Huffington broke the news that there was a new Wachowski movie, and she was appearing in it, by tweeting a series of pictures showing "how I'll look in 90 years." Including the one above and this one:

And Huffington also tweeted that it's a "futuristic movie on Iraq." (Presumably looking back at the Iraq war, not just about the country in general.)

No further details were forthcoming, even on Huffington's own site. Speculation among film bloggers is that the Wachowskis are simply doing screen tests for their next project. Cinematical's Erik Davis points out, in an email to Slashfilm, that the Wachowskis did option David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, parts of which take place in a post-apocalyptic future. In Cloud Atlas, a series of nested stories take us forward in time from the nineteenth century to the distant future. It's not clear right now if the Wachowskis are producing the film and reported director Tom Tykwer is still on board, or if the Wachowskis have taken over the directing reins.

Update: Chud insists, based on inside sources, that the Wachowskis aren't actually filming a new movie at all:

In fact, [Huffington]'s participating in tests for their next project. They're just shooting a couple of days this month, but it's all just test footage. As to what that next project is... well, I'm trying to find out. But in the meantime know that the Wachowskis are not shooting a secret movie... I should mention that these are likely camera tests. They're shooting on the RED.

Oh, and here's a picture of Huffington with Lana Wachowski and her parents:

[Slashfilm via Obsessed With Film]

In the "cosy catastrophe" genre, the end of civilization happens more gently, or is passed over altogether, and there's often some hope for the rebuilding of the world. The Guardian explains:

The phrase is attributed to the British author Brian Aldiss, who mentions it in his fascinating history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, while talking about the author of Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham. While Triffids, with its blinded populace and sinister, stalking plants, could hardly be described as "cosy", it is an example of a largely non-violent, non-destructive doom. Wyndham also wrote The Kraken Wakes, in which an alien invasion gradually destroys civilisation by way of melting the ice caps rather than with death rays and war machines. The book chronicles the rebuilding of a massively de-populated world once the aliens have been despatched.

John Christopher is another British author who embraced the idea of a cosy catastrophe. While his novel, The Death of Grass – which so worried Sam Jordison when he was younger – does feature an ecological disaster that causes often violent social breakdown, Christopher (real name Sam Youd) also wrote The World in Winter, a very much more British version of Emmerich's movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which increasingly harsh winters drive the population of western Europe towards the suddenly more temperate African regions. And then there's JG Ballard, who employed ecological apocalypse in his debut novel The Wind from Nowhere, as well as in his more famous works The Drowned World, The Burning World, and many of his short stories.

Of course, there may be a bit of wish-fulfillment on the part of these authors, as the Guardian quotes author Jo Walton suggesting. The survivors of these catastrophes are often very middle class, and they get to wander around a suddenly depopulated world, with the working class wiped out in a guilt-free way. And then they get to rebuild the world along more civilised lines.

But leaving aside the classist undertones of the genre, who's to say that a collapse of civilization wouldn't be slow and relatively non-violent? And that we wouldn't pull together to rebuild afterwards?

Cover of Day Of The Triffids by Mark Salwowski. [Guardian]

Imagine what would happen if prices rose, say, to $300 a barrel. Or higher. Not only would it become too expensive to drive unless absolutely necessary, but food would become prohibitively expensive to transport, goods from China would be too expensive to ship, and plastics, which come from oil, would be unaffordable. The cold turkey after more than a century of cheap oil would be painful indeed. For developing countries it would be fatal – many could not afford energy at those prices.

The Guardian quotes the International Energy Agency as stating the world needs to find an extra 64 million barrels of oil per day by 2030 — or around six times Saudi Arabia's production capacity — to meet demand. But nobody knows where that oil is going to come from. [Guardian]

You kind of have to love Def-Con 4, despite the silly title (Def-Con 4 is not when we launch nuclear missiles!) for moments like this one, where the grungy Paul Giamatti lookalike has very definite nipple preferences, even after the fall of civilization:

And this one. Check out the evil teen overlord's crazy corrugated metal vest!

Here's the new "book trailer" for Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games, in which the hints of political unrest in the first book appear to be exploding into full-on civil disorder:

And then Suzanne Collins reads from chapter 2 of Catching Fire, in which the President pays Katniss a visit, and we find out just how much she stirred things up when she outwitted the game-masters in the first book:

Catching Fire comes out Sept. 1, and we'll have a review in a couple weeks.

[Scholastic]

We look at science fiction from the Cold War era with a certain bemusement, with all those allegories about Communist aliens, valiant colonizers and suburban/corporate conformity being challenged. But it's a safe bet that our onslaught of cookie-cutter movies, TV shows and books will look just as quaint, and reflect our out-of-date obsessions just as much, in a decade or two. And (we can hope) a whole new bunch of soon-to-be-dated genre standbys will be bursting out of our screens and pages, in masses and masses of sameness.

Every science fiction cliche reflects the obsessions of the time that created it. The stories that we feel the need to tell over and over are, in a sense, both wish fulfillment and metaphors for our technological progress, as well as the fears that progress have given rise to.

When mainstream science fiction comments more directly on politics and our social anxieties, it often feels jarring and/or preachy. There are exceptions — Battlestar Galactica talked overtly about the War On Terror, with its storylines about torture and suicide bombers, and its enemy who can look just like us. And it paid off, with acclaim and awards. But often, science fiction hits home when it's discussing our fears and excitement about progress and politics from one or two removes.

So how do our current crop of overused story ideas reflect today's preoccupations? Here are some stabs at identifying the roots of our fantasies. As always, feel free to disagree:

Superheroes

As we pointed out a while back, today's biggest superhero narratives are all war stories. For a while there, every big Marvel crossover had to have the word "war" in the title, and the prevalence of crossovers, in itself, is a preference for war stories over minor battles. Superhero stories used to be about crime, and even godlike characters like Superman were called "crime-fighters," making the world safe from urban malcontents.

But now? Look at movies like Iron Man (about a munitions maker who confronts the cost of war), Incredible Hulk (about a military experiment who doesn't want to work for the army), Watchmen (about the heroes who, among other things, won the Vietnam war) and Wolverine (about a super-mutant who fights in every war before joining a secret army squad.) As for The Dark Knight, it was so clearly about terrorism and the lengths to which you must go to suppress it, including that whole "civil liberties versus safety" conundrum, that it became a parable of our times.

So-called "realistic" movies that try to deal with the Iraq War and terrorism, like In The Valley Of Elah or Stop-Loss, tend to vanish without a trace. But spandex-and-superpowers films deal with the same issues, they make billions.

Zombies and vampires

Every time we see another show like Vampire Diaries or yet another first-person zombie romance novel hitting the stands, we have to wonder: what is going on here, and when will it end? And yet, we can't help but wonder if it's just a coincidence that the hordes of the undead are swarming in every story at the exact moment that human lifespans have gotten so much longer that everyone is obsessed with the demographic crisis of the elderly. Old people aren't dying as early, or as cheaply, as they used to — instead they're hanging around, eating up all our resources, in many cases even after dementia has taken away their reasoning powers.

The movie which encapsulates the zombies-as-older-relatives idea most clearly is probably Peter Jackson's Braindead, or Dead Alive, in which the hero's mother gets bitten by a "Sumatran rat-monkey" and turns into a zombie-like monster — who, at one point, hosts a dinner party with a group of respectable society people, even as her body literally falls apart.

And if zombies are about the downside of conquering death and living on and on, vampires are about the weight of history. They may be eternally young and glamorous, and full of glib sexuality, but they're also constantly going on about their past lives in the 19th century and all the huge historical events that they took part in. It's hard not to feel like vampires are the upside of life extension?

