Pretty much every television show has done a Flowers For Algernon episode at some point, featuring miraculous technology that boosts your intelligence — and highlights the problems that go along with it. According to Wikipedia, this short story and novel have already been adapted eight times, into movies, stage musicals, plays, radio plays and more.

Movie news site Pajiba reports that Smith is set to play Charlie, the mentally disabled man who undergoes an experimental surgery that boosts his intelligence to genius level. (Algernon is the lab mouse who undergoes the procedure first.) Unfortunately, becoming a mega-genius doesn't do much for Charlie's relationships with everyone else. According to Pajiba's anonymous sources, Smith's frequent collaborator Gabriele Muccino (who directed Seven Pounds and Pursuit of Happyness) may be directing this one as well. Just as long as it doesn't end with Smith climbing into a bath with a jellyfish:

In any case, this is definitely an unsubstantiated rumor from a random website. So, you know, take it with several bucket fulls of salt, and a few jellyfish. [Pajiba]

Interviewed by Terry Bisson, Robinson explains:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we're trying for as a civilization.

It's a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells's stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

There are a lot of problems in writing utopias, but they can be opportunities. The usual objection-that they must be boring-are often political attacks, or ignorant repeating of a line, or another way of saying "No expository lumps please, it has to be about me." The political attacks are interesting to parse. "Utopia would be boring because there would be no conflicts, history would stop, there would be no great art, no drama, no magnificence." This is always said by white people with a full belly. My feeling is that if they were hungry and sick and living in a cardboard shack they would be more willing to give utopia a try.

And if we did achieve a just and sustainable world civilization, I'm confident there would still be enough drama, as I tried to show in Pacific Edge. There would still be love lost, there would still be death. That would be enough. The horribleness of unnecessary tragedy may be lessened and the people who like that kind of thing would have to deal with a reduction in their supply of drama.

So, the writing of utopia comes down to figuring out ways of talking about just these issues in an interesting way; how tenuous it would be, how fragile, how much a tightrope walk and a work in progress. That along with the usual science fiction problem of handling exposition. It could be done, and I wish it were being done more often.

[Shareable via Resilience Science]

Here's the book's caption for the above image and our other images of that concept art:

The parallel reality of conceptual design - visions of the exotic bazaar a wandering Kirk might have stumbled upon in the film. In its final design, the desert planet becomes a threatening world of snow and ice.

So instead of seeing Kirk chased through the snow by the Cloverfield monster's cousin, we could have seen him encountering a slew of weird alien traders and smugglers on a desert world? I guess Abrams' film was already enough like Star Wars without this sequence.

Star Trek: The Art Of The Film, on sale next week, is Titan Books' latest coffee-table art book tying in with a major science fiction movie, and it's one of the best so far. You get insights into stuff you might not have thought about, like the many different head tattoos the film's scurvy-addled Romulan dogs sported in the film — there's a two-page spread showing all the different tattoos, just in case you and all your friends want to get done up as Nero's crew for a convention. It turns out that the U.S.S. Kelvin was originally designed to look like a Soviet submarine (there are some early renderings) and Nero's ship, the Narada, was supposed to be like a hundred scary knives. The Cloverfield monster in the film was origianlly hairier and more like Aggedor from Doctor Who.

We've already seen some gorgeous concept art from the film, but there's still some great stuff in the book I hadn't seen before — including some early paintings of Vulcan, and a huge section on the reimagining of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Images from Star Trek: The Art of the Film. Out November 17th from Titan Books.

We're pretty excited for the Angry Robot release schedule, not least because it's bringing some authors to our shores who deserve more love. Here's the full schedule:

May
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
Slights by Kaaron Warren
Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero by Dan Abnett
White Tiger (Dark Heavens #1) by Kylie Chan
Winter Song by Colin Harvey
Kell's Legend (Clockwork Vampire Chronicles #1) By Andy Remic

June
Amortals by Matt Forbeck
Damage Time by Colin Harvey
Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon
Red Phoenix (Dark Heavens #2) by Kylie Chan
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Soul Stealers (Clockwork Vampire Chronicles #2) by Andy Remic

July
Blue Dragon by Kylie Chan
Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner
Vegas Knights by Matt Forbeck
The Crown of the Blood by Gav Thorpe
Walking the Tree by Kaaron Warren

August
City of Dreams and Nightmare by Ian Whates
Death's Disciples by J Robert King
Edge by Thomas Blackthorne
Embedded by Dan Abnett
The Road to Bedlam by Mike Shevdon

September
Dead Streets by Tim Waggoner
Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson
King Maker by Maurice Broaddus
Point by Thomas Blackthorne
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard

Details on many of these books, and much more information, is available over at the Angry Robot site.

The man behind the Perry Bible Fellowship is Nicholas Gurewitch. He produced PBF strips for the Daily Orange, a college newspaper, and for his website for nearly a decade, but the whole strip's run has never been collected in print in one place.

Until, that is, the Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack came out earlier this year. The book collects nearly every strip produced for the Perry Bible Fellowship, including loving homages to famous comic artists, meditations on sex and death, and a healthy dose of science fiction and fantasy strips.

In fact, the science fictiony strips tend to be among the best in the book. Gurewitch is at his best when he's exploring the absurdity of life and death, and there's no better way to explore this absurdity than with a good apocalypse or a story of science gone mad.

For instance, in "Sun Love," seen above, the Sun and the Earth's love affair, coupled with their casual disregard for humanity, amounts to an almost Lovecraftian tale of the horrors of an indifferent universe. But at the same time, it's also pretty cute. And damn funny.

And Gurewitch always has a healthy sense of fun. If a strip calls for it, he isn't afraid of a straight-forward gag, but he also isn't afraid to stretch a premise beyond its obvious conclusion and into something darker and more absurd, all without forgetting that humor is humor, be it dark and biting or light and fun.

An example of the former is "Astronaut Fall." It starts as a horrible, tragic moment during a space walk, but with the simple addition of a joyful child catching a "snowflake" on their tongue, the strip becomes an absurd death with a horrendously squick-inducing punchline.

An example of the latter, called "Super League," uses a super hero team to tell a joke that wouldn't be out of place in a "Dilbert" strip: a company making hiring decisions based on the applicant's ability to provide good coffee, not their skills. It's a pretty straightforward gag, but it's expertly executed and beautifully illustrated.

One caveat: some of the early strips, before the Perry Bible Fellowship found its unique voice, rely a little too heavily on anatomical jokes and innuendo. But no book is perfect, and this collection comes pretty close; as the book progresses, the crude anatomical jokes and innuendo become very clever anatomical jokes and layered innuendo.

And layered innuendo is one of Gurewitche's specialties. In "Zarflax," a hostile alien resorts to drastic means to try to lure in a hapless space adventurer. The result is essentially a space-bound anatomical visual pun.

It's overall a fantastic read, but if the collection has a weakness as a whole, it's that the experience is over way too quickly. The strips are one per page, and even at 256 pages, the hardbound book flies by too quickly. The upside of this is that the book merits multiple readings. Each time through these strips, I see new details that I might have missed in previous readings.

So peruse the strips below, and If you enjoy the strips you see here, the book is worth picking up. It includes bonus sketches, an interview with Gurewitch, and strips no longer available online. Plus, it makes a great conversation starter as a coffee table book. But only if you don't mind your conversations being about sex, death, irony, violence, and utter destruction. And laughter!

Buy The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack at Amazon

The Perry Bible Fellowship online

We wrote about Machine Man a while back, and its odd story of a guy who literally reinvents himself by lopping off body parts and replacing them with machine bits intrigued us with its blend of Tetsuo and slapstick. So we're intrigued by the idea of a Machine Man movie, and it's interesting that Barry has sold the movie rights before the book comes out in print (in 2011) and, for that matter, possibly before he's even finished writing it.

According to Variety, Barry's novel Company was already optioned by Universal. And his classic novel Jennifer Government was picked up by Warner Bros., with George Clooney and Stephen Soderbergh producing. (Although Barry says on his blog that the Warner Bros. deal "didn't work out," sadly.) I can literally think of no other novelist whose works I'd be more excited to see filmed. Okay, maybe Jim Munroe. But that's it. [Variety]

Robin Wasserman, author of the terrific robot-body novel Skinned (which has a similar storyline to Caprica) will join Libba Bray, bestselling author of A Great And Terrible Beauty and the new "transdimensional mad-cow road trip" novel Going Bovine. Also attending will be debut fantasy author Carline McCullough. They're all YA authors, but they're aiming the event at adults who have questions about the rising genre.

The event details are on Facebook, and here's the blurb:

Sex, Drugs, and Vampires — Everything You Secretly Wanted to Know About YA But Were Afraid to Ask
Once upon a time, YA fiction involved after-school special moralizing, teens worried about their split ends, and feel-good babysitting clubs. Now, it's a brave new world that reflects our modern anxieties—war, self-harm, drugs, sex, identity, gender, existentialism and more—with no-holds barred honesty (and occasional supernatural creatures). Join YA authors Robin Wasserman, Carolyn MacCullough, and Libba Bray as they discuss the new landscape of young adult fiction, from what makes a book YA to getting published to book banning and beyond.

This is something I've struggled with in my own fiction, and it's a much messier problem than you would think. Even when you feel like your tough woman space captain and your sensitive young astro-biologist are incredibly well drawn and full of character and neuroses, and nobody would ever imagine they were the same person. And then you're looking over your novel for the tenth time, and you realize that they're all sounding absolutely identical.

It makes sense, in one way — your characters are all aspects of you, after all. They all came out of your head, unless you based them on your friends or other fictional characters. (And even if they're based on someone else, they're still your creations, when it comes down to it.) You're speaking through their mouths. But that doesn't mean they're doomed to sound like you, or like the same person. This is totally a solveable problem.

Here are some solutions to the issue, ranging from least crude to crudest. If the least crude solution works for you, then you don't need to worry about the rest of them — but I've used all of these methods at various times, and there's no shame in using tough measures on your characters.

1) Listen to how people talk. I have a feeling this is what "real" writers do. Don't listen to how people talk on television or in the movies — go to a bar or cafe and just listen to the conversations around you, and try to hear how people are speaking. If you can write down snippets of people's conversations without being a total creep, then do that. V.S. Pritchett writes about doing this when he was a young writer — and one of those snippets of conversation even found its way into a short story that he later published. Try to get a feel for the rhythms of conversation, and the way different people form sentences. Bottom line is, if your characters all sound the same, then they're not sounding like natural dialogue at all.

2) Try to "hear" your characters' individual voices. This is not really cruder than the first one, actually. If your characters are really that vivid in your head — if you really feel like they're real, breathing people that you've brought to life inside a living story — then you should be able to hear their voices. And they don't just sound different because they choose different words to express themselves — they are saying different things.

Say Space Captain Starjumper makes lots of definitive statements, because she's got lots of points to get across, while Astrobiologist Second Class Sparrow is constantly raising tentative half-questions. Maybe Captain Starjumper has an undercurrent of insecurity, and that's part of why she has to make sharp statements all the time. And Sparrow really knows more than he's saying. The way in which people say the things they say also provides the reader with more information.

