This has been the dream of science-fiction fans and science-fiction authors since the days of "Clone Of My Own" (which is usually attributed to Isaac Asimov, but who knows if it's actually by him?) "Clone Of My Own" goes:

Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.

Clone, clone of my own,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.

There are about 29 versus more, but you get the idea. Actually, after reading authors like John Varley and Ursula K. Le Guin, the whole idea of the "opposite" sex has been thrown into question — surely, once we can all reconfigure our bodies at will, eventually we'll have some sort of sex tesseract.

But for now, here are the ways that science fiction offers, for us to meet our opposite-sex duplicates (and in some cases, have sex with them):

1) Cloning.

House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds:

Abigail Gentian, a wealthy woman, decides to explore the vastness of the stars — she she has herself cloned a number of times, and some of the clones are male while others are female. They all share Abigail's memories, and Abigail herself joins them without knowing which of them is the "real" her. And these "shatterlings" have sex — a lot. Especially in the novella Thousandth Night, there are tons of orgies in which all of the clones get together, making it a certainty that the "real" Abigail has been with her clones.

Time Enough For Love by Robert A. Heinlein:

Lazarus Long is the world's oldest human, and he decides not to undergo rejuvenation therapy, thus sentencing himself to death. His descendants convince him to keep on living, but he'll only do it if he gets to have a new experience — so two of his descendants become impregnated with opposite-sex clones of Lazarus. And after the opposite-sex clones of Lazarus are born, Lazarus raises them as his own daughters... and then has sex with them, of course.

"Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin:

This Nebula-nominated novelette, first published in Playboy, features a set of clones of a man named John Chow who died in a car accident, and some of them are female:

"All chips off the old block," Martin said valiantly. "But how can . . . some of you be women . . .?"

Beth took over: "It's easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It's trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually."

Sadly, nine out of ten clones are killed, forcing the remaining clone to deal with unaccustomed solitude.

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley:

The character Tweed has clones who are male and female clones of the same individual, called Vaffa or sometimes Hygeia. They're super-strong, super-big and lethal.

NYX and various other X-Men comics:

X-23, a female clone of Wolverine, first appeared in the X-Men: Evolution animated series, but then made the leap to comics, just like Harley Quinn. Despite looking kind of silly, she's manage to stick around long enough to get her own miniseries and have her backstory explained. I don't think she and Logan ever hooked up, but they have fought, which is almost the same thing when you come down to it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:

As Zaphod Beeblebrox explains, the girl Lintilla "has now been cloned over five-hundred-and-seventy-eight-thousand-million times - and has thus created a problem in some quarters." All of the Lintilla clones are female — but the anti-clones, sent to get rid of the infestation of female clones, are male versions of Lintilla called Allitnil. When a Lintilla and an Allitnil come together, he gets the Lintilla to "agree to cease to be" — but Arthur Dent takes a liking to one of the Lintillas, and kills her particular Allitnil.

Hunted by James Alan Gardner:

Edward York is an illegal clone of one of the Admirals on the High Council, and due to genetic problems he's a bit stupid. But a female clone of the Admiral, named Samantha, turns out super-smart and resourceful. Together, Edward and Samantha travel, as brother and sister, travel to the planet Troyen to try and negotiate a peace between two alien species, the Mandasars and the Fasskisters.

Kyle XY:

Kyle and his fellow vat-baby Jessi aren't strictly speaking clones, because I think they had different genetic stock — as far as I can remember, Kyle came from Adam and Jessi came from Sarah. But they do come from the same vat, and they resulted from the same super-baby program. So they could be considered akin to clones, sort of. Worth mentioning, anyway.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Clone Saga:

Can't believe I forgot this one, since I have the trades at home. In the Ultimate version of the Clone Saga, they clone Peter Parker several times... including a female version called Jessica Drew. And Jessica has all of Peter's memories — S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to erase Jessica's memories and set her up with a new identity, but she escapes and takes on the identity of Spider-Woman. Thanks, kwschuttler!

2) Alternate universes

Parallellities by Alan Dean Foster:

Max, the main character of this novel travels through the multiverse, and finally meets an alternate female version of himself — and has sex with her. Later, he manages to find an entire planet populated by copies of himself. As the back cover copy explains:

Now Max was lost in a virtual sea of collateral worlds, confronting man-eating aliens, dinosaurs, talking frogs, dead Maxes, girl Maxes, old Maxes, even ghost Maxes. His only chance to escape the space-time continuum was to find Boles and hope the loony genius could rescue him. But how could he be sure which world was real, which Max was Max, and which Boles was the Boles who could stop the madness—or trap Max in the wrong world forever. . . ?

