So…you have time to watch TV? Really? How do you do that? Does it involve a deal with an infernal being? Because, I mean, that wouldn’t be a total deal-breaker.

When I was young, in fact all the way up through high school, I watched prime time TV with a singular devotion. Not just science fiction but everything. Have Gun, Will Travel. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Colonel Bleep. Coronet Blue. Candid Camera. The Smothers Brothers. Captain Nice. I’ve Got A Secret. If I missed a show it was only because it was on at the same time as a show I was already watching, and in those days you didn’t have the option of a DVR.

On Saturday mornings I watched cartoons with near-religious fervor. If I didn’t start my day with a heaping helping of Jonny Quest, Heckle and Jeckle, and the Herculoids, I just didn’t feel right.

In college, all that went away. Suddenly I didn’t have a TV nor did I feel the need for one. I don’t know if it was TV or me that changed, but we were no longer a couple. We would run into each other at parties, exchange a few awkward comments, and gratefully recall other engagements. We had grown apart.

It happens.

Sure, there were shows I watched and enjoyed later in life. In some cases, enjoyed immensely. All In The Family comes to mind. The Star Trek programs, of course. Beauty and The Beast. Cheers. Hill Street Blues. Seinfeld. More recently, Big Bang and Madmen and Fringe, and Game of Thrones.

But it ain’t destination TV for me because there are so many other places I have to be, some of them rather unexpectedly, and I hate missing the odd episode and coming in the following week in the middle of a crisis I don’t understand. In fact, these days I seldom watch a dramatic series until it’s over and available on Netflix.

So right now, I’m the wrong guy to ask about Sleepy Hollow and Dracula and SHIELD. A few years from now, sure.

But now, not so much.

I watch too much television and these days, that means keeping up with what I like is difficult. Especially when people keep telling I have to try a series. My wife and I have begun to get a little draconian, dropping shows we’ve lost interest in or have outlasted their premise. But, here we are in December and most prime time shows are about to take a mid-season hiatus, letting us catching our breaths so it’s not a bad time to look back at the genre shows.

This month the C8 team will be taking a look at the newer shows and offering you our thoughts. First, let it be said that science fiction and fantasy television is alive and well, thriving across the cable box, showing up on many different channels from the major networks to the premium channels. That’s a major positive and with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon all joining the fray with original content, it won’t be long before genre shows start popping up. As it is, Netflix already has four Marvel Universe shows announced and in the works.

CBS’ Person of Interest has moved from speculative fiction closer to reality based on the revelations from Eric Snowden. While The Machine does not yet exist, data mining and drawing conclusions are alive and well. The series’ third season is stronger and keeps surprising us, especially with Carter’s long-planned death.

Over on NBC, J.J Abrams and Jon Favreau’s Revolution got off to a fine start, meandered for a bit and had a fine cliffhanger. The second season, though, feels as if it is spinning its wheels and the new pyrokinetic talents Aaron has demonstrated has the show veer far from its original premise., My biggest issue is that things blow up and people fight but every single cast member is devoid of character and the show never lets the characters actually talk to one another. Grimm’s third season is also stronger than its second although I could do without the entire European thread. It’s lightweight entertainment with an attractive and varied cast. I am not even going near Dracula since it has nothing to do with Bram Stoker’s character.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. arrived with high expectations and we expected perfection right out of the gate but it’s taken the show five or six episodes to truly warm up. I think its biggest failing is its lack of sharp dialogue and strongly drawn characters, but they seem to be fixing it. It could use a little tighter connection to the cinematic universe and the Big Bad is lackluster but it has all the elements of a good show so I’m sticking with it. Similarly, Once Upon a Time drifted into aimlessness last season but this year it’s much better with some very surprising twists. But I do have my limits and haven’t gone near Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.

On the other hand, I arrived with low expectations for the CW’s Arrow and was pleasantly surprised last season. Its second season is stronger, tighter, and smarter giving the CW demographic incredibly adorable men and women to ogle while delivering strong stories and evolving characters. I’m surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying it. On the other hand, much as I adore Payton List, I can’t bring myself to even try The Tomorrow People and won’t go near the mess that is Beauty and the Beast.

I’m late to Lost Girl on SyFy but am a quick convert. It’s also somewhat lightweight but damn is it sexy and has some interesting mythology to play with. That being said, it’s the only show I’m watching on the channel which a shame is considering its once great pedigree for compelling shows.  BBC America, though, seems to be where the action is at, letting us have Doctor Who, with its most excellent 560^th anniversary celebration. The one show I need to delve into is the well-regarded Orphan Black, a crowning achievement for the British company and, I gather, pleasant present for fans.

On the premium side, Game of Thrones continues to take its time showing us the perils of politics and remains a textbook example of how to adapt a book series to television. It and True Blood (admittedly, I’m two seasons behind here) continue to shine with good writing, strong casting, and taking advantage of the pay wall.

Sure, I have fond memories of the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers movie and TV show, and as a kid I loved the so-bad-it’s-good Flash Gordon movie with the Queen soundtrack.

