The SyFy network’s announced that they won’t be moving forward with Blood and Chrome, a prequel to their critically acclaimed hit Battlestar Galactica, which would have flashed back to the first war between humans and their robot creations, the Cylons. For Battlestar Galactica fans who have missed the space opera, which drew parallels to everything from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to student protests in the 1960s, since it went off the air in 2009, and the show’s prequel Caprica, which finished its run in 2010, this may be bad news. But it’s a good decision by the network. Battlestar Galactica was terrific, but it’s time for SyFy to stop milking the same concept, and to find a new great science fiction show worthy of the network’s name.

In recent years, one of SyFy’s most pronounced trends has been towards fantasy programming rather than science fiction. Alphas, its flawed-superheroes show, is wonderfully fun, but its characters’ abilities are of the X-Men-style, Children of the Atom mumbo-jumbo variety. The biological explanations are for the most part (Gary, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, is a notable exception) more hand-waving than serious exploration of the human body. Eureka, the network’s show about a town inhabited by the descendants of America’s greatest scientists and their cantankerous creations, is entering its final seasons. The artifacts that are stored in Warehouse 13 and hunted down by FBI agents gone steampunk are decidedly the stuff of literature and legend, rather than scientific discoveries that are key to American hegemony. Haven is about a town with supernatural troubles. Sanctuary is about a monster scientist. The network has no fewer than four shows about ghosts. And its latest mini-phenomenon, a syndication of the Canadian show Lost Girl, is delightful, but that doesn’t make it any less about a succubus making her way in the fairy community.

This seems like a real missed opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, and fantasy can set up moral dilemmas as well as science fiction: power is power, and decisions about how to use it can be fascinating whether it’s a new scientific discovery or a newly discovered supernatural ability. But, to go all Southland Tales on it, the future is going to be more futuristic than we imagined, and it’s getting here awfully fast. There are so many pressing questions that would also make for fabulous entertainment. What will it mean for space travel, something we once thought of as a scientific frontier and an escape hatch for humanity, to become a luxury tourism industry? What will it mean to be human as we’re increasingly integrated with our technology, perhaps to the point of having smart implants, like Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, or a bunch of the characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s forthcoming 2312? How will technology, medical advances, and the ability to augment ourselves exacerbate our class divides?

These questions are imminent, not theoretical. And they all lend themselves beautifully to television devices. You could do an office comedy about running a space tourism company, or a drama about corruption in the industry and an interstellar land grab. You can have chatty, snarky AIs as characters, or show humans growing overly invested in their technology—Apple clearly means for us to attach to Siri, and as she works better, I can see that happening. When there’s this much potential available, there’s something kind of unfortunate about turning away from the possible and the probable to the purely fantastical. Fiction doesn’t have an absolute responsibility to help us work out our problems, but it’s an incredible tool for helping us think through them. For a network with the motto “Imagine Greater,” that ought to be an exciting prospect.

I find Brit Marling, who broke out in dreamy science fiction movie Another Earth and is the best part of financial crimes thriller Arbitrage, which should be out later this year, utterly fascinating. So I’m intrigued by Sound of My Voice, in which she plays the leader of a cult who claims to be a time traveler from the year 2054:

I don’t know if the movie will explore this, but I think it would be fascinating if it at least interrogated the idea that people think Marling’s character is a cult leader because it’s easier to believe that than to accept that a woman might be capable of the miraculous, might be a savior. We get lots of pop culture depictions of cult leaders as men who are using their power, and the fact that people are willing to invest authority in them, as a way to enhance their sense of their own masculinity, whether by gaining sexual partners, amassing wealth, or creating opportunities for them to prove themselves in violent confrontations with outsiders. But we see women far less frequently, and I wonder if that’s a result of male creators not being able to identify with the idea that a woman could be a messianic leader.

I’m a bit late to this bit of brilliant viral marketing for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, in which Peter Weyland, the founder of the franchise’s fictional Weyland-Yutani Corporation, gives a talk at a futuristic version of TED:

I think what I like about this is not just that the clip gives me a sense of what the movie is going to be like, but that it’s a bit of connective tissue between this world and our own. For me, a lot of what’s fun about near-future science fiction is a sense of what will survive from one era into the next, whether it’s jazz on Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, eighties pop culture in Ready Player One, or a version of TED that kind of looks like it got mashed up with the Old Republic’s Senate Chambers. The future has to evolve from something. And while it can be interesting to just jump thousands of years away from where we are now, I’m actually more excited to see what I might have to look forward. We’re evolving fast, and I expect the world will change a great deal while I’m still around to see it.

As someone who spends a lot of time defending science and speculative fiction as valuable ways to conduct intellectual experiments around scenarios that are so far away that we can’t simulate them or that we desperately hope never come to pass, I was totally enchanted by this short piece by Madeline Ashby about science fiction and strategic forecasting. I think it’s a terrifically useful guide to making narratives more interesting and to thinking about what happens when you change certain variables, but also to making science fiction a more useful tool for thinking about the future. Of course, those two things do tend to go hand in hand, even if you need other factors to make for an excellent science fiction story. She gives advice like:

Pay attention and take note. Get a team together. Learn everything you all can about the industry, market, demographic, problem, etc. Find recent news stories about it. Save and organize them. Listen to the sources no one else is listening to, because weak signals have more to say about the future than strong ones. (A good example is the anti-vaccination movement. Once upon a time, it seemed like a small cluster of people influenced by faulty research would have no impact. Now, California has record numbers of measles patients.) This is also how I research my fiction. I learn unusual things and write about them. This is why my last story had Quiverfull families working with fansubbers to uncover the truth about zombies.

In Southland Tales, Krysta Now (speaking of which, MOAR GOOD ROLES FOR SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR-NOW-PRINZE PLZ) says that “Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.” I tend to think that folks like Kurt Andersen, who complain about the recycling of styles, tend to underestimate the extent to which accelerating change has left everyone kind of fatigued and in need of some familiar reference points. All of which is to say the future is moving really fast, and the more people who are engaged in trend-spotting and intelligent speculative thinking the better. Artists should be at the front line with scientists and marketers.

So, John Carter:

I haven’t read the books, and I’m not sure it would make a difference. But I find myself weirdly depressed by the idea of a movie where a character is magically transported from one vicious sectarian conflict (the Civil War) to another one, on another planet. Maybe there’s just no escape velocity from war and territorial violence. Or maybe the lessons of one world are meant to redeem another, a hope that seems vainly and permanently disproved — it’s too hard to see our errors coming at us from a distance to avoid them fully. Or maybe I’m overthinking this. But it does sort of put a damper on my enthusiasm about futurism and space travel to think that we’ll encounter the exact same problems all over again out there in the great beyond. I almost don’t care if there are bad things out there in our fiction if they’re new, and reveal something different about ourselves.