last year, and this year was used for Avatar and the videogame Assassin's Creed II. Next for Image Metrix: You'll be seeing effects created with the software in the film Splice.

Neville Page
The creature designer whose monsters are sometimes more memorable than the actors who fight them, Page created the Cloverfield creature, as well as working on character and creature design in Star Trek (yes, that was his weird red monster on the ice planet), Watchmen and Avatar. Not only are his monsters cool; they actually help advance the stories we see them in. Next for Page: He designed the suits in the forthcoming sequel to Tron.

Patrice Desilets and Jade Raymond
As Ubisoft videogame Assassin's Creed veers into science fictional territory, game designer Desilets finds himself heading up the creative team behind one of the most interesting, complex, and fun SF/F games of the past few years. As producer on Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2, Raymond helped popularize the games and made them accessible to a broader audience. Next for Desilets and Raymond: Desilets is at work on the next installment of Assassin's Creed; Raymond is heading up a brand-new Toronto Ubisoft office, where she says she'll work on AAA games.

Sam Worthington
Aussie actor Worthington came out of nowhere to helm two of the year's most anticipated science fiction epics: Terminator 4 (where many argued he was the only interesting character), and Avatar (where he proved he can act even when he's turned into a motion-captured animation). He's poised to be Hollywood's next big SF action star. Next for Worthington: Clash of the Titans; producing and starring in comic book flick Last Days of American Crime; possible Avatar sequel.

Zoe Saldana
After stealing the show in JJ Abrams' Star Trek and kicking major ass in Avatar, Saldana is on track to be the next Sigorney Weaver: Able to play smart believably, and able to throw down in highly physical, action-adventure roles. She leaves everyone wanting to see more of her brains and brawn. Next for Saldana: comic book flick The Losers; Star Trek sequels.

Thanks to: Michael Goldfarb, Stephen Totilo, Charlie Jane Anders, Meredith Woerner, Graeme McMillan, and Lauren Davis, who all helped compile this list.