Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

Stephen Baxter's Manifold Trilogy

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

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey

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

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

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

David Brin's Uplift series

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

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris

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

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

Many, many thanks to Liz Henry with the Feminist SF blog for helping me put together this exhaustive list of lesbian-dominated cultures in science fiction. Smug Sappho! There are way more than I'd expected.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. A weird virus on the planet Jeep kills all the men, and most of the women, and the women who survive are changed, gaining access to a sort of Jungian collective unconscious. Deprived of access to men's precious bodily fluids, the women start mating using a weird ritual called "deep trance." One reviewer was annoyed that all these women, who presumably aren't naturally lesbians, seem way too comfortable turning to lesbianism and don't seem to miss the men at all. Ammonite won the Tiptree Award for science fiction that considers gender themes, prompting also-ran David Brin to complain that he'd been robbed.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr. A trio of astronauts blast off into a mission around the sun, but a solar flare knocks them forward in time a few hundred years, to an era when a plague (again!) has wiped out all the men and most of the women. The surviving women reproduce via cloning, and a few of their girl-babies are dosed with androgens early on to make them grow up bigger and stronger. The three male astronauts are thrilled at the chance to be the only men on Earth — either to become patriarchs, or just to have lots of sex — but then it turns out the women rulers have no intention of letting the men live. They're happy without men around, and don't want to upset their groovy, stable society with annoying menfolk.

Walk To The End of the World and Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas. A horrendous gay male-dominated society that locks up women in breeding farms. But then a free lesbian society, the Motherlines, springs up and shelters the refugees from the ebil male society. And the nomadic, horse-riding lesbian culture has an... interesting way of reproducing. In a nutshell, they, ummm... collect semen from their male horses and then use it as a catalyst to reproduce themselves. Or as Liz puts it, "horsefucking lesbians."

The Marq'ssan Cycle by L. Timmel Duchamp. In the dystopian future of 2076, everything's run by lesbians, and somehow the world is still totally fucked. The novel pits the lesbian Anarchist Collectives in the Women's Free Zone against the evil Executive Class, which runs the rest of the world and is equally lesbiotic. Ideomancer explains:

Executive men are 'fixed', which means they are capable of reproduction but entirely uninterested in the act except as a mean to an end. They derive no physical pleasure from the act, which frees them to pursue their vocations and hobbies without internal conflict. Executive women are almost entirely homosexual, except when it is necessary to bear their executive men children-and it is a distasteful act: in Renegade, one executive woman speaks of the obvious perversion of heterosexuality-but there is a very strong prohibition against executive-with-executive sex: executive women are only to have sex with service-tech women, who are sometimes available during parties much as champagne and caviar are provided. Executive women are also taught self-defense against un-fixed men.

The Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski. The planet Valedon is materialistic and has a rigid class system, but its moon, Shora, is covered by a shallow ocean full of water-breathing lesbians who live in harmony (but don't have any goats.) The Sharers of Shora are pacifists and super-advanced biologists, who communicate across long distances by talking to the insects, and reproduce by parthenogenesis. They live in peace... until an army from Valedon comes to "develop" Shora. Here's sample dialogue after the army has taken a few Sharers prisoner:

"We seek our sister Sharers," Merwen said.
"Who might they be?"
"Lerion Nonthinker, Ronesha the Coldhearted, and Oo the Jealous, who were last seen with Valans on Nri-el raft."

The Wanderground by Sally Gearhart. A linked collection of stories about a future lesbian utopia, where women can communicate telepathically, not just with each other but also with plants and animals. They can talk to the flowers! And everyone lives in harmony with nature. The women raise children collectively and die when they decide to. Gearhart coined some fancy terms for the lesbians' non-verbal communication, including "learntogether" and "listenspread." In the book's final story, an old woman and her goat prepare to pass on together.

Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson. This is more like the traditional "spaceman visits a planet of all women" story, except that for once the women-only planet is explicitly lesbified. As Liz puts it, "The lesbian society is like OMG SPACEMENZ please fuck us." Similarly, World Without Men by Charles Maine from 1958 features a lesbian-dominated dystopia, which is saved by a man. Here's how the Feminist SF web page describes it:

In World Without Men, all the men are dead and the women perverted lesbians. The story explains that this was caused by feminism and sexual liberation. One man is created from frozen sperm and saves the society.

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison. Everyone in the ruling class is gay, except for a few "deviant" professional class hets. Cloning has replaced sexual reproduction as a means of carrying on the species, but a few women rebel and bear their own children. Heterosexuality is seen as "rather an unpleasant word," because heterosexuality leads to violence and aggression. And sports. By the end of the book, however, there's the suggestion that eventually society may stop conditioning everyone into mandatory homosexuality.

Shore Of Women by Pamela Sargent. In a post-nuclear dystopia, the sexes have been segregated: Lesbians live in the cities, while savage men lurk out in the wastelands. Every now and then, men come to "shrines" in the wilderness and "consort with the lady," meaning they have virtual-reality sex with a fake goddess. During these cyber hook-ups, the savage men are milked of semen, which is used for artificial insemination by the city women. A woman who murders another woman is exiled from the city, to a horrible fate in the wilderness of men. But there's a shocking twist: the men are so conditioned to worship women that when they meet one in person, they're enraptured instead of violent. So you see, cybersex can change the world after all.

Want more worlds ruled by lesbians? (And who doesn't?) Here's an exhaustive list of gay female worlds in lesbian science fiction.

• 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.

Famous names: Kevin Costner, David Brin

Crunchy goodness: 2

Copycat: This much-maligned flick is based on a much-loved novel by David Brin

Elevator pitch: This movie is like Road Warrior, except with a postal carrier instead of a motorcycle and a fascist dictator instead of a gang of asswipes.

Most painfully dated moment: That anybody thought Kevin Costner could direct a movie is such an entertainingly 1997 idea that you've gotta love this movie on that basis alone.

The Postman: The Movie - An Impression by the Author of the Original Novel by David Brin, Ph.D.