The Chicago Tribune toted up some of the predictions people made ten years ago for the world of 2010 — and unless something drastic happens in the next couple of weeks, they're looking a bit optimistic.

Forecaster Faith Popcorn said 90 percent of all consumer goods would be home-delivered. The World Future Society said you'd have a wristwatch-type device that monitored your blood chemistry, while an implanted microchip in your forearm adjusted the lights and heating systems of any building you walked into. Arthur C. Clarke predicted we'd have portable quantum generators that drew on the power of space to give us unlimited clean energy.

Also: Animal-to-human organ transplants would become common by now, school would be year-round and pre-school would be universal, everyone would have wearable computers and 7 percent of cars would be internet-enabled, and "Smellyvision" would allow you to smell cooking shows.

The funny part is, Tribune columnist Eric Zorn starts out by saying these predictions are all for "the next ten years" — without mentioning they were made ten years ago. So as you read the list of predictions, you're left wondering just how plausible these predictions are for the year 2020. And in many cases, they seem at least somewhat believable. Does that mean the predictions were possibly accurate, but just too optimistic time-wise? Or are we just incurably optimistic ourselves? [Chicago Tribune]

They Come Back, But Not Quite Alive

Torchwood: When Jack Harkness is understandably upset when Owen Harper is shot and killed. But at least he's got the Resurrection Gauntlet to bring him back to life, right? Well, sort of. Owen still walks and talks, but he's not precisely alive. His heart doesn't beat, his flesh doesn't heal, and his reflexes are gone. And, if that wasn't bad enough, he can't even enjoy food or sex anymore, and Weevils follow him everywhere.

Caprica: Granted, the consequences of bringing Zoe Graystone back from the dead are pretty far-reaching. After all, it results in the creation of the Cylons and the eventual decimation of humanity. But when Joseph Adama encounters a computerized copy of his dead daughter, her concerns with being back from the dead are more immediate. Without a living body, she has no pulse and just generally feels wrong, to the extent that she can't stand being semi-alive this way.

"Playback" Arthur C. Clarke: Caprica's borrowed a page from Clarke here, who wrote a tale of aliens who try to bring a pilot back to life after his ship explodes. They manage to restore all of his memories, but have no idea what kind of body he had, and he's a bit depressed to find that he's just a non-corporeal simulation.

"The River Styx Runs Upstream" by Dan Simmons: When a young boy's mother dies, his father has her body resurrected. Although her body has returned, her mind simply isn't there, and she wanders through life as an automaton. The boy's distraught father and older brother eventually kill themselves in their grief, horror, and shame, but the boy doesn't think resurrection's so terrible. He himself goes to work for the Resurrectionists, spending his free time with his resurrected family.

You Bring Them Back Wrong

Doctor Who "The Empty Child:" Well-meaning nanobots attempt to reconstruct a child killed during the London Blitz. But not knowing what a human child looks like, they bring him back as a mindless abomination, with a gas mask for a face and ever searching for his mother. Even worse, the bots decide that this is what all humans must look like, and proceed to transmute healthy children as well.

"The Monkey's Paw" by WW Jacobs: The mystical monkey's paw grants wishes, but never in the way you hoped. After the first wish Mr. White makes results in the death of his son Herbert, his second wish is for Herbert to return. Mr. White never sees his son, but he knows after a horrible accident and a week on the slab, Herbert probably isn't the same. His third wish takes Herbert away.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Forever:" Following the same vein as "The Monkey's Paw," Dawn tries to resurrect her dead mother via magic. She also never sees her mother, realizing that what comes back won't quite be her, and breaks the spell before her mother reaches their front door.

They'll Try to Kill You Afterward

30 Days of Night: Dark Days: After Eben Olemaun becomes a vampire to save the remaining citizens of Barrow, he turns to ash when the polar sun finally rises. This sets Stella Olemaun on a quest to bring her husband back to life. But when she succeeds, Eben is still a vampire — and a hungry one at that.

"Herbert West — Reanimator" by HP Lovecraft: Medical student Herbert West is fascinated by life and death, and develops a serum he believes will restart the machinery of the human body. The serum works, but turns the corpses into cannibalistic zombies. West is unrepentant , focused on new ways to find dead subjects for his experiments. Of course, eventually his zombie experiments turn on him.

Practical Magic: After Sally Owens' boyfriend Jimmy turns out to be abusive, she drugs him and accidentally kills him. Fearing prison, Sally and her sister Gillian cast a spell to revive him, but Jimmy's immediate reaction isn't exactly gratitude. He tries to kill Gillian, forcing Sally to murder him once again.

Pet Sematary: Any dead creature buried in the ancient Micmac burial ground comes back to life, just not quite the way you put it in. After losing his young son Gage, Louis buries his son in the graveyard. Sure enough, Gage comes back — and promptly murders his mother.

Lexx: You would think that, given the prophecy that the last of the Brunnen-G would kill His Divine Shadow, the last thing His Divine Shadow would do is resurrect a Brunnen-G corpse. But he did exactly that to Kai, making him one of the living dead as a Divine Assassin. It takes over 2000 years, but eventually Kai does get around to killing him.

Supernatural "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things:" College students and necromancy are always a recipe for trouble. When a broken-hearted boy tries to bring his dead crush back, she's of course got to go zombie and start chomping down on her loved ones.

