As far as I can tell from all focus groups, market research, and user data that I’ve seen, the general difference has less to do with whether women relate more to a specific genre, and a lot more to do with the methods that allow us to use our media to reach a state of escape. Science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, vampires, whatever… guys will check this stuff out simply because it’s cool. But most women need a subtler.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised at see the results of this survey taken on women who read comics. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that can be unpacked from the responses, but overall you can see that female nerds are similar to male ones in that they’re looking for something edgy and empowering. But to sell to women you need to give them more than just a hot and hunky hero (although that’s sometimes a good start), and a big fight—you need give them a character that they can identify with (even if it isn’t the protagonist), and tell a story that engages the imagination.

And that’s because the great thing about the female audience is that once you’ve engaged them, they’ll stick around a lot longer. Women are aware that there’s only so much media they’re going to relate to, so they can be pickier about the relationships.

Take a look at Twilight and you’ll see a passionate audience, committed to consuming whatever comes out in that series, whether it’s movies or books. They have a relationship with the story, and they’re not ready to break up even years after the last book has been put on the shelf.

I know I’m making some big generalizations here, and I’ve really only scratched the surface of the female genre fan.

I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on the subject.

5. Twilight

The runaway success of what is essentially a non-ironic vampire soap opera is vexing for fans of more traditional genre media. It also seems to come without the usual focus on deep story and “realism” that had been a hallmark of the 2000s.

In the end it’s a tale of teen angst that wears its heart on its sleeve, because that’s all it really has to offer. And while most of the other properties on this list have moved relentlessly forward into spectacle, Twilight is unashamedly old fashioned, focusing on emotion and chastity, with over-wrought and tormented characters that are so forthright they seem to be beyond parody.

But at the same time that genre movies have become increasingly focused on CGI and explosions an entire generation of female fans having been grown up with the gender-bending romance of anime, along with the emotionally driven fantasy of Harry Potter. Given that, along with the fact that women are, statistically, far more likely to read a book, the idea of a creating a strongly female-focused paranormal romance makes a lot of sense.

If the genre continues to grow, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, we’ll see other properties appear in the next decade that are similar, but hopefully with a bit more narrative spine than Twilight’s pastiche of longing looks and romantic clichés.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               No
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   No
Video Games:                         No
Roleplaying Games:               No
Collectable Card Games:       No

4.The Avengers

Coming into the new millennium, Marvel comics had been all about the X-Men. Not only had they been Marvel’s top comic book superstars since the 1970s, but the decade started off with a shiny new movie that fans felt had finally captured the soul of what made the comic great. Born with strange “mutant” powers that also marked them as outsiders, they had just enough gritty ennui to make them seem more realistic than the typical costumed hero with a hyphenated name and a colorful costume.

But brewing in the background was a revolution. Brian Michael Bendis was cooking up a plan to bring the classic marvel superheroes back to the front burner. His plan was to reboot Marvel’s most venerable team-up book, The Avengers, by putting all their biggest and most-popular heroes, including Spider-Man and Wolverine. The book would be the flagship for the Marvel universe, featuring massive battles set against personal issues that would give this world of costumed do-gooders a genuine sense of verisimilitude.

After killing the old team off in Avengers Disassembled, the comic, now titled “New Avengers” started off with a bang, mining the long history of the Marvel universe and tying together hundreds of loose threads that had cropped up into continuity over the last two decades.

The book was a smash hit. Fans were clearly hungry for this kind of re-invention. It wasn’t just about making the characters gritty, which had been the formula in the 90s; it was about being willing to tell deeper stories, and treat the world like a canvas. It also meant treating the ridiculous with the same degree of intelligence and detail as the sublime. Marvel’s chief-editor, Joe Quesada embraced this vision, and made it work across the line.

The Iron Man film was an attempt to take that formula and make it work on the big screen.  It was a smash hit, with a sequel on the way. But more than just a single hit film, Marvel is attempting to bring continuity to the movies, creating a series of films that share a consistent universe. The Hulk, Captain America, and Thor are all pieces of a puzzle that are supposed to come together with an Avengers film appearing on-screen in 2012.

The fact that Marvel has been able to build up a property with so many characters, and so much flexibility, shows the raw power that they wield now that they’ve been retooled and rebuilt. It will be interesting to see how things go in the next decade with Disney in charge of the cross-media reigns.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               Yes
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   Yes
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               Yes
Collectable Card Games:       Yes

3.The Lord of the Rings

While the classic trilogy had been venerable best-sellers for decades, the genre of high fantasy that sprung from them had always had an uneasy relationship with other media. In many ways it existed as a strange child of the seventies, often appearing on-screen in a manner that was goofy and off-putting, with a macramé and clay-pot sensibility that had only reinforced the feeling that it couldn’t really work on the big screen.