3) Realize your characers are not talking to you, or directly to the reader. Unless you're really doing some kind of post-modern fourth-wall-shredding exercise, your characters are talking to each other. And think about what kind of reaction your characters are hoping to get when they say something. Not the reaction they actually do get — it's too easy to jump straight to that — but the reaction they expect. Fine, Navigator Angstrom's revelation that he turns gay whenever the ship is in hyperspace meets with a stunned silence. But was Navigator Angstrom hoping for a stunned silence? Was he trying to provoke an angry response, or some kind of accepting, reassuring statement? Was he trying to guilt-trip the captain for making so many hyperspace jumps lately? It sounds obvious, but it's often hard to remember: the response you're hoping for shapes the way you talk. And every one of these characters has a script in his/her head for how this conversation is going to go, whether it goes that way or not. You, as the author, know the way you want/need for the conversation to go, but you need to know what the characters want/expect as well.

Update: Zack Stentz, writer on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe, points out another helpful way of looking at this: "Every interaction between two people is on some level a negotiation for status." Remember that, and your characters' speech will automatically get richer and more interesting. Apparently this advice originates with Terry McNally, co-writer of Earth Girls Are Easy.

4) Try giving each character a few unique verbal tics, or habitual words. Maybe Captain Starjumper says "I declare" a lot, in between all those declarative statements she makes. (Okay, bad example.) Maybe Navigator Angstrom makes lots of puns, or tosses lots of sarcastic jokes into the end of every comment. Give
each character a few habits of speech, and maybe after a while those props will help you hear each character speaking differently. You may even be able to go back and take out some of these tics, if they get too repetitive, and if the speech around them has started to differentiate itself from the rest.

5) Go one step further, and give them catch phrases and stuff. This worked for Dickens, after all. A lot of Dickens characters basically have the same verbal habits over and over — the most famous of these, of course, is Mrs. Malaprop, who always uses words incorrectly, and gave us the term malapropism. (Update: Various people have pointed out this is not true. Sorry about the mix-up. I've read almost every Dickens novel, and somehow I believed this incorrectly. My bad!)

But it's true of a lot of minor Dickens characters. And especially if you're going for humor, there's nothing wrong with having a character who comes out with variations on the same funny line on several occasions. Maybe your astrobiologist character constantly states the obvious, but prefaces it by saying, "I have made a cunning observation."

6) Realize that you may have, at most, three or four character "voices" and refine those. As regular readers of this blog know, I utterly, unreservedly love Joss Whedon. But he is a perfect example of a writer who has a few voices that he uses over and over. There's always the stilted British person (Giles/Wesley/Adelle), the funny, quippy nerd (Xander/Topher/etc.) and the lost/crazy girl (River/Echo/Fred/etc.) And the amazing thing is — those characters are all wildly individual and have tons of depth. You would never mistake Giles for Adelle, even leaving apart that she's way prettier. (Well, somewhat prettier.) Whedon may have a few basic voices that he reuses over and over again, but he finds other ways to make his characters unique and distinct from each other. He's also worked, over the years, to refine each of those voices and make the most of their strengths.

7) Vary your sentence lengths, and play with punctuation. If all else fails, try this. In real life, some people tend to speak in longer sentences, others in shorter ones. (Actually, we all vary our sentence lengths all the time, but our average sentence lengths vary quite a bit.) There's nothing wrong with just deciding arbitrarily that Captain Starjumper's average sentence will be five words long, while Navigator Angstrom's will be twenty. Also, you can try giving one character lots of emdashes or colons in his/her speech — but do this sparingly, and only for one character. In my new fantasy novel, I have one character who includes lots of parenthetical statements, and I put those in actual parentheses. But I made sure to avoid any funny punctuation games with any other character's speech, so it didn't start annoying the reader too much.

8) Adjust the French/Anglo-Saxon mix. Those of us who write in English are lucky — it's actually two languages in one. (Plus random language detritus from a dozen other languages.) We're speaking a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French, the language of the Normans who conquered England in 1066. And just as the Enterprise's engines are a mix of matter and anti-matter, your speech is a mix of French and Anglo-Saxon. And some people definitely use more words of Latin origin than others — it's often a badge of education and upper-class status to use lots of obviously Latinate words. So if all else fails, try experimenting with having one of your characters use more Anglo-Saxon words than the rest of them, or more fancy French words. Grab a dictionary of etymology and think about which words come from which language — you can give your characters a more Germanic or more French "voice" without actually making them speak a foreign language at all. You could also just try having some characters use more one- or two-syllable words than the rest, but this might be subtler and more fun.

Illustrations from Jovike, vivir_descalzo_mx and Terry McCombs on Flickr.

King's attempted to finish this book twice before, but it's finally all done. Here's the official synopsis:

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as ‘the dome' comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. Dale Barbara, Iraq vet, teams up with a few intrepid citizens against the town's corrupt politician. But time, under the dome, is running out....

Right now if you head over to the Dome site, the entire 336,114-word book is broken down into over 5,000 chunks. If you have the, time and the talent, try organizing the thousands of paragraphs into one fluid novel.

Daniel Wilson is angling to be the Max Brooks of robots, having written How to Survive a Robot Uprising and How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Aliens, Ninjas and Zombies (he also happens to have a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon). His latest manuscript, Robopocalypse, sounds like the robotic answer to Brooks' World War Z, describing human life after a robot uprising.

DreamWorks and Doubleday have snapped up the movie and publishing rights respectively, and it sounds like it won't be too long before we're fleeing from swarms of nanobots and our household appliances. DreamWorks spokesman Mark Sourian cited the manuscript's "frightening level of realism," so hopefully we'll get a richer view of the robot apocalypse than we saw in Terminator Salvation.

[Variety]

Nightlight, which has just been released, is the Harvard Lampoon's first foray into parody novel-writing since its 1969 spoof Bored of the Rings. But this volume appears to be an obsessive, scene-for-scene parody of Meyer's books, lampooning not only Meyer's writing and characters, but also the vampire craze itself. Belle Goose is the new girl in the dreary town of Switchblade (some of the jokes appear to have been written via Mad Libs), where she spies her handsome classmate Edwart Mullen. She immediately decides that Edwart is both her soulmate and a vampire (thanks in part to his aversion to tater tots and his rescuing her from a snowball), and that she must convince him to make her his undead wife. But there are plenty of parodies of Meyer's writing style, such as when Belle describes being "unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, and disreputably" kissed by Edwart, and the scene when we first meet the supposed vampire boy:

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.

A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room - maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

A preview of the entire first chapter is available at Entertainment Weekly.

[Nightlight]

The vampire glut compelled me to put out a tongue-in-cheek guidebook, basically mapping out the types of vampire based on personality traits, physical features and habitual actions (among other things). Think of it as a How-To Guide, using popular culture as our teacher. For example, it's important to get the word out to the folks reading Vampire Diaries and let them know that, repeat, reborn lovers were a common theme among vampires. Hopefully, it will encourage those excited about those trendy present-day vampires to reach out and explore more obscure things like the Dracula Hammer films and Preacher and other lesser known vamp commodities — and maybe teach them a lesson on how to interact with a modern day vampire.

It's called Vampire Taxonomy, and it's on sale today at bookstores and online. No, Mom, it's not at Costco... Sorry.

Now let's celebrate with these mouth facing crotch Twilight undies. Panties via Twitarded. You've really outdone yourself this time Twilight fans.

Chabon talks about how his eldest son startled a British attendant at the Smithsonian with his Dalek T-shirt, and then his other children had to regale the man with tales of their Cybermen and Time Lord shirts, until he understands they're a geek family. And then Chabon talks about how the new Doctor Who series has brought his family together, and sings the show's praises:

And if you aren't watching and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of the Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show's debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especial harsh pity of the geek.

As you might have gathered from its subtitle ("The Pleasures And Regrets Of A Husband, Father, And Son") Manhood For Amateurs is Chabon's collection of essays about being a man, and the various personas he's taken on. But even as he delves into the heart of his own struggles with maleness, Chabon invokes science fiction and comics, exploring topics as diverse as why Big Barda is the greatest superheroine, or why all futurism is now retro-futurism, and we've lost our starry-eyed optimism. Like manhood, these geek avatars gain their meaning from other people, they're public and subject to interpretation. They also change over time, like the Doctor. (Chabon, himself, has gone through incarnations, including being a "little shit" in his twenties, as he makes clear at various points.)

The Doctor Who essay, one of the last in the book, returns to the theme of the book's first essay: the solitary and communal sides of fandom. Chabon grew up, like many of us, as a solitary geek, with nobody to share his obsession with comics and science fiction paperbacks. The first essay talks about how he tried to start a local comic-book fan club, with his mother's help — they even paid $25 to rent a room for the first meeting, and only one other boy showed up, then immediately left before he could get sucked into this "loser's club." The Doctor Who essay is about how the new version of the show has given Chabon's children the gift of each other, and how fandom and families are the same, with their rituals and obsessions.

Most provocatively, in the earlier "Loser's Club" essay, Chabon even suggests that fandom and the artistic drive come from the same impulse, and even hints that fanfic and literature spring from the same well:

This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city — in every cranium — in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makees it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

Manhood For Amateurs isn't just notable for the honestly with which Chabon deals with every aspect of his life, including his insecurities and his relationships with women and his own children — it's also a more revelatory look at fan culture, and science fiction, through the lens of the personal essay. Anyone who's interested in discussing science fiction and its attendent genres for their personal as well as cultural significance should be checking out these essays.

More than ever, Chabon uses superhero comics, Star Wars toys and Doctor Who's Daleks as signposts to the masculine imaginary. He geeks out about these things as if they are the only points of certainty in a shifting, illusory world.

(The book is by no means perfect: At times, his opinion-spouting gets a little overwhelming, and by the time he gets to the section where he talks about women, about two-thirds of the way through, I was starting to wonder if Chabon really did live in some male-dominated enclave — but then a lot of the last third of the book is about women, and he addresses that criticism of his writing head-on. But my criticisms of the book mostly have nothing to do with its discussions of science fiction or geek culture, and they're pretty minor in any case.)

Manhood, Chabon seems to be saying, is improv. You create yourself on the fly, in roles as perplexing and diverse as husband, father, lover and friend, and hope to project an impression of knowing what you're doing. The fact that Chabon deconstructs masculinity while pulling together so many elements of science fiction turns nerd culture into a set of anchor points. You sort of expect Chabon to use comic-book and science-fiction icons to illuminate his inner world, the way in which superhero storytelling in Kavalier And Clay became a kind of emotional atlas. But it goes beyond that: one of the constants in Chabon's essays is the primacy of play, in the midst of all this role confusion. And geeking out is an essential ingredient of that play.