God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert: For thousands of years, Leto Atreides has ruled over humanity, and always has a ghola — a copy — of his father's faithful friend Duncan Idaho to serve him. But the Duncan ghola's almost inevitably rebel against Leto and try to kill him, forcing Leto to kill all but 19 gholas. Still, Leto keeps bringing in a fresh Duncan ghola after each attempt on his life.

They Bring Death With Them

Pushing Daisies: When pie maker Ned touches dead bodies, they become reanimated, without regard for mutilation or decay. But if he fails to deanimate them after more than a minute, a random person in close proximity dies, taking their place. And for Ned, bringing the dead back to life is further complicated by not being able to touch them, lest they fall dead once again.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "After Life:" Actually, bringing a body-stealing demon into the world of the living was probably the least of the disastrous consequences of resurrecting the Slayer. Still, when a demon gets loose in Sunnydale, the Scoobies have to kill it before it kills Buffy.

Carnivale: Ben Hawkins has the power to bring people back from the dead, but it comes with a price: one person of Hawkins' choosing must die in exchange for the life. And, try though he might, he can't choose himself.

Torchwood "Dead Man Walking:" Another fun consequence of Owen's walking death is that Death himself comes along for the ride. He's looking for 13 souls to consume so he can remain in the world of the living and slake his thirst for destruction.

It Will Come at Great Personal Cost

The Dresden Files: The sorcerer Hrothbert of Bainbridge committed a crime against his order by bringing his beloved Winifred back from the dead, prompting the High Council to hand down a severe and lasting punishment: they imprison his spirit inside his skull for all eternity. Hrothbert, now "Bob," has been around over a thousand years, but he can't interact with the physical world.

Torchwood "They Keep Killing Suzie:" The other Resurrection Gauntlet actually does bring the dead back to full-fledged life. But naturally there's still a catch: the resurrected person draws life energy from the living wearer, and permanent resurrection means the death of the living wearer.

Full Metal Alchemist: After their mother dies, Edward and Alphonse try to revive her through alchemy. Not only do they fail to bring her back from the dead, they lose physical pieces of themselves in the process, with Edward losing his left leg and Alphonse losing his entire body.

Supernatural: The Winchesters thrive on death and resurrection. When Sam is shot and killed, Dean trades his soul for Sam's life, with the bartering demon collecting in just a year. Sure enough, after a year, Dean dies and head off to Hell.

It Will Attract Unwanted Attention

The Outer Limits "Josh:" When reclusive Josh Butler resurrects a young girl through a strange electromagnetic pulse, it attracts the attention of a tabloid TV reporter looking for a scoop. Unfortunately, it also attracts the attention of the US Air Force, who promptly seize Josh and start performing medical tests.

The 4400: Shawn Farrell manages to bring a bird back from the dead, just one example of his amazing healing abilities. But not everyone is thrilled about his strange new powers, and they bring him to the attention of Jordan Collier, which is a bit of a double-edged sword.

It's Only Temporary

AI: Artificial Intelligence: The evolved mechas who find David frozen beneath the water are able to give the robotic boy his greatest wish: time with his long-dead adoptive mother Monica. The resurrection only lasts a day and can never be repeated. David's okay with the arrangement, since that one day is perfect, but it's a clear audience tearjerker.

They Were Actually Okay With Being Dead

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Willow assumed that Buffy's death by interdimensional portal had sent the Slayer to a hell dimension, and conjured up some ill-advised magic to bring her back. Unfortunately, Willow never considered that Buffy might actually be in Heaven, leaving her in a major season-long depression as she adjusts to inferior life back on Earth.

Supernatural: Okay, so Dean didn't exactly enjoy his stay in Hell, but he's dealing with some very Buffy-like issues on his return to Earth. He clearly remembers his agonizing time in Hell and got a real taste for torture. And God might have pulled him out of Hell, but his plans for Dean on Earth involve more havoc and torture.

Green Lantern: Maura Rayner is infected with a sentient virus sent by Sinestro and her son Kyle failed to get back in time to save her. He uses his powers to revive her, but she won't have any of it. She senses that, once dead, there's something wrong with being alive and begs him to let her be dead once again.

You Never Really Liked Them in the First Place

The Venture Bros.: Dean and Hank Venture are a tad on the death-prone side, so their father always keeps a few clone slugs around to imprint with their memories. But once they're alive again, he generally treats them as nuisances — or ignores them entirely. But he does find it handy to have a spare organ donor (or two) around.

Red Dwarf: Nearly the entire complement of the Red Dwarf is killed off in the first episode, only to be resurrected in the eighth season thanks to a little nanobot magic. Lister is no longer the only human in the universe, but he and his cohorts immediately run afoul of the newly reconstructed crew.

It Makes for Unnecessary Sequels

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer: We said goodbye to several major characters from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (as well as the entire planet Earth) at the end of Mostly Harmless. Presumably Eoin Colfer's sequel will see Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Trillian ride again, and Arthur's none too pleased about it.

So why are these cities so overwhelmingly large? And where do they come from? Here's a list, by region:

North America:

The city of North Am (in Magnus Robot Fighter) does just what it sounds like — it covers almost the entirety of North America, giving you lots and lots of space in which to (what else?) fight robots.

The Maze is a huge network of underground parking garages that stretches all the way from New York to Los Angeles, in the movie Circuitry Man.

Lots and lots of SF stories predict a huge swathe of city stretching along the East Coast of the United States. One of the most famous is Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, which eventually stretches all the way down to Florida.