(In other words, zombies are your loved ones living to be 100. But vampires are you living to be 100 — hence the added glamour and wish-fulfillment.)

And yet also, vampires represent the weight of history, the baggage we thought we'd let go of, which insists on hanging around. Wasn't history supposed to have ended around 1990?

Cyborgs and robots

This summer, Terminator and Transformers clashed over the "giant robot movie" crown, and this Friday's G.I. Joe is bringing us (minor spoiler, sorry) evil nanomachines and cybernetic "accelerator suits."

It's not hard to see what these fantasies are about — Terminator Salvation director McG summed up the themes pretty concisely in his thousands of interviews about that film: we watch movies like his (or not, as the case may be) because we're uneasy about our creeping dependency on computers and gadgets generally. We fret about at what point we are so integrated with our iphones and our assistive technology, that we stop being human. (And Dollhouse is basically about the fact that we've subsumed our identities as people into Twitter and Facebook, so that our personalities exist as much in the computer world as in our heads.)

On the one hand, it's liberating and awesome to feel as though we have masses of knowledge and memes and ideas within easy reach of our brain tendrils. On the other hand — we're like cyber-inter-junkies! Cut us off from our devices, and our brains start to deflate like bad pastry. Writer Stephen Elliott spent a month without using the Internet, and had a week of bad withdrawal.

And it's hard to watch Transformers without thinking about our dependency on cars, how much like our best friends they are, how heartbreaking it is when they let us down.

Space opera

In books, space opera has lately been prone to massive, aeon-spanning sagas that take into account the vast distances between star systems and the large amounts of time required to traverse them. (Not to mention the time dilation and cognitive dissonance that happens when you travel at relativistic speeds.) But mass-media space opera tends to assume quick-and-dirty faster-than-light travel, and zipping from Alpha Centauri to Betelgeuse is as easy as a road trip from Albuquerque to Vegas.

As a result, mass-media space-opera becomes a veiled comment on globalization, and the feeling that our world is shrinking.

In the 1990s, we had the endless parade of Star Treks and their ilk, in which every planet you visit looks much the same as the last — with minor variations. And each new alien is only slightly differentiated from the previous dozen. It's not that different from going to Bulgaria and realizing that there's a Starbucks and a McDonalds and Budweiser on draft everywhere you go. The excitement of seeing that things are the same wherever you go ("exploration") is tempered by the guilt that you're ruining all these places just by visiting them ("the Prime Directive.")

Now, we're seeing a newer, even guiltier, run of movies about space and aliens — ones in which humans are clearly the bad guys, and aliens are the victims. The biggest example of this is James Cameron's Avatar, in which the naughty, naughty human race comes to despoil the pristine planet Pandora, so we can build strip malls on it. There's also District 9, coming next week, in which alien refugees come to Earth, and we force them into ghettoes. (And as I mentioned yesterday, a number of the stories in the awesome new anthology Federations also feature humans paving paradise and putting up a parking lot.)

If 1990s space opera was the happy-but-queasy view of globalization, then the new breed is just pure misanthropic "we're crushing the third world" bleakness.

Post-apocalyptic yarns

This one is the most transparent of them all — we're terrified it's all going to fall apart, thanks to swine flu and global climate toiletness and so on. And yet there's something liberating about casting off the shackles of history — no more metaphorical vampires! — and we love to fantasize that we'll be among the few who survive after everyone else is sleeping with the mutant fishes.

So what's next?

Want the flood of superheroes, apocalypses and zombies to stop? Then you should root for us to get a whole new brand of progress, and a whole new batch of anxieties to go with them. (It's true, of course, that Hollywood will keep greenlighting the same movie over and over again, no matter what, but only as long as the latest iteration of that movie is making money.)

So here are a few ideas about the next up-and-coming obsessions, and how they could translate into science fictional genres:

• Biotech. We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with gene-splicing, stem cells, cloning and smart drugs. How will these treatments change who we are? What kind of new life forms could we create?

  What kind of science fiction could we get? Well, there's the obvious cloning horror stories, like The Sixth Day or The Island. And there's the strange not-quite-human monster film — like Vincenzo Natali's creepy-looking Splice, coming later this year. OMG we're playing God — what's the SAG rate for that?

  But my hopes are pinned on a new genre of Charlie Kaufman-esque stories about people whose personalities or bodies are being altered by their new medications or new body parts. You can start out with unsettling little differences, and slowly build up to outright strangeness and horror, where people have hands coming out of their foreheads, by the end.

  I was chatting the other day with a friend who was writing about new Alzheimer's Disease treatments, and he mentioned that Maureen McHugh's collection Mothers & Other Monsters is chock full of stories about Alzheimer's — including ones where a cure turns you into a totally different person, with a whole new personality.

• Statelessness. The collapse of the modern nation-state may be one of the big stories in the next decade or two. On the one hand, you have multinational corporations getting more and more powerful, and global challenges like climate change will require stronger international responses. On the other hand, if our current econom-ick goes on for a decade, governments may become more impoverished, overstretched and weakened. Result: More countries will start to look like Afghanistan or Somalia, with governments that barely govern.

  

  What kind of science fiction could we get? Pirates! Please, let there be pirates! Preferably space pirates as well as futuristic ocean pirates in the style of Waterworld. And possibly there will be more stories about international hero squads, like G.I. Joe, where the war on evil has a new front line — and it's multilateral. (Maybe "This time, it's multilateral" could become the new action-movie catch phrase?)

  And maybe we'll see a new brand of space opera in which the dangerous, no-beings-land of deep space is populated by creatures with shifting allegiances and itchy trigger tentacles.

• Peak oil and the smart house I was going to do these two things separately, but they kept coming together in my mind. Oil forecasters are increasingly pessimistic about our oil supplies, and how much longer we'll be able to use up fuel on Traveling Pants-style roadtrips of self discovery. And meanwhile, everyone keeps saying that by around 2020, our houses will be brilliant. All our appliances will be talking to each other, and they'll all be plugged into our social network, so our friends can tell our refrigerators to make funny-shaped ice chunks. In other words: We'll never leave the house again, and our houses will do everything for us.

  

  What kind of science fiction does this give us? Well, there's the obvious trapped-at-home story, like E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or the upcoming movie Surrogates. But if you think of science fiction stories as talking about our advances and fears a bit more metaphorically, then maybe we'll get something a bit further afield: like, say, stories about claustrophobia or evil buildings trying to kill us. Or even better, a slew of "Earth is quarantined" stories, where aliens try to keep us from leaving our planet and infecting the rest of the cosmos with our naughtiness.

Slate talks to GBN, a corporate futurist organization, and despite being professional doomsayers, the GBN gang doesn't see the U.S.A. falling apart over 100 years as being that likely. But GBN does see a few crazy out there ideas for how the U.S. could end — including the rise of a new class of genetically modified super-humans, like Khan Noonien Singh, who take over the entire world and crush everybody else beneath their heels. But the four main scenarios GBN sees as being likely are:

• Collapse, due to massive, intractable corruption.
• Friendly breakup, because the U.S. is too big a country to govern properly.
• Global governance, in which U.N.-like institutions become much more powerful to grapple with global crises like climate change.
• Global conquest, in which a Hitler-esque dictator actually conquers the whole world.

It's probably true, though, that a country with oceans on two sides and relatively friendly neighbors, plus a fairly robust democracy, has a good chance of surviving over the next 100 years, as GBN says. On the other hand, predicting anything 100 years out (as the GBN people admit) is basically like throwing darts in the dark, drunk, using your feet. And I suspect that if fuel becomes much more expensive in the coming decades, the huge distances across the United States could become a lot more daunting and regional tensions could get a lot more pronounced. But there's a reason why medium-near-future science fiction is so hard to write.