The discussions of play includes a very carefully considered history of Lego toys, and their development from abstract bricks to a world dominated by crudely representational minifigs. (We featured a "quote of the day" a while back, in which Chabon talked about how his kids were remixing these Lego sets and transcending the tyrannical corporate-sanctioned instructions.) He joins the chorus of people lamenting the fact that kids no longer roam free on their bicycles and skateboards. He narrates some bizarrely awesome-sounding games he and other kids played, based on the 1973 Planet Of The Apes TV series (not the movies, weirdly enough). And he talks about stargazing, and discovering our smallness in the cosmos, as well as the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock and how it's making him wonder why we've stopped obsessing about the far future.

All in all, Manhood For Amateurs is a much geekier book than you might have expected from its title, and yet also a much more personal book than most geeky essay collections. If you've suspected that fandom's signs and collections of ill-fitting clues were markers in someone else's inner cosmology, just as they are in yours, then you will definitely bond with this book.

The list is very eclectic and leaves out some genre superstars — no Iain M. Banks, Robert Charles Wilson or China Mieville here — instead, focusing on some up-and-coming writers and a few you might not have heard of.

It's also a bit slanted towards fantasy and the gothic: Catherynne M. Valente's well-received urban fantasyPalimpsest makes the cut, as does Cherie Priest's Boneshaker and Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree. More traditional fantasy also winds up on the list, in the form of David Anthony Durham's The Other Lands and Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale Of The Brothers Grossbart. Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts' novel which Kim Stanley Robinson said should have won this year's Booker Prize, also makes the cut.

The anthologies on the list are slanted towards the literary and eclectic: Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, the genre-busting Interfictions 2, and the Library of America's Gothic survey, American Fantastic Tales Boxed Set.

All in all, it's a list that's sure to provoke some debate, and hopefully gain some exposure for writers who deserve wider notice.

[Amazon.com]

There was a brief time in my youth when I was very into the V universe. I wore out my VHS tapes of both the original miniseries and The Final Battle, and would have traded all my Transformers for a Hasbro-made shuttlecraft. Let's face it—Mike Donovan was pretty much the coolest guy on the planet. Except for maybe Ham Tyler. As the low-rent, one-season weekly series was stinking up the airwaves—it did quite poorly, of course, but the SyFy marathon is showing me that it was much better than I remembered—a set of V novels was filling up bookstores shelves, as well as my own.

Since the upcoming reboot does not look too promising to me (Seriously, the bottom of the ship is an HDTV? You're gonna stick with that?) I had to go into my old boxes of books and dig out the remaining copies that I could find from my V library. I never did get a complete set—there were 16 in all, many released after the show was canceled and the world had lost interest — but looking over the ones that survived my many moving vans was a fun trip down memory lane.

V: The first book based on the show was a straight novelization of both the Original Series and the Final Battle combined into one hefty tome. At the time it was maybe the longest book I'd ever read and actually did add a lot of color to the story, filling in gaps that were left open in the 10-hour TV-movie. (Basically more gruesome deaths and real sex scenes! Juicy stuff for impressionable minds.)

EAST COAST CRISIS: This was the first V book to break outside the TV world to introduce new characters and plot lines to the mythology. It takes place concurrently with both halves of the mini-series, but the setting is New York and Washington. You get to read about the adventures of the "other" resistance, led by an aging New York Yankee (boo), and learn how the U.S. president becomes a brain-washed pawn of the Visitors.

THE PURSUIT OF DIANA: Written as a prologue to the then-upcoming television series, this book brought the old gang back together—Donovan, Julie, Ham, Elias, the fifth columnist, Martin, and of course, lizard queen Diana—although none of the action from this episode actually made it into the scripts of the TV show. The plot details the immediate aftermath of the Visitors departure from Earth, as those aboard the L.A. mothership figure out how to return to the planet without freaking everyone out; rescue the frozen human dinners on board; and keep Diana from rallying her brainwashed human conspirators in order to escape back to her home world.

THE CHICAGO CONVERSION: Remember the creepy shot from the pilot episode, where the entire Vistor fleet is just chilling out behind Earth's moon? That's the setup for this novel, which also picks up after the events of "Final Battle" as a group of shock troops, immunized against the red dust, try to destroy the Chicago-based Resistance from the inside. It also establishes my favorite trope of the books—titles constructed with formula: "The [Name of U.S. Region] [Sinister Noun]". (See "The Florida Project" or "The Oregon Invasion.") I was always hoping for "The Michigan Rag" or "The Indianapolis 500," but it was not to be.

PRISONERS AND PAWNS: The next book in my collection, though not the next in the series, takes us back to L.A. for more Donovan/Julie/Ham/Diana goodness. It's also our first introduction to some of the characters that were later revealed during the show, like Diana's catfighting partner, Lydia. Although it takes place during the time frame of the first TV show, and claims to follow the continuity, it bears little resemblance to anything that aired.

THE NEW ENGLAND RESISTANCE: In this episode, V meets Stephen King as we travel to Maine to meet a lonely scientist, a town full of mysterious shotgun wielding rubes—who hide a secret!—and a sadistic Visitor captain who loves to torture humans (and his own kind) even more than he loves to eat them. The doctor has developed a new anti-Visitor toxin that he has to test (on Very Special Guest Star Willie!) while avoiding the human traitors among the simple town folk. Also, Willie can talk to bears somehow.

A note at the start of "Prisoners and Pawns," from its author, Howard Weinstein, explains that the first batch of books (starting with "Pursuit") were commissioned as a series of novels that would be released in concert with the new weekly series debuting in the fall of 1984. The books were extremely rushed and written without the benefit of knowing what the television writers were planning to put on the air. It was basically sanctioned fan fiction and in most cases the quality of writing rises only slightly above the average fanfic. The books are short, simple reads, but loyal enough to the themes and characters of the show that it's easy for a real fan to get sucked in. Mostly because they turned out to be way better than the show the show that inspired them.

As Weinstein wrote:

"I can only hope that the TV series has been good enough—and popular enough—that it's still on the air as you pick up this novel. As many of you know, it's not uncommon for a new television series to have a life expectancy similar to that of a person floating in the void of space—without benefit of a spacesuit.

What's will V's fate be? Who knows?

If the writers, producers, actors and all the other talented people who work on a TV series have the time to craft this show the right way, it could have a long run. Decent action-adventure, with a little thoughtful substance mixed in, could make for pretty good television."

Yes, it could, Howard. Yes, it could ... but don't hold your breath.

When I first heard about Matt Youngmark's Chooseomatic book, I fully expected I'd get a fairly straightforward (perhaps even perfunctory) take on the zombie apocalypse where the only twist was the multithreaded, Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired storytelling layered over it. It's something we've seen before; last year, a pair of designers released a choose-your-own-ending film, The Outbreak, with a similar premise. But I was pleasantly surprised when the book arrived and I found a pink, chainsaw-wielding bunny on the cover and a note inside warning me to avoid the zombie kitten.

Zombocalypse Now doesn't just feature a pink stuffed rabbit; you are the pink stuffed rabbit, living in a world where stuffed animals walk, talk, and intermarry with the human population. As the book opens, you are waiting on what is sure to be another atrocious online date. And sure enough, when he or she shows up, they're disheveled, glassy-eyed, lacking in hygiene, and mumbling something about brains. You've been on so many bad dates that it takes you a while to figure out that they're undead, but soon enough, you're up to your fuzzy elbows in the walking dead.

From here there are, of course, multiple paths your bunny self could take from here. You could tag along with a renegade cop named Mittens (who, despite the name, is not a stuffed animal). You could visit your conspiracy theorist friend Ernie, who is convinced that the walking dead are powered by fluoride in the water. You could try to strike out on your own and bash in as many zombie brains as you possibly can. You just hope that the choices you make lead to your ultimate survival.

Spoiler alert: you usually end up zombie chow.

To get the full effect of Zombocalypse Now, you have to read through several of the plotlines. Some are, admittedly, stronger than others (there's an oddly rushed one where you go all I Am Legend and start experimenting on the zombies), but taken together, the stories do form a cohesive narrative, and the logic from one plotline still holds true in the others. For example, in several storylines, the zombies are unusually attracted to your car (as in licking the windshields), and in one of threads, we learn exactly why. The chilling and rather amusing cause behind the zombie outbreak is also key; you learn about it in certain storylines, but it plays a significant role in others — including one ending where you mistakenly believe you've survived.

Youngmark packs a lot of strange odds and ends into his zombie adventure, and cherrypicks references from a wide variety of genres: mob movies, cop dramas, the works of Stephen King, and The Postman, to name a few. There's even a moment where you let out the battle cry "Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!" The effect is over-the-top silliness, like someone set a particularly manic children's book in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Sure, it's a bit on the fluffy side, but I found myself eagerly flipping back to try out different plotlines — at first to see if I could survive, then to root out some of the book's more bizarre twists and turns. It's a satisfying way to spend a couple hours here and there, even if you do die most of the time.

And do watch out for that zombie kitten. It's a killer.

The hard science-fiction mastermind's descriptions of his next two books sound pretty intriguing, especially the second one:

Zendegi is set in Iran in the very near future; the first part of the novel takes place in 2012. The ultimate focus of the story involves brain mapping and virtual reality, but the backgrounds of all the characters are entwined with the Iranian pro-democracy movement in various ways. It's due to be published in mid-2010.

Orthogonal is a novel I'm working on right now; it's set in a universe with laws of physics that are different from our own. One small change in a fundamental equation - just turning a minus sign into a plus sign - leads to some incredibly rich variations in everything from the way biology works to the relativistic effects of space travel.

He also explains why we may not be as close to creating A.I. as you'd think, and why we should tread carefully:

I can't say I'm disappointed, or surprised, that we don't have artificial intelligence yet. I've written things where conscious software is created in the near future, but it's usually in the form of direct copies of human minds, so it's more a matter of us migrating from our bodies than creating a new form of intelligence from scratch.

At the moment we're so far away from creating any kind of conscious software that it's hard to know which prospects are realistic, and which are pure fantasy. When we do finally grope our way towards some tangible results, I hope we proceed slowly and carefully, because this has the potential to lead to a lot of suffering.

The present generation of humans emerged out of hundreds of millions of years of animals tearing each other's throats out, and tens of thousands of years of people being prey to famine and disease. We might aspire to do much better than that, but creating an entirely new kind of intelligence that's happy with its own place in the world is an incredibly daunting prospect.

Interestingly, he also says he thinks brain-mapping may be the most promising new technology being developed right now.

Egan also explains why he didn't write any books for four years (he was working to help refugees in Australia), why he doesn't allow any photos of himself on the internet, and why he avoids science-fiction conventions. [Keeping The Door]

The panel included a lively discussion of trends over the past two years in fantasy and science fiction, and included Gollancz associate editor Jo Fletcher, Locus magazine editor-in-chief Liza Trombi, book critic Tom Whitmore, and bookseller Justin Ackroyd, who runs Australian mail order bookstore Slow Glass Books.

