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Ion Sci-Fi will be a weekly video stream of sci-fi entertainment and space science and technology news in parallel with regular blog posts throughout the week.

Blogposts will start first and video streams will commence soon.

We'll be looking at and discussing sci-fi through an Australian lens. That doesn’t mean there will be kangaroos and koalas everywhere, but when we report release dates and which network / service shows will be on, those will be Australian. When we can we'll provide the same info for our friends overseas.

Our location can also impact our access to and experience of sci-fi.

Historically many sci-fi TV shows didn't make it onto our networks. Even when they did, we didn't always get a full run. Channel Ten only aired the first season of the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Channel Seven the first two seasons of Stargate Atlantis. Then years of repeats of Atlantis seasons 1 and 2 until pay-TV channel SciFi (now SyFy) brought us seasons 3-5.

The Next Generation era Star Trek series did manage to get full runs here but catching them was tricky. TNG started airing during prime time but was soon relegated to a very late night slot. Kind of. Its start time changed from week to week, sometimes also the day it aired on, and it could start over an hour later than advertised. Or occasionally earlier than advertised. Even with a standard three hour tape you couldn't set a recorder to the advertised time plus an hour either side and be certain you'd get the whole episode. 

Games are also sometimes affected. Endgame content in the online RPG Wildstar was physically unplayable here because of higher latency. Its developers admitted that before it was released. That content required players to move out of lethal attack telegraphs on the ground so quickly that Australian players wouldn't even see the telegraphs until after they'd died. 

Sci-Fi conventions happen here but they're newer for us and we do them a bit differently. Our comic con is not quite ten years old and travels to multiple state capitals each year. Because Australia is huge.

Streaming services - assuming you subscribe to them - have drastically changed the TV scene for us. We now have essentially the same access to content as everywhere else. Nice. But even that's a different experience for us. Post Enterprise and the Stargates going off air, we had very little televised sci-fi. Doctor Who and an occasional new show on pay-TV SyFy which would be lucky to get more than one season before being cancelled, leaving viewers with an unresolved ending. Now we have so much sci-fi available to us that one could watch that almost exclusively.

Those are just some examples of how sci-fi can look different through the Australian lens.

Welcome to the site and channel. We look forward to keeping you all informed about a genre we love and would encourage everyone to register with the site so we can hear from you. Perhaps you have some other examples of how sci-fi can look different from down under which you'd like to share in the comments.