Red Dwarf, "Parallel Universe":

Our gang finds a device that's supposed to transport them home to Earth instantly — but instead it zaps them into an alternate universe. There, they meet alternate versions of themselves, including female versions of Lister and Rimmer (and Cat's counterpart is a Dog.) Rimmer has to fight off his female counterpart's sexual advances, while Lister actually does wind up in bed with his female version, Deb. And because in this alternate universe, it's the men who get pregnant, Lister winds up carrying his alternate self's baby.

Sliders:

Thanks to Xicer for pointing out this one: in the episode "Double Cross," Quinn meets an evil female duplicate of himself from (of course) another universe, and almost makes out with her:

Transition by Iain Banks:

This dimension-jumping novel mentions that it's quite common to enter the body of your alternate-universe self and find that the alternate self is the opposite sex. This is a known syndrome, which causes some discomfort or confusion among the universe-hoppers whom it happens to.

3) Time travel

"All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein:

This story features a young man who's tricked into impregnating his younger, female self — because it turns out he had a futuristic sex change at some point, which the reader doesn't realize at first. And then it turns out that he's actually the child of that union, meaning that he's his own mother and father — the mother of all time paradoxes, in other words.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold:

Daniel Eakins travels backwards and forwards in time many times, meeting himself and having sex with himself — over and over and over. But after a ton of trips, he actually meets an alternate-universe version of himself who was born female, and they shack up together at the beginning of time. It goes great for a while, until they get fed up with each other, and then Daniel's time-traveling female counterpart manages to erase herself completely from Daniel's timeline, so Daniel can never find her again.

Needless to say, this post would not have been nearly as fascinating without TVTropes.org, the fountain of all greatness. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

1: Pump the atmosphere full of nanomachines to get "smart weather."

In Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, people seed the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tons of tiny floating machines, "invisible to the eye, harmless to people." They controlled the weather and fixed the climate by reflecting radiation here or absorbing it there. The machines made clouds appear and disappear and controlled ocean currents. And it works — for a while. The climate starts returning to pre-2050 conditions. But then the nanomachines stop obeying orders, and even create an obscene symbol off the Bay Of Biscay "that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image." The scientists try to release even smarter nanomachines to deal with the first batch of nanomachines and — well, you can guess how well that turns out.

2: A ring of ice.

In the Stanislaw Lem novel Fiasco, scientists launch an artificial ring of ice into the atmosphere of the planet Quinta to reduce temperatures so the oceans will recede and more land mass will be available. The mass of the ice ring is equal to around 1 percent of the oceans' volume. The protagonists speculate that the ring was created by causing lightning in the upper atmosphere to create a kind of ice rail-gun that could shoot the ice up into orbit. This being a Stanislaw Lem novel, the whole thing falls apart due to political wrangling before it can be completed, so huge chunks of ice rain down onto the planet's equator in a never-ending torrent.

3: Use special bacteria.

In the story "Noah's Ark" by Narendra Desirazu, we find bacteria on Mars, with bizarre properties — it hibernates just below the freezing point of water, but when the water melts, the bacteria goes into frantic activity to get the water to refreeze. So scientists struggle with the effort to introduce the bacteria only to the icecaps and other areas where they want to reverse melting — without letting it get into, say, our oceans and stuff. Luckily, there's a happy but "ambivalent" ending.

4: Build a giant sunshade around the Earth.

We build huge space elevators and a massive sunshade in The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, causing the dawn light to look all trippy:

The dawn sky glowed innumerable shades of green, from lemon to duck-egg to almost blue, like the background colour in a Hindu painting, and turned slowly to a pure deep blue over ten minutes or more as he watched. He dozed again.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise includes a ring of satellites and space stations linked together around a planet's equator by cables and other connectors, which becomes an unbroken wheel of tremendous stability — which presumably can reflect a lot of sunlight. And in Clarke's Childhood's End, the Overlords are able to use polarized fields to "make the sun go out" for a particular region of South Africa, to punish the residents for depriving the white minority of civil rights. And in Venus Of Dreams by Pamela Sargent, colonists cool the planet Venus by using a giant Parasol to shade the planet, plus bombarding the planet with ice asteroids.

5: Take Earth further away from the sun.

The Futurama episode "Crimes Of The Hot" is like a smorgasbord of global-warming solutions. We learn that humans stopped global warming in the 21st century by bombarding the oceans with ice from space. And now that the planet is heating up again, due to the emissions from unsafe robots, there are a few solutions, including a giant space mirror (which goes awry) and shutting down all the robots. But in the end, the easiest solution is to have all the robots emit their exhaust at once, sending the planet further away from the sun — and giving us an extra week in each year, which can be Robot Party Week!

And in the novel The Circle: A Science Fiction Thriller by Harold R. Watson, the High Rulers Of Earth decide to haul the planet away from the sun to put it into a deep freeze for one year. At the end of that time, they'll return Earth to its original orbit. As some of the planet's icy covering melts, it'll have the effect of restoring the ozone layer, and after about five years, enough vegetation will have grown to make the planet habitable again. Suuuure.