I asked panelists about whether there is a recent trend in which fantasy has overtaken science fiction in popularity, and everyone seemed to agree that this idea isn't a recent trend at all. Jo and Justin pointed out that fantasy has been more popular since the early 1980s, and that there hasn't been a big science fiction bestseller in years (though there have been big fantasy bestsellers, and bestsellers by mainstream authors who have written science fiction novels, like Michael Chabon). Tom pointed out that almost since science fiction became a recognizable genre, people have been declaring it dead.

Other trends we talked about included young adult science fiction, which is one of the most exciting, growing areas where science fiction is being published. Liza suggested that YA fiction is intriguing because authors can be more overtly polemical in it. Younger audiences have more patience for overtly didactic stories. We also talked about how YA fiction allows authors to tell SF "starter stories" aimed at people who aren't familiar with the SF canon. "It's about storytelling," Jo asserted, "plain and simple." When authors aim at younger audiences, they are free to tell stories that break away from SF traditions.

Finally, we talked about how paranormal romance is one of the biggest-selling subgenres that crosses over with SF and urban fantasy. I mentioned that I think there is a lot of prejudice against paranormal romance, especially among SF readers, because it's viewed as silly and girly. Jo explained that there is a lot of great writing in the paranormal romance genre, and mentioned that Charlaine Harris' non-Sookie Sackhouse novels are really quite interesting and multi-layered.

Then we talked about our book lists, which are linked below. Tom didn't have time to put together a list, but he did mention that he was excited about Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, UNSEEN ACADEMICALS.

Justin Ackroyd's picks

Jo Fletcher's picks

Annalee Newitz's picks

Liza Trombi's picks

The Wikipedia entry for the book says* that They'd Rather Be Right, also published as The Forever Machine, "has often been considered the worst novel ever to win a Hugo." So it was with muted enthusiasm that I logged into Amazon and ordered a used copy. (The book is no longer being printed, as best I can tell, although I see it's available for the Kindle.) I confess, too, that I didn't dive right in when the mailperson delivered it a few days later.

As it turned out, once I actually started reading, I was pleasantly surprised. This should come as no shock — first, my expectations were low, and second, the Wiki entry doesn't even have a citation for its claim; the only external link from it is to this review by Dave Langford (himself a Hugo winner in several categories), although the review is indeed unequivocally negative.

I'll certainly agree with Langford that Clifton and Riley do more telling than showing in this novel, and I'm of the opinion too that this is generally a bad thing. And I'll even buy that They'd Rather Be Right is "an implausible award-winner," as he puts it. And yet...

The story is about three men on the run — two professors and a grad student. They're in hiding in San Francisco because they've built a supercomputer into which only pure facts — no assumptions, no theories — have been programmed. The supercomputer, Bossy, isn't quite an artificial intelligence, because she never demonstrates any individual initiative, but she can tell right from wrong, and in the mildly dystopic future setting of the book, where the government uses "opinion control" to keep the public in line, she's seen as a threat to humanity's place of primacy. Or something. It's not entirely clear what the public's initial problem is with Bossy, and that lack of detail is the sort of problem that plagues the story.

The public is right to be concerned, though. What Bossy is, though it's never mentioned by name (probably because Vernor Vinge wasn't even a teenager at the time), is the Singularity. Is she the first Singularity in SF? I don't know. She's definitely the first in a Hugo-winning novel.

What Bossy can do is, through "psychosomatic therapy," take a normal person and erase years of accumulated stress from their cells, essentially resetting the person, freeing them from a lifetime of frustrations and problems stemming from the unfounded assumptions that start afflicting everyone shortly after birth — and making them more or less permanently young. The catch is that the patient has to be willing to give up all the biases and prejudices, about themselves and others, that have been pounded into them.

Yeah, it's a little silly, but far from the silliest idea in SF. And it's a metaphor, and Clifton and Riley's telling is such that you can suspend your disbelief without much trouble. (Certainly, their recognition that you have to want to change for psychotherapy to work rings truer than the Freudian bits in their Hugo predecessor.) And although Dave Langford is arguably right in his review that the big idea here is "lamentably undeveloped," on the other hand, there are a lot of different ways to write a good book. They'd Rather Be Right does have a lot — like, a lot — of those sort of pontificatory passages about How Dumb People Are and How Smart We Could Be. And I can certainly empathize with readers who hate that shit. At the same time, plenty of great authors — Heinlein, Asimov, Card, Simmons, Stephenson, and innumerable others – have done it with frequency, and it can be very satisfying.**

And in They'd Rather Be Right's case, it might even be healthy, because the one core idea the book focuses on — again and again — is How Little We Know, and how reflexively we adopt and cling to what we think we know as truth. Proponents of hard science fiction lament the dearth of scientific accuracy in the genre, but far more important to me than whether a fictional technology is possible is driving home an idea that is the very foundation of science: that we only know what we know, and that what we know could change at any moment, subject to additional data. Science's job is not to preclude.

Rather does some other things well, too: Its handling of telepathy rings utterly true; and if you've read as much Marshall McLuhan as I have, you may find its notion of multi-valued facts, as well as its calling-out of the specialist mind-set, eerily prescient. And the workout at the end of the book — tycoon Howard Kennedy's solution to the Bossy problem — isn't stunningly original, but Slashdot types should appreciate it. (The final chapter, however, could be cut completely and the story would be better for it.)

Anyway, I can see how it was an implausible award-winner. But still, it reminded me, several times over, not to assume anything I don't actually know (like how good a book I haven't read is), and it did so in a way that'll stick. I'm not sure I'd run out and hunt down a hard copy if I were you, but think about getting it if you've got a Kindle.

*At least, as of this writing. Wikipedia changes, you know.

**The tone and style of They'd Rather Be Right are especially reminiscent of another classic work of science fiction that usually doesn't get regarded as such: Atlas Shrugged. Clifton and Riley aren't as compelling of novelists as Ayn Rand, but their philosophy holds up a lot better under scrutiny; one could do worse than administer their book as an antidote to hers.

"Blogging the Hugos" appears every other Sunday. In the next installment, on November 15: Double Star, by Robert Heinlein, from 1956.

Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found here.

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

This time around, we're not sticking an hyperlinks in the PDF version of this calendar, because that makes it way harder to make corrections to the calendar when people point out problems. Instead, here's a list of all the conventions in November, with URLs:

Friday the 6th:
Aki Con
Neko Con (thru Sun) Convention
Pacific Media Expo

Saturday the 7th:
Zenkaikon
King Con Brooklyn
Cincinnati Comic and Anime Convention

Sunday the 8th:
Seattle ComiCard Convention
Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention

Friday the 13th:
Dotcon
Izumicon
New England Fan Experience
Windycon

Friday the 20th:
Anime Crossroads
Anime USA
Another Anime Convention
Bishie Con
Daisho Con
Yule Con
Philcon
Zona Con

Saturday the 21st.:
Boston Super Megafest
Virginia Comic-Con

Friday the 27th.:

Tomodachi Fest
OryCon
Chicago Tardis 2009

Saturday the 28th.:
Atlanta Anime Day

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design by Stephanie Fox.

Set in the city of Ambergris that VanderMeer invented with his collection City of Saints and Madmen, the novel takes place after the once-oppressed "grey caps" have risen up from their underground ghettos and taken over the city. Mysterious and seemingly magical in previous stories, the grey caps are revealed in this novel - intriguingly - as bioengineers who can convert plants and animals into weapons, surveillance devices, superpowered implants, and even entire buildings. The city that was once run by industrial/colonial mafia-style companies is now entirely run by the grey caps, and our main character Finch has been enlisted to serve in their puppet police force.

VanderMeer is at his best when imagining the vast, alien, and yet strangely recognizable history of Ambergris. Built on the dead bodies of natives, then atop the oppressed grey caps' tunnels, and finally out of the imperial pursuits of warring companies, the city is like a puckered scar of historical traumas. Now its entire architecture is being rewritten by grey cap biotechnology, buildings evaporating into dust or rising up out of weird plants to form spongy, reeking structures. Half the citizens have been transformed by spore infections, converted into souped-up "partials" or simply killed by mushroom toxins.

The novel begins with ambiguous hero Finch investigating the extremely bizarre murder of a human and a grey cap, who appear to have been dropped improbably from a very great height onto a sofa in an apartment. Making matters worse is the fact that this investigation is being watched closely by his grey cap boss, who insists that he carry a spore gun that leaks weird fluids all the time.

Like any noir gumshoe, Finch finds himself drawn into a conspiracy far vaster than anything he'd imagined. With the help of his rebel librarian friend, and his spore-eaten partner, he discovers that the grey caps have a terrifying plan that involves two enormous towers they're building near the harbor. But he also discovers that there are insurgencies within insurgencies whose reach goes far beyond Ambergris' boundaries - possibly into other worlds. Finch's own family history connects him more deeply to the city's deep political structure than he ever realized.

Surreal and at times intoxicating, Finch is ambitious in a way that few genre novels ever are. VanderMeer has tried - and, often, succeeded - in blending fantasy, science fiction, and crime fiction into something delightfully evil and strange. He's converted the traditional hard edges of noir fiction into the foggy, fungal shapes of magical science realism. Especially when Finch is exploring Ambergris' new biotech contours, which inevitably lead into its industrial past, you get a visceral sense of what it means to discover that what you thought was magic was actually just advanced technology. This is a very difficult idea to depict using imagery and mood, but VanderMeer does it brilliantly.

There is a David Cronenberg feel to the universe of Finch, with its gooey guns and spore surveillance devices. But it's also a kind of Lawrence of Arabia story, which is what will keep you reading. You never quite know what sort of weird new narrative path you'll be led down, and that's exciting.

While the experiment of the novel is laudable, it sometimes fails frustratingly. The novel begins agonizingly slowly, which undermines the rapid pace required to tell a successful detective story. As if to make up for this problem, VanderMeer has written the entire novel in noir-esque sentence fragments that begin to grate on the nerves almost immediately. This is particularly tragic because so much of the author's charm lies in his lush prose.

While Finch may be flawed, it's ultimately a rewarding read. Even if you've never read any of VanderMeer's other Ambergris stories, it stands well on its own and is testimony to how mind-boggling and affecting science fiction can be when released from its usual cliches.

The sequel to Orxy and Crake, called The Year of the Flood, came out this month. (I'll post my review of it soon!) Like Orxy, Atwood's new novel is packed with weird hybrid animals and horrific biotech companies who will mutate any genome for a profit.

In these images, artist Jason Courtney shows us a few of Atwood's imaginary GMO animals, who are horrifying because they seem to have been created for no good reason. Who wants a half-ape, half-pig? What's the use of a half-snake, half-rat? These hybrids represent science gone decadent. And the tech culture in her novel has gone decadent too, with teenagers dabbling in child porn and playing videogames about destroying the world (which indeed one brainy techie finally does, as you can see in the post-apocalyptic painting of our main character reduced to a state of savagery, looking at the ruins of his virus-ravaged civilization).

Unlike a typical science fiction author, who would try to depict realistic possibilities for bioengineering, Atwood turns genetic engineering into a fantastical metaphor. Her pigoons and snats aren't likely ever to exist. So she may not have predicted the future, but she has created fantastical figures who neatly capture the worthlessness of innovation for innovation's sake. And Courtney's paintings bring that feeling to life.

