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This week, we did some strange things, like count how many science fiction stories have appeared in The New Yorker over the past few decades (surprise: Tina Brown's era saw the most scifi). You'll discover that the venerable magazine has never published William Gibson, though it did publish two parodies of his work. We listed the best swear words from scifi pop culture, told you about five Bollywood scifi movies you should know, enumerated the five ways 9/11 changed science fiction (with over a dozen examples), speculated about how the Justice League of America movie could be saved. Then we shocked you by claiming that Greatest American Hero might become a movie.
You weighed in on two important debates: Why is Land of the Lost so much cooler than Lost? And could you cut Superman with a light saber? Just to make your lives easier, we also determined once and for all who the tallest giant monster really is.
We showed you some of the very best dystopian fetish comics (NSFW), and we asked you to identify what's wrong with this Philip K. Dick book cover from the 1970s. You got to gawk at plans for a 2-mile high eco-tower that would house 1 million people, and check out pictures of St. Petersburg's market center, the first part of the city to be placed under a glass ceiling, and perhaps the first stage in making the whole of St. Petersburg a domed city.
Madness was a big theme this week: we told you everything you need to know about the madness of Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current electricity and a death ray, and we considered the way Cthulhu can drive people mad in a clip from the superlative film Call of Cthulhu. And finally, we tried to drive you mad with this clip of the scariest special effect ever created (NSFW).
We reviewed the final Y the Last Man comic book, told you about three science fiction novels recommended by free software guru Richard Stallman, and rhapsodized about The Descent, a cheesy but thought-provoking novel about how the military conquers an elusive human sub-species that has populated tunnels deep beneath the ocean. You also got to hear about Marc Guggenheim's new comic, which is about a post-post-apocalypse after the aliens leave Earth.
In science, we explained that chameleons change color to communicate, not camouflage. We speculated about how new breakthroughs in autism research would lead to pills that can make you temporarily autistic, and pills that can cure autism. We also talked about how neuroscience explains the mechanism that makes you feel pleasure when you hurt yourself.
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