Dinner & a Broadway show as a Christmas gift — a good way to feel like a tourist in your own city. Yet there are natives to be found. At dinner we had to push past a party for a retiring NYPD lieutenant, the crowd already quite raucous by 5:30pm, guns and radios on every hip. The Theater District beat can be a hard one.

The show was Fela, and other than the occasional, uncomfortable disconnect between content (oppression, torture) and context (Broadway), it had a lot to offer. The second act especially thrilling, and at times more innervating spectacle than Avatar. Speaking of which, the best quick summary of the movie I’ve seen comes from Caleb Crain, whoseDon’t Play With That Or You’ll Go Blind aptly sums up the rather rotten core of the film.

Some might protest: But what about Avatar’s anti-imperialism and anti-corporate attitudinizing? They’re red herrings, in my opinion, planted by Cameron with the cynical intention of distracting the viewer from the movie’s more serious ideological work: convincing you to love your simulation—convincing you to surrender your queasiness. The audacity of Cameron’s movie is to make believe that the artificial world of computer-generated graphics offers a truer realm of nature than our own.

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Something to consider in light of Avatar, and of Crain’s critique: Mundane science fiction, which posits that the standard tropes of science fiction, interstellar travel chiefly among them, are reflective of an adolescent willing-away of actual Earthly problems in favor of solutions-through-avoidance. The earth may be dying, but there’s always other planets!

Mundane science fiction is almost insistently reliant on contemporary science as a framework for science fiction (an upcoming anthology pairs mundane sf stories with commentary from Manchester University researchers, in an attempt to ground each story in scientifically realistic contexts). But what’s the trade off? Do we lose the allegorical potential in sf, in the figure of the alien, that perfect stand-in for the other?