You can see more of Jason Courtney's work in his online gallery.

Thanks, Janna!

The class' syllabus, quizzes and related links are online, and so are the study guide, a class wiki, and some student projects. It's pretty fascinating to get a glimpse into the ways in which some of science-fiction's weird creatures, including some of the most far-fetched ones, can provide insight into actual biology.

Top image is cover of Slonczewski's novel, A Door Into Ocean. [The Columbus Dispatch and Biology In Science Fiction Blog]

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

It's not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It's the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we'd get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.

That was the idea behind this chart – I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that's to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war's popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.

Predictably, the human-made apocalypse is a perennial favorite. The way we go about it, though, is always changing, as you can see on the chart, where I've broken up the "human made disaster" into subcategories.

The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.

The easily spotted trends make the patterns' total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there's a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.

That's an overly simplistic way of looking at it, though. It's not that the moment of destruction is boring; it's that it doesn't even matter anymore. There are an increasing number of books and films, like The Road and Zombieland, which pick up after the catastrophe and sometimes don't bother to explain what happened at all.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

Preceding victory with annihilation disguises how dizzily optimistic some of these narratives are. Stories about the End are so beautifully paradoxical; they are some of the most powerful affirmation stories we have. They can hardly be classified as optimistic, but no matter what happens, even if the End came by human hands, in most stories we are fixable. For the most part, we have faith that though we may screw up, and very badly, we will learn from our mistakes and the world will be better for it.

When the survivors wander around, they're looking at a burned-out shell of a world, but it's still a clean slate. A clean slate full of radiation and cannibals, maybe, but still. I think everyone's had that feeling of wanting to just heave everything out the window and start over. That's what is at the heart of apocalypse stories: the opportunity to rebuild the world in a radically different way.

During the pilgrimage through the wasteland, the survivors – and the readers – are left feeling ostracized from reality. The characters are probably more concerned with where their next meal is coming from, but the reader sees how they are cut loose from the anchors that previously protected us from being overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence. The only way to fix it is to find new ways of looking, new patterns to create meaning in the new world.

Destroying the world in books about apocalypse is one way we can entirely take ownership of it. We can only see the world the way we have been raised to, the way our parents saw it, so we need to raze the old world and build a new one in its place in order to have a world that is really and entirely our own. The story of the End, after all, is not nearly as compelling as the story of the Beginning that comes after it.

This is hardly the final word; more a collection of observations and theories. I won't claim any more than that, because if there's one thing I learned while researching apocalypses, it's just how much humans like to see patterns in things – and that when patterns start getting too neat, you've done something wrong. There are still some things about the chart I don't understand – the three points where the natural apocalypse overtakes the human apocalypse, for example – and it doesn't take into account the effect that movies or television had on books. As will any discussion of a large genre, there are some necessary overgeneralizations. But it's a starting point – have at it.

Chanda Phelan just graduated from Pomona College, where she completed a thesis on post-apocalyptic literature. You can read her blog at phnuggle.wordpress.com.

Chart by Stephanie Fox!

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have collected these nineteen stories to explore the supposed divide between mainstream literature and speculative fiction. They've written an eye-opening and informative introduction as well as compiled dozens of quotes by the individual authors on the subject of Sci-Fi vs. Literary Fiction or"Li-Fi"*. Writers and fans in the field have long complained of being marginalized by the general public and even more so by the literary elite. How did this happen and who's to blame? Does it even freakin' matter any more?

Before Hugo Gernsback there was no separate science fiction genre (or "scientificton" as Gernsback called it, Forrest Ackerman popularized the current two-word term). Writers from Mary Shelly, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Twain used themes of the fantastic in their works that are still considered classics of Literature today. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells explored advancements in contemporary science and technology and were lauded by audiences around the globe inspiring millions.

As Gernsback and later, John W. Campbell and others codified early science fiction traditions they were deeply mired in the pulp magazine traditions. Fun stuff to be sure, but the gee-whiz boys' adventure stuff was very lacking in well-rounded characters and well-crafted plotting. It has been pointed out recently that even notable award winners of the 1950s weren't really turning out timeless prose. Let's face it, the SF Ghetto was constructed from the inside out and zealously maintained from within.

Around 1970 followers of the New Wave movement like Moorcock, Aldiss, and Disch tried busting out of the ghetto but could never find a large enough audience. An incursion in the other direction occurred in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was shortlisted for the Nebula for Best Novel. It lost to Rendezvous with Rama which, with all due respect to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, is a novel with some cool science and a great setting where not much actually happens. In a 1998 Village Voice essay Jonathan Lethem called this moment "a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream". Really? Maybe it was just too soon. In the decades since Lethem made that morbid observation popular culture has become very accepting, if not downright starved for science fiction and its fantastical siblings. Granted, much of that is re-hashing Space Opera pastiches from the 50s or teen vampire fluff, but science fiction prose continues to grow, mature, and inspire. Besides, I really can't imagine Pynchon as a Guest of Honor at a big convention. Although he would probably like filking.

To me these concerns over genre distinctions are silly but will probably never go away. Booksellers and librarians will still need some classifications so that they can direct you to the right shelf. There will always be a handful of literary elitists in pooh-poohing our favorite books as escapist drek. And deep within the bowels of SF fandom, grumbles will continue about certain writers abandoning the field for snootier credentials (O hai Mr. Vonnegut & Ms. Atwood!). Or even worse, Outsiders coming in to completely destroy all their precious memories of Astro-King vs. the Bimborgs of Pluto (admit it, a remake of that would totally rock.). The thing to remember is that the distinctions between types of literature are not walls with razorwire to be patrolled. They are shifting vague zones— grey areas, if you will.

The Secret History of Science Fiction is all about authors mixing it up, exploring, Boldly Going where they like and never sacrificing quality. These stories are good enough to make The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley pop his cartoon monocle. You'll get profound and often disturbing looks at the human psyche and what we do to each other. The effects of science and technology upon society are also explored in this volume by writers who really know science fiction, not just slumming. Instead of quick summaries of these worthy reads I'm going to close with a few quotes by the authors about this whole imaginary divide of imaginations.

Gene Wolfe:

What we now normally consider the mainstream – so called realistic fiction – is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived.... It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. F you ga back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist.

Connie Willis:

The thing I have always liked best about science fiction is that it defies definition.
It keeps constantly reinventing itself – and just when you thought stories about robots or time travel or first contact had been done to death, it thinks of some brand-new story to tell.

T.C. Boyle:

I've thought about the domination of the literary arts by theory over the last 25 years — which I detest – and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level – moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

It seems to me that SF is standing, these days, in a doorway. The door is open, wide open. Are we just going to stand there, waiting for the applause of the multitudes? It won't come; we haven't earned it yet. Are we going to cringe back into the safe old ghetto room and pretend that there isn't any big bad multitude out there? If so, our good writers will leave us in despair, and there will not be another generation of them. Or are we going to walk through that doorway and join the rest of the city? I hope so. I know we can and I hope we do, because we have a great deal to offer – to art, which needs new forms like ours, and to critics who are sick of chewing over the same old works and above all to readers of books, who want and deserve better novels than they mostly get. But it will still take not only courage for SF to join the community of literature, but strength, self-respect, the will not to settle for the second rate. It will take genuine self-criticism. And it will include genuine praise.

Here is the complete Table of Contents:

Introduction by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
"Angouleme" Thomas M. Disch
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" Ursula K. Le Guin
"Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" Kate Wlihelm
"Descent of Man" T.C. Boyle
"Human Moments of World War III" Don DeLillo
"Homelanding" Margaret Atwood
"The Nine Billion Names of God" Carter Scholz
"Interlocking Pieces" Molly Gloss
"Salvador" Lucius Shepard
"Schwarzchild Radius" Connie Willis
"Buddha Nostril Bird" John Kessel
"The Ziggurat" Gene Wolfe
"The Hardened Criminals" Jonathan Lethem
"Standing Room Only" Karen Joy Fowler
"10^16 to 1" James Patrick Kelly
"93990" George Saunders
"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" Michael Chabon
"Frankenstein's Daughter" Maureen F. McHugh
"The Wizard of West Orange" Steven Millhauser

*That latter term was coined by that merry prankster Orson Scott Card. Say what you will about the guy, "Li-Fi" is pretty Goddamned fucking funny.

The Secret History of Science Fiction may be purchased here, here, or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Real Literary Critics as Chris Hsiang. He will not get off their lawns.

Here's why. For hundreds of thousands of years, life was brutal. It still is for a good chunk of the planet. The technology and wealth we enjoy in North America is a very new development in history, and I think we miss the challenges of day-to-day survival in our comparatively easy modern lives. Some people will even create problems if they have none.

Everyone's had a psychotic girl- or boyfriend, right? Well, lots of ‘em really are just nut-flavored bologna. They have a neurochemical imbalance or ate too many paint chips as a kid… but some people look for drama and emotional upheaval for reasons they can't explain themselves, reenacting the shortcomings, chaos, or abuse of their childhoods.

Surprise. These drama kings and queens might be exactly the kind of person you'd want at your back during the zombie apocalypse or the aftermath of a comet strike. Each of our nut-flavored friends is a sponge. They're ready to soak up as much as trauma as anyone can dish out. They have the stamina, heart and depth to keep on slogging through the radioactive bugs even long after the last shotgun shell is gone.

They're not the only ones. I like to think I'm the kind of guy you'd give the keys to the bomb shelter and I'm extremely boring and normal - wife, kids, mortgage, bleh - ha ha - except to say that I grew up fascinated with books like Lucifer's Hammer and The Stand.

We like to be scared because we have a huge capacity for fear. The most basic element of storytelling is conflict because we respond to it.

For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

Sure, the hot-sex-with-our-last-breath and the gunfights are fun, too, but ultimately my novels boil down to the ability of some people - the greatest of us - to overcome nearly any hurdle. I back my heroes into corners just to watch them wiggle free.

People are tough. We're evolved for less food; more exercise; less sleep; less security; more paranoia. The irony is that we're so good at what we do. We strive for more food; less exercise; more sleep; more security; less paranoia - and we've succeeded.

Look around. Humankind has remade the entire face of the planet, blanketing Earth with electrical grids, highways, super-agriculture, shipping lanes and aircraft, even wrapping the sky in satellites. It's easy to complain about your bills or morning traffic or the neighbor's neglected, ever-barking dogs (you know who you are), but these are fantastic problems to have.

The grocery stores are loaded, we have the industrial strength to roll off three cars per household, and every other family has enough money to spare to feed two dogs and a cat even though they don't have any inclination to walk Sparky and Spot every day and choose instead to leave their canines to noisily go insane, each set of dogs fenced off inside their own isolated little patch of suburbia.

Anybody with a computer to read this blog is richer than 99.99% of the human beings who've ever lived, and yet we can't help imagining what things would be like if we had to start over. Nuclear armageddon. Superflu. The living dead. Nanotech.