6: Hack The Human Genome

It's a radical solution, but it might be the only way. In the story "Dear Abbey" by Terry Bisson, a group of radical environmentalists come up with a plan:

Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe being the operative modifier. You can't call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one will even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for at least a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.

7: Restart the Gulf Stream

Kim Stanley Robinson is the champion of depicting environmental disasters and geo-hacking projects, and his environmental thrillers Forty Signs Of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below deal with the disastrous effects of global warming. Among other things, Fifty Degrees includes scientists trying to restart the stalled Gulf Stream. The ice caps melt completely, and in the winter, Washington, D.C. hits fifty degrees below. So an enormous fleet of ships ventures out to dump millions of tons of ice into the ocean in the hopes of rebooting the Gulf Stream. A fleet of 3,500 oil tankers is available to transport the salt, and five hundred million metric tons of salt is needed — about two years' worth of total world production.

8: Shut down all our technology

I'm still not entirely sure what happened at the end of last year's "remake" (quotation marks are necessary here) of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Keanu/Klaatu was going to unleash nanomachines to disassemble everything on Earth, because that would save the planet. You know that makes sense! And then he changed his mind and did some kind of EMP-ish thing that made all electricity go out and all technology stop working. So the human race was allowed to survive, but with no technology. Keanu is merciful! All hail Keanu!

9: Open a big hole.

Global warming? No problem! Just open a dimensional gateway and pump all the extra heat somewhere else. That's the scheme that a science whiz comes up with in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Brain Storm" (featuring Bill Nye the Science Guy, among other luminaries.) Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and the gathering of eminent scientists is in danger of freezing to death.


Also, in the Syfy movie Lost City Raiders, the world is flooded due to global warming. And the Catholic Church has the answer — an ancient hole in the ground, which will drain off all the excess water to... somewhere. But you need to find the secret hidden keys to open it. It all makes perfect sense!

10: Kill the aliens who are causing the problem in the first place.

But of course, you know deep down that global warming can't really be the result of our own completely harmless activities. There must be aliens behind it — probably evil dinosaur aliens. In the Syfy original TV movie, Heatstroke, it turns out that dinosaur people have been secretly working to pump out greenhouse gases to raise our planet's temperature and prepare the way for their invasion. But the U.S. government knows about this and sends a secret taskforce (why not a whole army? Budget constraints, I guess) to stop them. The aliens are operating on a tropical island, where an ex-swimsuit model just happens to be shooting a new calendar. It's like synergy! Oh, and there's also The Arrival directed by David Twohy, where Charlie Sheen discovers that weird double-jointed aliens are producing greenhouse gases to mess us up and transform our planet. Good thing it's Charlie Sheen, then.


Oh, and the Silurians in Doctor Who And The Silurians also have a similar idea about raising the planet's temperature, but they don't get very far with it.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. This post also would have been a lot harder to write without the never-ending awesomeness that is Technovelgy.com.

Even as more women are becoming astronauts and getting to pilot the space shuttle, science fiction has shown tons of women taking the helm. Here are some of the most awesome, in no particular order:

Lady Sharrow in Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks

We don't get to see combat specialist Sharrow doing that much piloting in this book — but when she does take the controls, she makes it count. The one sequence where she does some fancy flying is one of the best moments in the book.

Carolyn Fry from Pitch Black.

I don't know how I managed to forget her — I actually had her on my list, and had grabbed this cool pic of her in advance. She manages to bring a dead ship down in spite of incredible odds — and sure, she tries to jettison her passengers. But she's just being sensible, after all.

Sue Parsons from Virtuality

As with Sharrow, Sue Parsons spends most of her screen time doing other things — mostly, like all the other characters on this show, bickering and freaking out about virtual reality nightmares. But when she does actually get to handle the Starship Phaeton's controls — watch out. She does an incredibly complex series of maneuvers while giant bombs are going off in her wake. Makes all the drama totally worth it.

Jenna, from Blake's 7.

This smuggler is the best pilot around — there's no competition, except maybe that arrogant twerp Del Tarrant. Jenna manages to take the controls of the Liberator, the most super-advanced ship in space, and master them almost immediately. And she's able to take it on manual and do some fancy flying, on occasion.

Saint-Emxin from Battle Beyond The Stars.

She's a mean Valkyrie fighter pilot, who more than holds her own in the movie's crucial Star Wars-inspired firefights. Han Solo not only couldn't pull off her headgear, he also couldn't outfly her. (I almost included Padme Amidala in this list, since she pilots a ship in Attack Of The Clones — but could Amidala really hold her own against Saint-Exmin? I think not.)

Tak from Invader Zim.

The "hideous new girl" shows up hoping to do a better job of invading Earth than Zim, and she has the ability to hypnotize humans into doing her bidding — but she also pilots her own ship.