And if you haven’t read it, the novel version of 2001 — which was actually a short story in 1948 but came out in novel form after the movie — is actually a lot more optimistic than what Kubrick did with it. And by the way, Kubrick’s version is incredible, although not the kind of movie I run back to very often. Too ominous.

For my money, the best prose-to-visual translation of sci-fi begins and ends with Blade Runner, from Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?

The next question becomes … which version of Blade Runner? And my answer is … all of them.

They each have their subtle distinctions, and I’m not going to get into those now, but as a stand-alone, 2-hour movie, I just love the atmosphere, the noir tone, and the underlying question of what it means to dream.

And rarely has Harrison Ford been better.

It’s the kind of movie — and role — where I wish there had been an entire detective series of movies, with Harrison Ford essentially playing Humphrey Bogart, only in a hardcore, sci-fi setting.

There are plenty of other great sci-fi movies, but when we’re talking adaptations, for me … it’s all about Blade Runner.

I’ll never look at origami the same way again …

Rachel Thompson has been reading our columns about science fiction and asked an interesting question.

“I write sci-fi and fantasy and I’m learning the market for it is as tight as a buzzard’s ass in a power dive. Its seems to me zombies have taken over the ideas and market that sci-fi once dominated. I still love old fashion sci-fi as you do but it’s getting very hard to find sci-fi in book stores and even harder to get mine published. I do Kurt Vonnegut- like social satire along with outer forms: will sci-fi ever make a popularity come-back or I’m I just pissing down a gravity well?”

I put it to our collective for responses and here’s what some of us have had to say:

Aaron Rosenberg:

The thing about SF is that it’s actually more popular than ever. Just not in print. It’s appearing more and more in mainstream movies and even TV shows (Pacific Rim and Almost Human, anyone?), and people are loving it, including people who before this would never have read an SF novel in a million years. My hope is that at least some of those new fans will realize there are–gasp!–BOOKS with the same ideas and topics they’re now enjoying onscreen, and will then become new SF readers as well. In the meantime, SF fiction continues to have a hardcore fan base which I don’t think will ever go away. Market share is certainly tough right now, though, because publishers, especially the big houses, only want The Next Big Thing–they don’t do a lot of mid-list anymore, so they’re not interested in books that would still have solid sales numbers but might not crack the bestseller lists. Fortunately, there are tons of small presses out there now picking up the slack. People just like us. :) So don’t give up hope, and make sure to explore all your options–shoot for a big publisher first because if they pick you up they can do more marketing and publicity and distribution than you’d get otherwise, but don’t  ignore or discount a small press that can still do a nice job on your book and will work a lot harder for you because they form a more personal connection with each of their authors.

Paul Kupperberg:

The market is tight all over. The genre markets may have been hit hardest, and, yes, science fiction has been supplanted in the marketplace by zombies. In mysteries, I think the market usurper is the mainstream thriller. And the Sherlock Holmes pastiche. (And cats.) I believe the more eReaders there are in peoples’ pockets and purses, the more the tendency is going to be to lean towards “lite” versions of the popular genres because they’re going to be reading them in more frequent but shorter bursts; whenever there’s a spare moment, whip out the Kindle and read a few paragraphs before it’s your turn at the ATM. In the olden, pre-corporate days of publishing, untried writers stood a greater chance of being published because there were more slots to fill on the newsstand racks and bookstore shelves. Now, with distribution so tight and expensive, publishers have adopted the Hollywood-model–put everything you’ve got into the next summer blockbuster and leave the low-budget fare that needs the P.R. push to fend for itself. Which is likely to lead it to online publishing…but I wonder how many buyers browse Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com the way they browse bookstore shelves, looking for something that will catch their interest, rather than logging on to buy a specific book or author they’ve just heard about. So small publishers are the future.

So small publishers are the future. The SF marketplace may seem a bit slow now, but as readers increasingly buy books online, the e-reader marketplace for SF will continue to expand.

And often, as it does, the quality books will rise to the top and connect with an audience hungry for those kinds of stories.

Robert Greenberger:

This weekend’s Washington Post listed their top 50 novels of 2013 and Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining is the only genre book to make the list. This does not mean that science fiction, fantasy, and horror are no longer being read, but they never get the same serious analysis, review, and exposure as mainstream fiction. It has usually been this way. While Mysteries seem to get a lot of coverage, thanks to the best selling status of so many authors, every other genre usually gets short shrift. It seems that the very idea of writing in a genre from Westerns to Military appear to be looked down upon despite how much of out mainstream media output is entirely made up of genre material. Apparently, reading is reserved for more highfalutin fare.

And yet, so many of us are writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction, just appealing to a smaller, more dedicated audience. Small presses such as Crazy 8 Press let people find the fiction they like and in many ways, there is more available to readers thanks to digital publishing. The mainstream houses continue to also pump out these genres with new imprints announced with encouraging regularity.

When did science fiction begin? It’s an interesting question. And as we decide where we’re going as practitioners of the genre, maybe we should think about where we came from.