Give me a wild scenario and some smart good guys and I'm happy - just so long as the lights stay on and there's iced tea in the fridge. I'd really rather not be sifting through the rubble for canned food and medicine while we keep one eye peeled for roving gangs of illiterate cannibals.

Guest blogger Jeff Carlson is the bestselling author of the Plague Year trilogy. His latest novel, Plague Zone, comes out next month.

Crucial Stories

There are so many terrific, iconic stories by HP Lovecraft that no introductory list could ever satisfy completely. But here are eight stories and novellas that will introduce you to the main concepts in Lovecraft's world, as well as exposing you to some of his obsessive preoccupations. You can read the full text of all of these stories at Project Gutenberg.

"At the Mountains of Madness"
The tale of an ill-fated expedition to the mountains of Antarctica, this story explains the ancient, alien history of Earth as well as giving us a glimpse of "the Old Ones," the "shoggoths," and some backstory on the "spawn of Cthulhu." When the expedition discovers an ancient, alien-built city buried beneath the ice, they also find out what led to that city's demise. And let's just say it had to do with giant, shambling, polymorphous beings. What's great about this story is that it explains how many of the spooky, seemingly-magical beasts we encounter in other stories actually have an extraterrestrial (or biotechnological) origin.

"Call of Cthulhu"
While it may not be the very best of Lovecraft's stories, this tale introduces his most legendary monster and the madness it can bring upon the world. Just one glimpse of the tentacled visage of Cthulhu, and the non-Euclidean geometry of his city, is enough to turn an entire boat of tough sailors into shattered husks.

"Shadow Over Innsmouth"
One of my personal favorites in the Lovecraft canon, this story is also one of the more thoughtful, character-driven pieces that Lovecraft ever wrote. It's the tale of an antiquarian who comes across a forgotten, decaying New England town filled with oddly-mutated people who worship a strange deity called Dagon. Here we see Lovecraft dealing with an issue that preoccupies him in many stories - the terrifying and seductive results of a carnal intermingling between alien monsters and humans. Our hero is at first repulsed, then fascinated, by a town whose alliance with Cthulhu's spawn has resulted in a strange (and possibly beautiful) hybrid culture.

"Dunwich Horror"
Here Lovecraft delves deeply into the power of a mystical book he mentions in several stories, the Necronomicon by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred." A young antiquarian seeks the mysterious book at Miskatonic University (another favorite fictional institution of Lovecraft's), and then discovers that it holds a key to stopping a terrible force growing inside the barn of a local farmhouse.

"The Colour Out of Space"
One of Lovecraft's most straightforwardly science fictional stories, about a meteorite whose color begins to colonize everything around itself.

"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"
Sometimes called Lovecraft's only novel, this story is really more of a novella. It is also, like "Innsmouth," a revealing character study as much as it is a tale of historical terror whose claws reach into present-day Providence, Rhode Island. Ward, a young antiquarian (yes, Lovecraft has a lot of these), becomes interested in the papers of his ancestor Curwen, a man who grew rich trading in mysterious items from overseas, as well as in the slave trade. Curwen also built a house outside town, atop a vast underground catacombs devoted to nefarious experiments with the undead. Slowly, Ward is consumed by his obsession with Curwen, eventually attempting a dangerous experiment that will allow him to communicate with this once-powerful wizard from beyond the grave. There are several autobiographical flourishes here too, as Lovecraft sets the story in places familiar to him in Rhode Island, as well as bringing in characters who resemble historical figures in Providence history. It's an incredible, must-read Lovecraft story, full of the historical details that he loved as well as an alternate history of the slave trade that involves spirits as well as people.

"The Horror at Red Hook"
This is Lovecraft's classic story of the ghoulish goings-on beneath the cosmopolitan streets of New York City, where the writer lived for a few years in an immigrant neighborhood known as Red Hook. Here you'll see Lovecraft's usual obsessions - the horror of miscegenation/hybrid cultures, ancient forces from prehistory - set in an urban landscape rarely glimpsed in his generally-rural tales.

"The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
This is another of Lovecraft's near-novels, and is a crucial part of the author's surreal "dream cycle" of stories that involve the swashbuckling dream hero Randolph Carter. Unlike Lovecraft's usual heroes, who tend to be nerdy antiquarians or shivering half-monsters, Carter knows how to use a sword and trick the gods. In this adventuresome tale, we follow Carter through the dream world, from a city of cats (Lovecraft was very fond of these furry creatures), all the way to the Moon where a god of space (an "outer god") known as Nyarlathotep or the Crawling Chaos tries to trick Carter into abandoning his quest to dwell one day in a perfect city he once dreamed about.


Crucial biographical details

Though his stories are fantastical, Howard Phillips Lovecraft often pulled bits of his real life into them. Raised in Providence, Rhode Island, at the turn of the twentieth century, Lovecraft was a sickly child who was passionate about both ancient history and astronomy. Some of his first writing is about astronomy, in fact. His fixation on history was related in part to his fascination with pure Nordic cultures, and he once described himself in an essay as a "chalk-white racist."

But he was also a bundle of contradictions. When Lovecraft became a young man, he began contributing to - and eventually editing - the premiere pulp science fiction/horror zine of his day, Weird Tales. Through the group of friends he made while contributing to Weird Tales, he met an independent businesswoman named Sonia Greene. A Jewish immigrant to New York City, she brought Lovecraft to the city and they eventually married. So despite Lovecraft's horror at miscegenation, and his protestations that he was a racist, the one romance of his short life was with a Jewish immigrant.

After their marriage deteriorated, Lovecraft returned to his hometown of Providence in the mid-1920s, where he wrote some of his very best stories. Though he was poor, he was happy living with his aunt in a large house, and often spent his days hiking around Providence and writing in the city's beautiful, light-filled library called The Atheneum. When his aunt died, and then his good friend Robert E. Howard (author of the Conan books and a Weird Tales contributor) committed suicide, he fell into what today we would probably call clinical depression. He grew steadily more destitute, ate poorly (he mainly consumed bread, candies and coffee), and his health declined. He died at the age of 47, in 1937, shortly after completing his novella "The Shadow Out of Time."

The definitive biography of H.P. Lovecraft is S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: A Life.

Crucial literary connections

Two of Lovecraft's best friends and correspondents were Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, both contributors to Weird Tales and famous pulp authors in their own rights. Howard's work is probably remembered more today, with the help of the Conan movies, but Smith's work is usually deemed of higher literary merit. Prime Books is about to issue a handsome collection of Smith's stories called The Return of the Sorcerer.

Another of Lovecraft's great friends and literary champions was the writer and editor August Derleth, who kept Lovecraft's work in print long after the writer had died. In fact, it is probably Derleth's editorial efforts we have to thank for Lovecraft's cult status today.

One of Lovecraft's greatest influences was the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, who wrote about faeries and dreams in a poetic style that finds its way into Lovecraft's work as well. Like Dunsany, Lovecraft wrote reams of poetry but is largely remembered for his fantastical stories.

Crucial adaptations of, and immersions in, Lovecraft's tales

There are so many amazing stories, comic books, and movies that have been influenced by Lovecraft - not always in a good way - that it would be impossible to list them all. But here are some standouts.

Dreams in the Witch House
This was Stuart Gordon's entry in the "Masters of Horror" series on TV, and it's a great, modern-day adaptation of the Lovecraft story. There is even a moment when we see some terrifying geometry that is, in fact, sort of terrifying. Gordon has adapted several other Lovecraft tales, some more faithfully than others. While Gordon's Re-Animator is a true cult classic, it shares almost nothing with the Lovecraft story that inspired it, other than the main character's name, Herbert West. Same goes for Gordon's film From Beyond, which was inspired by Lovecraft too.

Dagon
A truly great Stuart Gordon adaptation, however, is Dagon - based on the short story "Shadow Over Innsmouth." While some of the movie is by necessity campy - sorry, but there is just no way to represent the church of Dagon without some seriously goofy outfits - it captures the poignancy of the original story. The ending of this movie is possibly the most truly Lovecraftian moment I've ever seen committed to film. (See a NSFW clip from the movie here.)

The Resurrected
Based on "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward," this horror movie is true to the original, but occasionally uneven in execution.

Call of Cthulhu (movie)
This silent film is set during the era when the story is supposed to take place - the mid-1920s. So the modern-day filmmakers have tried to create what they imagined a movie of the story would have looked like if it had been released at the same time as the short story itself. And they succeed incredibly well. This is retro-futurism at its finest, with gorgeous, expressionistic sets that look like something out of 20s horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Call of Cthulhu (RPG)
My favorite role-playing game ever, in which you can choose to be in a 1920s Lovecraftian scenario, or a contemporary one. Either way, you have to try to finish each quest without losing too many sanity points. Yes, the game has sanity points. Need I say more?

Hellboy (comics)
While the Hellboy comics created by Mike Mignola are not directly retelling any particular Lovecraft story, they are set in the world of the Lovecraft mythos. Several Lovecraftian monsters and wizards make appearances in Mignola's comics, and Mignola's illustrations are in my opinion the very best way to climb inside Lovecraft's crawly, dark imagination. (The image at the top of this post is a portrait of Lovecraft by Mignola.)

The Atrocity Archives
The first book in Charles Stross' Lovecraftian "Laundry series" of stories and novels, this set of stories takes us into a Lovecraftian world where a secret group called The Laundry deals with otherworldly phenomena and Nazis try to harness the powers of Cthulhu.

Evil Dead Trilogy
Sam Raimi's splatstick homage to Lovecraft begins with people who decide to mess around with a copy of the Necronomicon - and find out what it's like to do battle with the dead, from our dimension and others. The series begins with the movie Evil Dead, and ends with Army of Darkness.

As near as I can find out, there's only one horror movie that actually involves Alzheimer's directly: in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea (1999), scientists are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. So (as one naturally would) they genetically engineer SUPER SHARKS with amazing brains. What can possibly go wrong? Oh, yes. The shark thing, is what can go wrong.

Here's a good chunk of that movie, which conveniently starts out with the foolhardy scientists explaining their scheme to Samuel L. Jackson, and ends with indications that things are going wrong. (I do not think Jackson, at any point, utters the words, "Get these motherfucking super-sharks out of this motherfucking seabase." More's the pity.)

But that movie just uses Alzheimer's as a plot device. If you're looking for stories that actually play on our fears of Alzheimer's and what it means to our tenuous grasp of personhood, you have to look a bit further afield. And as Sir Michael Caine says, Alzheimer's is scarier than any shark, no matter how big.

But here are the ways in which i think we're starting to see the rise of horror that takes about Alzheimer's, obliquely rather than dead on.

Forgetting:

There's been a rise in stories about people's memories getting siphoned off. I have a vague but vivid memory of reading a comic book (or maybe seeing a TV show) with baddie who exults in erasing people's memories, and says things like, "I just took your memories of your mother," with a smirk. But I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this — almost as if my memory had been erased, fiendishly. And googling has turned up nothing. (Any suggestions?)