Image by Something_Clever on Flickr. [Slate]

We'll Write hails from London, and they start off their biography by noting that oil is vanishing, bees are disappearing, and robots will take over the world. Fittingly, they've titled their latest album Songs for the End of the World.

The two began singing together in 2004 and released their first EP in 2007 as a free download. And they've found a new way to release their first full-length album - instead of completing the album beforehand, they have released it in serial form, releasing each song one at a time, and completely for free.

Songs for the End of the World falls purely in the geek realm. Bleached Bone Fields, their first track off the album, follows a sort of post-apocalyptic vibe where there's vivid imagry of deserts and the protagonist trying to avoid falling asleep. Measure of a Man looks at robotics, Demon is about, well, Demons, Trampoline Song talks about the yearning to reach the sky, and so on. Additionally, while the first eight songs are available to download right away, there's additional b-sides that they include with each release for members of their mailing list.

The two have recently released their first music video for the song Measure of A Man, which features giant robots taking over the world. The CGI is a bit clunky, to be honest, but it certainly is amusing.

The album isn't perfect, but it is fun. It's pretty clear that these guys have a geniune appreciation for fandom and the elements that help to make it up, if this album is to go by.

Even as they sing about the end of the world, their music delivery method could be the beginning of something new. As the musicians and the music industry continues to realize just how the internet can be used to get music to fans, smaller acts such as We'll Write have the inherent advantage of being able to slip in, gainiing fans through a number of social networking sites and music blogs. It's entirely possible that this is the future, or at least a glimpse of the near future, when it comes to the entire entertainment industry.

Hopefully, though, the robot apocaylse won't happen until after their album is completed.

In the meantime, feel free to check out the album here.

We'll Write on Facebook
We'll Write on Twitter

The novel is Terminator: From The Ashes, by Star Wars veteran Timothy Zahn, published by Titan Books. And the comics are called simply Terminator Salvation: Official Movie Prequel (although the storyline appears to be called "Sand In The Gears." The comics are published by IDW, and they're written by Dara Naraghi and drawn by Alan Robinson. There's also a comic called Terminator Salvation #0, which appears to be a comic-book adapation of the first 20 minutes of the movie.

In From The Ashes, we catch up with John Connor and his wife Kate, in the bleak world of 2018. John's squad includes the super-bad foot-soldier Barnes (played by Common) and the master-dogfighting pilot Blair (Moon Bloodgood). They figure out where Skynet is going to launch its next Terminator attack against the human survivors, and they hatch a plan to capture Skynet's supply base while all its Terminators are distracted by the attack. But Connor doesn't know that the survivors who are Skynet's next target include the young Kyle Reese and his friend, the mute little girl Star (played by Jadagrace in the movie).

In the "Sand In The Gears" comic, meanwhile, John Connor is only peripherally involved, and none of the movie's other supporting cast appears. The main storyline involves a a group of Resistance fighters who launch a two-front operation against Skynet, in Niger and in the United States. The Niger operation involves an Arab resistance fighter, Yusuf, who must learn to trust Lysette, a French doctor who hasn't bothered to learn any Arabic, and who used to treat only the important people at the local mining company. Now that civilization has collapsed, can these two set their differences aside and work together? The answer may not surprise you. And in the U.S. part of the anti-Skynet operation, an old guy named Jackson whose family died in a Terminator attack seeks revenge, while Elena, a woman who's in love with John Connor realizes he'll never see her as anything but a good soldier.

The most interesting thing about both the novel and the comics is the portrayal of human survivors who haven't joined the resistance. In From The Ashes, Kyle Reese and Star go to live at Lost Mouldering Ashes, a community of about 250 people who are sheltering in a ruined building, trading gasoline for supplies and food. The community's leader, Grimaldi, is a former corporate executive who's used to being in charge but has no idea how to deal with a military struggle. And Grimaldi wrongly believes that Skynet will leave his community alone if the humans don't offer any provocation. When other communities have been attacked, Grimaldi believes the resistance brought Skynet's wrath down on them. The community's other main leader, former Marine Sgt. Orozco, realizes that Grimaldi is wrong about Skynet, but he has his own reasons for not wanting to join the Resistance.

Meanwhile, in "From The Ashes," another group of human survivors refuses to help Elena's operation against Skynet. Their leader, old man Jackson, says: Every time your joke of a Resistance pays us a visit, you're that much more likely to bring the damn Terminators down on us.... We'd rather just live our lives under the radar. The war is over. We lost. All's I care about is the survival of my family. It's only after Terminators wipe out his family that he swears revenge against Skynet and decides to help Elena's operation.

The other plot strand that these prequels set up is John Connor's struggle to get the Resistance to take him seriously. In the novel, particularly, he launches an ambitious plan to capture - not destroy - a Skynet supply/repair facility, because he needs to prove himself to the Resistance. The orgnazation is run by former generals and admirals, and has a relatively good supplies and ammunition. But they don't entirely trust Connor or see him as a valuable part of the fight against Skynet. At the end of the novel, he's finally proven himself enough to get brought into the Resistance chain of command proper, but he's still just one link in that chain, without much authority - even though he knows more about Skynet and Terminators than anyone else.

If you're only going to get one Terminator Salvation prequel, I'd recommend From The Ashes - for one thing, it does introduce the movie's main cast, except for Marcus Wright. For another, it's a pretty engaging war story, with enough cool action set pieces to keep you turning the pages. It gives a nice sense of how the world of 2018 works, with all the different types of Terminators running around, all networked to Skynet - so it knows whatever they know.And the main extra character, Sgt. Orozco, is an interesting enough chraacter that I was sorry he doesn't pop up in the movie (according to IMDB, anyway). Orozco's struggle to save a community he knows is doomed is pretty compelling, and his battle of wills with the stuffed shirt Grimaldi will no doubt remind you of all the delusional middle managers you've encountered in your own life. From The Ashes doesn't reinvent the war novel, or anything, and I couldn't honestly tell exactly what was supposed to be going on in about half the fight scenes. But all the sequences where Blair flies around and outwits Hunter-Killers (earning the name Hunter-Killer Butt-Kicker, or Hickaback for short) are pretty thrilling.

"Sand In The Gears," meanwhile, feels more non-essential. There were long stretches where I felt like Dara Naraghi wanted to write a story about Arab and French people learning to understand each other, and decided to use this opportunity to get it in front of a lot of Terminator fans. On the other hand, the stuff with Jackson's delusions that Skynet will leave his group of survivors alone were a nice compliment to Grimaldi's in the book. And the comic includes some great scenes of a T-600 trying to impersonate a human, with mixed success. There are some nice panels of T-600s squashing people's heads and running rampant through the post-apocalyptic landscape. But you won't have a great aching void in your life if you skip the prequel comic.

And then there's Terminator Salvation #0, which is an adaptation of the movie's beginning. It has a lot of the lines of dialogue you've heard in the trailers, including "If you can hear this, you are the Resistance," and "This is not the future my mother warned me about." It starts out with Marcus Wright in the 1990s, about to be executed for killing someone. A woman comes to him and offers him one more chance to donate his body to an experimental research program, and he finally says yes in exchange for a kiss. Then he's executed, and the next thing he knows, it's 2018 and Los Angeles has gone way downhill. He's about to become toast, until Kyle Reese and Star swoop down and save him. ("Come wiht me if you want to live," Kyle says.) Meanwhile, the Resistance leaders are suspicious of John Connor - again. He's the only survivor of an assault on a Skynet facility. (He escaped in his helicopter, with the dead pilot, just as everything blew up, while a Terminator clung to the helicopter skids.) Other Resistance fighters stand up for Connor and say they're sure he's not a collaborator. Plus, they found a purported list of Skynet's main human targets, and John Connor's name was second on the list. Top of the list was some random teenager named Kyle Reese. Connor says the Resistance leaders are being too cautious to win against Skynet, trying to outsmart an enemy a thousand times smarter than they are. He and the Resistance brass have this great conversation;

Random stuffed shirt: The men say you're going to lead the Resistance some day. You expect us to just hand over control to you, is that it?
Connor: No, I expect Skynet to kill you. I'll have to fight alongside whoever's left.

