I wrote this article just over a year ago but I could not find a paying home for it, so here it is. 

Up until the twentieth century, cannabis was frequently
used in western medicine. But more effective painkillers such as those
containing opiates were developed. And then concerns about recreational abuse
of cannabis lead to its use being prohibited. Despite it being illegal, research
continues into the medical uses of cannabis, and people continue to use it as a
medicine.

Recent research at Tel Aviv University in Israel studied
the effects of cannabis on Crohns Disease. Eleven of the study’s participants
smoked cannabis twice daily, while ten others smoked a placebo where the
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) had been removed from the cannabis. The Crohns
disease of five of the eleven who smoked the unaltered cannabis went into full
remission. But so did the Crohns Disease of one of those in the placebo group.
The researchers say more research needs to be done.

Research is also under way into the effect of cannabis on
medical conditions such as ulcerative colitis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and
arthritis. Cancer cells have been killed by cannabis in experiments. Cannabis use
has decreased nausea and increased appetites in people undergoing chemotherapy and
who are HIV positive. Cannabis is used by many people battling chronic pain. Cannabis
is also reported to help in the treatment of hepatitis C, skin cancer, migraines,
morning sickness, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. 

Possession of cannabis is illegal 

Anyone tempted to conduct their own personal research
into the effect of cannabis on their medical condition should be aware they are
committing a crime. In Victoria anyone caught with less than 50 grams of
cannabis risks being fined $700 for possession. They can be fined a further $700
if they are caught using it. The Victorian Legal Aid website says first
offenders will usually get a caution, rather than be charged and fined. People
caught with more than 50 grams risk being charged with trafficking drugs and sentenced
to jail. 

Harmful effects of cannabis 

According to the Victorian Health Department’s Better
Health website, short term use of cannabis can cause:

·        
impaired coordination

·        
drowsiness

·        
confusion

·        
vomiting

·        
hallucinations

·        
detachment from reality

·        
anxiety

·        
and paranoia.

Long term use of cannabis can cause:

·        
poor concentration

·        
memory loss

·        
an inability to learn new tasks

·        
increased risk of infections

·        
asthma

·        
throat, mouth and lung cancers

·        
and serious mental illness such as
schizophrenia.

Many health professionals are very much against cannabis
being smoked, but are more receptive to its medical use if it is taken in other
ways. Cannabis can be smoked, eaten, diluted into a tincture, inhaled as a
vapour, drunk as a tea or absorbed into the skin as a cream or from a nicotine
type patch.

In November 2012 the oral spray Sativex was included on
the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. The spray contains extracts from
cannabis leaf and its flower. A change to the Standard for the Uniform
Scheduling of Medicines and Poisons still needs to be approved before Sativex
can be marketed in Australia. A final decision about that change is due on the
27^th of June.

Research has shown that Sativex is effective in the
treatment of symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis. If approved, Sativex will only be
prescribed to people with MS by authorised medical practitioners.

Sativex has equal parts THC, the psychoactive part of cannabis, and cannabidiol (CBD), which
typically lowers the anxiety and psychotic symptoms of cannabis. So according
to its manufacturer, GW Pharmaceuticals, Sativex does not produce a “high” in
its users.

Trials of Sativex on pain in cancer patients are
currently being conducted by Dr Brian Le, a palliative care specialist at Royal
Melbourne Hospital. 

Unfortunately, Sativex
could cost up to $500 a month because it will not be under the Pharmaceutical
Benefits Scheme. 

NSW Government enquiry into medical cannabis 

In May this year (2013) a NSW Government committee released a
report on “The Use of Cannabis for Medical Purposes.” Many of the submissions
to that report suggested that cannabis should only be used when other legal
drugs have not been effective for a patient.

The committee heard from many people who illegally use
cannabis to self-medicate. They were told of a national survey where 18 per
cent of Australians with HIV said they used cannabis as a complementary
medicine. A person with Degenerative Disc Disease told the committee how she managed
to get her pain under control by eating cannabis butter and cookies. She no
longer had to take a long list of pain killers that left her wanting to spend
all day in bed.

The report recommended the legalisation of the medical
use of cannabis for people with a terminal illness and AIDS. They also
recommended that the NSW Minster for Health write to the Commonwealth Minister
for Health and Ageing expressing support for the evidence based approval of
cannabis for other patient groups, 
including those suffering chronic pain for whom existing pain management
was not effective. 

Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation

 

Alex Wodak is the Emeritus consultant at St Vincent’s
Hospital in Darlinghurst and president of the Australian Drug Law Reform
Foundation.  He wrote on The Conversation
website that the legalisation of cannabis for people with terminal conditions was
a good start. He said this should be a national approach. He also said cannabis
would be cheaper than many currently available medicines. 

Victorian Government 

A senior media advisor at the Victorian
Department of Health, said: “Currently there are no plans in Victoria for
an inquiry into the medicinal uses of cannabis.” He went on to say “The Victorian Government will monitor
closely any plans to implement the recommendations of the recent NSW inquiry
into the medicinal use of cannabis among a very specific group of patients.” 

Updates

 

Sativex was approved but because it was not placed on
the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme the manufacturer decided not to make it
available in Australia.

Lucy Haslam has a petition on change.org to get medical
cannabis decriminalised so her terminally ill son can use it. She recently got the NSW Premier Mike Baird onboard (picture). 

NSW Government inquiry: http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/committee.nsf/0/7641E8D87AC53FB3CA257ABF00134E57

Alex Wodak – President Australian Drug Law Reform
Foundation, article written for the website The Conversation:

http://theconversation.com/legalising-medicinal-cannabis-is-a-leap-forward-for-compassion-14297

Victorian Legal Aid, drug possession in Victoria:

http://www.legalaid.vic.gov.au/find-legal-answers/criminal-offences/drug-possession

Sativex

http://www.msra.org.au/cannabis-based-medications-tested-symptom-relief-ms

Sativex trials in Victoria:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/health/cannabis-spray-may-help-severely-ill-cope-with-pain-20121028-28djr.html#ixzz2AknlRFck

Better Health Channel, harmful health effects of
cannabis:

http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Cannabis_marijuana

Crohns cannabis study

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23648372

 

I came across a post about the recently awarded
Nebula awards the other day. I was curious how close its short-list of nominees
for the best science-fiction/fantasy novel of 2013 matched those of other
awards, so I had a look.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil
Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review)
Fire with Fire, Charles E.
Gannon (Baen)
Hild, Nicola Griffith
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
(Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Red: First Light,
Linda Nagata (Mythic Island)
A Stranger in Olondria,
Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)
The Golem and the Jinni,
Helene Wecker (Harper)

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit
US/Orbit UK)

Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross (Ace
/ Orbit UK)

Parasite, Mira Grant (Orbit US/Orbit UK)

Warbound, Book III of
the Grimnoir Chronicles, Larry Correia (Baen Books)

The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan and
Brandon Sanderson (Tor Books / Orbit UK)

God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Del Rey)

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
(Orbit)

The Disestablishment Of Paradise by Phillip
Mann (Gollancz)

Nexus by Ramez Naam (Angry Robot)

The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
(Gollancz)

The Machine by James Smythe (Blue Door)

They didn’t match at all. Only one novel made it
onto more than one list: Ancillary
Justice by Ann Leckie, which made it on to all three of the award
short-lists.

So why didn’t any other novel make more than one short-list?
Probably because of the way they are nominated. 

The Nebulas are nominated and voted on by members the
Science Fiction Writers of America. Membership of the SFWA is restricted to published
authors, including people who have sold at least three short stories to
professional markets. Reviewers and scriptwriters can also become members. The nominated
books must have been first published in America in the nomination year.

Anyone who buys a membership to World Con can
nominate novels and vote for the Hugos. This year’s World Con is in London. Anyone
going to Loncon3 could nominate novels that were published anywhere in the
world in 2013.

Novels are submitted by their publishing company for the
Arthur C. Clark award. Members of its judging panel and organisation committee
can also nominate novels. This year’s award was judged by Ian Whates and Duncan
Lawie from the British Science Fiction Association, Sarah Brown and Lesley Hall
from the Science Fiction Foundation and Georgie Knight from the Sci-Fi-London
film festival. The nominated books must have been published in the UK in the
nomination year.

Depending on the judges for the Arthur C. Clarke
award, it or the Nebula award would have better qualified judges than the Hugo award.
But the Hugo is open to nominations of books from all around the world,
including non-English written books.

I wonder how many of the short-listed novels are
read by those who vote. I would expect the judges of the Arthur C. Clarke award
to read all the short-listed novels. I would imagine that the authors of SFWA
would try to read many of the nominated novels before they voted for the
Nebula. But for the Hugos, I doubt whether many of the general public who
travel to Loncon3 will read more than one or two of the novels, if any. When I
went to Aussiecon I did not read any of the nominated novels, so I did not vote
for that part of the Hugos.

