As I wrote yesterday—and have said many times before—I’m deeply uncomfortable with many of the ideas in the Twilight series. But it’s easy for people to forget that those aren’t the only novels Stephenie Meyer ever wrote, and if they do, for them to assume that The Host, her science fiction novel, is as unnerving as Twilight. It’s not. In fact, while far from perfect, there’s some genuinely interesting world-building and stories about alien species in the novel. And I’m excited for the movie in part because it’s about how corrosive it is to deny someone control of their body and their mental autonomy:

The story is told from the perspective of Wanderer, a Soul, a member of an alien species that seizes control of the bodies of the species on planets it invades. But the Souls find that humans have stronger wills than great whales, or sentient flowers. And in particular, Wanderer discovers that Melanie, the woman whose body she occupies, has memories and a will, and is struggling to survive as an autonomous, uncontrolled being. Wanderer eventually comes to sympathize with her, and even to try to find a way to give Melanie control over her body and life again. And though there is a love triangle in the novels, it’s a much more nuanced one between Melanie/Wanderer, Jared, the man who loved Melanie before her body was given over to Wanderer, and Ian, who comes to love Wanderer for herself. It’s an important corrective to the drive towards bodily negation of Twilight, though I don’t know how much crossover there is between the readerships of each set of books. But if you were tempted to dismiss The Host because of who wrote it, it’s worth reconsidering at least the movie, even if you don’t want to commit to the novel.

In the rare bit of news that could blow Hurricane Sandy off the map, Disney announced today that it had purchased Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion—and announced that the company will debut Star War Episode VII in 2015. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” George Lucas said in the official announcement of the transaction, in what is a substantial understatement, given the creative quality of the prequels. “I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

While this opens up a new chapter in the cinematic development of the Star Wars universe, that doesn’t mean Disney will be flying off into uncharted territory. The Star Wars Expanded Universe includes a huge number of licensed books (not to mention video games, comic books, graphic novels, and animated television series) that lay out the story of the franchise’s main characters, and in some cases, their distant descendants. Given that Disney will need to woo legions of long-term fans who love the larger Star Wars universe and were burned to greater or lesser extents by the awfulness of the prequels, and will certainly want to keep monetizing the expanded universe, I expect they’ll preserve that continuity. The question is just which stories they decide to use as source material. Here are five options:

1. Heir To The Empire: One of the most venerable entries in the Expanded Universe, this series of three novels, also known as the Thrawn trilogy, explore one of the most fascinating problems left behind in the wake of the battle of Yavin: how do you clean up a counterinsurgency that includes highly trained admirals with considerable industrial resources and military hardware at their disposal, not to mention a Dark Jedi? Chock-full of military strategy, major roles for all the core characters, and a romantic foil for Luke Skywalker who isn’t secretly his sister—the awesome former Imperial agent Mara Jade—Heir to the Empire is probably the strongest contender for Episode VII, and Episodes VIII and IX to follow—that is, if you want to stick with the original characters.

2. X-Wing: Rogue Squadron: That said, the smartest thing for this new franchise to do would be to move beyond the core cast Luke and Leia Skywalker and Han Solo. The actors who played them are too old to reprise their roles in storylines set relatively soon after the events of Return of the Jedi, and too iconic to be replaced. But there are a lot of terrific other stories set in the Star Wars universe, and for my money, the best is Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing quartet, which involves Wedge Antilles, a minor character who survived both Death Star runs, setting up a new commando squad of flying aces. The franchise introduced Corran Horn, a Corellian Security Force veteran (basically, a Star Wars cop), who joins the squadron and learns more about his family history, and the forces that make him such a remarkable pilot. It also featured Ysanne Isard, one of the great villains of the Expanded Universe era, a former Imperial agent who seizes control of Coruscant, the Imperial capital planet, and then when she risks losing control of it, wages a biological war on non-human species that can only be fought with an extremely expensive cartelized medicine. It’s still an Imperial-New Republic showdown, but in foregrounding commando skills, conflicts between humans and non-humans, smugglers, and trade wars, the Rogue Squadron books explored strikingly new dynamics and made the Star Wars universe a much richer, more thoughtful place.

