Though Ridley Scott’s recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern runs a full two pages, virtually all of the media attention has been on its final sentence:

“And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist [in Blade Runner 2].”

But the entire interview – which focuses not on Blade Runner 2, but on Scott’s long history of films starring women – is well worth reading. What it’s like to pitch a female-led action film, in Scott’s own words:

“It’s far more considered normal to have a female in the lead [than it was in the past], and yet, studios will always look at the bottom line and the value of a female lead versus a male lead globally, because none of the budgets for these films are getting any smaller, so they have to take into account the bottom line from a business standpoint.”

Last January, I wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Rise of the Female-Led Action Film” that traced the shift of the action genre – which was once Hollywood’s most sexist genre, and has gradually become one of its most progressive. Ridley Scott and Alien writer Dan O’Bannon deserve much of the credit for this change; though Alien was groundbreaking in many ways, its most enduring legacy is protagonist Ellen Ripley, whose first silver-screen outing in 1979 represents the tipping point of the action genre’s shift from sexism to feminism.

James Cameron (the other great feminist action director) gets the credit for Ripley’s shift to a full-fledged action icon in the 1986 sequel Aliens. But the seeds of what the character would eventually become were sown in the original Alien’s ending. At its core – and unlike its three direct sequels – Alien is a horror movie, right down to the “final girl” at the end. But Scott makes an important distinction that separates Ripley from the “final girl” of Alien’s horror contemporaries:

“In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre […] that girl was still standing at the end covered in blood, but she’d survived rather than won. The difference with Ripley was that she had won and survived.”

Given his history, it’s unsurprising that Scott decided to cast Noomi Rapace as the lead in Prometheus after being impressed by her performance as Lisbeth Salander – arguably the most iconic new female character of the decade – in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

And the Blade Runner universe offers just as many opportunities for both insight and critique. Though the original Blade Runner’s feminist themes are far less front-and-center than Alien’s, there’s a scathing feminist critique embedded in its story as well. Blade Runner features an enormously gender-stratified society. All of the characters in power are men, and each of the major female characters is a replicant, with Daryl Hannah’s Pris getting the worst of it as a “basic pleasure model.” When replicant Roy Batty breaks one of Deckard’s fingers for each of the female replicants he’s “retired” during the film, he’s breaking the government tool that has literally dehumanized – and eventually dispatched – each of the most important women in his life. We know nothing about Blade Runner 2’s female protagonist, who could easily turn out to be a blade runner or a replicant (or both). But I’m thrilled by the idea of revisiting Blade Runner’s gender-stratified dystopia through the eyes of a woman.

io9′s Charlie Jane Anders has a typically intriguing interview with Jon Spaihts, the screenwriter who did the first drafts of Prometheus, and part of the discussion came down to the difference between rendering worlds and telling stories in video games and movies:

Storytelling in games has matured tremendously in the past decade. Some really great work has been done. But the design requirements are totally different, almost the opposite of filmic storytelling. The central character of a game is most often a cipher – an avatar into which the player projects himself or herself. The story has to have a looseness to accommodate the player’s choices. This choose-your-own adventure quality is a challenge for storytellers and, I fear, militates against art.

A filmmaker is trying to make you look at something a certain way – almost to force an experience on you. Think of the legendary directors, whose perspective is the soul of their art. It’s the opposite of a sandbox world. It’s a mind-meld with a particular visionary.

I’m actually curious if this, as well as production costs, are part of why it’s been so hard to adapt major video games into major motion pictures. There’s always uproar in fan communities about how true an adaptation is or isn’t to source material, and if the main character’s mostly a vehicle for a player, to project themselves into the game, it will be awfully hard to reconcile all of those private universes into a coherent whole that’s mostly satisfying to a majority of people. I know we all agree what Chell looks like, but I don’t know if anyone shares my idea of who Chell is.

I’ve eased up on the book club because I think it’s hard for a critical mass of folks to keep up—we all have a lot on our pop culture agendas. But some people have been asking me what I’m reading or what I’m looking forward to this summer. So here are five books that are either coming out, or are relatively new releases that I think are worth making time for if you’re escaping to the beach somewhere.

-Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson, Out on July 3: Alif The Unseen may not be the first major fictional take on the Arab Spring, but it’s definitely the first to examine what would happen to a censorious oil state if a talented young hacker of Indian-Arab origin, after having his heart shattered by the upper-class girl he’s in love with, goes on the run with his veiled neighbor and best real-life friend and a djinn. It’s a terrifically fun novel about the connections between literature and coding, magic and Islam, and the identities we create for ourselves.

-Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo, Out on June 5: For all my YA readers of all ages in the house, Bardugo’s fantasy set in a Russia where the tsar’s advised by both a Rasputin-like holy man and a powerful wizard is the first part of a trilogy, and by the end of Shadow and Bone, you’ll be glad that’s the case. Fictional authoritarians don’t always pack the punch or capture the rot of unstable regimes, but Bardugo’s does. Plus magic and smooching and some super-scary demons.

-Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, Out on May 8: Wolf Hall, the first book in Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, is one of my favorite books of recent years, a rich, strange volume that actually captures what it feels like to be inside a non-modern mindset. I’m excited for the HBO adaptation, if it ever comes to fruition. But I’m even more excited for this sequel.

-The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson: Johnson’s novel of life in North Korea has been out for a while, and at first blush, it might not seem like beach reading. But it’s gorgeously written, and a propulsive adventure, a reminder that life as we know it can be so strange as to approach magical realism. If you want a reckoning with American inability to comprehend the world beyond ourselves, this is one of the most innovative ways to have that conversation with yourself and a piece of literature.

-Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel: I feel like I shouldn’t even have to make the case for this graphic novel memoir, given how wonderful Bechdel’s meditation on her father, Fun Home, is. But for those of you who are unfamiliar, Alison Bechdel is a genius, and Dykes to Watch Out For, her long-running syndicated comic strip about a lesbian community, was fantastic, no matter what your sexual orientation.

In preparation for Prometheus, which looks just ridiculously awesome, I’ve been watching the movies in the Alien franchise I hadn’t seen before. And in the course of that, and related futzing around the web, I realized how striking the per-movie numbers were as an illustration of how the economics of blockbusters have changed:

Alien (1979)
Budget: $11 million ($34.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $104,931,801 ($331.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: Approximately $33,333 ($105,321 in 2012 dollars)

Aliens (1986)
Budget: $18.5 million ($38.72 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $131,060,248 ($274.3 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $1 million ($2.1 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien 3 (1992)
Budget: $50 million ($81.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $159,773,545 ($261.2 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $4 million plus a share of box office ($6.5 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien Resurrection (1997)
Budget: $70 million ($100 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $161,295,658 ($230.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $11 million ($15.7 million in 2012 dollars)

Prometheus
Budget: Estimated at $100-$150 million

I don’t think there’s a direct relationship between expensiveness and badness—The Avengers cost $220 million, which doesn’t count the expensive advertising campaign around it, and is just jaw-droppingly great (it is killing me not to be able to talk to you guys about it yet. Friday cannot be here soon enough). But at the same time, you can afford to do weirder things if there’s less money sunk into them. The Avengers kind of earns back some of that freedom—and I think Prometheus does, too—to be funny and weird and interesting and frightening because it’s guaranteed to make all of the money even if it was wretched. But a lot of the time when someone like, say, Michael Bay is in that position, they take precisely zero advantage of it. It’s one thing to be creative because you have to be to have a prayer of getting noticed and loved. It’s another to be creative because you have the luxury to be. On bad days, it seems like everyone else is just checking boxes. But this year feels to me like a time when the movies are new and exciting. I could be proven wrong. But it’s been fun so far.

The bridge is yours.

-M.I.A. apparently wrote the theme song for a talk show Julian Assange is doing. Our world is silly.

-These comics sound great.

-Really sorry HBO isn’t doing this.

-The origins of Ron Swanson.

-This looks like a lot of fun:

Given some of the sillier elements that crept into the later movies in the Matrix trilogy; given the semi-disaster that was their adaptation of beloved cartoon Speed Racer; given the lurid way the media portrayed Lana Wachowski’s gender transition in the press; given the way the Wachowskis were treated for trying to make a hard-R love story that would have depicted a gay American soldier and an Iraqi man (I’d be curious how the trade press would have treated someone else trying to get a similar project into production); given that The Matrix itself is thirteen years old, it’s easy to forget how amazing it was to see that movie for the first time, how visionary the Wachowskis seemed all the way back in 1999. And maybe The Matrix will never register to a generation the same way it did to mine, those of us who grew up without the Internet and then had it open up before us. But if anything, we’re still living in the world they laid out for us, and grappling with the questions they posed before us. There may be less black leather and fewer mechanical nasties, but we still haven’t figured out how closely we can be tied to our technology and still stay healthy, and hackers still have cachet and the power to poke hard at our government and businesses.

All of which is a long way of saying that whatever has happened to them creatively and personally in the years since The Matrix was released, I want the Wachowskis to have a hit again, and I’m willing to give them a lot of credit and leeway as they try. I’m glad they got a shot at adapting Cloud Atlas. And I’m pretty excited to hear that they’ve signed up Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum to star in their next original movie, a science fiction project about which little is known called Jupiter Ascending. They did a nice job of working with Keanu Reeves’ blankness in the Matrix trilogy, and while I think Tatum’s proved that he’s more than a slab of beef, this might be an opportunity for him to convince those who are unmoved by A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints or 21 Jump Street.

