I’ve enjoyed SyFy’s weird-things-happening-in-the-world-we-think-we-know shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13, but I sort of thought TNT and Fox stole a bit of a match on the network with shows like Falling Skies and Terra Nova that were based further in the future and did more to posit alternative societies. So I’m excited to hear about Deliverance, SyFy’s upcoming program set in “a world where humans and aliens live together on a planet ravished by decades of war.” Apparently, it’s kind of a western, with a human sheriff and mayor trying to keep peace between the human and alien populations of the former St. Louis.

My boredom with alien invasion stories is well-documented, so this is a nice variation, and the first pop culture product of its ilk since District 9, really. Cowboys and Aliens foundered in part, I think, because it didn’t have a clear sense for who or what its alien invaders were meant to represent. An old-school Western with aliens standing in for George Hearst and his minions, a kind of sci-fi Deadwood would have been sort of amazing, but Cowboys and Aliens was not that thing. The fact that humans are in charge of governance in Deliverance suggests that humans are somewhat more powerful than aliens, but I do think you could do something interesting where aliens are the more powerful constituency without being tyrannical or enslaving humanity. And a situation where aliens and humans are close to parity or co-dependent could be a really useful tool for exploring our attitudes towards immigrants or to coalition-building across constituencies. Stories are better when they know what their metaphors are for specifically, rather than standing in for a Random Big Bad Thing.

A new paper positing some scenarios for first contact between humans and extraterrestrials, whether it’s Megyn Kelly erroneously saying that NASA funded it or Dan Foster mocking the authors for assuming that more advanced societies will naturally be progressive. Ignored in all this hoopla is that the paper’s chock-full of scenarios that would make for awesome alien movies that go beyond the derivative invasion scenarios that were so popular this year. Here are five of my favorites:

1. Some of us discover we’re being kept under alien observation, and we reach out to make first contact, with…interesting results. The Prime Directive has the Federation refraining from messing with new societies, but what if we’re the society someone else is trying not to interfere with? Contact was the last major movie to explore what would happen if other species are waiting for us to grew up, but stopped short of exploring the implications of humanity reaching out in the universe:

The intentional form of this solution is sometimes known as the Zoo Hypothesis because it implies that ETI are treating Earth like a wildlife preserve to be observed but not fully incorporated into the Galactic Club…The Zoo Hypothesis thus implies that ETI could make contact with humans at any time. Perhaps such stealthy ETI will reveal themselves once Earth civilization has reached certain milestones. They may be waiting until we have reached a sufficient level of sophistication as a society such as the start of a METI program or the discovery of light speed travel, or they could be applying a societal benchmark such as sustainable development or international unity.

2. A two-sided story about two groups of people trying to get in touch with each other. Flip the perspective, and show both human and alien societies stumbling towards each other. Would require actual creative world-building to make the aliens, their society, and motivations feel as rich and compelling as our own, but those are good things to strive for:

Even if ETI exist in the nearby galactic vicinity, this does not necessarily imply that communication with them will be possible or straightforward. One major challenge is selecting the frequency at which to broadcast and listen. The electromagnetic spectrum consists of a continuum of wavelengths for communication that includes radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray bands. Searching this entire range is a monumental and nearly impossible task, so we choose particular wavelengths that seem more probable for interstellar communication.

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Super-commenter Gabriel Rossman pointed me in the direction of University of California, Davis professor Greta Hsu’s work on movies that span multiple genres a while back, and in the wake of Cowboys and Aliens, it seemed like an opportune time to dive deeply into a couple of her papers. Her research into the relationship between how active movie watchers assign categories to movies, and the commercial and critical reception of those movies, demonstrates a fairly unsurprising conclusion: “Producers who target a broad area of the market have access to greater potential revenue; the extent to which they capitalize on this potential, however, depends on the clarity with which they communicate their fit with targeted genres.”

This makes a lot of sense. If you take a gander at the top 10 all-time grossing movies (leaving aside for the moment factors like problems in calculation, the growth of the industry, the high cost of 3D tickets), they’re all very clean, effective genre-bridging movies. Avatar is a sophisticated science fiction adventure story that’s animated in part by a gooey romance. Titanic is a gooey love story facilitated by intense action sequences. James Cameron is a visionary film director who is pushing movie technology forward, but he’s also the undisputed master of working across genres. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is an epic struggle that’s also substantially concerned with whether our Bearded Hero Other Than The Short Dudes will get his elfin princess. Pirates of the Caribbean entwines its love story with its adventure story — Will falls in love with Elizabeth essentially at the moment that she steals a piece of cursed pirate gold from him when they’re both children. Toy Story 3 doesn’t really feel like a genre movie at all to me — it’s the only move in the top 10 that doesn’t fit into an easily identifiable genre category, which demonstrates the strength of that sort of simple categorization. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides brings back one of Jack Sparrow’s lost inamorata. Alice in Wonderland is the reverse of most of the movies on this list, which are largely movies men could take women to and the women wouldn’t mind, accomplishing this gender switch by turning Alice into a warrior. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 would have been a giant hit no matter how good or bad it was, but it’s also the movie in the series that is most a genre mash-up: it’s an intense adventure, during which the main characters’ romances come into full flower. The Dark Knight is perhaps the movie on the list that has the smallest amount of genre-crossover; Rachel Dawes and Bruce Wayne aren’t together in the movie, and while her death is a blow, it’s definitely a B or C plot in the movie, which is otherwise a very focused action morality play. And I don’t even know what to make of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
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I’ve long lamented the fact that we’re probably not ever going to get a movie series or television show based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because it’s too big, and too deeply rooted in discussions of science, to translate for a mass audience. But it sounds like Neill Blomkamp’s post-District Nine project, Elysium, in addition to boasting a cast that includes Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, and Sharlto Copley, may be exploring some of the same things I’d hoped we’d get out of a Mars project. A viral teaser for the movie comes in the form of an advertisement for a fictional company called Armadyne advertising for folks who work in everything from “zero g welders, mega-structure engineers, quantum networkers” to “zero g coupling and multi-generational planning”.

This seems promising. Mars is a major character in the Mars trilogy, but all of the characters’ engagement with the particular planet they settled are shaped by the equipment they have to work with, the structures they build, and the dramatically longer perspective they have on the impact of their work and the events of their relationships. Those concepts can be usefully applied to places other than Mars and to situations other than colonization. I thought that overall, Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City was not a particularly successful novel, though I did think that the best parts of the book were the ones about the fleet of ships sent from Earth to start new colonies that showed how extreme longevity could do the opposite of what Robinson suggests in the Mars trilogy, making people increasingly detached from morality, the value of relationships, and the consequences of their actions.

I’m not particularly surprised that Blomkamp, of all directors, would make a movie that’s engaged with structural issues. District 9 is about how humanity fails to understand the structure of an alien society because it doesn’t really see that the structure is there at all. And human governments manage their sense that they’ve got an anarchic — and to them, disgusting — society in their midst try to quarantine it with techniques that haven’t really worked perfectly before. Blomkamp did something astonishing and original when he demonstrated what happens when a society’s sense of what is true and what is possible is profoundly disrupted. I’ll be excited to see him build a new one from scratch.