In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson, a mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or The Sprawl.

In He, She And It by Marge Piercy, the urban megalopolis that stretches from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop.

And similarly, in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins, a huge sprawling "Conglomerate City" occupies most of the East Coast of the United States.

There's also BosWash, the city that stretches from Manchester, NH to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was first predicted in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman.

The City in Transmetropolitan is commonly believed to be a megacity including New York and stretching as far West as the Great Lakes, which are referred to as its Western lakes.

The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone: In Halo, the former city of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana. And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city-state consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations.

In real life, some urban planners talk about an area called ChiPitts, which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh, and everything in between.

Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz, appears to cover a huge chunk of the former Texas and Arkansas, and becomes the capitol of an empire that rules the Western Hemisphere — and eventually wipes out its main rival, New Rome. (Map from Wikipedia page.)

Texas City, in the Judge Dredd comic, covers a huge area of the former Southwest — including Texas, of course.

Bay City is a massive conurbation covering San Francisco as well as its outlying areas, in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

San Angeles appears in many different works of fiction, and it usually encompasses Los Angeles, San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara. It's the setting for Demolition Man.

Mega-City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did, until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comic.

South America:

Sao Paulo/Rio: In Ben Bova's Mars, the rural poor stream into the cities of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such huge numbers, the two cities grow into "a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide, that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all."

Ciudad Baranquilla, aka Banana City, is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics.

Europe:

Greater London — in Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, London has grown outwards massively, swallowing up tons of villages and formerly independent towns. Clarke and Baxter describe London as spreading out, "kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories... the scattered, helpless city that lay helpless below" a passing airplane.

Edinburgh/Glasgow — it's not strictly speaking science fiction, but there's a lot of talk about these two Scottish cities combining into one megalopolis in the coming century. The two cities could soon be linked by a high-speed maglev train. But it doesn't appear that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet.

Metropia, in the animated film of the same name, is a massive network of subway systems and "undergrounds" linking all the cities in continental Europe. The world is running out of oil, so the leaders come up with the plan to link all of the subway systems into one huge network — which appears to be haunted.

City Europe, in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, covers an enormous area of continental Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The city is made up of a series of "stacks" with the richest people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the wastelands below.

The south of England is occupied by Brit-Cit in Judge Dredd. Plus East Meg One is another mega-city in the Judge Dredd universe, which covers a big chunk of the former Soviet Union, including Moscow.

And of course, there's East-Meg One, the Soviet mega-city in Judge Dredd, which sprawls around the remains of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega-City One.

Africa:

Pan-Africa is a continent-wide quasi-state comprising several mega-cities in the Judge Dredd universe: they include Umar (the former Libya), Simba City (Cameroon), Luxor (Egypt), New Jerusalem (the northeast of Ethiopia), and Casablanca.

Gauteng is another one that doesn't appear to have popped up in science fiction very much, but it's talked about a lot in real life. In a nutshell, Johannesburg (a city already growing way past its capacity) joins up with Pretoria/Tshwane and a number of other municipalities, to form a single megacity. There are already plans to join them via a high-speed "Gautrain."

Asia:

Mega-Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis. An earthquake splits Tokyo in two, and as the city rebuilds, it gets even larger and much more sprawling, coming to be known as Mega Tokyo. Here's a map of Mega Tokyo, from B-Club Special (via Igarashi) Likewise, Akira takes place in Neo Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis of steel and neon. And the anime Cyber-City Oedo 808 takes place in a fictional future "Edo," or Tokyo, which is apparently much larger than the existing city.

And real-life urban planners talk about the Taiheiyo Belt, which will cover the Pacific coast of Japan including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

A single continuous robotic structure known as The Host covers almost all the islands of Japan, and 50 million people live inside it, in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai.

And of course, Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City covers most of Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama.

Australia:

Greater Sydney is predicted to encompass a region spanning from Melbourne, all the way up to Queensland along the coast. But as with Edinburgh/Glasgow and Gauteng, it doesn't appear that anybody's written science fiction about this megalopolis yet.

The South Pole:

A continent-wide city called Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic, in Magnus, Robot Fighter. Because robot-fighting is best served... cold.

And of course, the city of Holy Terra, or just Terra, occupies almost the entire planet's surface in Warhammer 40,000.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Map layout by Stephanie Fox.

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.

On April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic, the most technologically advanced ship of its time, struck an iceberg, and sank beneath the Atlantic ocean during the early hours of the 15th. Radio calls went unheeded, and over fifteen hundred people perished, with only seven hundred and six of the passengers surviving the wreck.

The wreck of our high-tech ocean-conquering liner has captured our imaginations ever since, especially after explorer Robert Ballard rediscovered the ship in 1985. Here are the classic science-fiction stories that feature the good ship Titanic:

Starship Titanic, Terry Jones & Douglas Adams
First a game, then a book based on the game, this story follows a main character whose home has been destroyed by a crashing space ship, the Titanic. Players solve puzzles, and the book, co-written by former Monty Python member Terry Jones (who also provided voicework for the game) collects a number of the story's subplots together. If you're interested, you can read the entire book online, although the words have been reordered to be in alphabetical order. Read it here

A Flight to Remember, Futurama Episode
Futurama also tackled the Titanic storyline, with Episode 10 of Season 2, "A Flight to Remember." The crew takes a vacation on the newly built Titanic, the most advanced ship in the universe, piloted by Zapp Branigan, and chrisined with the head of Leonardo DeCaprio. Predictably, things go south when Zapp pilots the ship between black holes, which he describes as Icebergs in the sky, and much of the plot spoofs the film Titanic.