Many a hardcore fan will tell you that the backbone of science fiction is the written narrative. After all, Hugo Gernsback, generally acknowledged as the father of the genre–though he preferred the term “scientifiction” to “science fiction”–published magazines made up of short stories.

And if we go a little further back, there are the pulps, and before that Herbert George Wells and Jules Verne, and even further back Mary Shelley’s dark and disturbing cautionary tale, a little piece she subtitled The Modern Prometheus. Should we consider Gulliver’s Travels a piece of science fiction? How about Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, written a few short years after the English started their colony in Jamestown? We can argue until the cows come home (where were they, anyway, and what were they up to? Something to do with bovine-human hybridization?) about which of these works got the ball rolling, but one observation is inescapable: They were all written narratives.

Me, I’d argue that the first example of science fiction wasn’t any of these estimable artifices, and that it wasn’t a written narrative either. Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A: The Birds.

Not the Hitchcock movie, though that certainly has its place in science fiction lore as well. This is the comedy by Aristophanes, first performed at a festival in Dionysia in 414 B.C. (or so I’ve heard; I wasn’t present at the time, contrary to what some of you may be wondering). The Birds is about two Athenian citizens, Pisthetaerus and Euelpidies, who encourage the birds of the world to built an ideal society, which the Athenians call Cloudcuckooland. Groundbound humans are so impressed with the place that they forget to sacrifice to the Olympian gods, who visit Cloudcuckooland to protest. SPOILER ALERT: The Olympians fail and the bird society prevails.

The word “utopia” wouldn’t exist for a couple of millennia, but that’s exactly what Cloudcuckooland was. It asked the essential “What if?” question–in this case, “What if we built a society from scratch?” And that’s what made it science fiction, as much so as Asimov’s Foundation or Blish’s Cities in Flight.

George Clooney as Pisthetaerus? Anthony Hopkins as Zeus (not such a stretch now that he’s played Odin)? John Malkovich as Prometheus, who tries to hide himself under a parasol at one point in the play? Okay, not likely. But The Birds unequivocally holds a historical place on the science fiction mantelpiece. And if you’re Aristophanes, that’s something (wait for it) worth crowing about.

Experience has taught me that I shouldn’t expect a whole lot from adaptations across media. In fact, I’ve managed to reach a sort of Zen acceptance of adaptations. I have delved the secret which makes the good cross-genre adaptations a pleasure and the bad ones irrelevant.

Also, let’s not forget that I came of age at the dawn of the cross-platformization of brands. Mine was the mid-1960s generation at the peak of Saturday morning animated spokesbeings, when Bugs Bunny not only starred in his own animated series but was also used to pitch the cereal sponsoring the show and was featured on the cereal packaging as well. My awareness of science fiction comes from old TV shows, most notably The Adventures of Superman, to which I was introduced first through the syndication of the 1940s Fleischer Studios cartoons and the comic book, and The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone. So early on I was more or less aware that a character could exist simultaneously in a variety of iterations. My immersion into comic books solidified that awareness as I saw that not only didn’t every writer treat characters consistently from one title to another, but once they got into the hands of people outside the comic industry, all bets were off. Any resemblance to the character as portrayed in the comic book source material is purely coincidental! The 1960s Batman, for example.

That being said, and with the recognition that it’s necessary to make changes to a property or story for the transition from prose to moving pictures, there have been a few successful attempts. A favorite book that became a favorite movie is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972. Vonnegut’s story of a man unstuck in time was adopted by the anti-war movement as an absurdist analogy to the growing resistance by Americans to the war in Viet Nam, and Hill’s deliberately paced adaptation captures the peace of Billy Pilgrim’s befuddled acceptance of his existence. Its success comes not so much from how closely it adheres to the book–I don’t watch a film with a checklist to gauge its fidelity–but how close it adheres to the intent of the book. I mean, no filmmaker could possibly film every page of Moby Dick, but director John Huston and screenwriter Ray Bradbury sure did find a way to boil the essence of Melville’s 600+ page novel down into a faithful two-hour thriller.

A more recent example of a film faithfully capturing the intent of its source novel is John Carter. Yes. John Carter. The 21^st century successor to Heaven’s Gate as biggest Hollywood mega-budget bust. I haven’t read A Princess of Mars in forty years so I’m sure some purist can tell me why I’m wrong, but Andrew Stanton’s 2012 John Carter seemed to strike all the proper chords I remembered from the books (don’t asked me why this great film tanked; I can only blame it on marketing). A lot of the current movies based on Marvel Comics properties have also found the right chord, tapping into the sense of wonder and epic excitement that made the comic books themselves work.

My two favorite science fiction novels, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, have never made it to the big screen. Maybe if someone did attempt to do it, I would be as unforgiving as the old, original Star Trek fan is to the J.J. Abrams remakes, but I hope I fall back on the secret that allows me to shrug off objectionable adaptations

No matter how good, no matter how bad, the original source novel or TV show or movie is still right there, on your self, waiting to be read or watched again.