Dead Tree Alert: What's Scary About Fringe

My piece in this week's TIME looks at Fringe, several episodes into its run. It's not so much a review—I've been back and forth on that here on the blog—as it is about how its brand of science fiction, like sci-fi of the past, speaks to today's particular fears:

Show me a human fear, and i'll show you a monster. Our ancestors populated dark forests with dragons and uncharted seas with krakens. Sci-fi transmuted commies and nukes into body snatchers and Godzilla. In the 1990s, The X-Files turned post-Vietnam paranoia into an elaborate government-alien conspiracy.

[snip]

With Fringe (from Lost's creator, J.J. Abrams), sci-fi has come full circle back to Frankenstein: we have gained too much power over life and made the body into a mere machine.

I had always thought the plural of "kraken" was "kraken," but the copy desk set me straight.