Faye from Cowboy Bebop

Faye is an awesome fighter pilot, and even held her own in a dogfight with Spike. Runner-up status also goes to space trucker V.T., aka Victoria Terpsichore.

Carol "Foe Hammer" Rawley in Halo.

She does some pretty nifty flying as the pilot of Pelican transport Echo 419 on the UNSC Pillar of Autumn. She specializes in doing lots of missions involving hostile insertions and rescues, making her stand out from the rest.

Ana Khouri in Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

This assassin joins the crew of the Nostalgia For Infinity, intent on killing one of the crewmembers, but then two different digital entities fight over control of her, and thus of the ship. Also a killer pilot is the ship's de facto captain, Illia Volyova.

Mary Raven from Ignition City.

This grounded space pilot journeys to Earth's last spaceport, Ignition City, to find out what happened to her dad, in this new comic by Warren Ellis and Gianluca Pagliarani. Space-jockey Mary Raven is determined to find out what happened to her dad, and she won't leave Ignition City until she gets some answers.

Lt. Shane Vansen from Space: Above And Beyond.

According to this site, she's "one of Earth's most celebrated pilots," piloting the SA-43 Hammerhead space fighter into battle.

Corp. Ferro in Aliens.

Okay, sure, she gets killed after speaking only a couple lines of dialogue. But she has cool sunglasses, and she manages to put the ship down through a lot of turbulence.

Carmen Ibanez in Starship Troopers.

Many of the badass pilots in this movie are women, and Carmen (Denise Richards) is the most memorable of them. She's a pilot in the SICON fleet, who pilots the drop ship, and even helps on the ground when things get rough.

Col. Wilma Deering in Buck Rogers In The 25th Century.

She doesn't just look good in a slinky jumpsuit, or boogieing next to Buck — Wilma's an ace fighter pilot in her own right, and a lot of episodes see her flying off solo to deal with the bikini-clad menace of the week.

Aeryn Sun in Farscape.

She's a formidable fighter generally, but she's also a former Peacekeeper pilot, and some of her best moments involve her taking the helm of a ship — like the season two finale, when Crichton is flying away with Scorpius' mind controlling him, and Aeryn chases after him in her own ship.

Yoninne Leg-Wot from The Witling by Vernor Vinge.

We don't actually get to see much of her piloting skills, since she and her companion Ajao Bjault get stranded on the planet full of telekinetic aliens early on. But she does turn out to be resourceful, and despite being unattractive by Earth standards, she helps win over the "witling" of the story's title, Prince Pelio.

River in Serenity.

Okay, so Serenity's real pilot is, and always will be, Wash. But you can tell, at the end of the movie, that River is gearing up to be a pretty great pilot in her own right. And in the series of movie sequels that unspool in my daydreams from time to time, she's piloting the ship all the time.

Manda in Burning The Ice by Laura J. Mixon.

Manda CarliPablo's stigmatized because she's the only colonist on a barren gas giant who's not a twin or triplet — her other clones died before they were "born" — but her isolation turns out to be a good thing, as she becomes the best pilot in the colony and explores the unexplored regions of this new world — discovering an alien race along the way.

Turanga Leela from Futurama.

Despite being captain, she's also always ready to take the helm of the Planet Express ship, and her lack of three-dimensional vision doesn't seem to interfere with her amazing piloting skills.

Jaina Solo from the Star Wars expanded universe.

The daughter of Han Solo and Princess Leia didn't just inherit her mom's Force powers — she also became a kick-ass pilot, like her dad. She flew the Millenium Falcon on a few occasions. When she got caught flying the Merry Miner, an unarmed mining ship, during the Yuuzhan Vong war, she managed to dodge the aliens' attacks until help arrived. And then she became one of the New Republic's most valued starfighter pilots.

Captain Beka Valentine from Andromeda.

Thanks to everyone who suggested adding her — Beka Valentine is, among other things, the Andromeda's first officer and pilot, taking advantage of her better-than-human reaction times and strength.

Tanni from Mutineer's Moon by David Weber

Here's the key sequence:

"And," MacMahan added gently, "Tanni will be your pilot."

"What?!"

"Tanni will be your pilot," MacMahan repeated mildly. "I'm speaking now as the commander of a military operation, and I don't have time to be diplomatic, so both of you just shut up and listen... we can't afford anything but our very best pilot behind those controls. You're good, Colin, and your reaction time is phenomenal even by Imperial standards, but good as you are, you have very little experience in an Imperial fighter.

Tanni, on the other hand, is a natural pilot and the youngest of our Imperials, with reaction time almost as good as yours but far, far more experience. The overall mission will be under your command, but she's your pilot and you're her electronics officer, or neither of you goes."

Kathryn Fairly in Space Camp.