Raise the Titanic!, Clive Cussler
Raise the Titanic! is the third book in Cussler's popular Dirk Pitt series, published in 1976. While mainly an action novel, there are some science fictional elements to it, as the protagonist seeks out the RMS Titanic to recover a shipment of minerals that would be used to power a top secret weapon, the Sicilian Project, being built by the US Defense Department. Pitt is tasked with raising the ship while intelligence and governmental agents clash, at the height of the Cold War.

Voyage of the Damned, Doctor Who episode
"What? What?!" So ended the third series of the current Doctor Who, as the Titanic crashes into the side of the Tardis. The third Christmas special, Voyage of the Dammed, finds the good Doctor on board the Titanic, a ship modeled after the real one, from the planet Sto. Along the way, he partners up with Kylie Minogue, goes down to modern-day earth, comes across some aliens and when the ship starts to crash into the planet, the Doctor saves the day. Business as usual.

The Ghost from the Grand Banks and the Deep Range, Arthur C. Clarke
This novel takes place in 2012, where two groups are attempting to raise the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean for the centennial event, where technological rivalries and egos ensure, while Astronaut Walter Franklin has been tasked as a submarine warden, and uncovers dangers under the sea while doing so.

Distant Waves: A Novel Of The Titanic, by Suzanne Weyn
This urban fantasy, released today by Suzanne Weyn on Scholastic Press, follows four daughters and their mother, as well as journalist W. T. Stead, scientist Nikola Tesla, and industrialist John Jacob Astor. One of Tesla's inventions dooms them, while another could save them.

Ghostbusters 2
The Titanic makes an appearance in the 1988 movie Ghostbusters 2, where a ghost Titanic lands in New York City, piloted by a number of ghosts.

The Cursed Tuba Contingency, The Middleman Episode
Last year's short-lived but amazing superhero show, The Middleman, featured the Titanic as well, with a cursed Tuba - when played, anyone who heard it would be fated to drown in the Atlantic. In the episode, the Middleman and Wendy attent a yacht party to attempt to prevent the instrument from being played.

Titanic: Adventure Out of Time
Adventure Out of Time was a 1996 computer game developed by Cyberflix. In the story, starting in 1942 during the London Blitz, players are sent back in time to 1912 as a secret agent, who is tasked with retrieving the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The story features a number of subplots, and by completing the missions, the player changes history, and prevents the Second World War from happening, as well as several other outcomes based on the player's performance.

Ghost Hunters
Tonight, SciFi will air a Ghost Hunters special on the Titanic, where the team will be investigating ghosts from the Titanic, at an exhibit of Titanic artifacts. This will be airing on the SciFi channel at 9 and 11 pm.

The list comes from Jeff Prucher, a freelance writer and editor of the OED's science fiction project. He put out a Hugo-winning book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary Of Science Fiction, which just came out in paperback.

The list includes the sciences of "robotics," named by Asimov in 1941, and "genetic engineering," coined by Jack Williamson in the same year. Williamson also gave us ion drive, in 1947's "The Equalizer." Meanwhile, E.E. "Doc" Smith gave us "deep space" and "pressure suit." David Gerrold invented the term "computer virus" in his novel When Harlie Was One, while John Brunner came up with the idea of a worm in Shockwave Rider. Then there are "gas giant," from James Blish, and "zero gravity/zero-G" from Arthur C. Clarke.

[Oxford University Press via Abe Books]

Note: Most of the stories below are anecdotal at best, and based on rumor and urban legends. Where possible, we've provided actual documentation.

L. Ron Hubbard's "start a religion" bar bet:

This one is commonly dismissed as a myth... but it's also like kudzu on the Internet. Supposedly, L. Ron Hubbard bet Robert Heinlein that he could make a ton of money by starting a fake religion. (In one version, Heinlein bet that his own invention, non-monogamy, would be more successful.) Or maybe Hubbard made the bet with Philip K. Dick. Or Arthur C. Clarke. Or George Orwell. Or John W. Campbell. No, wait - it was Ray Bradbury.

The Lewis-Tolkien time-travel wager:

Legend has it, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had a bet, that they would each try writing in a new genre, to stretch both of their writing styles. Writes Bruce L. Edwards in his book C.S. Lewis:

A simple flip of a coin determined that Lewis would try his hand at a space-travel story and Tolkien would try time-travel.

As a result, Lewis wrote the space trilogy: Out Of The Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Tolkien, on the other hand, wrote in a 1968 letter that his effort "ran dry." Writes Edwards:

Tolkien's typical method of composition led to a not surprising end: his initial attempt to write a tale of time-travel became overly complicated and burdened with detail and it was eventually left as an unfinished work. He called it The Lost Road and it was a tale of a present day English father and son who, through the son's visions and dreams, are able to travel back [through] time to meet another father and son, similar to them, who are living at the time in Middle-earth's history when the star-shaped island of Númenor is destroyed.

The Númenor tale wound up as part of Tolkien's The Silmarillion, but he never finished the actual time-travel story. So yes, Lewis won the bet.

