Monday night bloggity blogs.

* Samuel Delany's "The Star Pit" as a radio show. Really good.

* More on the surprise Dollhouse renewal, including word that "Epitaph One" will likely be aired after all and an interview with Joss. Too bad about Terminator; Bill Simmon links to a Fox executive explaining the one had nothing to do with the other, except insofar as it did.

"[Sarah Connor] has completed its run," Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly confirmed at a press conference this morning. "I think it had a nice little run. It was a good show. It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]. We did see it tailing off a bit [in the ratings]. It had a nice creative core, but, ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that's it for [Sarah Connor]... We make no apologies. We gave it a lot of support and some consistent scheduling. We tried and thought it was time to move on."

* Benen and Yglesias explain how the right's schoolyard strategy on Pelosi and torture may be making a truth commission much more likely.

* Rick Perry has abandoned neosecessionism. Score one for the Northern aggressors.

* I was so outraged by the very idea of this I completely forgot to blog it: someone's written a Catcher in the Rye sequel and their name isn't J.D.

"Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York," said California. "It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He's still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he's disappointed in the goddamn world. He's older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn't have all the answers."

Bunch of phonies.

* Maureen Dowd plagiarizes Josh Marshall and everyone has a really good time with it.

* The New Yorker covers the sixth mass extinction event. Print edition only, because analysis of an ongoing mass extinction event isn't something you just give away for free. A few more links at Kottke.

* Kos and Yglesias on epically bad ideas to save newspapers.

Trek: boffo at the box office.

Quotes to squirrel away somewhere, Michael Chabon edition:

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

and

“All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.”

Via the Valve.

A quick comparison: In 1982, the year’s major sci-fi releases included Blade Runner, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Thing and Tron. In 2007, we saw Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Invasion, Resident Evil: Extinction, Spider-Man 3 and Transformers.

Popular Mechanics takes on the Bronze Age of sci-fi cinema.

As movie studios sift through their own intellectual-property junkyards, no one seems to be making—or funding—the next Blade Runner or Alien. The path of least resistance is the remake, the sequel or the comic-book movie, with its lack of scientific background, its inherent implausibility and its weird cocktail of adolescent nostalgia.