The news of Jupiter Ascending also makes me feel like, despite my grumbling about the SyFy network yesterday, we might be entering a nice little moment for original sci-fi. Prometheus looks downright incredible, visually gorgeous and scary, and a reminder of the risks of our drive for exploration. I hadn’t even realized that Guy Pearce’s latest, Lockout, was a science fiction thriller until I saw a trailer for it in front of The Hunger Games this weekend. But I’m always down for a nasty, industrial view of space, where instead of the final frontier, it’s a place of exile and danger, in this case, for criminals and a few innocents. The Wachowskis found transcendence in metal, and wire, and castoff clothes once. I have such hopes for them taking us somewhere new, and frightening, and beautiful again.

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’ve written a great deal about how unfortunate it is that alien invasions are the main first contact scenarios we get in the movie, both because it’s unrealistic that we’d hold up for long enough for it to be interesting (much less win), and because there are so many more fascinating culture clash alternatives out there. But Nick Sagan, Carl’s son and a writer and producer in his own right, has some smart thoughts about one of the hoariest cliches in the invasion story—the idea that if aliens showed up, we’d forget our differences:

We’re so bitterly divided these days, the appearance of a true “other” might be the best chance of bringing us all together. But I wonder. If a fleet of alien ships appeared in the sky tomorrow, how do you think those who now call our president a Kenyan Marxist Muslim atheist would be most likely to react? Sure, they might turn around and say, “Whatever we may not like about Barack Hussein Obama, he’s as human as we are and we better put aside our differences to beat back these damn aliens!” I think the more likely reaction would be, “He’s probably one of them and it’s his fault they’re here!” Likewise, had a flying saucer invasion force descended during the tail end of George W. Bush’s presidency, I rather doubt the world community would have happily united behind his leadership. What’s more, these hypothetical extraterrestrials are unlikely to sit idly by as we try to figure out how best to move past our various differences. Human divisions would be child’s play for any reasonably competent alien overlord to exploit — check the masterful Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” for an example of how that might play out.

Using this as a jumping-off point, I can think of a couple of scenarios I’d love to see a science fiction movie explore:

1. If, in fact, we put aside our national differences and repelled an alien attack: What comes afterwards? District 9 explored this question on a small scale—white and black South Africans healed, or at least put aside, the deep rift of racism when aliens showed up, and employed the formidable machinery of apartheid to take it out on them. What lines might we team up along? What undesirables might we eliminate? Would we cure AIDS? Or kill a lot of poor people?

2. The arms race: If aliens invaded, but without the intent of waging total war, the effort to win them over as allies (if we could figure out what they wanted) would set off an all-time bonkers global competition. Can you imagine what would happen if aliens showed up and decided to throw their lot in with, say, Nigeria? The scramble it would set off and the global realignment would be fascinating, and deeply strange.

3. The reformers: To be fair, we are messing up our stuff pretty badly. So what if an alien species that, say, has an aesthetic attachment to our planet, shows up and tries to force us to stop? Would we play fair? Would we freak out and obey out of awe? Or would we split between folks who are grateful and folks who are profoundly resistant?

I tend to be suspicious of studies or articles that proclaim the end of men, or of the gender gap—after all, the hecession turned into the hecovery, and sexism looks relatively entrenched to me. But I’m kind of intrigued by Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex. That book notes that 40 percent of married women now outearn their husbands, and starts thinking about how our sense of masculinity might evolve if men and women switched their roles.

There’s already a fair bit of pop culture that explores the lives of stay-at-home dads, of which the best, I think, is Up All Night. But a lot of those depictions are still rooted in the idea that fathers taking on primary responsibility for their children or women supporting their husbands and families as the sole breadwinner is a strange and new thing. And in these worlds, what we understand to be masculine and feminine is pretty much the same thing, with a dose of daddy grooming rituals to keep things hot at home.

This goes hand in hand with our conversation from a couple of weeks ago about world-building. But I’d love to see someone take a book like The Richer Sex and use that as a basis for thinking about a science fictional world. We’ve had some good science fiction, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men that’s come out of a rethinking of the value of women’s fertility: when it goes up, women tend to be in even more danger of finding themselves under men’s control. But I wonder if we can imagine a future where women are more economically powerful men that is culturally different but not inherently antagonistic. What does masculinity look like when it’s divorced from the exercise of power? And what does femininity mean when it’s divorced from domesticity. I’d imagine different in the short-term and long-term, but that’s a thought experiment worth doing.