3. Yuuzhan Vong: If you want to throw out the conflict between the New Republic and the Empire—by this point in the Expanded Universe a breakaway state called the Imperial Remnant—Disney could tell the long-arc story of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion of the galaxy. A wacky conquering species that worships pain, views mechanical technology as an abomination, and terraforms planets to their needs, the Yuuzhan Vong unites the New Republic and the Empire, explores all sorts of complex new dynamics in the Force, and gets seriously violent and crazy. This franchise could be an amazing match for a monster-builder like Guillermo del Toro or an innovator like District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. But it’s probably too far out of the core Star Wars brand for this to happen.

4. Legacy of the Force: The most conservative choice, but probably also the most sensible one, is probably for Disney to skip forward a generation. This franchise explores the rise of Han and Leia’s twins, Jacen and Jaina Solo, as powerful Jedi Knights in their own right, and stages a very different kind of deadly familial showdown as Jacen’s arrogance leads him to the Dark Side, and Jaina rises as the Sword of the Jedi, the greatest warrior of the order. There are big romances, explorations of Han Solo’s home planet, Corellia, the tragic death of Luke Skywalker’s wife, Mara Jade, and lots of other collective drama. I wouldn’t mind a Legacy of the Force series. But it would be giving away a lot of potential to truly develop the world George Lucas built, with much greater nuance than he lent to the prequels.

5. Indie Star Wars: There is a lot of delightfully weird stuff in the Expanded Universe, including The Courtship of Princess Leia, in which Han finally tries to get it together to put a ring on it, but not without kidnapping, incredibly awful attempts at cooking, and a bunch of Force-sensitive witches with pet Rancors; Children of the Jedi, which literally involves Luke Skywalker having ghost sex; Truce at Bakura, which involves soul-stealing aliens invading the fragile New Republic; and superweapon stories like The Crystal Star and Showdown at Centerpoint. I think, however, we’re safe from an adaptation of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which was written before the big Luke and Leia reveal, and reads as disturbingly sexual in retrospect.

“If we start talking about it we’ll be here all day, making diagrams with straws,” Joe (Bruce Willis) tells Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his younger self, over diner coffee in Rian Johnson’s elegant but ultimately incomplete futuristic thriller Looper. To its credit, Looper spends more time on the uses and moral implications of its time travel technology, which has been outlawed, and is used primarily by a criminal syndicate that sends its victims back in time to be assassinated by young men who must eventually kill their future selves as part of the bargain, than in attempting to make it comprehensible. But the movie ends up split between two equally rich concepts, failing to adequately connect them, and doing full justice to neither.

The movie begins with Joe, a young looper, explaining his work in 2040s Kansas, where he kills people at the edge of a sugar cane field, burns their bodies in an industrial facility, and stops at a diner where he practices French with his favorite waitress, Beatrix. He spends more time on the mechanics and mindset of his job, a profession populated mostly by young men who aren’t very good at thinking ahead, but very much enjoy the lucrative rewards of their work, paid in bars of silver strapped to the bodies of their victims, which allow them to frequent flashy clubs and stay addicted to stimulant eye drops that turn the world pleasantly upside down. Joe’s boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels, vastly more enjoyable here than he is pontificating in The Newsroom), grumbles at Joe that “The movies that you’re dressing like are just copying other movies. Fucking 21st century effect. Do something new,” and suggests that he abandon his plans to visit Paris because “You should go to China…I’m from the future. You should go to China.”

As an aside, Joe mentions a mutation that’s given about ten percent of the population mild powers of telekenisis, a revelation that once lead people to believe that superheroes were about to emerge, but “Now it’s just a bunch of assholes who think they’re going to blow your mind by floating quarters. It’s like this whole town: big heads, small potatoes.” What’s initially an aside, a bit of local color in a glimmering megacity that Johnson builds with the same hardboiled spine and detailed flesh that he brought to Brick, his first feature, also a collaboration with Gordon-Levitt, becomes the point on which the movie bifurcates.