The Resistance has a new plan to defeat Skynet: a signal that will basically turn off all of the machines, everywhere. A secret "off button" that was installed before Skynet even took over. And they want Connor to test it. Oh, and the new timeline is so bad, that the horrible future John Connor's mother used to describe to him seems mild by comparison. "The future I used to dread is the only hope I have left," he says in a voiceover caption.

All in all, reading all this preview material has made me more excited for the movie, which I was already looking forward to. It's in the nature of prequels (and media tie-ins generally) to be non-required reading - although it sounds like the new Star Trek movie makes more sense if you've read the prequel comics. But these tie-ins are like most: they provide a bit of extra backstory and give you an extra story to sate your cravings in between the movies or TV shows. But From The Ashes is a pretty bracing war story about an army fighting without support from the last few remaining civilians, which is always a good basis for a tale.

The artworks include early watercolors of key scenes from the film, and then photomontages using actual location photos. Some of the photomontages are starkly disturbing, with pale gray landscapes where the only splashes of color come from flames and bolts of lightning. You can see how Kennedy took a fairly benign-looking beach and then imagined it strewn with bones, or a truck stop in ruins. Or a tunnel with loads of dead cars and graffiti at its entrance.

Now I'm twice as desperate to see this film. There's tons more at the link. [Hugh Marchant on Flickr, via Sci Fi Cool]

An article in today's Publisher's Weekly traces how the economic crisis and all the resulting social instability have led to two opposite but complimentary trends in book sales. On the one hand, there's the more obvious public interest in flights of fancy to happier, less complicated locales, which present clearer heroes and villains than what people get from the murky financial scandals that dominate the headlines. Seale Ballenger of HarperCollins's Eos Imprint explains:

"We are seeing the trend toward escapism across the board in all areas of publishing right now due to the faltering economy. People really want to focus on something other than the nonstop woes of the world. The escapist nature of SF and fantasy gives readers a doorway into a world very different from their own."

As we saw earlier, that mostly takes the form of urban fantasy. More traditional science fiction dominates the reverse trend, which has seen a huge increase in interest for dystopian fiction. Michael Homler, editor at St. Martin's, says:

"As a recession happens, there is a certain segment of the book population that likes to see it somehow mirrored in the entertainment that they buy....Paranormal, horror and especially apocalyptic-themed novels seem to draw a lot of attention. It hits home with some sort of psychological unease people have and also fits into our still-present fears of terrorism."

Though the impact has been on a smaller scale than that of, say, Twilight, the sales of such books have been exceptional relative to normal expectations. The article singles out the post-apocalyptic reprint anthology Wastelands as one such success story, which is heading into its fifth printing. The 30,000 copies already sold may not necessarily sound like much, but for its publisher, the relatively small Night Shade Books, that's far beyond even the wildest expectations. Another one of their big sellers, the zombie anthology The Living Dead, has already sold 45,000 copies in just six months, partially because readers respond to the thought of a zombie apocalypse, which Night Shade editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen says is really "a secular rapture." I don't know about that, but whatever the underlying motivations, readers are responding to some zombie gore, which can never be a bad thing.

Still, as much as it's tempting to draw a direct connection between social and literary trends, a lot of publishers think the truth is more complicated. The editor-in-chief of Penguin's Ace and Roc imprints, Ginjer Buchanan, says post-apocalyptic and dystopian ficton are more compelling to average readers because they're more instantly relatable than the latest space opera or science fiction offering:

"I'm not sure that the increasing market for apocalypse stories has much to do with the current state of the world....It's science fiction that's accessible to a wider readership. The singularity and nanotechnology can be hard to grasp, but people who have experienced a natural disaster or loss of electricity don't find it so hard to take the leap to thinking about the entire earth flooding, or about electricity not working anywhere."

Even so, it's probably fair to say that recent events have sadly made such scenarios more relatable to more people, and as a result these books now have a larger built-in audience than in the past. But it's not only a question of demand; the supply of potential books has definitely been affected, as publishers are now seeing far more pessimistic submissions:

"We're certainly seeing more submissions of novels with apocalyptic themes-whether it's the general feel of the world in which it's set, or specifically related to an apocalyptic event," says Orbit's [publisher Tim] Holman. "We're also noticing a definite trend toward fantasy that is more bloody, more brutal, and that doesn't end with a magical sword saving the day."

Don't dispair completely, fans of happy endings - the darkness of the setups for these books can also be to make the eventual triumph all the more heroic and inspiring. When the stakes in the real world seem so high and the odds of success so small, it's only natural fiction has to go even further to stay ahead. Also, much as it might be horrible to be stuck in a zombie apocalypse, at least one's goals are pleasingly simple: go kill some zombies. Night Shade's Jeremy Lassen probably puts it best:

"This isn't just about wanting to see people suffering. It's about seeing a protagonist overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles; in this case, the complete breakdown of the social order. When people are losing their jobs, and banks are failing, and they have no agency or control over their lives, the fantasies of simple problems with simple solutions and of protagonists with agency are very alluring, and apocalypse literature has them in spades."

A final sidebar in the article also explores the current state of race in science fiction. A new boon to the ages-old struggle to improve the diversity of science fiction comes from the current boom market for escapism. Multiple publishers and editors point out the rather obvious fact that people of color are just as interested in escapist fiction as white people, and futuristic or fantastic settings overwhelmingly dominated by white people may not be ideal for that purpose. Verb Noire publisher Mikki Kendall distills the problem to its essence:

"Do we really believe that only white heterosexuals with no physical or mental impairments are worthwhile representations of our future?"

Taken as a whole, there still seems like there's plenty of territory for science fiction to explore, and readers might well be more receptive to the genre than any point in recent history. Although it does seem as though sprawling, morally ambiguous, science-heavy narratives might want to run and hide from the oncoming zombie hordes and dry-humping vampires, at least until the Dow Jones gets back to 9,000.

[Publisher's Weekly]

Bong contributed one of three segments, along with Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, to an anthology film called Tokyo!, opening in limited release this Friday. But he's also hard at work on a crime film called Mother, and then he hopes to put out Transperceneige by 2011 or 2012.

Talking to Collider, he said the movie version of the snow post-apocalyptic comic would feature a multilingual cast and international co-production, but ultimately would still be a Korean movie. And he added that it's a dystopian vision regarding the future of humanity.

In Transperceneige, wars and glaciers have rendered the planet almost uninhabitable, and one last train carries the last survivors of the human race. The society on board the train is a microcosm of humanity, with social and class divisions still persisting in cramped quarters.

In an earlier interview with Yonhap News Service, Bong elaborated:

The story will be in a tone similar to Noah's Ark (from the Bible)... This train has enraptured me. I believe everyone has a fantasy about trains giving off chugs and puffs, and landscapes viewed from the window... What you can see from the window in this story, however, is only the world icebound, with minus 80 degrees outside. Survivors live in the train, but they can't stay in harmony even at a time of adversity... Each partition of the train represents a class. In the last partition of the train, people live wretched lives. The closer to the front they are, the more luxurious life gets... Le Transperceneige is going to be much more spectacular with all the trains and frozen scenery. But the spectacle is not what I really want to show. The mood and sentiment you can feel inside the train, the desperateness. The exterior should be only groundwork to show all that.

