This has been the dream of science-fiction fans and science-fiction authors since the days of "Clone Of My Own" (which is usually attributed to Isaac Asimov, but who knows if it's actually by him?) "Clone Of My Own" goes:

Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.

Clone, clone of my own,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.

There are about 29 versus more, but you get the idea. Actually, after reading authors like John Varley and Ursula K. Le Guin, the whole idea of the "opposite" sex has been thrown into question — surely, once we can all reconfigure our bodies at will, eventually we'll have some sort of sex tesseract.

But for now, here are the ways that science fiction offers, for us to meet our opposite-sex duplicates (and in some cases, have sex with them):

1) Cloning.

House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds:

Abigail Gentian, a wealthy woman, decides to explore the vastness of the stars — she she has herself cloned a number of times, and some of the clones are male while others are female. They all share Abigail's memories, and Abigail herself joins them without knowing which of them is the "real" her. And these "shatterlings" have sex — a lot. Especially in the novella Thousandth Night, there are tons of orgies in which all of the clones get together, making it a certainty that the "real" Abigail has been with her clones.

Time Enough For Love by Robert A. Heinlein:

Lazarus Long is the world's oldest human, and he decides not to undergo rejuvenation therapy, thus sentencing himself to death. His descendants convince him to keep on living, but he'll only do it if he gets to have a new experience — so two of his descendants become impregnated with opposite-sex clones of Lazarus. And after the opposite-sex clones of Lazarus are born, Lazarus raises them as his own daughters... and then has sex with them, of course.

"Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin:

This Nebula-nominated novelette, first published in Playboy, features a set of clones of a man named John Chow who died in a car accident, and some of them are female:

"All chips off the old block," Martin said valiantly. "But how can . . . some of you be women . . .?"

Beth took over: "It's easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It's trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually."

Sadly, nine out of ten clones are killed, forcing the remaining clone to deal with unaccustomed solitude.

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley:

The character Tweed has clones who are male and female clones of the same individual, called Vaffa or sometimes Hygeia. They're super-strong, super-big and lethal.

NYX and various other X-Men comics:

X-23, a female clone of Wolverine, first appeared in the X-Men: Evolution animated series, but then made the leap to comics, just like Harley Quinn. Despite looking kind of silly, she's manage to stick around long enough to get her own miniseries and have her backstory explained. I don't think she and Logan ever hooked up, but they have fought, which is almost the same thing when you come down to it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:

As Zaphod Beeblebrox explains, the girl Lintilla "has now been cloned over five-hundred-and-seventy-eight-thousand-million times - and has thus created a problem in some quarters." All of the Lintilla clones are female — but the anti-clones, sent to get rid of the infestation of female clones, are male versions of Lintilla called Allitnil. When a Lintilla and an Allitnil come together, he gets the Lintilla to "agree to cease to be" — but Arthur Dent takes a liking to one of the Lintillas, and kills her particular Allitnil.

Hunted by James Alan Gardner:

Edward York is an illegal clone of one of the Admirals on the High Council, and due to genetic problems he's a bit stupid. But a female clone of the Admiral, named Samantha, turns out super-smart and resourceful. Together, Edward and Samantha travel, as brother and sister, travel to the planet Troyen to try and negotiate a peace between two alien species, the Mandasars and the Fasskisters.

Kyle XY:

Kyle and his fellow vat-baby Jessi aren't strictly speaking clones, because I think they had different genetic stock — as far as I can remember, Kyle came from Adam and Jessi came from Sarah. But they do come from the same vat, and they resulted from the same super-baby program. So they could be considered akin to clones, sort of. Worth mentioning, anyway.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Clone Saga:

Can't believe I forgot this one, since I have the trades at home. In the Ultimate version of the Clone Saga, they clone Peter Parker several times... including a female version called Jessica Drew. And Jessica has all of Peter's memories — S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to erase Jessica's memories and set her up with a new identity, but she escapes and takes on the identity of Spider-Woman. Thanks, kwschuttler!