Joe’s routine is interrupted when his friend Seth (Paul Dano) shows up at his apartment having failed to kill his future self, or close his loop. He’s terrified, and with good cause: Abe’s private squad of hitman show up at Joe’s apartment to do the job he couldn’t. Joe eventually gives Seth up in order to keep his secret stash of silver, a not particularly subtle allusion. But before Seth dies, he passes along a warning from his future self to Joe: “He told me there’s a new holy terror bossman in the future and he’s closing all the loops.” It proves prescient. Joe’s loop shows up, but unlike Seth’s, who slips because of Seth’s negligence, he’s prepared, which makes since, because Future Joe is prepared, determined to escape and kill the bossman, known as the Rainmaker, so he can avoid being spent back and live out his life with his wife in China.
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Over the last two television seasons, both Fox and NBC have both tried to make science fiction and fantasy shows work, focusing heavily on the visuals rather than the conceptual and emotional architecture underneath them. Both Terra Nova and Revolution look good. Fox spent money to make sure its dinosaurs didn’t look like an embarrassment. In its pilot, Revolution’s abandoned shells of airplanes and overgrown Major League baseball stadiums have a handsome air of decay. But watching both those shows and the finale of SyFy’s Lost Girl in recent days, it’s striking the extent to which shows seem to be able to pull off either the look or the ideas, but rarely both.

For much of its first two seasons, Lost Girl managed to be a relatively low-effects show for a story set amongst the fae. The episodes relied on physical props, on people acting as if they’d been controlled, on wild eyes and good makeup and what looked like surprisingly enjoyable sex for basic cable. But in the second half of the second season, as succubus Bo and her human and fae comrades went to war against a powerful antagonist called the Garuda, the show’s effects faltered. Suddenly, it looked a lot more like Charmed, the WB show about three sisters who also happened to be witches, which started airing in 1998. The Garuda’s lair, like those of the demons the sisters faced down on Charmed, looked more like a basement hideaway than an evil citadel. His wings of fire were transparently terrible animation rather than a compelling deception. But even though the fight scenes looked disappointing, everything that surrounded them worked. The show had ideas it wanted to explore—Bo’s confrontation with the Garuda was a way for her to finally accept leadership within her community, and a tool for her to confront issues in some of her relationships with both humans and fae—and the actors involved had the chops to pull it off.

Terra Nova and Revolution both look a lot better than Lost Girl, a Canadian import that fits well into SyFy’s lineup, a place where the core audience is used to doing a little extra work to suspend disbelief. But even if the visuals on Revolution make it easy to believe that the population of the United States has dramatically shrunk, and that Wrigley Field is overgrown, the show’s ideas and acting interfere with its emotional credibility. If Revolution was interested in exploring what life was like after the clock turned dramatically back on technological development, we could enjoy the sight of the lost world, we could explore the things things they’ve built to replace lost conveniences, the infrastructure that once held society together. Instead, there are pesky questions hanging around the premise. If Ben Matheson knows why the electricity went out, why has he kept silent for fifteen years? Why does electricity work in Grace’s attic if it doesn’t wear anywhere else? Why aren’t people building steam engines? I understand that the show intends to answer these questions, but it’s hard to imagine that the answers will be good enough to justify the irritations of the inconsistencies, or that Tracy Spiridakos, the show’s CW-style lead actress, can provide enough emotional weight to give us consequences beyond the setup.

I’d love science fiction and fantasy shows that both look great and have great setups. But Battlestar Galacticas are few and far between. And apparently they aren’t frequent enough, or big enough hits to convince networks that their shows need to have concepts, visuals, and people who can actually act. Revolution‘s off to a good start, ratings-wise: 11.7 million people tuned in to its pilot, boosted by a lead-in from The Voice. But genre fans shouldn’t let networks buy them off with things that look good but don’t have anything underneath the hood. And if we have to pick one or the other, I’ll take solid worldbuilding and actors who can carry that world on their shoulders over pretty, flimsy pictures.

I know. There aren’t a lot of competitors for the mantle. But I’ve been catching up on SyFy’s Alphas, a show about people with remarkable abilities, the people who want to exploit them, and those in their number who want to declare independence from humanity, and I’m increasingly impressed by its political savvy. While at first blush, Alphas might seem like a rip-off of X-Men, it’s turning into a deeply thoughtful meditation on extremism, equality, and the profound difficulty of achieving political consensus.

Many science fiction or fantasy franchises have a range of villains who stand in for a series of big ideas, like Magneto’s representation of mutant superiority in the X-Men, or the Lizard’s advocacy of evolution beyond humanity in Spider-Man. Alphas has one big question—how people with abilities can live in a world where they are a minority—and a lot of people who believe they have the correct answer to it.