Due to the different nomination and voting
processes, Spock would give more credence to the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke
awards, until he found out no Vulcan literature would be accepted for them. 

I had a look at the past
winners of the awards. I have not read many of the winners due to my concentrating
on reading Australian authors. And only one of them, George Turner, has won any
of the three awards. My favourite international authors do not seem to have won
many awards either. 

I have read only three of
the Arthur C
Clarke Award winners from its 27-year history. I have read eight of the Nebula award
winners from its 47-year history, and nine of the Hugo award
winners from its longer 61-year history. With the slightly shorter history,
it looks like I am more likely to have read a winner of the Nebula award. It
must be noted that a few of the award winners that I read did not live up to their
hype, but that seems to apply equally over the awards.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie won the Nebula
and Arthur C. Clarke awards. I must get a copy. Will it win the Hugo?

 

I have
been very distracted over the past couple of weeks by the Australian Government’s
budget. I worried about what the Government might cut, and how it might affect
the poor. My concerns were realised when the Government produced a horror
budget that attacks Australia’s most vulnerable.

The budget’s
most appalling measure is that people aged 25 to 30 will have to wait six
months to claim unemployment benefits, then be kicked off them after six months
and have to wait another six months before they can get back onto them. Imagine
the stress of having to live on nothing if you had no family to fall back on. A
25 to 30 year old who moved to the city to work and lost that job would probably
have to move back home again.

The
government wants to introduce a seven dollar co-payment for doctor
appointments. Seven dollars can be a lot of money to the poor. This appears to
be an attempt to destroy the universality of the Medicare scheme. A scheme that
was designed to provide quality free health care to all.  

People who
were given a disability support pension after 2008 will be reassessed. Imagine the
stress they are going through now. Will the so-called independent government
appointed assessors get bonuses for the number of people with disabilities they
remove from the disability support pension?

The government
wants to cut university funding by 20% and then let the universities charge
whatever fees they like. This will leave universities little choice but to put
up fees, massively. It will make university less affordable and leave students
with greater debts when they finish. Imagine if you started a course and then
were incapable of finishing it. I predict the collapse of Victoria University due
to a lack of students.

The
government wants to cut $80 billion out of the health and education budgets of
the states over the next decade. It appears to be an attempt to get the states
to demand that the government increase the GST, which it would obviously be
happy to do. The GST is a regressive tax that hits the poor harder than the
better off.

I am not
so fussed about the fuel excise increase, which will add only about one cent a
litre per year to the price of petrol. And I really think anyone earning over
$180,000 who can’t afford the debt levy needs to seriously look at their
spending.  

One
strange thing about the budget is that the government has stopped funding the
energy discounts for pensioners. This is after them repeatedly screaming before
the last election that the carbon tax was hurting the ability of pensioners to
pay their energy bills. The pensioners will be much more impacted by the end of
the discount then they are by the carbon tax, which they received supplementary
payments for.

Why does
the Federal Government want to do this? Evidently we have a budget emergency,
even though our budget deficit as a percentage of GDP is just about the lowest
in the western world.

If there
was such a drastic need to cut spending in a hurry than why get rid of the half
billion dollars or so the mining tax brings in? Or
the $6.7 billion the carbon tax makes. Why use the $7 Medicare co-payments to
create a research fund instead of using it to pay off debt? (Obviously to try
and wedge the opposition by saying they don’t want to fund research.)  And why are does the government want to spend billions
on a gold plated maternity leave scheme when there is already a pretty good
Labour scheme?

This
is not a budget designed to fix the budget deficit, it is an ideological budget
designed to hit those people and institutions like the CSIRO and the ABC whose
views and lifestyles differ from the rich white men who are currently running
the government.

It
is a budget designed to please Rupert Murdoch who tweeted after the coalition
won the last election that now it was time to cut all the welfare fraud.

It
is a budget that will divide Australians into two classes, the very rich, and
the rest of us. I hope many in the rest of
us underclass wake up before they lose their lifestyles, and vote those rich
white men who have no empathy for them out.  

If
the measures in this budget go through, I predict a very different Australia in
the future. A land of security guards protecting gated communities as crime rates
sour. A land were illiteracy flourishes. A land where anyone born poor will
stay poor.  A land where people die in
the streets from lack of medical care.  A
land of hatred and confrontation. Mad Max, here we come.