The Host brought amazing freshness to the monster-movie genre, and it sounds like Transperceneige could do the same for overexposed post-apocalyptic storylines.

Readers, here is the long-awaited second installment in my Pre-Golden Age SF series. I can't afford first editions of PGA SF novels, but I've managed to collect images of their dustjackets and "boards" (as bookbinders call the paper- or cloth-covered stiff cardboard forming a book's covers). The following 10 SF novels boast the most thrilling and evocative cover (board or dustjacket) illustrations and design from 1904-33.

I invite your criticisms; please note, though, that this is a survey of PGA SF first editions. Later Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks don't count.

Pre-Golden Age SF's Top Ten Book Covers

1. Norman Matson's Doctor Fogg (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929). A shy and retiring Chicago scientist manages to communicate with an advanced alien civilization, whose scientific secrets he refuses to share with Earth's flawed political powers; and he accidentally "broadcasts" a gorgeous naked blonde alien with whom he falls in love. What does the fun dustjacket illustration have to do with it? Nothing! But I love the speeding meteors, which converge cozily at the center of the image; the void of space absolutely chock-full of stars and planets; the awkwardness of the gentleman at top right compared with the insouciance of the woman beneath. I also admire the crimson-orange/navy blue/silver color scheme. Making the characters' hair, the men's neckties, the woman's dress the same color as the slightly italicized title? An inspired decision. NB: The board illustration is also super-cool: it's a silver planetoid with the words "Doctor Fogg" inside.

2. Karel Čapek's Krakatit (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925). An English translation of the Czech author's 1924 novel. A scientist discovers the most powerful explosive ever, but he refuses to share it with (see above) Earth's flawed political powers. The Art Deco jacket design captures both the excitement and terror of such a discovery. The stylish typeface says, "Not to worry, the future is awesome!" But K. Romney Towndrow's artwork - an explosion rending the very planet in half - says, "Yes, worry." Still, this is a satire, so we're not encouraged to take things too seriously; the illustration kinda reminds us of limelights in a canyon of skyscrapers. It's as though we were approaching a 1925 Hollywood movie opening, perhaps Marion Fairfax's The Lost World. Fun facts: The book was adapted as a 1947 movie (d. Otakar Vávra) and a 1960 opera (Václav Kašlík); both are supposed to be tremendous. The 1925 US edition of Krakatit has a more restrained, but still fun, jacket.

3. Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1917). I'm not impressed with the original book jacket illustrations for Burroughs's Barsoom series. Sure, they feature lone heroes confronting hordes of alien warriors, not to mention half-naked damsels menaced by multi-limbed aliens, but... Frank Frazetta's later work on the same titles demonstrates just how tame the original jacket illustrations were. They make the swords-and-sandals-in-space genre feel middlebrow and uplifting, which is precisely what we hi-lobrows do not enjoy. Peel away the Barsoomian jackets, though, and you'll often find more compelling boards underneath. A Princess of Mars was Burroughs's first published story - it was serialized in 1912, under a pseudonym - and everything great about his writing is captured here. That Arts & Crafts typeface, so pseudo-medieval and chivalrous! That red planet, so mysterious and alluring! Stop the world, Edgar, I want to get off.

4. L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz (Reilly & Britton, Chicago, 1914). Illustrated - like 39 of the 40 canonical Oz editions - by John R. Neill, Baum's picaresque concerns the efforts of the Shaggy Man (a proto-hippie who disdains all possessions except his Love Magnet) to rescue his brother from the Nome King. Tik-Tok, a copper-bodied clockwork man, first appeared in Ozma of Oz (1907), then starred in a 1913 stage musical. In this book, despite Neill's sweet, startling dustjacket illustration, Tik-Tok is (as ever) an emotionless though fiercely loyal servant. Exactly like Karel Čapek's flesh-and-blood "robots." Fun fact: Though often described as the first robot to appear in modern literature (if you don't count living-metal creatures, like the golden maidservants who attend Hephaestus in The Iliad, that is), Tik-Tok was preceded by Edward S. Ellis's Steam Man of the Prairies in 1868.

5. Rudyard Kipling, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). This SF novella by Kipling - best known for The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just-So Stories - first appeared in McClure's magazine in 1905. In 2000, lighter-than-air craft traverse the globe; the plot follows a mail dirigible on its adventures. Never Kippled? This ain't the place to start. However, Kipling did get so excited by his own nerdy vision that the book's appendices include ersatz instructions to aviators, not to mention advertisements for imaginary dirigible and aeronautical products. Detailed illustrations and pictorial endpapers make this a gorgeous production, indeed. "A beautiful object, most strange and peculiarly inspiring," writes one rare bookseller, of the 1909 Night Mail. The same could be said of the gilt-and-silver zeppelin that materializes - Millennium Falcon-like - from the star-spangled indigo depths of the book's cloth-covered boards. Wow!

6. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1935). Perhaps my favorite Argonaut Folly fiction, Odd John concerns the efforts of an international band of teenage and twentysomething "supernormals" (or "wide-awakes") to form an island colony, where they can devote themselves to "world-building" ("individualistic communism," not to mention the founding of a new mutant species) and "intelligent worship." The jacket illustration captures Stapledon's notion of the titular John: half-child and half-philosopher, ruthless but not malicious, "a creature which appeared as urchin but also as sage, as imp but also as infant deity," a fallen angel with a face that is "half monkey, half gargoyle, yet wholly urchin, with its huge cat's eyes, its flat little nose, its teasing lips." Cue David Bowie: "Look at your children/See their faces in golden rays/Don't kid yourself they belong to you/They're the start of a coming race." Homo Superior, that is.

7. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922). More admired than read, Ouroboros is a linguistically adventurous saga recounting the infinite war between the king of Witchland and the lords of Demonland... on the planet Mercury. Call it Nietzschean SF: somewhere out there, the author would have us believe, another world is possible, one in which the self-overcoming values and worldview of Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, and Scandinavian Vikings will never be corrupted. (As Lord Juss puts it: "For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.") The end of Eddison's novel is also its beginning, hence the title and Keith Henderson's heavy-metal jacket illustration - a snake devouring itself tail-first. Like they so often do in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec glyphs, and on Agent Scully's lower back. Wish I could afford a 1st edition.

8. George Babcock, Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown (Bridgeport, Conn. & New York: Co-Operative Publishing Co., Inc., 1922). Almost as much as I love the Satan-vs.-Martians jacket illustration ("from painting by the author"), I love the novel's description: "Highly eccentric romance of reincarnation, which includes an account of the colonization of the Moon by near-perfect humans of Mars and the unhappy circumstances of the descent of our ancestors to Earth." Mars, it seems, was once a technologically advanced utopia. Then, 20 million years ago, it lost its atmosphere, so the Martians relocated - but, in doing so, degenerated into our beast-like ancestors. (Isn't this the plot of Jack Kirby's The Eternals? And Scientology?) As for the devil on the dustjacket, the occult point of Babcock's novel is to inform us that we are divided creatures, within whom Bonality and Malality (good and bad aspects) struggle. Moral: Don't let Malality triumph, or it might break Martian-filled eggs with its pitchfork.

9. Harold Steele Mackaye, The Panchronicon (Scribner, New York, 1904). I'm informed that The Panchronicon concerns a pair of New Hampshire spinsters who are given the opportunity to travel through time via a solar-powered airship-thing from the 27th-century. See, first you fly the Panchronicon to the North Pole; then you orbit the Earth widdershins (anti-sunwise, like Christopher Reeve does in the 1978 Superman); and presto, you're in 16th-century England, where you're able to disprove the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory. Meanwile, your drunken shipmate, Copernicus Droop, can attempt to patent the phonograph and the bicycle. Sounds fun... but as you've perhaps intuited, I'm not convinced that the book is actually worth the effort of reading. Still, the cover board illustration is awesome. If this is what 27th-century time-travel technology looks like - part houseboat from Arthur Ransome's Big Six, part Terry Gilliam machine, part Owlship - then western civilization is inarguably headed in the best of all possible directions. Sign me up.

