Mork, the slapstick alien played by the late, great Robin Williams in the ’70s sitcom Mork & Mindy, was a fan of exclaiming “Shazbot!” The word was never translated literally, but the character might not have been seen as so endearingly childlike if we knew he was shouting “Fucking hell!” in Orkan. The show also wouldn’t have been on at tea-time. Sci-fi has always been a way of holding up a mirror to the world. Ursula Le Guin famously said that science fiction isn’t about the future but the present, and a huge amount of people have been introduced to satire and anti-authoritarian ideas through various tin-foil-covered allegories. From the earliest days of pulp fiction to the mega-franchises of today, powerful and important concepts have been subtly taug...