A group of teenagers get to go aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis during a test-firing of its engines. But the mean android named Jinx decides to — what else — jinx them by making the space shuttle blast off for real. They're stuck in orbit, without enough oxygen to get home. And Kathryn (Lea Thompson), who was struggling with the "multi-axis trainer" that's required for shuttle pilots, manages to ace the real-life situation that simulator creates: a flat spin after the shuttle's reorbit burn. She brings that bird down safe and proves she's an awesome pilot.

Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica.

As I said before, these are in no particular order — but if they were, Starbuck would be #1 in any list. She's clearly the best pilot among Battlestar's flyboys and -girls. Adama always refers to her as his best pilot, and she pushes herself harder than anyone else. Kat may have tried to challenge Starbuck's impressive kill rate, but she never really had a hope.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Special thanks to Pete Gofton, Brian Williams, Erin Souza, Ira Wile, Jordan Hoffman, Austin Grossman, Ekaterina Sedia, and @soapboxx on Twitter.

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff (DAW)

In this urban fantasy, Allie Gale's grandma disappears, leaving behind a strange shop that sells magical supplies to the local witch population. When Allie takes it over, she's suddenly involved in a mysterious struggle within the Canadian magic community. If you ever wanted to speculate about the witch population of modern Toronto, this is your book.

Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central Publishing)

From the io9 review:

This is a novel of pure adventure, with a kick ass heroine who gets to fight, do magic, and get laid just like the swashbuckling heroes of old. It's a perfect beach read. And the best part is the Jacqueline Carey is extremely clever – don't let her fool you with all that romantic frippery. She manages to slip a lot of interesting, subversive messages into this swords-and-sorcery tale.

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

The women of a Victorian brothel are hired to cater to the needs of a party of businessmen holding an auction for a mysterious piece. They find themselves quickly involved in intrigue and espionage, in a story with flecks of steampunk and classic mystery. We reviewed it (along with a couple of other Baker books) here.

Wild Thyme, Green Magic, Jack Vance (Subterranean)

This career-spanning collection of stories from Jack Vance includes a wide variety of genres, including a few science fiction stories about other worlds. Vance's ability to build worlds has been praised by Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg.

Fragment, Warren Fahy (Delacorte)

A reality show crew on a ship stumble on an island ecosystem inhabited by parallel-evolved monsters. From the io9 review:

If you like monsters and mad science - and who doesn't? - this is the perfect book to take on your vacation or on that long plane ride to a remote island. However, if you're looking for characters who move outside of two dimensions, you might want to give this one a pass.

The Year's Best Science Fiction 26, edited by Gardner Dozois (Griffin)

I'm a sucker for well-complied science fiction anthologies, and this one appears to be no exception. Including 30 stories from masters and new writers alike, this collection also has an extended list of honorable mentions. It looks like a pretty hefty resource for the short story geek.

Green, Jay Lake (Tor)

A fantasy / steampunky tale of international espionage and mythology. From the io9 review:

At times unsettling but always compelling, Green abounds with intrigue and adventure. A feminist fable lovingly written with a father's hope and concern for his daughter's future, Green is the story of a strong-willed young woman trying to find her place in a world that would rather ignore her. Green will not be ignored.

A Monster's Notes, Laurie Sheck (Knopf)

This novel turns inside out one of the oldest science fiction stories. The story imagines Frankenstein's monster not as Mary Shelley's creation, but as her companion, consoling her in a time of sorrow. He discusses with her all of the facets of humanity, trying to understand human connection in a world where he doesn't belong. It's a tale of speculative alternate history, couched in a story of compassion and companionship.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles WIlson (Tor)

A speculative future of post-oil America. From the io9 review:

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

Haze, L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Tor)

An agent of the now-Chinese-run Earth investigates a planet surrounded by a haze of nano-satellites. He finds an eerily familiar world of superior technology.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Ace)

This book came out a little while back in the rest of the world, but this month marks its publication in the United States. It's a space opera of post-humanity and colonization, with the added twist of relativistic travel. As a result, this novel chronicles a mystery distorted by time. It's certainly nice to see a space epic that explores some of the complexity of actual interstellar travel. We reviewed it here.

The Strain, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (William Morrow)

Master of Horror Guillermo del Toro brings vampires back from their whiney post-Buffy image. From the io9 review:

The Strain is a breakneck thrill ride chronicling only the first four days of the vampire plague that may destroy civilization. The cinematic quality really comes though, making the book feel more like a action blockbuster than a thought-provoking horror novel.

It's not quite as massive as it sounds at first — that £1 million is for ten books over the next ten years, so it's only £100,000 per book. But that's still quite a sweet advance, and as Reynolds himself points out, the deal "gives me a huge amount of security for the next ten years." It does mean he has to put out a book a year, but Reynolds, who quit his job as a scientist with the European Space Agency to write full-time starting in 2004, says he's proved over the past decade that he can meet deadlines. He's already written eight books during that time, a few of them while he was still at the ESA.