10. E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923). "Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity," writes Brian Stableford, in Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, "this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue." Eight thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads, devices which permit us to move through time and space - at the cost of a certain amount of agency. If one of these devices should go awry, a "clockwork man" might appear in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village, behaving strangely. Worse, like the titular character in Philip K. Dick's 1969 story "The Electric Ant," the clockwork man might tinker with his own mechanism. Bad idea! NB: This book is extremely rare; I've never seen a copy for under $500... and that's without the dustjacket. The illustration is like a Bildungsroman cover re-jiggered by Hannah Höch. Cool.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

AFTERWORD

Since publishing the first post in this series, I've been inundated with suggestions about terrific-sounding novels from 1904-33 concerned with, for example, Artificial Life, Homo Superior, Mad Scientists, Outer Space, and Lost Worlds. Commenting on my Top Ten Apocalypses post, for example, io9 reader Mathmos suggested:

It doesn't fit the Apocalypse category, but I like the title: The Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix by Homer Eon Flint.

A Francophone friend of mine emailed to say:

Don't forget Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938). Friend of Verlaine, influence on Cendrars and on the Surrealists. Best books take premises from Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs and go crazy. A war fought mostly in the air (before 1914) between rival Mormon millionaires in Utah vying for control of sub-Atlantic railroad lines! A sculptor of human flesh! The planet Mars ruled by a Great Brain and populated by vampires!

And a fellow PGA SF aficionado forwards these lines from Amazon or Wikipedia:

Leo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, was created in 1911 by Jean de La Hire, one of France's most prolific serial writers. Gifted with night vision, hypnotic powers and an artificial heart, Saint-Clair is a fearless hero who battles colorful super-villains.... In The Nyctalope on Mars (1911), Leo faces the megalomaniacal Oxus, master of the secret society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars. After defeating the Fifteen, the Nyctalope must then face an ever more fearsome foe: H. G. Wells' Martians.

All of which makes me worry: What have I overlooked? How can I declare which Alien Invasion and Cosmic Perspective novels from 1904-33 are the best of their kind before I've read Gustave Le Rouge's Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist? I'm going to read these two books, among others, before New Year's Eve. I'll be back, newly confident and opinionated, next month. But keep the suggestions coming.

Happy New Year! And please stay tuned.

Hollywood adaptations of Brave New World and When Worlds Collide, based on books released at roughly the same time as Princess of Mars, are also in development. Novels of this period are re-exerting their power over the collective imaginary.

Welcome to the first episode of an irregular series of posts that will survey science fiction novels published from the beginning of the 20th century until the advent of science fiction's so-called Golden Age. Not to be confused with SF's Pulp Era (i.e., the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s), I've named the years 1904-33 its Pre-Golden Age, or PGA. For our first foray into this era, let's consider ten great novels of the apocalypse.

Hold on, though: The 20th century began in 1901, while the Golden Age is widely agreed to have kicked off in or shortly after '38, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories. So why doesn't the PGA begin in '01 and end in '37? Why 1904-33, instead? Glad you asked. I've got a whole post explaining why this era is meaningful. Click the link if you want more historical background, or just plunge right into the apocalypse below.

Many of these novels are in the public domain, and I've indicated where you can find them in full text online, as well as where you can pick up a printed copy if you like.

1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930). In his awe-inspiring, tragicomic first novel, Stapledon, a British philosopher and progressivist, ventriloquizes the future history of humankind as related to him telepathically by one of the Last Men - alien descendants of ours who will inhabit Neptune, where they'll face extinction as the sun burns out, some two billion years hence. So what does fate hold in store for us, the First Men? Well, the post-WWI "passionate will for peace and a united world" won't last long, Stapledon's narrator informs readers. Within a century aerial bombs and poison gas will have laid waste to Europe (including Russia), leaving the Chinese and Americans to compete for global military and economic domination. Eventually, a World State will be founded, and peace and prosperity will reign... until Earth's natural energy sources get used up! At that point, civilization will collapse and the First Men will devolve into superstitious savages living in the shadow of their ancestors' skyscrapers - "though for the most part they were of course by now little more than pyramids of debris overgrown with grass and brushwood" - until, after nearly 100,000 years, they'll re-civilize themselves and discover atomic energy. Which they'll use, "after a bout of insane monkeying with the machinery," to inadvertantly annihilate all but 35 men and women, whose mutated descendants will be the Second Men. This sort of thing goes on, and on, and on, entertainingly and soberingly, for 18 generations of humankind. Multiple apocalypses, and all for the price of one novel! Read more about Last and First Men in the Homo Superior installment of this series.
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2. William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land: A Love Tale (1912). Hodgson, a British sailor, strongman, and visionary, paints a macabre, fascinating portrait of a frozen future Earth whose few remaining human inhabitants live in a vast underground space created by earthquakes, lit by the glare of lava bubbling up from below, and inhabited by dinosaurs. Worse, at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached "the Barrier of Life" that separated our dimension from one populated by "monstrosities and Forces" - Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, "Ab-humans," Brutes, enormous slugs and spiders - collectively known as the Slayers. (At least one of them, as far as I can tell from the 1972 Ballantine paperback cover shown here, resembles Pac-Man.) The unnamed narrator, along with apparently every other surviving human, lives trapped in the Last Redoubt, a eight-mile-high metal pyramid-city constructed by their ancestors using now-forgotten technologies. The pyramid is protected from the Slayers, who surround and observe it constantly, by mysterious Powers of Goodness, and also by a massive force-field powered by the "Earth Current" - a Tesla-esque force drawn from the planet itself. Our hero is telepathic, and one day he receives a distress signal that appears to issue from a woman living in a long-forgotten community of humans sequestered in a distant Lesser Pyramid whose power supply is running out. Arming himself with a lightsaber-meets-brushcutter gizmo called a Diskos, and eating nothing but protein pills and powdered water, he sets forth on a mission impossible - into the Night Land.
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3. M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901; read why I consider this a PGA novel here). When Brian Aldiss quipped, in reference to PGA SF, that "the period was a welter of variously colored plagues," this is one of the two catastrophes that he must have had in mind; Jack London wrote the other one. Not a pandemic but a deadly vapor that sweeps across the planet - perhaps as some kind of chthonic punishment (as in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) for humanity's failure to respect Nature's mysteries - the purple cloud leaves behind only one living human, Adam Jefferson, who'd been away in the Arctic. Sporting an Englishman's idea of a Turkish pasha's get-up (complete with mustachios not shown here, for some reason, on the cover of the June '49 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries), Adam divides his ample time between roaming the world in search of other survivors, building himself a tropical-island castle that would have made Mad King Ludwig jealous, speculating on the nature of the Earth itself (is it intelligent? out to get him?), and burning cities down for fun. It's not much of a plot, but the writing is a delight, as purple as the poison cloud itself: "For oftentimes, both waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which orb I was, nor in which age, but felt my being adrift in the great gulf of space and eternity and circumstance, with no bottom for my consciousness to stand upon, the world all mirage and a strange show to me, and the frontiers of dream and waking lost." (This is how reading the best PGA SF makes you feel, in my experience.) Adam eventually discovers his Eve... but refuses to mate with her, because the human race doesn't deserve a second chance. Will he change his mind? Fun facts: Shiel was an Englishman born and raised in Barbados, an anti-Semite and racist (he coined the phrase "Yellow Peril"), and - according to some critics - a fascist. Ironically, this novel was an inspiration for the classy, anti-racist SF movie, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, in which Harry Belafonte won't mate with the world's last woman... because she's white.
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4. Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1922 as Továrna na absolutno; in English in 1927). In the near future (i.e., the Thirties), a Czech scientist invents "perfect combustion," and an industrial concern starts manufacturing an atomic reactor that provides cheap energy - with an unexpected byproduct: God. To be precise, it's the Absolute, the spiritual essence that permeates every particle of matter... or did, anyway, until matter began to be annihilated by the super-efficient Karburetor. Instrumental rationality, and the capitalist cult of efficiency, are satirized brilliantly by Čapek, the Czech absurdist whose 1921 play R.U.R. first gave us the word "robot." As they're released from imprisoning matter by the Karburetors and Molecular Disintegration Dynamos cranked out in the thousands by Ford Motors (the novel's Czech title means "the factory of the Absolute") and other manufacturers around the world, God-particles infect humankind with wonder-working powers and ecstatic religious sentiments. What's more, the Absolute begins operating factories itself, producing far too many finished goods for anyone to consume: "It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day." As a result, economies collapse, unemployment is universal, and from 1944 through 1953, fanatical sects whose -isms (including rationalism, nationalism, and sentimentalism) are religious only in the broadest sense do battle. Every single country on the planet is drawn into the Greatest War, during which everyone invades everyone else, atomic weapons are deployed, and civilization collapses. Now, that's instrumental rationality operating at peak efficiency.
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5. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid (1926). Those of us who grew up reading apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic potboilers like Lucifer's Hammer or Battlefield Earth might find the preceding four titles - as fun to read as they are - a tad slow-moving. Perhaps that's because they weren't written by Americans, or serialized in American pulps? Burroughs's The Moon Maid is a multi-generational, three-books-in-one saga that literally gallops from Julian 5th's crash-landing on the moon, where he makes a daring getaway (with a moon maid in tow) from subhuman Kalkars who dwell in the asteroid's hollow interior; to the same Julian's doomed effort to defeat a Kalkar invasion of Earth; to Julian 9th's failed but inspiring rebellion against the mongrel descendants of the Moon Men, who've presided over the Earthlings' return to a medieval agrarian lifestyle; to the final triumph of Red Hawk (Julian 20th), the leader of a primitive tribe of freedom-fighters who, 400 years after the invasion, finally defeats humankind's overlords - Battlefield Earth-style - in the ruins of Los Angeles. The Julian 9th story, one hears, was originally written after the Bolshevik revolution, and was rejiggered later to fit into the Moon Maid saga: it's a red-blooded example of anticommunist SF that predates Ayn Rand's We the Living and Orwell's Animal Farm by decades. ("We would slay all the Kalkars in the world, and we would sell the land again that men might have pride of ownership and an incentive to labor hard and develop it for their children, for well we knew by long experience that no man will develop land that reverts to the government at death, or that government may take away from him at any moment.") No matter what you may think of its politics, The Moon Maid has been described as "Burroughs' masterpiece of science fiction and a too-often overlooked pioneer work of social extrapolation in science fiction" - which is true.
MOON MAID - FULL TEXT | MOON MEN - FULL TEXT | RED HAWK - FULL TEXT | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY

6. Philip Gordon Wylie & Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933). Wylie and Balmer's masterpiece is, for the most part, a pre-apocalyptic novel. The plot details the efforts of The League of the Last Days - an international band of 1,000 brilliant scientists, action heroes, and fertile women (I exaggerate, but not much; the main female character is named Eve!), who've discovered that two rogue planets are entering the sun's orbit, and that while one of these planets (Bronson Alpha) will collide with the Earth, a remnant of humankind might be able to survive on the other (Bronson Beta) - to design, construct, and outfit rocket-arks that will transport a few of their number to safety. We are treated to two terrifying apocalyptic scenes: One, when the rogue planets first pass by the Earth, triggering stupendous cataclysms; and the other, when worlds collide: "The very Earth bulged... It became plastic. It was drawn out egg-shaped. The cracks girdled the globe. A great section of the Earth itself lifted up and peeled away... The two planets struck." But it's the post-apocalyptic scenes that I enjoy most: a deserted, Ballardian Chicago whose skyscrapers are knocked out of plumb; violent, half-naked mobs battling the National Guard in Pittsburgh; an army of hate-filled Midwesterners that nearly succeeds in wrecking the rocket-ship project. Plus, I dig the quasi-Nietzschean philosophizing: "What are morals, fundamentally, Tony?" demands Eve of the novel's protagonist, her fiancé. "Morals are nothing but the code of conduct required of an individual in the best interests of the group of which he's a member. So what's 'moral' here wouldn't be moral at all on Bronson Beta." Eve is explaining, you see, why she won't be faithful to Tony even if they do survive doomsday. Sequel: After Worlds Collide (1934). Fun facts: The book influenced the strip Flash Gordon, while Siegel & Shuster lifted key ideas from both When Worlds Collide and Wylie's earlier SF novel, Gladiator when they created Superman. George Pal's 1951 movie adaptation of Worlds is a sci-fi classic (it inspired the Rocky Horror lyrics "'But When Worlds Collide,'/Said George Pal to his bride,/'I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills'"); one fears that Stephen Sommers's forthcoming adaptation won't be an improvement.
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7. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt: Being an account of another adventure of Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E.D. Malone, the discoverers of "The Lost World" (1913). Doyle's first Professor Challenger tale, The Lost World, was a romp through a South American jungle crawling with prehistoric monsters and beast-men. Why, critics have wondered ever since, did he follow it with a yarn that takes place almost entirely in a locked room? (That's Challenger, et al., crowded comically together on the book's spine.) Challenger discovers that the planet is about to be engulfed in a poisonous belt of "ether" (astrophysicists now prefer the term "dark matter"). Inviting his comrades to his home outside London, where he and his wife have laid up a supply of oxygen canisters, which may or may not save their lives, Challenger tells them: "We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function. It is, in my opinion, the end of the world." Barricading themselves into his wife's boudoir, like astronauts strapping themselves into a rocket, the adventurers sit and wait, debating everything from the possibilities of the universe to the "abysses that lie upon either side of our material existence," to the "ideal scientific mind"; meanwhile, the world goes to rack and ruin. True, Poison Belt is a Wellsian exercise, i.e., not nearly as action-packed as Doyle's usual output. But unlike other apocalyptic fictions, which model proper (heroic) action in the face of certain disaster, Doyle's novella models proper behavior - think of Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('57), for example. Also, the coda, in which humankind becomes more socialist, less fanatically religious and political, and generally wiser, is sweet; and Challenger's personal qualities - his scholarly sprezzatura, overweening egotism, and nerves of steel - make him fine company, whether in the jungle or in his wife's boudoir.
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8. Jack London, The Scarlet Plague (1915). Although Mary Shelley and M.P. Shiel beat him to the punch, London's post-apocalyptic plague novel has proved more influential on subsequent SF apocalypses - from Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz ('59) to Hoban's Riddley Walker ('80), to Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, for example - whether they're of the pandemic, atomic, or natural-disaster variety. One suspects that Scarlet Plague influenced the Moon Men section of Burroughs's Moon Maid trilogy, too, since the plot begins in 2073, 60 years after a plague has reduced the world's population to a few scattered bands of neolithic scavengers. London's vision, like Burroughs's is an anti-Marxist one: See what happens when the proletariat take over? Everything gets worse, not better! In the post-apocalyptic social order, women are degraded and beaten: Vesta Van Warden, wife of the richest man in America before the plague, we learn from the ancient James Howard Smith, became the chattel of one of her former servants, a man known only as Chauffeur. Predatory nomads - members of the Chauffeur Tribe - named Hoo-Hoo and Har-Lip roam among the ruins of San Francisco. And poor Smith, formerly a professor of literature at UC Berkeley, is reviled by his juniors for being literate: "What I want to know," Edwin continued, "is why you call crab 'toothsome delicacy'? Crab is crab, ain't it? No one I never heard calls it such funny things." Not one of London's most rollicking adventures, but fun and provocative.
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9. Edward Shanks, People of the Ruins (1920). Like London's Scarlet Plague, Shanks's pessimistic postwar novel explores a western society in steep decline. During a workers' strike in 1924 London, our protagonist - Jeremy Tuft, an "investigator in physics" - is accidentally frozen by an experimental suspended-animation ray (as demonstrated on the cover of the June 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries); he wakes up in a medieval-style idiocracy, 150 years hence. Not only have his fellow Englishmen forgotten most of what they used to know, before a worldwide workers' revolution and famine led to civilization's collapse, but they don't particularly care to re-learn any of it. People of the Ruins is, I'd say, an early Sleeper- or Idiocracy-like satire on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward or Wells's The Sleeper Wakes, novels in which a Rip Van Winkle figure finds himself in a wonderful techno-utopia. However, though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his era's doctrine of Progress ("He had held the comfortable belief that mankind was advancing in conveniences and the amenities of life by regular and inevitable degrees"), Tuft soon decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful, safer ("We used to feel that we were living on the edge of a precipice - every man by himself, and all men together, lived in anxiety"). In this sense, People of the Ruins is an early example of the "cozy catastrophe." Either way, it's worth reading - but doesn't get exciting until the brutish northern English tribes join forces with the Welsh and invade London!
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10. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914). "It is full of lively ingredients; it has no organic life," writes Aldiss of this book. "Wells the One-Man Think-Tank has burst into view. His books are no longer novels but gospels." Yeah, I probably wouldn't include this book in this Top Ten list if I'd managed to acquire and read J.D. Beresford's Goslings (a plague kills every male in London), or Cicely Hamilton's Theodore Savage (a post-apocalyptic novel by a noted feminist), or John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (I like the title). But I haven't - they're very rare. Also, The World Set Free is the best of Wells's four(!) PGA apocalyptic novels, so its lively ingredients are worth a look. Building on the recent discovery that "the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and - lifeless - lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy," Wells conjures a 1950s England in which clean, efficient atomic engines have transformed life for the better. Alas, government and education, not to mention social justice, have not kept pace with advances in science and technology, and in the late '50s a world war breaks out. Atomic bombs that never stop exploding wipe out the world's great cities. Worldwide civilization is on the brink of collapse - "the community as a whole was aimless, untrained, and unorganized to the pitch of imbecility"; "there were rumors of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes" - when, miraculously, a New World Order is formed. But more about that another time. Fun fact: Hungarian-German-American astrophysicist Leó Szilárd, who worked on the Manhattan Project, claimed that The World Set Free helped him conceive of the nuclear chain reaction.
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Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

