When the first teaser for The Host, the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s science fiction novel starring Saorsie Ronan as an alien lifeform implanted in the body of a young human woman, came out, I decided to give Meyer the benefit of the doubt and give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised, and it made me wonder how Meyer’s career might have gone if The Host had been published before Twilight and Meyer had been embraced as a science fiction novelist, rather than primarily as a romantic one. But we live in the world that Twilight built, and so The Host looks like it’s going to be marketed as an intense young adult love story:

This is too bad, because to my mind, the most interesting thing about The Host as its status as a kind of peaceful Old Man’s War from the aliens’ perspective. Ronan’s character is an extremely fragile alien who goes by Wanderer. Her species is a colonizing—and as they see it—civilizing one that travels to new planets, removes the consciousness from the sentient species who live there, and insert themselves. The worlds they run are free of conflict, poverty, disease, and ecological devastation. In Wanderer’s opinion, this is a significant improvement, and lets her species, known as Souls, gather the stories, traditions, and wisdom of the species whose bodies they occupy. Where in Old Man’s War, John Scalzi’s characters drop in on species and civilizations as they fight their way through the galaxy, Wanderer gives us fleeting but powerful glimpses of life in all its possibilities.

That’s not to say there isn’t a YA-level love triangle in the novel, but rather than being defined by Who Loves Bella Swan more, the people who end up competing both for Wanderer’s love and the affection of the body she inhabits offer differing models of human independence in the face of alien invasion. The man who loved the body Wanderer occupies before it was hijacked stands for resistance to the invasion, to an inflexible vision of humanity as pure and independent, while the man who comes to love Wanderer for herself is one of the first humans she meets who is intrigued by the possibility of expanding his knowledge of the universe and his understanding of the kind of people who are worthy of sympathy and empathy. It’s a triangle with intellectual purpose beyond emotional frisson.

The book isn’t perfect, far from it. But it’s going to make me sad if The Host gets sold as another romance in the vein of Twilight and not as anything more. I’d like to think that a sense of wonder is still something that can get pricked by exposure to the potential size of the universe, not just by the sensation of being desperately wanted. Maybe The Hunger Games will convince folks that if you heighten romance with a postapocalypse, girls won’t be deterred, and boys will feel there’s something there for them, too, and we’ll all get a better movie as a result.

In case any of you haven’t seen it yet, I wanted to call your attention to Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker column on Community and Doctor Who, which is really a stealth argument that it’s time for those who look down their nose at genre fiction to reconsider, in part, perhaps, because genre fiction itself has changed:

The original “Who” dwelt on pure sci-fi obsessions, abstract questions of how society is organized and the line between humans and machines. But, as deeply as fans loved the show, its themes were rarely emotional. Instead, it jumped from Aztec civilization to Mars, as much an educational show for children as an adult narrative, with a British-colonialist view of the universe. (So many savages, so little time.) The series’ most striking feature was the Doctor himself: in contrast to “Star Trek” ’s Kirk—the Kennedyesque leader of a diverse society—the early Doctor Who was an alien iconoclast with two hearts and a universe-wide Eurail Pass. For a certain breed of viewer, this was an intoxicating ideal: the know-it-all whose streak of melancholy—or prickly rage, depending on who was Who—had to be honored, because he actually did know everything. Though that show had its charms, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that the modern “Doctor Who” has a very different emphasis: it’s a show about relationships, in an epic and mythological vein.

“It’s so much larger when you’re on the inside,” she writes of science fictional shows, though it’s worth remembering that emotional complexity and attentiveness to relationships aren’t the only thing that validate science fiction. There’s plenty of value in well-executed silly gadgets and drivebys to distant civilizations. The Daleks may be low-effects “Nazi-ish pepper pots,” but shabby exteriors and crude mechanically can be a vehicle for totalitarianism as well as glitz and glamor. Dropping in on a planet or a time per week can read like a survey of the Empire, but early Star Trek made those encounters melancholy, and strange, and sad (and occasionally silly) from the outset—those visits were less an affirmation of control but a reminder of how much there is out there. It’s not less worthwhile to dream about how we’ll interact with the strangenesses of the future than to ruminate on how we might have interacted with people we already know in the past. The world is changing rapidly, and even outwardly silly thought experiments may yield useful lessons and parallels. How we’d behave under siege may be a question that fluctuates only slightly if the invaders are orcs, or medieval humans, or Nazis, or cybermen. How we define humanity is a question that can be extended and expanded by science fiction in a way that realism or historical fiction may not allow us to access. Execution is one thing, but ambition itself is not inherently laughable or dismissable.

Genre fiction may become respectable when it’s seen to be answering the same sorts of questions as literature, and if it meets certain standards for prose or artistry. But judging fiction on the former rather than simply the latter says more about the gatekeepers of respectability—the New Yorker a week earlier banged the guilty pleasure drum to no particular effect or insight, saying “part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better”—than about the fiction that’s up for judgement.

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.