I real­ize that trib­ute must be paid to the van­ity of actors, but I’d really like to see a sci-fi show that didn’t have space­suits with lights inside the helmets.

Urgent: Save ‘Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles’ From Ter­mi­na­tion. This may be your last chance to save the best sci-fi show on tele­vi­sion from can­cel­la­tion. Here’s why you should care, even if you’re not yet a fan. [Wired News]

I hope the show does sur­vive. The qual­ity of writ­ing has been quite good, par­tic­u­larly the var­i­ous AI characters–I can’t remem­ber ever see­ing better-written non-human char­ac­ters from Hollywood.

New at Rea­son: Kather­ine Mangu-Ward on Sci­ence Fic­tion Pub­lisher Tor Books.

From our Decem­ber issue, Asso­ciate Edi­tor Kather­ine Mangu-Ward offers a guided tour of the anti-authoritarian uni­verse of Tor Books, the world’s most suc­cess­ful sci­ence fic­tion publisher.

Read all about it here. 

[Hit and Run]

Some par­tic­u­larly good quotes from the article:

Sci­ence fic­tion nov­el­ist Cory Doc­torow, a self-described civil lib­er­tar­ian whose Tor titles include the bril­liantly para­noid young adult novel Lit­tle Brother, sug­gests why sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers think so much about alter­na­tive worlds. “It’s com­pletely unsur­pris­ing that peo­ple who, you can imag­ine, aren’t at the top of the peck­ing order in high school would turn to sci­ence fic­tion,” says Doc­torow, who is also co-author of the wildly pop­u­lar geek blog Boing Boing. “The peo­ple who write it have often not been ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the author­i­tar­ian sys­tem. They’re the peo­ple who don’t fit in exactly, and if you always rub up against social con­straints, you’re the kind of per­son who’s will­ing to sit down and have a good hard think about whether this is the best way to do things.”

And:

“I sus­pect S.F. has an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic, anti­au­thor­i­tar­ian trend to it not least because so many of the peo­ple who read and write it (not all by any means, but quite a few) are innerdi­rected intro­verts who make nei­ther good lead­ers nor good fol­low­ers,” emails Harry Tur­tle­dove, a best-selling author whose most famous nov­els pose ques­tions about con­tin­gency in his­tory and the impor­tance of indi­vid­ual action. “Am I talk­ing about myself? Well, now that you men­tion it, yes. But I ain’t the only one, not even close.”