Dr. Rosen believes that integration, including channeling his charges’ abilities in service of law enforcement and helping them manage the manifestation of their abilities so they don’t do damage or make other people uncomfortable, is the best way to go. Red Flag, the terrorist organization the advocates for Alpha dominance, isn’t a monolithic organization. The first member of it we meet, Anna, an autistic woman with the ability to translate languages and invent them, believes that Red Flag is necessary as a way to force a truce with normal humanity. If humans had their way, she believes, they’d prevent people like her from being born, both because they’d see her autism as a defect, and because they find her gifts threatening. Later, Brent Spiner played Dr. Kern, an Alpha who went a step further, sowing active DNA in prenatal vitamins in the hope his experiments on non-consenting women would result in the birth of more of the people he sees as a miraculous improvement on humanity’s base state. And lately, the show’s been spending time with Stanton Parish, an apparently unkillable Alpha who’s murdered more moderate members of Red Flag.

It’s a fascinating approach, turning a villain-of-the-week formula into a more deeply nuanced exploration of a question that deserves that kind of sustained interrogation. Gary, an autistic member of the core team, complained in an episode in the first season “Why do we always have to fight people with abilities? It’s annoying.” It’s a question that almost anyone who cares about politics has asked themselves at some point, wishing it was easier to get it together to win an election or a legislative vote. But the answer is that the big questions aren’t resolvable quickly or easily. It takes time to reach a consensus, and even then, there will likely remain people outside of it. Alphas is the rare science fiction program smart enough to understand that, and it’s making for fascinating television.

io9 has the story of Weird Tales, the venerable science fiction magazine that committed to run an excerpt of a novel called Saving the Pearls, in which people of color tyrannically oppress white people, who are considered ugly and genetically disadvantaged because ozone layer damage makes them much more susceptible to UV rays, apparently in part because the author, Victoria Foyt, told the editors the people who were criticizing her were just haters. In the statement from the Weird Tales publisher, he says:

Marvin was approached by Victoria Foyt, and was asked to review her novel. He was told that she was being slammed online by people who had not read it. I have not read the novel, but have gone over its online presence today. I have no need to read it. I saw the blackface video and read the excerpts the author and publisher chose to make available. I must conclude that the use of the powerful symbols of white people forced to wear blackface to escape the sun, white women lusting after black “beast men,” the “pearls” and “coals,” etc., is goddamned ridiculous and offensive. It seems like the work of someone who does not understand the power of what she is playing with.

In a way, this reminds me of the controversy over TLC’s great reality show All-American Muslim, when advertisers including Lowe’s and Kayak pulled out of the show after a fringe Florida group that purports to represent many more people than it actually does, told them that the show in some way was a contravention of their values. Both cases are a reminder that when someone is really eager to discredit a controversy, or to tell you that something that seems utterly anodyne is secretly nefarious, it’s probably worth going to the source material, or whatever of the source material is available, and making your own independent judgement.

Andy and Lana Wachowski have not stuck the landing on the emotional conclusion really, I think, since The Matrix, but they always produce a fantastic visual spectacle, and Cloud Atlas, which they directed in collaboration with Tom Twyker, looks like it’ll be no different:

One interesting piece of context for this very long trailer that the directors give in their commentary on it is that the actors, who are playing multiple parts in the movie, may be switching genders and races from storyline to storyline. I’ll be curious to see how the movie executes that, given the risk of handling blackface poorly. And I’d be fascinated to see what the movie (I haven’t read the book) ends up having to say about the commonality of human experience across race and gender, given that the time periods it spans, from 1850 into the distant future, are periods of radically changing conditions for women and people of color.

The movie also comes at a period of significant change for the Wachowskis. While I don’t like overreading creators’ personal experiences into their work unless they suggest that I ought to, it’s hard to see it as total coincidence that they’re making a movie about the continuity of the human soul no matter the body it’s in during a time when Lana, who was born Larry, went from living as a man to living as a woman. The Wachowskis have always been totally uninterested in discussing their personal lives, even when it means that something like the Rolling Stone story about Lana’s transition, which was salacious in the extreme, was published without comment from them. Perhaps they’ll break character here, and end up doing a magazine story or a profile. But if they don’t, there’s something radical about Lana just showing up as she is, without explanation. It’s a wonderful thing when gay and transgender people come out and tell their stories and act as role models for others. But there is no universal obligation for gay and transgender people to translate their lives for those who don’t understand them, or to put their sex lives or gender ahead of the work that made them famous and important.

Wired’s Observation Desk videos are meant to be quick takes on important issues, which is kind of too bad, because I could listen to Adam Rogers talk all day about ecological post-apocalyptic science fiction and why it matters.