The unnamed SF writer who wrote an intentionally bad book:

Rumors abound that a famous science fiction writer bet that he could write an intentionally terrible book and it would be a hit, because the public's taste was so bad. And indeed, the book in question was a huge hit. (This wager is supposedly mentioned in the foreword to Spider Robinson's Callahan Chronicles, but not the name of the author.)

Asimov's impossible isotope:

The Internet has lots of unsubstantiated reports about Isaac Asimov's trans-universal novel The Gods Themselves. Either Asimov wrote it in response to a dare, to write a novel "about an impossible isotope of iron." Or he wrote in response to people saying he couldn't write about aliens or sex, which is sort of like a bet. There's also the famous Asimov-Clarke treaty, where Asimov agreed to call Clarke the best science fiction writer, as long as Clarke called Asimov the best science writer.

Update: reader Jacob Kaufman says Asimov actually wrote the novella that became part of The Gods Themselves in response to Robert Silverberg saying that science fiction should be about the human dimension, not "Plutonium 186," picking a science-fictional term at random. Asimov laughed, because there's no such thing as Plutonium-186, and there can't be in this universe. But then he became intrigued and decided to write about a universe in which Plutonium-186 existed, and came into this universe as a free (but unstable) source of energy. (More details on that here.) And Asimov didn't write the book in response to people saying he never wrote about aliens or sex, but he did include those elements in the middle section, for that reason. Thanks, Jacob!

Michael Crichton's Beowulf wager:

The Jurassic Park author wrote one of his best novels, Eaters Of The Dead, in response to a wager that he couldn't write a version of the Beowulf saga and make it relevant to a modern audience. The resulting book is presented as a lost manuscript written by an Islamic envoy kidnapped by Vikings in 932.

Harlan Ellison's jazz record wager:

In 1960, Harlan Ellison was already a major up-and-coming science fiction writer, but he fancied himself a jazz expert as well. One day, he got into an argument with jazz columnist Ted White over whether a 1939 Mildred Lewis album featured backing music by John Kirby or John Lewis. Ellison was so sure of himself, he bet his entire record collection - and if he lost, he'd only collect one record from White's collection. In the end, Ellison settled the bet... at gunpoint. You can read the whole account in White's famous essay "The Bet."

James P. Hogan's win and loss:

Libertarian science fiction author James Hogan is a betting man. First, according to his own website, he wrote his first novel on a bet with a coworker that he couldn't write an SF novel and get it published. (He won five pounds that time.) But also, according to this other site, Hogan also bet that his novel, Inherit The Stars, would be better than the Arthur C. Clarke story that provided the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I'm guessing he lost that one.)

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Reading Peter Crowther's anthology, I was struck by how little had changed, in some ways, about our ideas of artificial intelligence, since Asimov's and Heinlein's tales, not to mention novels like Gerrold's When Harlie Was One. We still have many of the same themes, including A.I.s coming of age, trying to become more human, struggling to understand humanity, or exploring religion. A number of the stories could easily have been written in 1970.

Other commonalities: Many of the A.I.s are female, especially the ones who have lovely bodies that male humans fall in love with or are seduced by. (Alll but one of the collection's authors are male, I think.) A couple of different stories reference HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are two or three stories about an A.I. that's fractured into different personalities, or a composite of personality fragments.

And yet there are many nuggets of innovation scattered throughout the collection. I really liked "Adam Robots" by Adam Roberts, in which two robots named Adam find themselves in a virtual Garden Of Eden, trying to unravel a modified form of the Adam-and-Eve story. (You expect there to be a twist involving what happens when one robot takes the apple of knowledge, but it's not what you expect.)

The story "Sweats" by Keith Brooke has probably the cleverest, and most surprising, concept of them all: someone creates an artificial personality out of pieces of different people's minds, and then installs it into the body of a hapless teenager. This artificial personality is designed to be a cold-blooded killer and sent to murder a politician — so one of the people whose personality traits is used to create this composite mind is arrested for murder. Can we hold someone responsible for a crime committed by a collection of his personality traits mixed with those of others? This story also incorporates a virtual afterlife (like Second Life, but only for reconstructed personalities of the dead) and is vastly entertaining, except that it has one or two plot twists too many and stops holding together by the end.

Also super entertaining is the story "The New Cyberiad" by Paul DiFilippo, in which two artificial intelligences in the distant future decide to build a solar-system-sized time machine to return to the present. They want to collect some present-day humans to repopulate the future, which is now devoid of organic life. It turns into a bizarre, rolicking quest narrative that contains witty nods at Gerrold, Clarke, and several other writers. At one point, the two boy-robots create a girl-robot to handle routine tasks, and then they both fall in love with their creation in a pastiche of the Pygmalion story. It gets more and more demented.

Also a fun read is "The Highway Code" by Brian Stableford, in which a sentient truck grapples with a road-centric version of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

There are a few other clever ideas, but for the most part this anthology felt stronger on ideas than execution. A lot of the writing left me sort of underwhelmed, and there are almost no memorable characters or really strong moments in the collection. Many of the stories in the book felt like they needed a bit more fleshing out, or perhaps a tighter focus, to change them from cool ideas to actual stories.

And then there were a few moments that I found actually embarrassing, like this bit from James Lovegrove's "The Kamizaze Code." A man and a woman (who are lovers) discuss sneaking a bit of code out of a top-secret Ministry Of Defense facility, and we get this bit of dialogue:

"I've thought about that too," said George. "You could smuggle it out... dump it onto a flash drive, then you take the flash drive to work with you..."