ALSO OF INTEREST

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13):
* Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man (1904 as Fragment d'histoire future; 1905 in English)
* George Long, Valhalla: A Novel (1906)
* Van Tassel Sutphen, The Doomsman (1906)
* H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906)
* H.G. Wells, The War in the Air (1908)
* James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908)
* George Barr McCutcheon, Her Weight in Gold (1911; novella: The Wrath of the Dead)
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge (1912)
* J.D. Beresford, Goslings (1913, pub. in US as A World of Women)

THE TEENS (1914-23):
* George Allan England, Darkness and Dawn (1914)
* Herbert Gubbins, The Elixir of Life, or 2905 A.D.: A Novel of the Far Future (1914)
* Maurice LeBlanc, The Tremendous Event (1920 as Le Formidable Evenement; 1922 in English)
* Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage (1922)
* Ella Scrysmour, The Perfect World: A Romance of Strange People and Strange Places (1922)
* C.F. Ramuz, The Triumph of Death (1922 as Presence de la Mort; in English, 1946; pub. in US as The End of All Men)
* J.J. Connington, Nordenholt's Million (1923)
* P. Anderson Graham, The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33):
* H.M. Egbert, Draught of Eternity (1924)
* Martin Hussingtree, Konyetz (1924)
* V.T. Murray, The Rule of the Beasts (1925)
* Edgar Wallace, The Day of Uniting (1926)
* Shaw Desmond, Ragnarok: The Armageddon of the Gods (1926)
* C.E. Jacomb, And A New Earth: A Romance (1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, Deluge: A Romance (1927)
* Charles J. Finger, The Spreading Stain: A Tale for Boys and Men with Boys' Hearts (1927)
* Pierrepont B. Noyes, The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927)
* Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (August 1928, novella in Amazing Stories)
* J.W. Chancellor, Through the Visograph (1928)
* Paul Creswick, The Turning Wheel (1928)
* S. Fowler Wright, Dawn (1929)
* Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930)
* F. Wright Moxley, Red Snow (1930)
* Thomas Alva Stubbins, The Story of the Tomb of Gold (1932)
* John Collier, Tom's A-Cold (1933, pub. in US as Full Circle)
* Helen Simpson, The Woman on the Beast: Viewed from Three Angles (1933)
* Neil Bell, The Lord of Life (1933)
* H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933)

PLUS:
* Karel Čapek, War with the Newts (1936)

At first glance, it's pretty hard to watch. It's one of the grimmest things I've ever seen, and I've watched student productions of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. The first couple of three-minute episodes seem to consist of just Schofield acting his heart out in a grim post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. (You can take a drink now.) It's not entirely clear to me what the plot of Kirill is, but it seems as though Schofield's character is trying to communicate with our time, 50 years in his past, and warn us about some future disaster. And (shockingly) the Large Hadron Collider is involved.

MSN UK will post two three-minute episodes per week, for the next five weeks. And there's some kind of vague interactive component, to do with MSN's instant messenger tool "Live Search" and MSN's social network. Maybe you can communicate with a dying blogger in a ravaged world 50 years from now? Your guess is as good as mine. Here's the trailer:

[MSN]

Becerra's animation is scary-real, and often times it's impossible to tell the difference between the drawings and reality. The original animated short made its way through the festivals and can be viewed at Moving Pictures Magazine.
[Quiet Earth]

As we mentioned before, there have been a ton of young-adult postapocalyptic novels, many of them quite disturbing and hardcore. (And our list didn't even mention Uglies or Tripods.) And, Glenn adds:

I can think of a dozen post-apocalyptic movies that I saw as a teen, in the '80s, at the Harvard Square and Orson Welles theaters — including "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and sequels, "The Omega Man" (1971), "Sleeper" (1973), "Death Race 2000" (1975), "A Boy and His Dog" (1975), and of course "Road Warrior" (1981). As hard as it is to believe that adults would go to see "Death Race 2000," though, these movies weren't intended for teen audiences. So they don't count.

There have also been a couple of post-apocalyptic TV shows that seemed aimed at teens: the original "Battlestar Galactica," for example, not to mention "Planet of the Apes." I've never seen "Jericho," so I can't say whether it's aimed at teens. Oh yeah, in England, in the 1980s, there was a short-lived TV adaptation of John Christopher's excellent "Tripod" trilogy.

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Will City of Ember be the first Post Apocalyptic Children's film? [Quiet Earth]
Post-Apocalyptic Kiddie Movies [Boston Globe]

The vault will hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds for the world's main food crops, allowing humanity to re-establish agriculture if our main food plants disappear due to a catastrophe. Already, "gene vaults" from Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed due to the wars in those countries. Images by AP.

[AFP]