But in the 90s Xena and Hercules, although post-modern and sort of a parody, flirted with an edgier vision of modern fantasy. Building on that heritage of New Zealand production, Peter Jackson, using all the tools at his command, created a version of the story that infused the whole production with a new level of detail and craftsmanship that remade the series as a historical epic about a world that never was.

From the clothing to the landscapes, the movies existed as a portal to another reality that often felt richer and more detailed than our own. It wasn’t just a story to watch, it was a place to inhabit. And by the time the final film had won the Oscar for Best Picture, it seemed as if the audience had become almost overwhelmed from the richness of it all.

Still, the series had redefined the vision of fantasy in the mass-market, banishing the seventies excesses, and allowing fantasy a genre to flourish both on-screen and off. With a new series of Tolkien movies starting up production under with Del Toro directing, it will be interesting to see if the franchise has legs longer than a Hobbit’s.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               No
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   No
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               Yes
Collectable Card Games:       Yes

2. Batman

In the beginning of the decade Batman was a brand in decline. The “franchise” had been totally derailed by the disaster film known as BATMAN AND ROBIN, effectively killing off an iteration of the character that Tim Burton had started a decade before.

Comic books in general were feeling tired after the over-hyped insanity of the 90s, with Batman having been subjected to numerous interesting re-interpretations, but essentially rudderless.

Even the Animated Series, which had probably done more to define the character as a brand than anything which had come before, had decided to retire Bruce Wayne, and created the futuristic “Batman Beyond” as the standard bearer for the animated continuity.

A mid-decade attempt to reboot an animated version of the character as “The Batman” didn’t manage to find real purchase with the fans, although it did run for five seasons.  The current “Brave and the Bold” cartoon series started in 2008, and is skewed younger, but feels far more iconic.

Meanwhile, back in the comic books, the character slowly found his feet over the course of the decade, with Grant Morrison’s current run finally managing to find a perfect balance between the outlandish and gritty elements of the character that had always seemed to be in conflict before.

But for the brand, the proof that things are different now came with the release of “The Dark Knight”. This second Bat-Film by Christopher Nolan was the ultimate Batman film, with Heath Ledger’s Joker finally giving the character the genuine on-screen menace he deserved.

Batman is a venerable franchise that’s currently firing on all cylinders. It’ll be interesting to see where it ends up going over the next ten years.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               Yes
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   Yes
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               Yes
Collectable Card Games:       Yes

1. Harry Potter

While other properties on this list are older and more venerable, Harry Potter is the true ideal of creating and nurturing a cultural phenomenon in the 2000s.

Already rolling when the decade began, the movies and books kept coming out at regular intervals, with the films managing to gracefully transition from a book about magical shool-children, and produce interesting films that on occasion surpassed the narrative of the books they were based on. Meanwhile the hype machine kept relentlessly chugging away, along with a torrent of branded material, and filling store shelves with tiny plastic brooms.

It’s hard to believe that the same pre-teen “kids” who started out reading the first volumes of the series when they are now adults in their 20s, but it’s also hard to believe that they won’t show up to see the final two films.

Already completed in their original novel from, it’s now up to the movies to determine whether the story of the boy wizard will end with a bang or a whimper.

Theatrical Movie:                   Yes
TV Series:                               No
Novels:                                    Yes
Comics:                                   No
Video Games:                         Yes
Roleplaying Games:               No
Collectable Card Games:       Yes
Toys:                                       Yes

Wrapping a science fiction story around something like this is a no-brainer:

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

Food processing companies in Germany have already carried out trials of the spray, and found sterile surfaces that usually needed to be cleaned with strong bleach to keep them sterile needed only a hot water rinse if they were coated with liquid glass. The levels of sterility were higher for the glass-coated surfaces, and the surfaces remained sterile for months.

Whether it turns out to be a blockbuster or a bomb (I’m betting on it hitting big), there’s no doubt that next week’s release of Avatar is the last major Science Fiction event of the year in a year that has already had an amazing number of “important” genre films, whether it’s the action over substance of Transformers 2, the quiet subtlety of Moon, or the amazing blend of action and substantial themes in District 9.

Surprisingly it’s the action films that usually the far more dense plots. The stories behind Transformers 2 and the latest Star Trek film make little or no sense logically, but they’re deep nonsense. Transformers is about a secret message imprinted on the brain of a human that contains the secret to finding an artifact hidden by ancient robots with the potential to wipe out our sun. Star Trek is a story of multidimensional revenge that involves super-explosive red liquid, time travel, alternate realities, and the wholesale destruction of planets. It’s safe to bet that Sex in the City 2 won’t involve any red liquids more powerful than a bottle of wine…

But as compelling as all these different plot elements may be to imagine, they don’t really drive story, they drive spectacle. And the core of any modern Science Fiction film is the promise that (like the gun on the mantle) if a crazy idea is discussed in act one you’re going to see it in act three. So if someone mentions that a new starship comes with a weapon that “can punch a hole through the universe” then we had damn well better see that rip in the fabric of space/time by the end of the film, or we’re going to leave disappointed.