Next week I hope my mind will be back
on to science fiction and writing.

It
has been an interesting time to be researching an article on the National Disability
Insurance Scheme in Australia, with lots of discussion about it in the
Australia media and on social media.

My
aim is to write an article based on interviews with one or two of the
participants in the scheme. So I joined a Facebook discussion group on the NDIS
and hoped to find someone who was part of the Barwon regional trial in Victoria
to interview. I decided to lurk for a while to see what they were talking about
and hopefully identify a few people to approach who were part of the Barwon
trial.

Unfortunately,
while still lurking, a journalist from The
Australian posted an interview request. I worried what sort of interview he
would conduct. For those who don’t know, on the night of the last federal
election Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Australian, tweeted something along
the lines of “now we can get rid of all these welfare bludgers.” So I worried that
his journalist might have an agenda to show the NDIS, which the ill-informed mistakenly
think of as welfare scheme, in a bad light. I have had a look in The Australian and there articles seem to be overwhelmingly negative towards the NDIS.

Meanwhile,
I decided to wait a day before posting my interview request on the discussion
group.  The next day, I logged on to the discussion
group and find that the administrator of the group has had a request from the
ABC to interview NDIS participants about their fears of the upcoming budget.
Bloody hell. I decided not to delay my request for interviewees any longer and
posted a request to the group. I stressed in my post that I did not have an
agenda, hoping they would take the hint about the journalist from The
Australian.

The
following day I logged onto the Facebook and the NDIS discussion group is abuzz
about an article that has appeared in The Australian: Mother
sees merit in NDIS slower rollout. The article was written by a
different journalist to the one who had contacted the discussion group.

In
the article, a mother suggests that the NDIS be delayed because she had some
difficulties with it. As pointed out in the discussion group, if she had had
the years of frustration of trying to survive and cope with a fragmented and
underfunded non-NDIS disability sector, her attitude to her NDIS hassles might
have been very different. I am curious, if she had enthusiastically endorsed
the NDIS and not said its rollout should be delayed, would the Australian have
reported her comments?

So
far, no one has gotten back to my post. I am not surprised, as I have had
limited success with similar requests I have made on social media. But while
doing more research, I discovered the LEAD program in Geelong which has a
number of participants in the NDIS who volunteer to tell people about it. And one
of those participants is a fellow Divine writer. I sent him an email and he has
agreed to an interview. Yay. I just sent him a number of questions.

But
I would still like another point of view for the article, preferably from
someone who is just an ordinary client of the NDIS. So I have just reposted my
request to the discussion group, this time including my questions.  

I am sorry
Transcendence, but you seem doomed to
be ridiculed and scorned, because I liked you. My favourite films of the past two
years all suffered the same fate. Last year it was Oblivion, the year before
Prometheus.
The year before that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was
ignored by most science-fiction viewers. I liked them all because they gave me
plenty to think about. I am sick and tired of science-fiction films that are
instantly forgotten the moment you leave the cinema, like the Iron
Man and Star Trek franchises, and all those science-fiction movies that
I have seen and forgotten.

I liked Prometheus, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Oblivion because they all tried to explore ideas, rather than just explore
special effects.

There are
two main reasons that I liked Transcendence.
First is its ambiguity: the story deliberately left many of its questions open
to interpretation. The second reason I liked Transcendence is that it is the first film I can recall that
seriously tries to tackle the Technological Singularity or Spike as I prefer to
call it.

To clear
up any ambiguity about the ambiguity and the Spike in Transcendence, I am going to have to reveal a bit of its plot. Two
scientists, Will and Evelyn Caster, are working on an artificially intelligent
computer. They hope to create a sentient machine that thinks for itself. But Will
is shot by some terrorists and is dying, so Evelyn decides to upload his brain
into the AI’s memory coils, where the upload comes to life as a virtual avatar.

One of the
main hopes of scientists working on artificial intelligence is that once machines
reach the intelligence of humans their intelligence should quickly exceed that
of humans, and then, under the AI’s guidance, technological advancements will
speed up drastically, causing a Spike in human advancement. Humans will change
massively. Post-spike humans could quickly advance to a near immortal God-like
existence. The key technology in the Spike seems to be artificial technology
that has the ability to create and advance technologies like nanotechnology and
virtual reality.