"Can't do that. We're not allowed to take equipment onto or off the premises. That's one of the things we're searched for every time we enter or leave."

"I know, but a flash drive is very small. About the size of a marker pen. And they don't do body cavity searches, do they?"

Jennifer caught his drive, and grimaced.

"It'll work," George insisted.

"Why not use your body cavity then, if you're so confident?"

"Becuase you have a body cavity better suited to the task. Trust me, I know," he added, with what he hoped was a safely salacious smile.

First of all, eww. Second of all... so this is a top secret facility without any metal detectors? And third of all, they don't let you take an ipod to work?

Bottom line: There are a few memorable stories here, and most of the other stories have something interesting to say about the nature of A.I. But this is probably one volume you'll want to take out of the library or buy a used copy of.

[Amazon]

The Stage, the British weekly newspaper for actors, is reporting that well-respected actors like Derek Jacobi, Jason Isaacs and Alex Jennings will be taking part in the new BBC season of sci-fi radio plays to be broadcast across the corporation's various networks this March. In addition to previously-announced adaptations of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama and Iain M. Banks' State Of The Art, the season - spread across BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and digital channel BBC 7 - will include new original works from Kim Newman and Mike Maddox, amongst others... but what explains the sudden popularity of the genre amongst big-name actors like Jacobi? A familar face, according to Jeremy Howe, BBC Radio 4's commissioning editor - Doctor Who:

There is a queue of people wanting to be in science fiction, because it’s seen to be sexy [thanks to the success of the series].

Of course, not everyone has the looks of David Tennant... but considering it's radio, who can tell?

Jacobi and McCormack to star in BBC radio’s sci-fi season [The Stage]

Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1993): A continuation of Prelude to Foundation, it continues the life of psychohistorian Hari Seldon as he develops his theory to create a society to replace the crumbling Galactic Empire. Like the original Foundation, it consists of a series of interconnected stories.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The first three stories in Forward the Foundation were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine prior to his death in 1992. By the time Asimov succumbed to kidney and heart failure, he had a complete, albeit unedited, draft of the book. Asimov’s third memoir, I, Asimov was also published after his death, as was a final collection of short stories and It’s Been a Good Life, a compilation of Asimov’s diaries and personal correspondences collected by his wife Janet, which for the first time revealed that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion a decade before his death.

Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K. Dick (1976): Nixon stand-in Ferris F. Fremont occupies the White House and has turned the United States into a police state, by inventing a fictitious group of home-grown terrorists. Science fiction writer Phil Dick finds himself the target of this new paranoia while his friend, record executive Nick Brady, starts hearing voices from an alien entity that may be God. And the entity, Valis, is prodding Brady to overthrow the corrupt commander-in-chief.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? Dick submitted the manuscript (under the title Valisystem A) to his editor, Mark Hurst, who sent the novel back for minor revisions. But rather than make the changes, Dick reworked the concepts into an entirely new novel, VALIS. Dick gave the Valisystem A manuscript to fellow science fiction writer Tim Powers, and eventually Arbor House acquired the rights to publish it, but retitled it to avoid confusion with VALIS. Dick’s early rejected non-science fiction works, Gather Yourselves Together and Voice from the Street also enjoyed posthumous life.

For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939) by Robert Heinlein: Heinlein’s first novel outlines a roadmap from America’s Great Depression to a futuristic utopia. Engineer Perry Nelson experiences a bad car accident in 1939, and wakes up in the year 2086. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman, is reprogrammed to remove his outdated sexual mores and jealousy, and learns about the technological and social advances that have passed him by.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The book was rejected by several publishers, possibly due to its depictions of nudity and sexual liberalism. Although the ideas in For Us, The Living fed some of Heinlein’s later works, he was not eager to see this early effort come to life. He attempted to destroy every copy of the book. But Heinlein did give the manuscript to at least one friend, and Robert James, a Heinlein scholar, eventually found it stashed away in a garage. And so, despite the author’s best efforts, it found its way into print.

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002): The unfinished novel, collected with other Adams works in a volume of the same name, promised to be the third volume of the Dirk Gently series, but Adams was considering remaking it as another volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? While Adams was still deciding what to do about Salmon, he suffered a fatal heart attack, and now we’re left with Eoin Colfer to give us a new Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl (2008): In Clarke’s final novel, 15 year-old Ranjit Subramanian achieves fame when he publishes the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Meanwhile, an alien empire realizes that humans have developed nuclear weapons and decides the planet must be wiped out.
Why wasn’t it published while Clarke was alive? As Clarke was working on The Last Theorem, his health began to deteriorate. So he tapped his longtime friend, Frederik Pohl, as his collaborator. Clarke sent Pohl 100 pages of notes, only 40 to 50 pages of which contained fully written text. Even Clarke had difficulty deciphering the notes, but Pohl wrote out the manuscript, the final version of which Clarke reviewed just days before his death this past March. But Clarke offered a more direct farewell to fans in the form of his 90th birthday video:

Says Fincher:

“It looks like it’s not going to happen. There’s no script and as you know, [star Morgan Freeman’s] not in the best of health right now [after an August car accident]. We’ve been trying to do it but it’s probably not going to happen.”

