Better than a kick in the knickers with a winklepicker

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Liza Tarbuck Ate My Fudge.

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How do I feel about Human Cloning? Why, I'm beside myself!

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Anything citing Destiny as a reason for anything happening.

Especially when something bad's happened which is in fact something that the Destiny-citer could have halted or avoided but were too crap to do so. Attributing some sort of celestial predestiny to your own balls-up - beyond bollocks. Even generally, claiming that something was 'destiny' is utterly wet, half-baked pseudo-Spiritualism. If somebody is Religious and claims that something happening was the doing of the God of their choice, well as an Atheist I believe they're wrong, but at least they're consitent, their belief in an outside force shaping events is part of a larger set of beliefs that great minds have pondered over for years, but namby-pamby 'Oooh, it was just meant to be' thinking really annoys me. There is cause and effect. That's it. I didn't meet Hubs because it was pre-ordained - due to a long string of circumstances, I found myself at University at the same time with someone who I found attractive, who felt the same about me and with whom I shared many common interests & a sense of humour. Everything else was down to how we reacted to one another. If we'd never met, both he and I may well have found other Loves of our Lives - we weren't hand-picked for each other by some faceless love-god.

There was a buzz on Twitter a few months ago about a poor woman who'd missed the AirFrance plane that crashed, who was killed in a car crash a few weeks later. So many idiots claiming this proves the existance of their vague, Hollywood-fed concept of Destiny and that death can't be cheated. It made me want to reach through the internet and slap them all. Final Destination is a fictional franchise. Lost - fictional, again. RomComs heavily reliant on a concept of Destiny, drawing the lovers together - again, fiction. Destiny is a good narrative device, but it's about as real as expecting a Sad Trombone to play magically from nowhere every time you tell a rotten joke. Maybe some people watch too many films. Maybe some people hate the idea of a chaotic universe so much that they have to rely on the idea that destiny stands between them and the void, or absolves them of the culpability of free will. But it's the worst kind of bollocks and it infuriates me.

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Ah. Now, I'm aware a lot of my FList will be expecting me to say 'Trek', but it ain't. TNG is the Space-set SciFi that I find the most fic-able due to its fairly open-to-possibilities nature, its having a wealth of fun characters and a pretty straightforward narrative style. I'm a big fan of TNG, but it still isn't my *favourite*, because there's a lot of it and some of it - whether in terms of writing, directing, characterisation, production and so on and so on - is, in my opinion, kinda ropey. I'm looking mainly at the bookends here - the first couple of series and the last couple of films - but, like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead; when TNG is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid. Well... not HORRID horrid - there's still lulz to be had along the way, but you get my drift.

Old Star Wars is awesome, but gets let down by Lucas' inability to let a good thing just be. Plus, I didn't grow up with Star Wars, so I don't feel the same emotional attachment to it that I do to TNG, say. BSG is similarly fab, but has gone a bit weird and unfocussed towards the end (still haven't seen the last half a series yet). When we believed that the Cylons Had A Plan instead of bickering amongst themselves and shagging lots of humans it was better. Aliens is a brilliant movie, and Alien a very good movie, but again, the franchise is seriously let down by its later installments.

Two that aren't up on the Writer's Block list but should be are Red Dwarf and H2G2 - and, now, I did grow up with bother of those. I had the original radio series of H2G2 on cassette and listened to them so often I could pretty much quote the episodes line by line if I wanted to. Very witty, with a combination of the surreal and the mundane that has spilled over into my own writing style ever since. And if Red Dwarf had ended with S5, I'd say that that was definitely my favourite. The first two series of that show have an empty loneliness about them that you can practically taste. It is, essentially, Porridge In Space. Then the middle series brought in more of a madcap SciFi element which managed to be very funny and very innovative, on a fairly small budget. Unfortunately, the BBC did what it always does when it finds a successful sitcom on its hands, which is to carry on throwing more and more money at it, tempting back actors who are too old and writers struggling for new ideas to continue with a show for several series after it should have died.

This leaves Futurama and Firefly/Serenity out of my pool of favourite Space-set shows/movies, and I honestly don't think I could pick between them. Both shows hit the ground really running - comparing how polished Futurama's first few episodes are with the first series of The Simpsons (compared with Simpsons series 6 or 7, say, when it was really in its stride), for example, really shows a massive difference - and Firefly/Serenity has to establish its exposition twice - once for the pilot episode and once for the movie, and does so very differently, but very effectively both times. Futurama has a bit more dead wood than Firefly, but then Firefly never had chance to go off the boil. Both are very funny, very exciting and have a cast of characters who I care deeply about - who manage to be realistic and otherworldly/superhuman at the same time. They both have warm, flawed, unconventional female characters, which can be a bit of a rarity in the still male-orientated SciFi genre. Plus - I prefer their ships. Yeah. You read right - I'd rather fly the Planet Express Ship or Serenity over the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon any day. They're dinkier, and you get the feeling that you'd actually be able to feel yourself flying them, rather than pushing a few buttons and setting the ship on cruise control. It's the same reason that I prefer driving little cars. You can't feel the road in a big car. The logic of that continues that a little ship would be easier to park. And until you can convince me that even the best Captain would be able to reverse the Enterprise D into a bay between two badly parked Chelsea Tractors, I shall remain unswayed.