Which is great! That's a long list and I'm proud of them all. But what if you went the full Cory Doctorow on that shit? What if Paolo Bacigalupi wrote the next hospital drama, or Ted Chiang was driving the new crimescene procedural? What if China Miéville had a teen drama on ABC Family, how wonderful a trainwreck would that be? What if Grant Morrison wrote Smallville? What if Neal Stephenson wrote Lost, suddenly and all those Asperger's clues actually meant something? Wouldn't it feel more like the future, then? Wouldn't you feel like we were going somewhere?

I'm not saying that even needs to happen: I'm just saying that's what you're watching. It doesn't have much to do with the TV SF we've been trained to expect, but it has a hell of a lot more in common with SF literature than 90% of what's out there. Not an heir to Roddenberry or Lucas, boo hoo, but a hell of a lot closer to the lineage of Bradbury and Sturgeon and Ellison. It's fine to look for what's not there -- to demand that everything act like space opera, to get vicious with SGU for attempting to be less formulaic and idiotic than its forebears, while handing over record ratings for utter trash fanfic like Tin Man and Alice -- but when you do that, you run the risk of missing what is there because you didn't even know to look for it.