IO9 recently asked whether or not this abundance of CGI is “ruining movies”. While that’s an interesting way to look at the problem, I think the real question is much more subtle: How do we feel about the genre being hijacked by all this spectacle?

Hardcore fans often have a problem with spectacle being used an end in itself instead of a means to an end because we’re narrative nerds. We want a world we can inhabit through the characters.

It’s all good and well to have a 45 minute laser sword battle on a lava flow, but what matters more is what’s at stake for Ben and Anakin, especially if you already know how that fight is going to turn out. Ultimately its more compelling to see them fighting as an old man and a seven foot tall black-clad monster because we know Ben is battling to gain some time for Luke to escape. Having the old Jedi explain that he’s going to win the fight by losing it is just icing on the cake.

From a Hollywood point of view it’s also problem they can take all the way to the bank, since selling images don’t depend on the audience being able to make a genuine connection with anything but a big, fat explosion.

But like casual sex and comic books in the 90s, you end up feeling unfulfilled. The other challenge of spectacle is more nuanced, and so far, I think, mostly un-discussed. Lawrence Miles, on his Doctor Who blog, wrote a number of fascinating essays (since deleted, as he’s a bit eccentric) discussing the subtle differences between spectacle and narrative. His main point (as I see it) is that when we see computer generated imagery appear on our screens we immediately shift into a different mode as a viewer. On a subconscious level we recognize that we’re seeing something designed to be perceived as something other than narrative media.

Here’s how he described it:

Any CGI monster is by definition going to be regarded as a Special Effect rather than a natural part of the story. The advantage of a “real” monster, whether it’s a Dalek, a gasmask-zombie, or even a Muppet, is that it stops being bizarre after the first couple of minutes. The audience begins to treat it as a normal element of the story-world, and accepts it as a given fact, which means that we find the programme much more engaging. Whereas the point of a computer sprite will always be to make the viewer say “gosh, wow, look!”, and the result of this is usually a series of set-pieces in which the episode shows off the CGI as much as possible whether we care about it or not.

And that has an impact on how we perceive all visual media. Spectacle what people mean when they describe something as a popcorn film: the moment when you’re supposed to turn off your mind and experience what is happening in an almost purely visual sense.

Like the uncanny valley, the shift from narrative to spectacular perception isn’t a discrete moment: it’s a sliding scale, starting at the point when our minds begin to shift from engaging with the characters and their motivations to giving up any pretense of caring for the emotional impact and simply going along with a purely visual “wow factor” of modern visual entertainment.  As an example start with the pure Shakespearean stage action of Julius Ceasar, then the BBC version of I, Claudius, head into HBO’s Rome, through Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, and finally into Clash of the Titans, which seems poised to copy 300’s method of showing myth as a parade of impossibly perfect human forms and escalating boss fights.

Unlike story, which is about judging an experience against our own lives, we evaluate spectacle on its own merits, almost entirely outside of the context of any narrative we’re watching it in. Most of us have any real emotional bond to the Transformers beyond a happy haze of nostalgia, making it a perfect spectacle delivery vehicle. It’s nerd pornography: express the idea as fantastically as possible, then fill in the cracks with any spare plot you have lying around. The only common human experience we need is a pair of eyes.

Maybe I’m over-simplifying it, but the more I think about CGI and spectacle as something other than story and characters, especially in the context of other visual media such as comics and video games, the more it seems to make sense.

I’d love to have an ongoing conversation on the idea of “the spectacular shift”, maybe even finding a better name for it… so please if you have some thoughts, tell me what you think in the comments.

Here’s an example of the babbling hysteria contained within:

So that now, sixty four years after the Holocaust, the Nazi disdain for the book has become the feel-good Hi-Tech campaign to rid the world of books in place of massive easily controlled centralized repositories of book texts downloadable on little hand-held devices and from which a text can be dissapeared with the click of a mouse: in Nazi terms, a dream come true.

If you think that’s silly and hyperbolic, read the rest of it. I was no great fan of the Kindle when it launched, but there’s no reason to this rant beyond the formula of claiming that if you can find any twisted way to equate something modern to something the Nazis did it must therefore be the same. It’s silly and childlike, and it’s the kind of thing that destroys our ability to reason our way into the future.