The veteran actor had been attached to the project in various forms for roughly eight years now. And when previously interviewed, it appeared as if Fincher had been giving the execution of the pic great thought:

“It’s probably technologically within striking distance right now. That was always the thing: You couldn't afford to build these things as sets. It’s just too huge.… I think it’s more along the lines of motion-capture.”

Like the curious beings with their cryptic motives at the helm of the Rama, it now looks like we'll never quite know what really could've come of this long-anticipated movie.

Klosterman writes:

As predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in 3001: The Final Odyssey, the orbiting luxury hotel is connected to Earth by a massive space elevator. Hyperstrong cables anchored to the earth near the equator (as required by physics) stretch 100,000 kilometers into the sky, rising into the hotel's lobby.

Now we just need him to design a space hotel. Would that hotel have the Hyperion adaptation On Demand? Ah, the future. We can dream. [Esquire]

It's hard to quibble with their picks for best movies and books. Being mostly Brits, the New Scientist group put Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy at the top of the novel heap. Iain M. Banks would have won, but his vote was split among a few of his books. (Including Feersum Enjinn. Really?) Frank Herbert's Dune also came close to winning. The best movie, according to the NS crew, was Blade Runner, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Serenity.

The "worst" lists might be a tad more controversial. The worst SF books include 3001, Arthur C. Clarke's fourth and final book in the Space Odyssey series, and L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. The worst films were The Blob and David Lynch's Dune. Several people apparently also voted for The Matrix (the original) for worst film, but others named it one of the best. One person said of The Matrix:

It has one of the worst backplot elements ever: using people as power sources. I could write an essay on how ludicrous that is.

Finally — and here's the part where some people may disagree violently — the New Scientist staff named Primer the "most incomprehensible" science fiction movie.

"Well worth watching," said one of our editors, "though you might be excused for wondering if it makes any sense at all."

You can vote for your own favorite books and movies, and give your reasons, at this link. Or you could just write a diatribe about why Primer really does make sense, if you watch it eight times. Shape-shifting robot image by Mondolithic Studios for New Scientist. [New Scientist]

There's way more great suggestions over at the link. [LibraryThing]

Stephen Baxter's Manifold Trilogy

In these three novels and a few related short stories, Baxter explores possible solutions to the Fermi paradox. His first Manifold novel, Time, operates under the conceit that we really are the only ones around, despite high-probability estimates to the contrary. Space, Baxter's second Manifold novel, asserts that there have been a multitude of other civilizations, but various cosmic disasters destroy them before they are able to make connections. The third novel in the series, Origins, posits that intelligent life is actually separated into parallel universes, so that it is impossible for two different civilizations to contact each other. Baxter's Manifold short stories, which are collected in the book Phase Space, explore these and other possible answers to this perplexing question.

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Everybody knows this famous novel of space exploration and the pitfalls of advanced technology. In this story, Clarke postulates that intelligent life does exist independent of our planet and our species — but we're not smart enough to understand their messages. The limited awareness of humans is probably the most plausible explanation for the Fermi paradox, but it's also quite a depressing one.

Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat"

This Nebula-nominated short story, which Bisson has made available online, is at once hilarious and chilling, an all-dialogue portrayal of intelligent extraterrestrial beings who decide that we're far too primitive to even contact. "What is there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?'" That's one solution of the Fermi paradox — the aliens are here, but they're too snotty to pay us any mind.

David Brin's Uplift series

Brin's Uplift stories, beginning with the 1980 novel Sundiver, contain another assertion that humanity is vastly simple compared to other lifeforms. In this universe, civilizations are not permitted to interact with other intelligent life until they have been "Uplifted" — and that only happens when a vast galactic society decides that they are not only sentient, but sapient. Since every other species in Brin's novels has been found by a far more advanced civilization, genetically modified for thousands of years, and then uplifted, the evolution of the human race seems something of a mystery. Our unique independent development would explain our puzzlement with the Fermi paradox.

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris

In Lem's novel, which has twice been translated to feature films, he explores the idea that alien intelligence operates on a totally different level from our own. Humans who venture to the planet Solaris do discover an intelligent lifeform there, but they are incapable of communicating with it in any way that they understand. Instead, the organism manipulates their emotions and their thoughts without revealing its own, and in the end the planetary researchers are left confused and half-insane. Though this is, again, a depressing idea, it still leaves us with the hope that our society might one day advance enough to commune with others and move forward.

I'm sure you have even more recommendations for Fermi paradox stories, and I urge you to share them with io9 in the comments — but do it quickly. As panelist Michael A. Burstein pointed out, "Wouldn't it be funny if we got a signal from aliens tomorrow and this whole conversation was moot?"

Eight years after the release of the movie version of Clarke's novel, Marvel Comics not only released an oversized adaptation of the film by Fantastic Four, Hulk and X-Men co-creator Jack Kirby, but also let Kirby loose on a follow-up series. While the movie adaptation didn't lack for ambition (The cover announced that "The Ultimate Trip Becomes The Ultimate Illustrated Adventure!") and had a weird charm in over-the-top narration like this -

The great Monolith makes a soft sound - - A simple, maddeningly repetitious sound which hypnotizes all who come within its spell. Moonwatcher and his tribe cluster like sleepwalkers before the cube. It is talking to them... and the man-apes are listening - - Moving closer - - Touching - - Responding to communication from the infinite...