Says his editor Jo Fletcher at Gollancz:

We don't sling that sort of money around lightly. Al's got big ideas for the future and we wanted to make that happen, but it's also a signal to the publishing industry that we're taking him seriously, and that they need to... He is very good at characterisation, he is very good at complex plots and he's very good at making you feel the vastness out there. He's got the whole package.

The big book deal does sort of confirm Reynolds' status as one of the giants of the new British space opera. And it's especially interesting because I don't get the sense that he's quite as big a name in the U.S. as he is in the U.K. Reynolds' most recent book, the Clarke Award-nominated House Of Suns, only just came out in the U.S. months after its debut in England.

Top image is Chris Moore's cover art for Reynolds' next novel, Terminal World.
[Guardian]

She writes:

In some sense it reminds me of Welsh scifi supremo Alastair Reynolds' futuristic vision of one faction of the human race. In his Revelation Space universe, a branch of humanity has evolved with democratic anarchy at the core of its political system, embedded into daily life via a neural implant which constantly polls the user's opinion on aspects of life in the Demarchy. Demarchists are so used to this prompting that they give it as much active attention as you or I might pay to ambient noise - and yet they're constantly contributing to the relatively smooth running of their world.

Okay, so, we're a ways away from the neural implants as a communications channel, but the principle that members of a community should be able to vote on changes that will fundamentally alter the dynamics of said community is not a novel one. Nor is it unheard of in the modern world to involve the user community in a process of discussion and collaboration that feeds back into the iterative development of a product or in the case of government, a body of laws. I just wonder when companies like Twitter or Facebook will catch the wake up needed for them to get in on this action too.

House Of Suns is one of those novels that assumes a shape after you're done reading it. All of the elements that seemed purely random fall into place, and you realize quite what an intricate design you've been looking at all this time. During the story, however, you're frequently left wondering if Reynolds was throwing darts at an idea-board. This novel has everything: artificial intelligences that become sentient, post-humans, questions of faster-than-light travel and causality, cloning, virtual worlds, a murder mystery and a group of nigh-immortal people dealing with the burden of history in a more personal way than most of us ever do.

It's probably one of those novels that's more satisfying to re-read than to read, actually. A lot of the cool elements will seem a lot more satisfying the second time around, and when you can see the whole picture, you'll appreciate the flow of the story more. The first time around, though, the novel feels like an endless succession of awesome ideas and neat moments. It probably doesn't help that it has the kind of post-human characters who are common in the new space opera: all of the main characters in the book are six million years old, and have seen galactic civilizations rise and fall, over and over.

In House of Suns, it's six million years in the future, and humans have colonized the entire galaxy. Our heroes are "shatterlings," or a set of clones of a woman named Abigail Gentian, who lived six million years ago. They create "stardams," or artificial spheres around suns that are in danger of going nova, for a living. And there are other sets of "shatterlings," other groups of clones of wealthy people who lived six million years ago. Thanks to travel at relativistic speeds, and various methods of slowing down people's bodily functions, the main characters have only lived through a fraction of those six million years. (They're called "shatterlings" because in some sense, they divide up the identity of their progenitor amongst them.)

Our two main characters are Campion and Purslane, two clones of Abigail Gentian, who are committing a "shatterling" taboo by carrying on a sexual/romantic relationship. Their forbidden love for each other is one of the two relatable things in the book, and it drives a lot of the story forward in the second half. The other major emotional strand in the book is their friendship with Hesperus, a "machine intelligence," or robot, who nearly dies to save them from a horrific massacre.

That massacre turns out to be tied to a crime that the "shatterlings" are complicit in, but have forgotten, millions of years ago. And that historical atrocity, which is both ancient and personal, turns out to be connected to a whole host of other secrets about the nature of the galaxy and our place in the universe. Meanwhile, we learn about another crime, which the clones' progenitor, Abigail Gentian, committed in her youth, inside a virtual world called Palatial. In a universe where we're reminded, over and over, that "nascent" societies rise up out of nothing, only to die off again in a scant half-million years, how much do we owe to the ghosts of the intelligences we've wronged?

In a real sense, House Of Suns is about history, and the fragility of memory. The shatterlings have lived almost as long as humans have had language, but what they've forgotten about the galaxy — and what they never knew — would fill volumes. And it turns out almost everything they believed about themselves, as dispassionate observers, aloof from the barbarism of history, is false. (I'm trying to avoid major spoilers here.)

Another major theme in the book is the prejudices of organic life forms against artificial intelligences. Early on, we meet an aquatic creature named Doctor Meninx, who is a Disavower, an organic who hates A.I.s and doesn't believe they have souls. He's quick to assume the worst of any machine intelligence, even though the main A.I. character in the story, Hesperus, turns out to be the most sympathetic and altruistic character. Of course, later on we meet machines who don't have humans' best interests at heart, but by then we've discovered there's a lot more to the picture than we'd realized.