And while we Xers aren’t as young as we used to be, it confuses me a bit to see a generation of re-creators beginning to become afflicted with conservative* attitudes as we age. Not that I thought we were better than that, exactly, but it seems a bit hypocritical to say the least.

What seems to lie at the core of this idea is the belief that the natives of the new new future (the one that will live on after us) have been afflicted with problems that are uniquely terrible, and can ultimately only be solved by not doing them, or doing things the way they used to be done, otherwise they will turn out wrong. And this is because (in no particular order) the internet, music, dating, sex, and politics are somehow worse due to the technologies that have fallen into the hands of these new young savages, and we figured it out and they haven’t yet, which means that they’re doing it wrong in a way that will harm them as humans and ruin everything forever.

I naturally tend to doubt that given the arc of human history. Like it or not, the very nature of society is that if enough of you are doing the same thing then you’re doing it right. (With the notable exception of sex, because even though everyone is doing basically the same thing, it’s really doing it at all that’s totally unacceptable.)

As we age, and accumulate a history, the past starts to looks better. Not only is our hindsight 20/20, but it is endlessly mineable. It is our museum of thought, where we can walk around an old idea until we find a perspective that we like, and then tell everyone that our viewpoint is the one true vision of the way things were, and the way it ought to be.

It’s an aspect of human nature that I find that to be a bit sad, honestly. To me the future remains exciting even if less and less of it is going to be my future. I’m not against the ideas of channeling our new technologies and giving them a philosophical spin, but this instinct to magnify the problems with the new and put them into doomsday scenarios is always a bit puzzling to me, as if somehow one of the goals of life is dodging the apocalypse.

As I say when that I use when try and sell me on their version of doomsday:
The problem with the apocalypse is that there’s no precedent for it.

* In this case I mean it in the truest sense of the word: that things should remain as they are, or recently were.

Take a look at these pictures and tell me that you don’t get a least a little bit of a hard SF vibe, or at least a feeling that you could play a level or two of Halo in that city, or a rebirth of Disney’s original dream of building an inhabitable amusement park.

And even though it was built in a desert halfway around the world, to me it looks like a kind of fictional American future—a mall city constructed in the middle of a desert on the cutting edge of technology and capitalism. Vegas and Wal-Mart smashed together under a repressive theocratic government.

We’d already heard a great deal about the corruption and suffering that lived behind the facade, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about in the months and years to come as the cracks widen.

Whether it lives or dies, it’s pretty clear that the dream of Dubai as a place where excess can birth mega-projects on a river of money is over now.

And the strains of Ozymandias keep ringing in my ears…

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

So perfectly apt for this city built in the desert it’s almost ridiculous…

What the author doesn’t mention is how this paradise was essentially an orwellian nightmare—a place where people could be detained for almost any infraction, up to and including supposedly legal narcotics found in their bloodstream.

It was also built on the backs of what was essentially legalized slave labor

Engineering and technology are amongst our most powerful tools, and there’s a certain amount of hubris necessary to take any project of significant size and vision.  But there’s a point at which what you can do far outstrips what you should do.

As our financial system has become more divorced from actual human work we’re seeing the danger that comes from an ability to turn our wildest dreams into reality, both good and bad. And while I’m all for urban fantasy and modern re-interpretations of classic fairy tales, it’s important to remember that our most enduring stories of fantastic creatures are mostly cautionary allegories about the dangers of what happens when our wildest dreams come true.

Here’s what we thought the present would look like in 1993:

AT&T didn’t bring it all to us.  That was the corporate cyberpunk part…

It’s certainly an interesting artifact, and if you’re a geek you realize just how right it is on so many levels. In many ways it represents a genuine manifestation of the role that R2D2 fulfilled in the series, providing mobile technical expertise, and displaying just the right video to the right people at the right time.

It also has all the right inputs, allowing the player to interact with a variety of modern objects. I have to admit that I almost gasped with glee when the iPod dock popped out of the chassis.  This is clearly something that has been thought about, and designed with a clear audience in mind, although it’s doubtful the slacker hipster stereotype who’s playing their awesome game on the ceiling of their deluxe bachelor pad is the person who would buy this (or even actually exists). But the nerd is clearly the target market, and it’s a well aimed piece of tech.

It’s also a masterpiece of instant obsolescence. 

From the moment you buy it, those slots and connectors are already out of date, and note that if you want to watch an HD-DVD you’ll need to hook up that PS3 they’re talking about. This is a piece of tech that is all about the moment, and as impressive as it is to have a mobile high def screen, it’s something that’s going to last about as long as your average computer.

That said, there’s something truly futuristic about the idea of this thing. It’s the beginning of the transformation of the appliance from a passive to an active device, wrapped up into a context that defines both the expectations and the use of the device.