(Update: Thanks to everyone who commented. I think Ian Cyr is right, and it's a recent issue of Green Lantern Corps. by Dave Gibbons et al., featuring a baddie with mental powers. Although, someone reminded me The Surgeon General does something quite similar in Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and, yes, Gibbons again. But it's fascinating how many other examples people came up with.)

In any case, there are lots of other examples of recent stories about mind-erasure. Dollhouse is an obvious example, which asks explicitly what's left of us after our memories have been stolen away. (And comes up with a moderately hopeful answer, over time: There's still something that remains even after our minds are gone, although it's hard to define.)

Heroes has the walking plot device, the Haitian, who mostly just shows up and zaps some of your memories whenever HRG or someone else needs a little memory lapse — then wanders off to do his own thing, until he's needed to henchman up again. But there is that one super-creepy bit where HRG is interrogating his former mentor in Russia, and he gets the Haitian to zap bits of the mentor's memory, piece by piece, gloating the whole time. You get the full scariness of being unable to remember your mother, or your wife, or other bits of your past.

Torchwood season two had Adam, the guy who insinuates himself into your memories. Smallville had Lex getting some super-advanced electro-shock therapy, which erased seven months of his memory, and being shattered as a result. DC Comics grappled with the ethics of the magician Zatanna erasing people's memories in "Identity Crisis." Acheron Hades in the Thursday Next series has shown a propensity for zapping people's memories as well. Various X-Men have gone around zapping memories of late, including Rogue, Professor X and Jean Gray. (And in
one recent X-Men comic, Emma Frost sadistically erases an assassin's only happy memory, vowing to do worse if the assassin comes back. In Mark Millar's Authority issues, the Evil Doctor also gets off on nuking people's memories.

The 2001 movie Time Lapse features someone who's been dosed with a memory-erasing drug, rushing to stop an evil nuclear scheme before his memory goes away completely. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind featured people paying to have memories selectively erased, only to discover how terrifying that is in practice. And Dark City was all about people's memories being rearranged every night.

I feel like this is just scratching the surface — there's a lot of fiction right now talking about how fragile your memories are — and how, if they go, what's left may or may not be recognizeably "you."

The shambling hordes:

And then there's the fact that we're seeing a proliferation of zombie movies, which are all about people who are falling apart physically and have lost all of their personality and sense of identity. As someone who's lost a few close relatives to Alzheimer's, slowly and horribly, it's easy for me to recognize how zombies are a metaphor for this dissolution of the self. People with Alzheimer's are still conscious and aware, they still move around and seem to respond to stimuli, but as disease progresses they get less and less capable of reasoning or having any kind of meaningful interaction with anyone around them. It's heart breaking and horrible — the person you knew is still there, but no longer really him- or herself.

As I pointed out a while ago, the zombie movie which comes closest to depicting the awfulness of losing a parent to Alzheimer's is Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also sometimes called Braindead:

Quasi-zombie movie I Am Legend even makes the link clearer by showing that the "zombies" still have vestiges of humanity and are capable of caring about each other. In the movie's original ending, Robert Neville is able to get through to the zombies and help them remember they used to be people — he comes up with a cure for their condition, and is able to get through to them. Because their real problem isn't that they're feral or mindless — it's that they've forgotten themselves.

The movie Fido also plays with this fairly explictly, by having the main character's dad become a docile, enslaved zombie by the end. He's still recognizeably the same old dad, but the biggest change is that he's lost most of his mind.

Obviously, a huge part of the zombie fad simply comes from the fact that they're a cool way to have an apocalyptic scenario — they're unstoppable and nasty, and if they bite you, you're screwed. They have many of the hallmarks of a good monster: loud, relentless, biting, overwhelming. But at the same time, as the zombie genre continues to expand and diversify, people are using zombies as metaphors for a bunch of different things — and one of those things, clearly, is having a loved one disappear, inexorably into the mists of forgetting.

So if it's true that we're only just seeing the beginning of the onslaught of dementia in our rapidly aging societies, you can expect to see more fantastical and science-fictional stories that attempt to capture the madness of it all. As Caine says, no monster can ever be as scary as Alzheimer's... but some monsters can help us come to terms with it.

Thanks to Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Capt. Snowdon, Lynae Straw, Michael Wilson, Martina de la Cruz, Nivair H. Gabriel and anyone else I missed.

In the early years of the Cheney administration, my neighbor's house burned to the ground; and in her grieving give-aways, I inherited an unscathed copy of John Shirley's Really Really Really Really Weird Stories. I hadn't known my neighbor well, and I had obviously never been a huge reader of whatever exactly it was that Shirley was writing. So, it wasn't for another six months that I cracked the first page of the book, a story collection so creatively explosive, trembling with unashamed poetic license, that it become almost a talisman to me, a Yes from the Cosmos, a direction to an aspiring story-teller.

The most remarkable thing about that collection, perhaps, was that each of its four sections, did, as promised, get progressively weirder. And the first story, in which a street-walker in San Francisco answers a marriage ad from a Mexican B-actor who bills himself as the world's smallest man, was already weird enough. Charlie Manson only wishes he had the mental powers of the trailer park psychotics that lash out at Shirley's cold doctors and stuffy bureaucrats. The Virgin Mary only wishes that she could be revivified from the homely rubber of an ordinary beach ball.

Though his stories are grittier, more carnal, and far more menacing, Shirley's collection brought to mind a master from a different time. Shirley works with his post-punk urban decay, the aftermath of Reaganomics, in much the same way that Alfred Bester had worked with his epochally charged up-scale Madison Avenue of the 1950s, namely, picking it up like a snow globe with a city inside, shaking it up a few times, and letting it settle into his brilliant space-stories. Like Alfred Bester, Shirley struck me as a literary southpaw, a natural born story-teller, whose strong imagination defied the myriad rules of thumb that burden other authors. Faithful only to the caged beast that wants to burst out of each story, their work unfolds exactly the way you'd want it to unfold, passionate, unpredictable, uncannily true, and often funny enough that you stupidly try to retell the story at parties.

Much of what I've always loved about John Shirley pours out of his new novel, Bleak History.

In hero Gabriel Bleak, Shirley draws a fine portrait of a scruffy outsider who earns his living on the margins of society, as a bounty hunter, and of a young man whose psychic wounds go much deeper than his gory bad memories as a reluctant soldier in Afghanistan.

The hunter himself, we soon learn, is being hunted by a splinter group of American intelligence. In mercenary fashion, the CCA would like to "contain" Bleak's talents, and use them in a secret war against the nebulous Enemy. They've been watching him since birth, and in some ways, know more than Bleak about the source of his psychic gifts, which include the knowledge of when he is being observed, an ability to speak with ghosts, and the power to condense the energy of "the Hidden" into fireballs and ladders.

Shirley is ever the master of twining plots, each with their own energy, that come at each other with the inevitability of runaway trains.

In Bleak History, we are treated to a parapolitical story of the CCA, whose methods of keeping America safe go as far as kidnapping "talented" children, including Bleak's own brother, and keeping them in an adolescent (and emotionally larval) state. Halfway through the book, this plot line rams right into the compelling story of Troy Gulcher, a scuzzy crook who calls upon an old dark entity called Moloch. These two stories then intersect with a fictional piece of historical metaphysics, in which Sir Isaac Newton and a group of luminaries attempt to spare the world from another grueling Dark Age with the help of an extremely ancient bit of technology left deep inside the ice at the Magnetic North Pole. Into this mix, Shirley threads the story of the mystically perfect love which has, so far, skirted Gabriel Bleak, and a plot line in which Moloch, through the use of his human puppets, prepares to take over the world.

As these various plots thicken, each of the Faustian puppet masters find themselves the unwitting puppets. One by one, Gulcher and the others experience reversals of fate, until even the power mad general Forsythe, who is using the CCA, and these magical entities, lies in the dirt, babbling, impotently bemoaning what he's done.

What is so enjoyable about Bleak History, however, more than its head-strong plotting, more than all the spectacular and baroque metaphysics, is the way the author depicts the levels of human cruelty. I suppose the same could be said of Dante Alighieri. In any case, both authors show a loving touch in their canny portraits of morally repulsive men and women of their times. And both lay out a very pleasant variety of the faces one finds within every rotting institution, with its colorful monsters and gentleman failures.

While I consider this novel, in many ways, a work of genius, I did get a sense, at times, that the author himself was not exactly aware of where his unique strength lies. In many places, Bleak History moves on the page a bit like an action movie, where one can see every kick and grimace and plume of dust. Don't get me wrong. I heartily enjoy the exquisite shadenfreude that only Shirley evokes. But for me, the visceral effect was diluted by what came across as a readying of the story for another medium. Bleak History was strongest in those places, mostly in the little details, where the author gives himself to the madness of the story, and perhaps, to madness itself, and manages to bypass the kind of pre-thinking that can be harmful to the unscrupulous lifeblood of art.

What I love so much about Shirley's characters, at their best, is how they come off as such hilariously chipped tea cup specimens of humanity, so American, so horrible, so believable, and so very John Shirley. But in this book, I didn't detect that strong heartbeat. One can see what the characters in Bleak History are pointing towards. But I didn't feel them fully materialize, each as a world unto herself. Instead, the more authentically geisty dregs of humanity take a backseat, in this book, to a more accessible kind of oddball, who only really represents an oddball to that vast majority of normals. I feel as though it was well within John Shirley's reach, when he painted his gang of misfits (the so-called ShadowComm, who reluctantly accompany Gabriel Bleak) to add those few brushstrokes which would render them as something worthy of A Confederacy of Dunces, or A Feast of Snakes. It almost seems that some dark entity was exerting a force on the brilliant wordsmith, all along, so that his creations would instead come out as a better drawn bunch of X-Men.

On the other hand, perhaps the organic vitality of the characters suffers precisely because the book does so much. Bleak History takes the reader on a heady tour of demonology, love, crime, war, an intricate and homespun system of mysticism, the psychic surveillance state, unique variations on the Stockholm syndrome, the sorrows of every eternal misfit, and an apt critique of institutional thinking. There are plenty of thought-provoking tropes in the book, including self-enclosed realities the author calls pocket worlds, an autistic oracle, various ways a person might reach into another mind, and scientific explanations for Magic and the Occult. And like so much of Shirley's work, beneath the twisted story, the reader is treated to a Matryoshka series of dolls within lying, paranoid dolls.

Roth has declared the novel all but doomed, saying that within 25 years, its audience will have dwindled to a "cultic" minority, going the way of Latin poetry and similar archaic art forms. The issue, he says, is that books simply can't compete with television and other screen-based entertainment.

He said it was "the print that's the problem, it's the book, the object itself". "To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities," he said.

Of course, others don't have such dire predictions for the fate of written literature. Just a few weeks ago, we spoke to writer Cory Doctorow about the future of the novel, and his view was that the web actually increases interest in and access to print novels.

