Mark Harris over at Entertainment Weekly posted an interesting article today about the status of Science Fiction in popular culture. To quickly sum it up, he postulates that with the most promising SciFi material of late comprising I Am Legend (the third remake of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel), Battlestar Galactica (a politically-recharged update of a Star Wars ripoff), and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel, all the ideas are rooted in nostalgia and Science Fiction itself is dead.

Are we looking at the end of forward-thinking SciFi, which at its core is meant to look towards the future? Or is it actually more important that science fiction has always been primarily concerned with looking at the world today through the guise of an alternate universe? Visionaries like Gene Roddenberry were as concerned with race relations and nuclear war as they were with transporters and rayguns.

If SciFi hasn't generated any truly original narratives of late, so what? As long as we're able to look at the psychology behind a suicide bomber, as in Ronald D. Moore's masterful show, who really cares where the source material comes from?