Besides the somewhat unrelatable characters — even Campion and Purslane, with their star-spanning love, feel a bit empty most of the time — the novel's other big problem is its structure. Reynolds chooses a structure that few novelists could pull off. The novel is divided into eight "books," and each book starts with a first-person section from the point of view of Abigail Gentian, who becomes the progenitor of most of the clones we meet in the book. (Her "shatterlings" are referred to as "Line Gentian.") And then within each book, we alternate chapters from Campion and Purslane's point of view. (This isn't explained, you just have to sort of pick it up.) So the novel has three first-person narrators, two of whom are clones of the third. For understandable reasons, all three narrators have the same narrative voice, and share the same values and attitudes. In other words, the narrative trick is just a way for Reynolds to get across more information, without dipping into third-person narration. But it's a distracting structure, confusing at times and a bit annoying at others.

And the other huge structural problem is that the novel's story actually starts on page 96 or thereabouts. Nearly the first hundred pages are just backstory, introducing us to our main characters and giving us some exposition we'll need later on. Nothing of any real consequence happens in the first 100 pages, other than that Campion and Purslane meet Hesperus.

I found the novel slow going until around page 100, and then it suddenly became a compulsive read that I found myself staying up until three A.M. reading. (In fact, as I write this, I'm a bit sleep-deprived thanks to the crackling narrative intensity of House Of Suns. It really does get amazingly good, and you're kept wondering what happens next. The murder mystery stuff is fun while it lasts, and the space battles are exciting as all get-out.) At the same time, the last chapters of the novel contain massive amounts of infodump, as characters explain the plot to each other.

The novel brims with ideas, many of which deserve their own book. There are the Priors, the mysterious ancient intelligences who left behind a few clues to their super-advanced civilization. There's the Absence, a black void that seems to have swallowed the Andromeda Galaxy. There's the Golden Hour, a kind of ring around a single sun containing a number of worlds that are never more than an hour's communication apart at sub-light speeds. There's Palatial, the virtiual-reality world where young Abigail Gentian spends her time, which seems to become sentient.

I found House Of Suns incredibly clever and sweeping and thought-provoking, and it all pays off in the final chapter with a very cosmic moment where the story's sweep opens up to take in a much larger, and stranger cosmos than we've glimpsed so far. Once you get past the slow begining, it's an exhilerating read that keeps your brain buzzing the whole time. And there's a payoff to the Campion-Purslane-Hesperus relationship that caught me by surprise and made me love those characters much more than I'd been able to during the novel. I'm not sure it's a great novel as a novel, but as an exploration of the myriad possibilities of our far-future descendants in a vast, bizarre cosmos, House Of Suns is a terrific read.

House Of Suns was nominated for a Clarke Award. Read more of io9's coverage of 2009's book award nominees here.

It's pretty much impossible to discuss fictional archaeologists without talking about Indiana Jones, but until a year ago he arguably wouldn't have belonged on this list. If nothing else - and I'm pretty sure that that film didn't accomplish anything else - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull firmly ensconced Indy in the realm of science fiction. Which is probably a good thing, considering Dr. Jones is generally considered the quintessential fictional archaeologist, the iconic representative of everything alluring about the discipline - solving history's mysteries, going on exotic adventures, stealing priceless cultural artifacts...it's all there! That said, Indy can't really be considered the preeminent archaeologist in science fiction.

That title would probably have to go to Stargate's Daniel Jackson, who in his various incarnations headlined both the original movie and a decade's worth of television, making him arguably the most prominent archaeologist in all of science fiction. As a nice bonus, he even occasionally bordered on being a vaguely realistic depiction of an actual archaeologist, particularly when he used his linguistic know-how in the original movie to decipher the language on the other side of the Stargate. And honestly, who can resist the oddball charm of James Spader?

There are plenty more scifi archaeologists; in fact, far more than any one list can hope to capture. But here's a rundown of some of the most notable.

Doctor Who

Despite his stated policy of pointing and laughing at archaeologists, the Doctor does seem to spend a lot of time with them. If I had to guess, it's probably because nothing beats an archaeologist when you need to accidentally release an ancient evil. There's Professor Parry and his assistant Viner from the Patrick Troughton classic The Tomb of the Cybermen – I think you can guess which bunch of monsters they awaken (hint: it's not the Daleks). But nobody beats Marcus Scarman in Pyramids of Mars when it comes to unleashing evil; he lasts for maybe thirty seconds of episode one before the all-powerful alien Sutekh murders and possesses him.

The new series has only introduced one archaeologist, but Professor River Song is fairly important, what with her being the Doctor's wife and all (or not…I'm still not completely clear on that point). Still, she's not the first such scientist to play a major role in the Doctor's life – that honor goes to Professor Bernice "Benny" Summerfield, a hard-drinking, wise-cracking archaeologist from the 26th century. Originally created by new series scribe Paul Cornell in his novel Love and War, she both accompanied the seventh Doctor and had her own adventures in a horde of novels and audios.