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult within 25 years [Guardian via Bookninja]

The storyline for Death Troopers is pretty simple, really — an Imperial prison barge, during the years right before the original Star Wars movie, runs into some engine trouble. Good thing they find a Star Destroyer in the middle of nowhere, which they can cannibalize for parts. Unfortunately, the Star Destroyer has some kind of weird virus on board, which kills everyone it comes into contact with... and the people who die don't stay dead. And that's about it. The survivors from the prison barge have to run a gauntlet of Imperial zombies and try to escape in one piece, while facing their own personal traumas and uncovering a sinister biological weapons program that comes straight from Lord Vader himself.

Among others, we meet a sadistic prison guard, Sartoris, an idealistic prison doctor, Cody, and the Longo brothers, the two sons of Trig Longo, a smuggler whom Sartoris murdered. Everybody gets a nice story arc in between (and during) zombie attacks.

It's a quick read, and there's a lot of chasing around dark corridors and crawlspaces and the holds of abandoned spaceships. But the good news is Joe Schreiber, a horror veteran, finds enough twists and turns in the narrative to keep it thrilling. There are enough subplots and surprising nasties (like former officers aboard the Star Destroyer who've resorted to cannibalism and are as bad as the zombies) to keep things interesting. And a couple of characters you've actually met before do turn up, so you're not just stuck with a cast of newbies.

And Schreiber writes in a pleasingly intense, thriller style, managing to find new ways to convey terror and desperation. Like this bit, which I liked:

But there is nothing to worry about, Sartoris told himself, dropping the thought like a pebble into the deep well of his subconscious and waiting to hear some sort of telltale plink of reassurance. The silence that came back wasn't particularly reassuring.

Later on, he has neat bits about people running so hard, they have lactic acid in their joints and stuff. The visuals of deformed faces behind Stormtrooper helmets, and pits full of undead, howling Imperial officers, are vivid enough to make you cringe a bit, and the story's revelations hint at an evil greater than anything we've seen in Star Wars before: an unstoppable contagion that uses "quorum sensing" to lie in wait until it has enough numbers to overwhelm you completely.

The main problem with the novel is a slightly convenient, almost Deus Ex Machina ending. Apart from that, though, it's pretty much exactly what you want from a Star Wars zombie novel: monstrous evil, unspeakable horror, the grinding cruelty of the Empire, and a handful of petty criminals and rogues who discover their inner nobility at the exact last second. What else could you hope for? [Death Troopers at Borders.com]

Publisher's Marketplace reported last week that Mickey Zucker Reichert, a fantasy author best known for the Renshai series, has just completed Robots and Chaos. Set during the I, Robot era in Asimov's chronology (which I think was around 2004, if I've done my math right), the prequel focuses on the early days of Susan Calvin as she completes her medical internship. The book is said to be a mix of quintessentially Asimov hard science fiction and Michael Crichton-like medical thriller, with a heavy emphasis on the shifting definitions of humanity after the creation of robots. There will be a race against time to safeguard our way of life.

Reichert will be the first female author to write in Asimov's universe and the first to explore the time of Susan Calvin. Her work joins such previous authorized additions as the second Foundation trilogy, written by Greg Bear, David Brin, and Gregory Benford, as well as Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban books.

The report also claims a new I, Robot movie property has been sold to 20th Century Fox, the makers of the Will Smith adaptation. It's unclear whether the property in question is Reichert's new book or something else. Either way, between this and the upcoming Foundation and End of Eternity movies, now seems like a pretty good time to be one of the Good Doctor's books, be it of the Asimov or quasi-Asimov variety.

The Masks by Ray Bradbury

Masks, myths and metaphors" play an important part in much of Bradbury's work, claim Jonathan Eller and William F. Touponce in their Bradbury study, The Life Of Fiction, and they believe Bradbury gets to the bottom of this obsession in his never-finished novel called The Masks. Filled with images of carnivals, this 1940s novel would have been the purest distillation of Bradbury's obsession with magicians and magic.

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

When Dick died in 1982, he was busy with The Owl in Daylight, which is reputed to be concerned with deaf aliens abducting a B-movie composer, artistic genius, new forms of sensory input, an amusement park, or a sci-fi reboot of The Divine Comedy, depending whom you ask. Dick never outlined the plot, so it's hard to say. His wife Tessa published her interpretation of his concept in 2009, but her version is largely her own work, and draws inspiration from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Irontown Blues by John Varley

We interviewed Varley back in March 2008, and he told us:

One of these days I hope to write a third novel in the Steel Beach, Golden Globe trilogy, entitled Irontown Blues. The reason I haven't written it is that I don't yet know what's going to happen.

People have been waiting for this novel forever, and little is known about Varley's ideas so far. Back in February, he said it's "third in line," after two other novels he's working on. "If I write it, it would be about a cop," he told Xero magazine.

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

A sequel to Camp Concentration, about the pursuits of a society of humans become immortal through genetic alterations caused by a plague that swept through the world. A few regular mortals also survive, hiding out in enclaves. Disch explained:

For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on "Pressure", and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realise I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standards sf advance". The personal reasons included an intense affair with the poet Lee Harwood that lasted about six weeks. After Harwood left him, Disch suffered several months of unrequited love. Disch confessed that much of The Pressure of Time was "inspired by the pangs of despised loved". Disch travelled around, visiting Ireland and Turkey, but suffered writers block. Unable to continue with his own work, he wrote novelisations of The Prisoner and Alfred the Great.

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

Butler died after Fledgling came out, but the book's ending left most people believing she intended to write at least one sequel, if not many. I've heard rumors she'd made notes on a sequel, but can't find any confirmation of that online. Butler also had started a third novel in her Parable series, called Parable Of The Trickster, but was unable to finish it due to a seven-year bout of writers' block. (Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? "Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.")

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

Verne wrote 50 pages, and never finished the rest. The book was rewritten by his son Michel as L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, along with several other works inspired to greater or lesser degree by his father's manuscripts. Esperanto enthusiasts are particularly saddened that in so doing, Michel expunged all references to support for the nascent language, of which Jules was a proponent.

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ia! Ia! Lovecraft started this novel in June 1922, but only wrote a small fragment, which was published afterh is death in the journal Leaves. According to Wikipedia, he described it as "a weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel." (Vathek being an 18th century novel about Arabia.) You can read the fragment that he actually wrote here. It starts quite stirringly, bemoaning our gray, citified, un-magical existence.

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

Yes, that Henry James. The "Turn Of The Screw" guy. He started writing this romance, about a young man who discovers he can walk through portals into the past, in 1900, but all the time-travel mechanics got too convoluted and gave him a headache. He abandoned it, only to return to work on it in 1914, writing another huge section. In the novel, Ralph Pendrel travels back and takes the place of his own ancestor, but then the woman he loves realizes he's a time-traveler and makes a great sacrifice to help him return to the present.

The Plant by Stephen King

This was King's famous experiment, where he serialized a novel online, and you were supposed to pay him $1 every time you downloaded a chapter. If the percentage of downloaders who paid $1 dropped below 75 percent, King threatened to stop posting the chapters. And eventually, that's what happened. The already-posted chapters have been removed from King's site. The novel is about a paperback editor who receives weird letters (and odd photographs) from a magical weirdo. The editor sics the cops on the magician, who sends him a strange plant in revenge.

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

A story of interdimensional travel including the titular tower (which turns out to be a far-future replica of the the bog-ugly Cambridge University Library), this was supposed to be the original sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. It ends abruptly and some people have accused it of being a forgery.

The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities by Samuel R. Delany

This sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand may never actually see the light of day. We asked Delany about it a while back and he explained:

I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in.

And after that, Delany's view of the gay community changed somewhat drastically.

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Adams was working on this book, a Dirk Gently novel, when he died, but he'd decided his ideas for it didn't work for Gently. So he tried first turning it into a standalone novel, and then reworking it into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy installment. The version which appears in the book of the same name does star Gently, and involves a client who wants to hire him to find the back half of her cat. According to Don't Panic, the book about Adams by Neil Gaiman (with revisions and updates by Guy Adams), the fragment which appears in the book is actually from several different versions of Salmon which were on Adams' various hard drives. What we have is pieced together from three files — Chapters 2, 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, Chapter 1 is from an earlier draft, and Chapter 9 is Adams' last known piece of writing. It's basically a mish-mash, and an assembly of working notes and fragmentary stuff.

Like the novels we're discussing, this list is decidedly unfinished — what are the books that were never completed, for whatever reason, which you would dearly love to read?

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder, Mary Ratliff and Cyriaque Lamar.

To create When It Changed, editor Geoff Ryman (author of the multiple award-winning novel Air), set up science fiction authors with scientists, and had them develop stories together. The awesome list of contributors includes Paul Cornell, Justin Robson, Liz Williams, Kit Reed, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod and Ryman himself. According to the publisher's Facebook page:

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Ryman told the news department at Manchester University, where he's based at the University's Center for New Writing:

We wanted to go out and locate what is fresh and new in the sciences, and gives writers a chance to work with researchers to come up with different, contemporary themes. When it Changed actively extends the scientific repertoire of fiction — all fiction, because we have mainstream writers as well. But it gave some of the best SF writers I know of a chance to work closely with a scientist. Some of the ideas they've come up with are mind-blowing ... round the world particle colliders, virtual research, or suits that heal their wearers. And the scientists get to comment or explain.

The book's launch party is tomorrow, Oct. 24, in Manchester, UK. We can't wait to see a copy! Too bad it's not out in the U.S. until April 1 next year.

John Derbyshire wrote in the New Atlantis a while back:

You could make a case, in fact, that Verne was not really interested in science at all, so much as in technology. Certainly he was a magpie for curious technological and biological factoids, and had a fairly good head for numbers. The imaginative side of science, though - the side that actually propels science forward - was a thing he had no acquaintance with. I am sure he would have been baffled by Vladimir Nabokov's remark about "the precision of the artist, the passion of the scientist." The great pure-science advances of his time made no impression on him. I do not know of anything in Verne's works that would be different if Maxwell's equations had not appeared in 1865. About Darwin's theory he seems to have been utterly confused, employing a sort of crude pop-Darwinism in books like The Aerial Village (1901), yet declaring himself "entirely opposed to the theories of Darwin" in an interview he gave at about the same time. This was not likely an opposition based on religious belief. Though he always, when asked, described himself as a "believer," this was part of the bourgeois façade that Verne chose to live behind after some youthful dabbling in la vie Bohème. He actually gave up attending Mass in the 1880s, and probably died an agnostic.

Though a gifted storyteller, in fact, at any rate in his early years, Verne had not sufficient powers of imagination, or scientific understanding, to rise to true science fiction.

Drabble, author of many amazing literary novels including The Millstone, has no particular opinion over whether Verne was writing science fiction, but she confesses to being a huge fan of his work — something she kept secret until she realized he was actually avant garde. Writes Drabble:

I used to be somewhat ashamed of my love of Verne, but have recently discovered that he is the darling of the French avant-garde, who take him far more seriously than we Anglo-Saxons do. So I'm in good company.

What do you think? Science-fiction pioneer? Gee-whiz technologist? Avant-garde darling? Or all of the above?

[John Derbyshire via Isegoria, and L.A. Times]