When Will is
uploaded into the computer ambiguity starts creeping into the movie. It is
unclear whether the uploaded version of Will is the sum of what he was as a
human, or are parts missing? Is he a mixture of his human self and Evelyn’s
ethics as she was the one who wrote the code to upload him into the computer?

Will’s/the
Ai’s intelligence quickly grows. Will/the AI perfects and controls nanomachines
that cure blindness and revive the recently killed. But there is a hitch, he/it
also includes a link to his/its mind in those he heals. So another question of
ambiguity comes in, does he/it plan to control humanity or help it?

The movie
is told from the point of view of those who interact with the AI/Will, which
allows the question of the AI’s/Will’s benevolence to continue for the entire
film. The audience is never taken into its/his mind to find out what his/its
intentions are. He is attacked and uses the linked humans to defend himself. It has
the ability to create technology that could wipe out humanity, but doesn’t.
Instead it/he creates technology to link all humanity, but for what purpose, to
help or control?

If you
dislike movies that don’t tell you the answers to the questions it raises, you
are not going to like Transcendence.
You will probably think it full of plot holes that made it hard to understand
and react by calling it “silly” like one pathetic reviewer did for the Murdoch
press. But then he works for Murdoch so has no need to think.

The film’s
big theme is will we be slaves to technology or will it liberate us? A guy
sitting two seats down from me at the cinema who left his seat three times to
use his mobile phone, might think the former. I am hopeful that it is the
latter.

Transcendence is a science-fiction film that got me
thinking, for that I am thankful. I do hope that others appreciate it too, so
we can see more films that explore science and ideas, and not just Battleship
your brain. But alas, I think most people who went to see Transcendence were hoping the AI did a
Skynet so they could watch heaps of explosions and chase scenes.  

General Will Smith and his recruit son are on a ship that
just happens to be carrying a captured alien. It could not possibly escape,
could it? The alien is a large reptile like creature, that is blind and relies
on its sense of smell to hunt its prey. It can smell and track the pheromones humans
release when they are scared. Right there and then, I knew the whole plot of
the movie was going to be about Will Smith Junior overcoming his fear so he
could get close enough to kill the alien. Pretty lame. 

The ship is caught in a meteor storm. General Smith
orders the ship to make a risky space jump and guess where they end up? Crash
landing on Earth of course. An injured General Smith and his recruit son then
have to survive the hostile planet and the alien.

But why did Will Smith Junior have to get close to the
alien? Why didn’t he just do an Indiana Jones and keep his distance while shooting
the alien with a blaster? Because the soldiers didn’t seem to have any blasters,
all they had were collapsible staffs with blades on each end. So that was the
best weapon humans with otherwise advanced technology could come up with? No
wonder Earth was devastated: humans were bloody morons.

Couldn’t Junior just have lost his weapon in the crash?

So one my pet peeves in science-fiction involves advanced
races using totally un-advanced weapons to fight with. I particularly loath the
plethora of instantly dismissed or forgotten science-fiction were the only
weapons are swords, and martial arts experts prevail. Swords and bows and arrows
are okay in a post-apocalyptic world were all the technology has been
destroyed, like the world in which the Revolution television series is set.
Thankfully, there are no martial arts experts in that series, yet.

 And martial arts experts are okay in computer generated
worlds, like in The Matrix, because that world, and therefore their martial
arts abilities, were computer generated. Otherwise, no karate-chopping-sword-wielder
would stand a chance against Firefly’s
Jayne Cobb, let alone a Terminator.

So please, if you write science-fiction that has battles
and fighting, have the weapons match the surrounding technology.

The really sad thing about After Earth was it was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who made the Sixth Sense and the very
good Signs.
The
Happening wasn’t bad either. Will Smith probably paid him a mountain of
money to direct his son.      

For a
while now, I, like many other writers, have been wondering how well independent
or self-published authors are doing in the ebook market compared to those who
use traditional publishers. There is so much secrecy in the publishing industry
that it is hard to tell. But I have just read a report, written by Hugh Howey,
that suggests indie ebook authors are doing very well when compared to those
who use traditional publishers.

For those
who don’t know, Hugh Howey
is a science-fiction author whose self-published Wool series has sold
millions of ebooks. He was offered a million dollar deal to sign with traditional
publisher Simon and Schuster. The original offer was to distribute Wool
to book retailers across the US and Canada and included the ebook rights. But
Howey decided to keep the ebook rights and took a six figure deal instead.  