[The New Seed] will always be there in the story's final moments to taunt us with the question we shall never answer. The little shaver is, perhaps, the embodiment of our own hopes in a world which daily makes us more than a bit uneasy about the future ... in the meager space devoted to his appearance, he brightens our hopes considerably. He is a comforting visual, almost tangible reminder that the future is not yet up for grabs. And wherever his journey takes him matters not one whit to this writer. The mere fact that the chances of his making it are still good is the comforting thought.

I place Kirby's 2001 book in the same category as William Shatner's schlock vanity singing album. Kirby did it because it was something he wanted to do, even though there was no market demand for it.

2001: A Space Odyssey Comic Book [SciFi Dimensions]

Actually, there are two lists here: a list of pre-Murdoch stories that predicted the rise of a media omnivore; and a list of more recent works which use a Murdoch figure to make a point, either satirical or serious. For convience's sake, we'll date the Murdoch era as beginning in full force in 1985, the year Murdoch took on American citizenship so he could legally start buying up U.S. TV stations.

Stories which predicted Murdoch:

Diana Christensen in Network. Faye Dunaway's character gets some dynamite footage of terrorists robbing banks, which propels her to the top of her network. But she's not satisfied, and ends up merging the network's news and entertainment divisions into one monster, which she controls. Then she decides to give some Maoist terrorists their own TV show, and their first episode consists of killing the last "mad as hell" newscaster who clings to truth and all that crap.

Palmer Eldritch from The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick. Eldritch is the ultimate media mogul, because he controls your dream afterlife, via his substance Chew-Z. Forget controlling what you watch on TV or at the movies — getting to be in charge of your eternal afterlife is the ultimate media-whore rush. At least this guy is convinced Palmer Eldritch is a Rupert Murdoch archetype.

The Great Zapparoni from The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger (1957). The Great Zapparoni runs a huge entertainment empire that depends on animatronic robots. He's achieved "global domination" in the information and entertainment industries thanks to super-sophisticated artificial intelligences. But he's paranoid about the scientists who work for him selling his secrets, so he tries to hire a war veteran to be his head of security and keep tabs on his employees. Bruce Sterling praised the novel's prescient social commentary and technology.

Stories which poke fun (or a scorching-hot poker) at Murdoch:

Christof from The Truman Show. The creator of the ultimate reality show, Christof crosses over from media megalith to mad god. He wants to keep Truman terrified of water, so he'll stay trapped in the fake reality Christof has created for him. And when the two of them finally speak to each other, Christof sounds both paternalistic and omnipresent, his voice echoing out of the sky.

The Jagrafess from Doctor Who, "The Long Game". At first you think the Editor, in his natty suit, will turn out to be the Murdoch of this far-future dystopia. After all, the Editor is the one making the eloquent speeches about how you can control people completely by feeding them fake news and emphasizing just the right word to create a "climate of fear." But it turns out the frozen head office of Satellite Five, the huge media empire, is really run by a giant slug overhead, the Jagrafess, which spits venom down at the pathetic Editor.

Grossman from Max Headroom. The head of Network 23 has an evil scheme to create "blipverts," which cram 30 seconds worth of advertising into just 3 seconds, so you can't change the channel or walk away. The only problem is, they make people explode after watching too many of them. Reporter Edison Carter starts to uncover the truth, so Grossman orders him dead. But instead, Carter is transformed into the cyber-personality Max Headroom.

Hiram Patterson from The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C.Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Patterson's news company OurWorld develops the WormCam, which uses wormhole technology to spy on anywhere in the universe instantly. And then Patterson also develops the SmartShroud, the only thing which can hide someone from the WormCam. And eventually, he can even use his WormCam to spy on events in the past. But his ultimate aim is even more sinister — to use wormholes to suck power out of the Earth and the stars, all to help his energy company crush the competition. The greedy and psychotic Patterson has "certain elements" of Murdoch, Clarke conceded. (Clarke and Murdoch are very close friends. After a Murdoch paper reported the accusation (later discredited) that Clarke was a pedophile, Murdock assured Clarke those reporters would never work again. And Murdoch's Harper Collins published Clarke's anti-Murdock novel.)

Daniel Siltz from Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter. It's the 24th century, and everything has gone to shit. Britain is dominated by American media oligarchs, and all real experiences are illegal. The only legal experiences are virtual ones, which you have to pay for. Siltz, who's clearly meant to be Murdoch, wants to resurrect the mind of dead 20th century author Daniel Feeld, so he can make money by selling Feeld's memories on his virtual entertainment network. But Feeld's mind becomes conscious of his predicament and begs for death, arousing the sympathy of anti-VR guerillas, who eventually kill Feeld and Siltz. Potter wrote this TV drama while he was dying of the pancreatic cancer which he named Rupert after the man who represented everything Potter loathed most.

Linderman, from Heroes. He's an evil omnivore who controls everything and manipulates everyone from behind the scenes. And actor Malcolm McDowell says he's lost count] of how many times people have asked him if Linderman is based on Murdoch. (I can't quite see it, myself. But then again, McDowell himself says the alleged Murdoch resemblance holds true for many of the characters he's played in recent years.)

Fred in Planet Fred, a movie which Dreamworks optioned back in 1999, and which probably will never come out at this point. Supposedly it's about a microscopic alien who settles on the head of a Murdochian media boss. It sounds sort of How To Get Ahead In Advertising-esque, so it's too bad that we're getting Eddie Murphy's new Starship Dave (about tiny aliens living inside Eddie's head) instead.