This, I think, is the important takeaway: as Rogers puts it, “We hope that science fiction can be, in some cases, better at teaching us things than science.” By this, I don’t think he means that science fiction communicates the facts better than a biology or climate science textbook, but that fiction can give visceral life to concepts that feel abstract even when they’re clearly laid out with facts and figures that should be intellectually and emotionally comprehensible to us. Beasts of the Southern Wild, which he talks about, does a terrific job of communicating what it is like to ride out a hurricane in insufficiently hardened shelter, and what it’s like to see a landscape we’ve come to know radically rearranged in the aftermath of the storm. Educating people is one thing. Getting them emotionally invested and activated is a second step, one which art is particularly well-suited.

And that’s the reason why I get so frustrated with science fiction that is conceptually lazy or sloppy, or oriented towards spectacle rather than making an idea visceral for the audience. Not everything has to be sober, or substantive, or educational, of course. But I hate watching people make science fiction, in particular, that’s intended to leave the viewer with absolutely nothing, no connection to the things going on around them, when they leave the theater or turn off the television set.

I’ve written before about Beasts of the Southern Wild, the apocalyptic fairy tale about people living outside of the levees in Louisiana, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, remains one of my favorite movies of the year, and stars the most original superhero of the summer in six-year-old Hushpuppy. It’s a deeply, intensely political movie, though not along conventional lines: director Benh Zeitlin told writer Jeremy Butman of his characters, who live through a hurricane and resist efforts to relocate them behind the levees, that “It’s not like the movie is advocating that people not be rescued from disastrous situations. But it’s that condescending notion of, ‘We know better, you should live somewhere safer,’ which definitely infuriated me after the storm and that was a big entryway into the movie.”

I was also intrigued by what Zeitlin said in response to what I think is the most substantive critique of the movie, that it can seem to glorify extreme poverty, an answer that also clarifies the ideas behind his world-building:

The Bathtub is not a place where money exists. The whole idea of the Bathtub is that it’s a society where all the things that divide people have been removed. So there’s no religion, no politics, no money, no one sees race, there’s no rich and poor because there is no currency. So, I never thought about that because to me the Bathtub is this utopian place. And the poverty thing, to me it’s much more like it’s been cut off from the world, and it’s a survivalist place where they have to build everything by hand, they have to live off the earth. You don’t have any commodities to sustain yourself, but to me there’s no poverty there. There’s this ultimate freedom that exists there. But part of it is that when people see a trailer it’s like, “Oh, it’s a trailer. Poor people live in trailers.” That’s how I know it has been looked at, but I think that people are bringing certain preconceptions. When you see a trailer there’s a certain association. When you see black people in dirty clothes there’s an association. Those are things that people are bringing in because they’re used to those aesthetic elements communicating a very specific narrative about misery and poverty. So, it’s not that I don’t understand the reaction, but I don’t know that it’s in there.

Science fiction and fantasy can create new things, of course. But I think it’s easy to forget that they can also help us question the associations we have with images and signifiers, and pose challenges to our visions of what counts as affluence, or comfort, or an aspirational lifestyle. Respecting Hushpuppy means, at least for the duration of the movie, accepting her worldview. As she puts it, “Daddy says on the other side of the levee, on the dry side, they afraid of the water like a bunch of babies…The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world…Daddy’s always saying that up in the dry world, they ain’t got none of what we got. They only have holidays once a year. They got fish stuck in wrappers and babies stuck in carriages…Me and my daddy, we stay right here…We’s who the earth is for.”

I’m quite looking forward to Robot & Frank, a story about an aging jewel thief and the robot he’s given to keep him company, not just because of the absurdly terrific cast, or the fact that it’s near-future science fiction, which tends to employ small changes rather than broad metaphors, to sharp effect:

Robot & Frank is a case where the scenario in which the technology’s being employed—to resume Frank’s heist career, and get revenge on the tech nerds who are taking over the local library—is actually more baroque than the technology itself. Japanese companies have long been at work developing robots to assist in many aspects of elder care. Technology companies depend on our ability to develop low-level emotional bonds with technology ranging from Roombas, which act as surrogate pets, to Apple’s Siri voice technology. And the continued work and social lives of aging people, as well as elder care, are major issues that Hollywood almost never has the courage to touch, much less approach from the perspective of people who are aging rather than the younger people who will take lessons from them. I’m almost as excited for a thoughtful, funny, fully human story about retirees as I am to see a movie about robots.