In a review of Dalek, I Love You, a memoir by Dr Who fan Nick Griffith that should be appearing sometime soon in Vector I wondered whether the book represented a Nick Hornby moment – a time when a boyish hobby/obsession (in Hornby’s case football, in Griffith’s case wobbly sceneried tv science fiction) stumbled out of the musty bedroom of secretive geeky pleasure and into the sunlit uplands of general acceptance.

It seems I was not alone in my speculations that we might be on the verge of a different era in the perception of science fiction by the public and by critics.

Television science fiction is going through a bit of a renaissance – BSG is as good a space-based sf tv sho as has ever been broadcast, Heroes is entertaining and smart, Lost – at least in it’s early incarnation – felt startlingly different, and given the different structure and smaller audience of modern television, Dr Who is probably as popular as it has ever been.

All four shows are excellent and although fans of others such as Star Trek or Buffy or X-Files or Twin Peaks might fairly argue that their shows were just as good, I do believe there is something significantly different between the current batch of programmes and those that have gone before. What distinguishes this current group of shows isn’t necessarily that they are better produced but that they deliberately seek to speak to those beyond the confines of the genre.

Shows like Star Trek might, in the past, have dealt with complex issues, but they did them through metaphor – half black/half white aliens, etc. –BSG doesn’t do that. BSG deals with modern political issues up-front, as issues in themselves. That’s astonishingly different and could only safely be done in American television dressed in sf’s motley.

Heroes has the teen appeal of Buffy (as well as the intense geek factor) that draws people into the genre through the attractiveness of its central characters. Lost has that same appeal, but added that Twin Peaks-ish weirdness that caught prime-time viewers off-guard.

And if new Dr Who, knowing, metro-sexual and high-velocity though it is, doesn’t always offer the viewer a great deal in terms of intellectual stimulus (not that Who ever did), it does offer something almost as precious – undiluted, wide-eyed, rictus-grin entertainment.

That isn’t to say that other sf shows haven’t reached beyond the haven’t reached beyond fandom’s boundaries before – Buffy, X-Files & Twin Peaks all had their mainstream appeal. What, I think, is unusual now is that we have a number of shows at their creative peak and with the ability to draw mainstream audiences all on the screen at once.

Niall Harrison (at Torque Control) argues that the shows of the 90s were every bit as good as this current crop. I disagree. I was never a big fan of shows like Farscape, the various shades of Trek and Babylon 5 that dominated tv sf in the 90s though I occasionally watched and enjoyed individual episodes of all of them. They could be fun, but they were what Russell T Davies has called “subscription-based programmes for a dedicated audience” and as such they were fundamentally limited.

There were good writers, clever production staff and some good actors on all those shows, but they were limited in their ambition – partly out of the limitations placed on them by the segmented marketing strategies of television at that time which narrowly confined them into boxes from which they could never emerge. And partially because everyone involved was afraid of offending the most conservative audience in television – sf fandom – the only audience in television willing to pay money to buy the show “bibles” of their favourite programme and then persecute anyone who might dare deviate from that sacred texts.

It is the difference between that inward focus and the outward-looking appeal of the new generation of shows that marks these new shows as significantly different from what has gone before. These earlier shows were good – sometimes very good – but, perhaps by design, perhaps accident, they were shows that created ghetto audiences.

Those sf shows that had appeal that reached beyond the fan event horizon – like Buffy, X-Files and Twin Peaks – came along too rarely to achieve a critical mass.

Then again, perhaps it is something in the zeitgeist – something to do with the post-millennial, post-modern, post(dare-I-say-it)9.11 world we live in that has prepared the public to engage the fantastic and the weird on their television screens in a way that (of course) they have in the cinema for decades. If this does mark the drift of sf out of the fan-based ghetto and into the mainstream it would only mark television catching up with cinema. Of the top 50 films listed in IMDB’s worldwide highest grossing movies, only seven are not to some degree sf or fantasy films. SF in the movies has never been a minority pursuit and producers have never felt trapped by their appeal

And behind BSG, Lost, Heroes and Dr Who has come a mass of other sfnal stuff of varying quality that aims beyond the genre to a mainstream audience. Both main terrestrial UK channels are willing to devote Saturday evening to sf dramas – ITV has Primeval, BBC Dr Who and now Jekyll, Spooks is sfnal in all but branding and Kudos (the producers) also created Life on Mars and are to bring us Outcast a prime time drama about the colonisation of an alien planet to UK TV. And there’s still Torchwood (ahem! fingers-crossed for season two).

And there’s no shortage of new and old imports (see earlier post) – some of which, this year, are going to do much more than plug holes in the schedules. Virgin Media’s new channel Virgin 1 will be virtually constructed around The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Star Trek repeats.

So, is this the moment sci-fi tv goes mainstream?

Well, one duff show could burst the bubble for everyone. And public moods can be fickle. But why not? There are enough talented writers out there, and enough producers and even critics with powerful inner nerds dying to be let loose.

And the one thing we have learned over the past 18 months is that there can be an mainstream audience for sf tv that goes looking for it..