Star Trek

Jean-Luc Picard was a huge archaeology buff, studying under the preeminent archaeologist of the 24th century, Richard Galen. He was even entrusted with completing Galen's final project, which revealed…well, I think I've dealt with that before. Picard also romanced the ethically dubious Vash, who was really more of a looter with a diploma than anything else.

Captain Kirk, on the other hand, showed no particular interest in the field. It probably didn't help that every archaeologist he ever encountered was a crazed degenerate with woman issues, whether it was Robert Crater in "The Man Trap" or Roger Korby in "What are Little Girls Made of?" It's almost as though the Federation's apparent policy of stranding one or two people on an uninhabited planet for years at a time to dig through the remains of a dead civilization was somehow flawed.

DC Comics

Want to become a superhero without all the hassle of locking yourself inside a nuclear reactor? Archaeology might just be the career for you! It's actually unclear whether there are any ancient idols in the DC Universe that won't give you superpowers. There's Carter Hall, who upon touching a stone knife remembered his past life as Prince Khufu and so becomes Hawkman. Rex Mason became Metamorpho when he was exposed to the radioactive Orb of Ra. The Silver Age Blue Beetle*, Dan Garrett, discovered the mystical scarab that gave him his powers during an excavation in Egypt. Adventurer Adam Strange was engaged in some archaeological work when the Zeta Beam transported him to the planet Rann. Sven Nelson died shortly after uncovering the Tomb of Nabu, but his son Kent would be trained by Nabu's spirit to become Doctor Fate. Oh, and the Tim "Robin" Drake's dad Jack was an archaeologist as well, but he somehow managed to never get any superpowers out of the deal.

*OK, technically a Charlton, not DC, character. But you get the idea.

Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds

In his 2000 novel, Reynolds follows Daniel Sylveste as his excavations on the planet Resurgam reveal newfound details about the long-dead Amarantin civilization. From this starting point, Reynolds weaves a tale of cyborgs, assassins, cosmic mysteries, and antimatter implants, all of which sounds pretty awesome. It's almost enough for me to forgive him for not knowing how to spell "Alasdair." Almost.

Isaac Asimov

Archaeology forms a pretty big part of my second favorite Asimov book, the criminally underrated Pebble in the Sky. The Sirius-born Bel Arvadan comes to the primitive backwater known as Earth in the hopes of evaluating the local claims that humanity originated there. Naturally, he gets a bit distracted by a plot to wipe out all of humanity and never does get round to doing any excavating. Which is why Foundation, set millennia later, finds the foppish Lord Dorwin blathering on about some very promising leads regarding humanity's origins recently discovered in the Arcturus system. For obvious reasons, this line of inquiry doesn't pan out, and shortly thereafter galactic civilization pretty much collapses, which I'm guessing led to some serious budget crunches in a galaxy's worth of archaeology departments.

Babylon 5

Ian McShane took some valuable time out from being a total badass to play Dr. Robert Bryson in the B5 television movie The River of Souls. Dr. Bryson brings an orb on board Babylon 5 that apparently contains a billion tortured souls. For some reason, the orb holds the secret to immortality. Either way, this is a serious enough situation that Martin Sheen shows up as a Soul Hunter to demand the orb be returned to him. This eventually happens, but not before Dr. Bryson and the billion souls team up for some serious havoc-wreaking.

"Omnilingual", by H. Beam Piper

This 1957 short story centers on the efforts of an archaeological team to decipher the language of an ancient Martian civilization, a task that at first seems all but impossible. They eventually figure out a road to decipherment with the discovery of some linguistic common ground: the periodic table of elements.

Saga of Seven Suns, by Kevin Anderson

The husband-and-wife xenoarchaeological team of Louis and Margaret Colicos accidentally set off Anderson's seven-book battle royale of elemental forces when they discover ancient technology that can turn gas planets into stars. This is great news for lovers of solar energy, but bad news for the super-intelligent, all-powerful aliens that live on gas planets (it's also bad news for people who don't want to be wiped out by super-intelligent, all-powerful aliens). Not the greatest advertisement for archaeology I've ever heard, really.

Futurama

I'm fairly sure we've yet to see any actual archaeologists on Futurama. If I had to guess, they're probably hiding out of shame at the general terribleness of their work.

Mystery Science Theater 3000

Speaking of shame, the wonderfully, horribly Canadian MST3K entry The Final Sacrifice probably involved archaeology. The film isn't really coherent enough for me to speak with certainty, but I believe the father of hero person with the most lines Troy McGreggor got killed by an evil cult because he was investigating the ancient Ziox civilization. Although, on second thought, I think Crow and Servo clearly established Troy's father was really Miami Dolphins great Larry Csonka, who is not generally considered an archaeologist. Not yet, anyway.

There are plenty more, of course. Who are some of the biggest ones I missed?