Gojira, Gigantis... in the Latin, godzillasaurus. Belching atomic flame and using Tokyo as a wrestling ring, Toho's famous rubbery dinosaur has many names, but within the mental lexicon of science fiction fans, he will always be the Big G.

There are few indisputable facts about Godzilla, and one of these is his origin. Lurking deep in the subaqueous depths of the Pacific Ocean, outside of the tranquil Odo Island, Godzilla hibernated from the dawn of time until modern days, until one of the earliest H-bomb explosions irradiated him, yielding a monstrous avatar of the atomic age. Godzilla rampaged through Japan, destroying any obstacle in his way, before finally being melted by an experimental oxygen destroying device. On these facts, everyone agrees, although some of the details have become fuzzy with time: For example, no one can agree whether or not a young Raymond Burr was a witness to Godzilla's initial reign of terror.

Behind the scenes, though, Godzilla's origin as one of the greatest giant monsters in scifi is cloudier. Even the origin of his name is a mystery: Originally, the concept was to do a movie about a monster that was a cross between a gorilla (gorira) and a whale (kujira), and so one theory argues that Godzilla's Japanese name, Gojira, is a simple portmanteau. Other rumors claim that Gojira was the nickname of a brutish stagehand at Toho Studio. Whatever the truth, Americans sidestepped the issue entirely with their Anglocized renaming of the monster, thus giving the world the wildly popular "-zilla" suffix: to denote monstrous, reptilian scope.

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The series of novels and short stories that would become the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov's magnum opus spanning 50 millennia of human civilization, had an innocuous and humble start. As Asimov told it, the idea came to him when flipping through Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during a cab ride to the offices of editor John W. Campbell of Astounding Magazine. Asimov -- still green behind the ears as a young sci-fi writer -- thought the tale of an intergalactic civilization's decline into the dark ages would make a great quick pitch... an intriguing enough idea to secure him a few months work. Little could Asimov have guessed that a simple pitch for a short story would keep him with more work than he knew how to complete for the next half a century.

A series as pantagruelian as Foundation is hard to summarize (the universe in which Foundation takes place is collected into no less than 25 different books) but the gist is this:

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There have been many Enterprises in history: There was the French frigate, L'Enterprise, captured by the Brits in 1705 and rechristened Her Majesty's Enterprise, and America's USS Enterprise, the world's first nuclear aircraft carrier. These Enterprises are unimportant, by solitary dint of not being flung through the stratosphere and into outer space under the impetus of Gene Roddenberry's imagination. No. The only Enterprises we care about are designated NCC-1701.

The ship that went on a five year mission "to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before" is an odd-looking ship. It may, in fact, be the first space ship in scifi to eschew an aerodynamical design, and thus recognize you don't need to be flight worthy to fly through outer space.

The first Enterprise, NCC-1701, was commissioned in 2245, its components beat together by rugged, carbon-smeared workmen (at least, according to the trailer for J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek reboot) in the San Francisco Navy Yards, while the vessel itself was constructed in outer space. It has the sleek lines of a strange fish: A slender neck supports an impossibly large, flat and heavy head. It is this head -- the saucer -- along with the two glowing nacelles that unite all subsequent Enterprises in a harmony of sympathetic design. You can tell an Enterprise with just a glance.

Despite the magnificent prologue of the original Star Trek's credit crawl, the NCC-1701 Enterprise went through many captains on many five-year missions. James T. Kirk is the man who "made" the Enterprise, but it had two captains before him (Robert April and Christopher Pike) as well as two captains after him (Willard Decker and Spock). Ultimately, though, it was Kirk who put the Enterprise to rest, blowing her up at the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to save his crew.

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Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Saturn's moon Mimas, the Death Star was the super-weapon of the evil Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars films: A planet-sized ship that could boil oceans, vaporize continents and explode small suns. An unassailable force of oppression, capable of terrorizing political opponents into complete submission -- there's a reason Emperor Palpatine opted to dissolve the Galactic Senate at the precise moment of the Death Star's completion: Why bother giving face time to a bunch of milksop representatives' grievances when you can just nuke their homeworld? United Nations, take note.

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For a genre with such a simple name, cyberpunk sparks a lot of debate. A "cyberpunk" is a cyborg teen with a disdain for authority, right? Eh, not so much. Much like the dreaded "emo" label in music, aficionados of the genre argue endlessly over what does and does not constitute cyberpunk. Is The Matrix, with its dystopian setting, heroic hacker lead, and overabundance of leather a classic of the genre, or merely "cyberpunk lite"? What about the government-dodging teens in Akira, racing their motorcycles through the streets of Neo-Tokyo? And the William Gibson story aside, must we also include Johnny Mnemonic? 

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Notice anything different about your loved ones or coworkers lately? Are they acting a little cold and distant all of a sudden? Or perhaps they seem a little too normal? Not to alarm you... but they could be alien pod people sent to Earth to replace us all. Run now, before they snatch your body and make you one of them!

Back in 1956, Invasion of the Body Snatchers kicked off an entire sub-genre of paranoid sci-fi. Don Siegel's classic saga of plantlike pod aliens replacing humans is often seen as an indictment of the era's rampant McCarthyism. Since its release, the theme of aliens posing as humans (be they the robotic Cylons or the teacher-infecting space worms from The Faculty) has become a classic sci-fi trope. The thought that aliens could look exactly like us is, literally, a skin crawler, and has been used to great effect in everything from They Live to V.

Body snatching aliens are an instant method of conveying that something is just not right with the world. Phillip Kaufman's 1978 Body Snatchers remake could stand alongside All the President's Men and The Parallax View in the pantheon of classic thrillers tinged with conspiracy fears and post-Watergate paranoia. (The themes are so rich that they were revisited again in 1993's Body Snatchers and 2007's The Invasion.) In every iteration of Body Snatchers, and also in its many copycats, the alien duplicates play on our fears of conformity and homogenization. In fact, the term "pod people" has come to be short-hand for the loss of free-thinking and individuality.

Recently Battlestar Galatica has played with body snatching theme with its Cylon "sleeper agents," but a big-screen revisit could definitely tap into the unrest in our current political climate. Last year's Nicole Kidman-vehicle, Invasion, tried, but ended up a big-budget debacle. Perhaps a more free-thinking director (like, say, David Fincher) could bring body-snatching pod people into the new millennium.

There's a reason why androids are so prevalent in modern sci-fi films and TV shows: They require zero special effects. Just get an actor who can properly convey a lifeless automaton (like, say Lindsay Lohan. I'll be here all night, folks...) and you're all set. Androids are often the most tragic of science fiction characters -- they look just like us, but cannot grasp that thing we call "love." At one time or another you've probably been moved by an android's onscreen "death." But come on, they're still robots underneath that lifelike skin! Robots that would subjugate the entire human race if reprogrammed for evil. But it's their human forms (and metallic innards) that make androids so resonant in modern science-fiction. Or maybe its just that we all secretly long to make out with a robot.

Here are icons of androids:

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