In Swanwick's story, originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, computers and related technology are forbidden. Hence the massive mutant queen, who has an amazing long lifespan. Guarded by super-intelligent and loyal apes, she governs the country and secretly longs for death.

Here are some of the other great monstrous queens of England:

"Victoria" by Paul Di Filippo. A young Queen Victoria runs away to go live in a brothel and experience the wild life she's been denied. Luckily, an inventor has succeeded in cloning a newt/human hybrid that looks just like the Queen. So the mutant takes the Queen's place while her handlers search for her. Things get more complicated when a nuclear-powered train explodes. This story appears in Di Filippo's Steampunk Trilogy.

Doctor Who, "Tooth And Claw." An alien parasite that looks much like a werewolf is attempting to bite Queen Victoria so it can take her over and rule the British Empire through her. It's strongly hinted at the end of the episode that the werewolf actually succeeded and Victoria now carries the werewolf strain. Which means the plot to assassinate Queen Victoria in the 1989 story "Ghost Light" may actually have been a good idea after all.

The frozen head of Queen Victoria, kept alive by a steam-powered life support system (of course), presided over a robot contest at a British convention called Beyond Cyberdrome. Here's a photo:"Send Her Victorious" by Brian Aldiss. "Queen Victoria" turns out to be an ultra-superior alien who created the Earth in some kind of bizarre experiment. In the late twentieth century, a man realizes Queen Victoria's grave is actually a portal to her alien dimension, and she's about to destroy the human race now that the experiment has run its course. He confronts the giant Victoria in her lair, leading to this classic paragraph: "She grabbed him up between two immense pudgy fingers. She was imperious, regal, she was Queen Victoria. And she was not amused." This story appears in the book Intangibles, Inc.

The real Queen Victoria had hemophilia despite having no hemophiliac ancestors, which means she actually was a mutant. Some experts cite her rare "mutation" as proof that she was actually illegitimate.

David Icke used to be a football star and then a Green Party spokesman in England, but now he's a famous conspiracy nut. He believes Queen Elizabeth is a shape-changing reptile, part of a secret reptilian cabal that runs the world and organized the Holocaust, 9/11 and pretty much everything else. His followers pore over photos of the Queen for evidence of "lizard neck." Really.

So there you have it. The only question left is, is it the monarchy itself that inspires these fantasies? Or just the idea of a female monarch? Maybe in a few years we'll be seeing a spate of "Mutant President Hillary" stories.

• SF is now real life. "We are at last living in an SF scenario," Brian Aldiss said in a recent London Times interview. The article went on to paraphrase: "A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers - it's all coming true at last." It's like SF is a laundry list of predictions, and we've ticked them all off. What about colonizing Mars, though? Why do only the sucky predictions have to come true?
• It's been colonized by mainstream literature. Authors like Cormac McCarthy and Kazuo Ishiguro have stolen away our precious science fictional heritage and re-branded it as literary fiction. The literary establishment lavishes attention on these appropriating works, but ignore speculative fiction that has similar themes. And somehow, this will cause SF to wither into irrelevance.
• It's turned into pure fantasy. People get off on the "sense of wonder" in science fiction, says Bookslut's Paul Kincaid. Think of SF as a cosmic crack dealer. But over time, the wonder has gotten bigger and bigger, and authors have given up on trying to provide a rational explanation for it. So the science has become magic, and the SF has become just another kind of fantasy.
• The fanbase is ancient. "The literature of youthful, forward-looking openness... is graying," laments David Brin. At conventions, you see more retirees in scooters than kids. Is it because teh kids are too busy playing video games? Or is it that those older readers have created an impenetrable fan culture and a genre that caters to their finnicky needs? Either way, this demographic trend spells trouble in the long term.
• Rackspace is shrinking. Science fiction books are doing well as trade paperbacks (the bigger kind) but are in danger of losing their prominence as mass market paperbacks (the pocket kind), says Tom Doherty, publisher of Tor Books. That means fewer impulse buys at airports and drug stores, which convert new readers to SF.

• New production photos of Reposession Mambo tell us absolutely nothing about the more serious of the two organ-repo movies coming next year. You can see allegedly "futuristic" cars and some buildings. Yawn. [ShockTillYouDrop.com]
• The new Justice League movie is being "cast as cheaply as possible," says New York Magazine. It's semi-official that total unknown Armie Hammer will play Batman in the League. That's in addition to the previously leaked cast: Scott Porter as Superman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Common as Green Lantern and Adam Brody as Flash. "In other words, a D-list cast is set to portray the world's oldest, most iconic superhero team," Matthew Perpetua kvetches. [NYMag]
• Newly released clips from I Am Legend reveal no spoilers, but prove the film will live or die depending on how much you enjoy Will Smith talking to himself. [IESB]

• Battlestar Galactica co-creator Ronald D. Moore has two new TV series in development: one that he's developing for NBC/Universal, and one that he's supervising for Fox Broadcasting. He's also writing a sequel to iRobot, and a new version of The Thing for Universal. The new Thing will be linked to the 1982 version somehow. [Eclipse Magazine]
• Fans who want to see more of George Takei's Sulu as a starship captain in his own right had better not blink during the new Star Trek movie. The older Captain Sulu will appear in a brief scene with Leonard Nimoy's Spock. [TrekWeb]
• Brian Aldiss spent ten years trying to convince Stanley Kubrick not to turn AI into a dumb PInnochio story. "But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a chair as persuade Stanley of anything," he complains. In the end, Kubrick died and Spielberg turned AI into non-sensical "crap," says Aldiss. [London Times]

Here is today, 2007, with its diseased ideas of drugs, Darfur disputes and suicide bombers. The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario. Little wonder the tiger is almost extinct, the polar bear doomed. How do you think the algae feel, in the great wastes of warming ocean? Can you not hear the ecosystems crashing down? Ideal fodder for SF, one might think. However, one might not if one was brought up on Isaac Asimov and AE van Vogt. SF is not designed for realism but for imagination.

Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.

Our science fiction fate [Guardian Unlimited]
Everybody is happy now [Guardian Unlimited]