Here are the top 10 books to read to save the world, according to Sci Fi's visitors:

• 1. 1984 by George Orwell
• 2. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
• 3. Dune by Frank Herbert
• 4. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• 5. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• 6. The Stand by Stephen King
• 7. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• 8. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• 9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• 10. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

Similarly, the TV choices include a lot of paranoia, anti-authoritarianism and apocalytic narratives, with a dash of optimism further down the list:

• 1. Firefly
• 2. Battlestar Galactica (2004)
• 3. The X-Files
• 4. Heroes
• 5. Stargate: SG-1
• 6. Doctor Who
• 7. Star Trek: The Next Generation
• 8. Babylon 5
• 9. Star Trek
• 10. Buffy The Vampire Slayer

And here are the top movies. I'm not sure what the world-saving message of Jurassic Park is, other than "don't clone dinosaurs." There's a definite optimistic strain in a couple of these choices, like 2001 and Close Encounters, but otherwise it's pretty much doom across the board. Science goes too far, humans ruin the Earth, we're too violent and ignorant, and we're likely to become slaves of machines. Or enslave our own creations.

• 1. Blade Runner (1982)
• 2. The Matrix (1999)
• 3. The Terminator (1984)
• 4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• 5. Jurassic Park (1993)
• 6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• 7. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
• 8. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• 9. Children of Men (2006)
• 10. Armageddon (1998)

So what do you think? Can 20,000 readers be wrong?

The 20,000 respondents in the Sci Fi poll voted "reading" the number one thing to do to save the world, so the Visions For Tomorrow initiative will partner with Booksfree.com, the internet's biggest paperback and audiobook rental service. If you sign up for Booksfree through Sci Fi's Visions For Tomorrow site, you get an extra 20 percent discount. The other activities that could save the world included recycling, giving blood, voting, eating healthy and being kind.

Visions For Tomorrow is the Sci Fi Channel's public affairs campaign, which aims to use the power of science fiction to inspire people and organizations to "meet the growing challenges of the future."

You could argue that most dystoipan movies are really false utopias, because the rulers of a dark, bleak dystopia (like, say, Brazil) still try to pretend that everything is perfect and wonderful. The difference is, most dystopias start out bleak and dark, and just get more horrid until the protagonist is forced to confront the darkness around him/her. But in the "false utopia" subcategory of dystopias, everything is bright and wonderful, and the main character is either getting some great drugs, or having lots of fun sex, or both in the case of Brave New World.

The "false utopia" genre, says Transparency Now,

shows humanity lost in false paradises of technology and simulation. In one subcategory, we see enclosed high-tech cities or habitations with apparently well-ordered societies full of people who are trapped by their dependence on automation and computers. They may also live decadent lifestyles that serve to distract them from the truth of their circumstances.

Here's a brief and cheerful history of fake utopias:

1909. "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Forster's reaction to some of H.G. Wells' more optimistic fiction. In the distant future, humans live underground, each in a separate "cell," with all of his or her needs provided for by the all-powerful Machine. Human culture stagnates, and people wrongly believe they can't survive on the surface of the Earth without protection. Over time, people start to worship the Machine like a god, forgetting they made it. And then eventually the Machine starts to break down.

1932. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's 2540, and everybody's drugged up to the gills on Soma, a sort of anti-depressant/psychotropic, and people can learn in their sleep. There's lots and lots of casual sex and orgies, and people chanting "orgy porgy" while having orgies. It's awesome. Oh, and people are incubated artificially instead of being born "naturally." The lower classes are engineered to be less intelligent and curious than the upper classes.

1956. The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a billion years in the future, and humans have mostly abandoned Earth to go off and create super-ultra-awesome minds in space. In the domed city of Diaspar, people lead perfect lives, governed by the Central Computer. When they die, the Computer stores their memories and grows new bodies for them, making them nearly immortal. But then it turns out humans have been lied to about why they have to stay on Earth.

1971. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Ijon Tichy goes to sleep (or does he?) and wakes up in the trippy year of 2039, an utopian era without money or want. Everybody's mood is kept carefully controlled using drugs. Many people have pointed out the similarities of this drug-induced utopia to The Matrix: At one point, Tichy's girlfriend offers him a choice between two pills: The black pill will make him forget their relationship, the white pill will make him commit more deeply.

1976. Logan's Run, the movie based on the 1969 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Everything is perfect in the domed city, with all the casual sex and meaningless hedonism you could ever want. Machines provide for all of your needs, but there's one drawback — when you turn 30, you have to die.

1994. The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this award-winning young-adult novel, it's a perfect world: bad feelings and conflict have been eliminated, thanks to perfect communication and drugs. (It's always drugs.) People get around by bicycle, and there are very few cars or airplanes. Romantic love and sexual desire (called "stirrings") are illegal, and are suppressed via medication. Instead, couples are matched up based on compatibility and can adopt up to two children from "birth mothers": one boy and one girl. Here's a Christian review warning against this book based on a misconception that it's actually utopian.

1998. The Truman Show. Truman lives in a lovely small town, surrounded by nice people, with possibly the only job in the insurance industry that doesn't totally suck. The only problem is, he can never leave town, and he's kept scared of the ocean by a fake story about his father drowning. He doesn't realize that everything in his world is a lie, and he's really one of the Pussycat Dolls.

2002. Equilibrium. I hesitated to include this movie, because it's not much of a utopia. It's sort of bleak and nasty, and Christian Bale will do gun-aerobics in your face. But it does have many of the hallmarks, including people being drugged into flat affect-hood.

2005. The Island. Ewan McGregor lives in a utopian community where everything is perfect, and all of his choices are made for him. As usual in these types of stories, everybody's told that the rest of the world is uninhabitable due to some kind of toxic disaster. Everybody yearns to win the "Lottery" and go to "The Island," a tropical paradise — but it turns out The Island is made of people. Sort of.

There's a natural crossover between druggies and science fiction fans, writes Robert Silverberg, author of Son Of Man:

Surveys have shown that the audience for science fiction is primarily adolescent and above average in intelligence; most of the readers are between 15 and 25 years of age (though of course some remain addicts of the genre throughout their lives.) Therefore, there is great correspondence between the main drug-using and science-fiction-reading segments of the population.

So no doubt all this talking has made you wish you were doing drugs right now. So you tell us. If science fictional drugs were real, which one would you want to take?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

What was it in the novel that made Bush change the course of the nation's scientific research, putting the U.S. several years behind Europe and Asia? Apparently Bush adviser Jay Lefkowitz read the President a passage from the novel about genetically-engineered babies being grown in womb factories and Bush got really quiet and upset. He seemed to think there was a direct connection between stem cell research and wholesale government control of future generations' genetic code. What he didn't realize was that the genome hacking in Brave New World is actually done to prevent the need for welfare and other pesky social programs that Bush hates — all the working class people are designed to be strong, stupid, and enjoy manual labor so they never get annoyed by working at McDonalds. And they never demand libraries or healthcare.

Just goes to show that you can write a leftist scifi critique of government authoritarianism, and still wind up inspiring the very authoritarians you hoped to undermine. Maybe Huxley will have the last laugh, though. By retarding our progress in medical science so much, Bush has probably done more to make the U.S. irrelevant to the future than any other leader has. (Except perhaps Reagan, whose military policies were inspired by Star Wars.)

Dystopian Scifi Shapes White House Stem Cell Policy [via Carpetbagger Report]