Howey
recently wrote a report based on data he obtained from a software program that
trawled the web for information on ebooks sales. The data he uses in the report
is from nearly 7,000 ebooks in several genre categories (including science-fiction
and fantasy) on Amazon. The report is simply titled the 7K report and is
available at authorearnings.com.

The report
has several very interesting graphs like the one above. It shows that over half
the ebooks in Amazons bestseller genre lists were indie or self-published. Howey
says the pie chart suggests that the major publishers are not publishing enough
genre fiction, including science-fiction, so the slack is being taken up by
indie and self-publishers.

This is
great news for a science fiction writer like myself who is repeatedly reading
that the science fiction readership is decreasing. It looks like it might be actually
increasing, despite traditional publishers best efforts to ignore it.

The report
reveals many interesting details about ebook publishing on Amazon. For example,
it really pays to be published by Amazon themselves (on 47 North or
equivalent). The pie chart above show Amazon publishers accounting for only 4%
of the titles in the genre bestseller list, but another graph in the report
shows those 4% of ebooks accounting for 15% of the daily ebook sales in those
genres.

If you
were wondering how Amazons ebooks sales compare to their sales of hard backs,
the above pie chart is astounding.  It
shows that 86% of the top 2,500 genre bestsellers in the Amazon store are
e-books.

The above
chart helps Howey conclude that genre writers who indie or self-publish are
financially better off than authors who go with traditional publishers, no
matter what the potential of their manuscripts is. If you are a fiction writer,
you have to read the report.
  

I have
watched a few new (well new to me) science-fiction shows over the past few
months. A couple were excellent , two others will require more viewing to
decide, and another had so many clichés in the first episode I was immediately sent
looking for something slightly more original. I will start with the good ones.

Utopia is a six-part British mini-series. Set in a near
future England where a group of comic book fans get their hands on the notes
for a sequel to a cult comic book. Those notes contain hidden details of a plan
to re-engineer the future of humanity, so the fans become the target of government
spy agencies and other mysterious organisations. The series is full of tension,
complications, and striking visuals. The characters are non-mainstream,
especially a killer sent to hunt them down.

Orphan Black is a Canadian mini-series. A petty criminal watches
a woman who could be her double jump in front of train. The suicide victim left
her handbag on the platform, so the criminal grabs it and then assumes her
identity. The suicide victim was a police detective investigating other people
who looked exactly like her. This series has many slightly off-centre characters,
especially a female assassin.

Real Humans is a Swedish mini-series that I have just
started watching it. It is set in an alternative world where human like
androids are as common as mobile phones. The first episode jumped straight in,
with no explanation and had a number of different storylines, all involving
people’s interaction with androids. One story suggests the androids might be
about to revolt. Another asks what
humans will do when androids are capable of doing nearly everything a human can
do. A further story seems set to explore human/android sexual relationships. I
look forward to watching more of the series on SBS2.

The Tomorrow People is an American remake of two British
series of the same name. A high school student hears voices in his head and
continually wakes up in other nearby locations. The owner of the voice in his
head appears and she informs him that he is a Tomorrow Person with special
powers. The first episode was full of boring beautiful people and clichés. A
jock bullies our hero, the beautiful female has an arrogant boyfriend, the hero’s
father was a leader of the Tomorrow People, and bad government meanies want to
capture all the Tomorrow People. Need I say more? I will probably watch the
second episode and hope something unexpected happens. The writers of this show
should watch AIphas, a show full of slightly off key characters.

Star Crossed is an American science-fiction romance series. An alien race
lands on earth, and because Americans are so paranoid and have so many guns,
they attack and kill most of them. A decade or so later the remaining aliens
are kept in detention camps. Some of their kids are allowed out to attend high
school. There’s no need for special toilets to be built or for the canteen to
serve alien food, or for the aliens to wear special breathing apparatus to
breathe our toxic atmosphere, because the aliens are exactly like us, only more
beautiful than people outside of television land. To make the aliens stand out
as something to be discriminated against they have some tatts on their neck. They
also behave exactly like human kids do. A bit of makeup and who would know they
are alien at all. 

Of course, a human female and an alien male fall for each
other. What’s that I hear you say, sounds a bit like Buffy and Angel (but with
absolutely none of the wit or offbeat characters), or thousands of other
stories of forbidden love between races or classes. This type of story has been
done to death, leave it alone.   

I hope that there are more science-fiction series in
production that are like Orphan Black and Utopia: full of non-mainstream characters
that force the story off cliché.