2) Alternate universes

Parallellities by Alan Dean Foster:

Max, the main character of this novel travels through the multiverse, and finally meets an alternate female version of himself — and has sex with her. Later, he manages to find an entire planet populated by copies of himself. As the back cover copy explains:

Now Max was lost in a virtual sea of collateral worlds, confronting man-eating aliens, dinosaurs, talking frogs, dead Maxes, girl Maxes, old Maxes, even ghost Maxes. His only chance to escape the space-time continuum was to find Boles and hope the loony genius could rescue him. But how could he be sure which world was real, which Max was Max, and which Boles was the Boles who could stop the madness—or trap Max in the wrong world forever. . . ?

Red Dwarf, "Parallel Universe":

Our gang finds a device that's supposed to transport them home to Earth instantly — but instead it zaps them into an alternate universe. There, they meet alternate versions of themselves, including female versions of Lister and Rimmer (and Cat's counterpart is a Dog.) Rimmer has to fight off his female counterpart's sexual advances, while Lister actually does wind up in bed with his female version, Deb. And because in this alternate universe, it's the men who get pregnant, Lister winds up carrying his alternate self's baby.

Sliders:

Thanks to Xicer for pointing out this one: in the episode "Double Cross," Quinn meets an evil female duplicate of himself from (of course) another universe, and almost makes out with her:

Transition by Iain Banks:

This dimension-jumping novel mentions that it's quite common to enter the body of your alternate-universe self and find that the alternate self is the opposite sex. This is a known syndrome, which causes some discomfort or confusion among the universe-hoppers whom it happens to.

3) Time travel

"All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein:

This story features a young man who's tricked into impregnating his younger, female self — because it turns out he had a futuristic sex change at some point, which the reader doesn't realize at first. And then it turns out that he's actually the child of that union, meaning that he's his own mother and father — the mother of all time paradoxes, in other words.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold:

Daniel Eakins travels backwards and forwards in time many times, meeting himself and having sex with himself — over and over and over. But after a ton of trips, he actually meets an alternate-universe version of himself who was born female, and they shack up together at the beginning of time. It goes great for a while, until they get fed up with each other, and then Daniel's time-traveling female counterpart manages to erase herself completely from Daniel's timeline, so Daniel can never find her again.

Needless to say, this post would not have been nearly as fascinating without TVTropes.org, the fountain of all greatness. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

David Gerrold wrote a piece in the Village Voice, responding to Josh Olson's rant "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script." And Gerrold, who wrote classic Star Trek episodes including "The Trouble With Tribbles," plus The Man Who Folded Himself, When Harlie Was One, and the Chtorr War series, explained just how annoying it is when other writers try to send him their unpublished materials for feedback, or so Gerrold can pass them along to the powers that be. Explains Gerrold:

Not too long ago, a writer of my acquaintance (a person of some fame in the industry) was hired to work on a major franchise. After several months of development, the project was making genuine progress and looked good. Then one day, out of the blue, an amateur from West Elbow, Nevada, sends him an email containing her outline for a spinoff of that franchise, asking him to help her sell it because "she has the story, but he has the access to the people who will produce it."

My friend backed away in horror, but the damage was done...

He had received this woman's email. Even the act of telling her, "No, I can't help you," was an acknowledgment of receipt. Therefore she could prove that he'd had access to her material — and it didn't matter that he'd already done six months on the project — her email had created a situation where she (and an unscrupulous lawyer) could claim that he had ripped off elements in her material.

The studio's lawyers were not happy and my friend almost got booted off the project, until he informed the amateur that he intended to sue her for compromising his ability to earn a living. She signed and notarized a waiver and he got to keep his job.

And John Scalzi (coincidentally, a writer recently hired to work in a major franchise, Stargate Universe) chimes in on his own blog:

You know, right after I announced that I was hired as the Creative Consultant for Stargate: Universe, people I didn't know came out of the woodwork asking me if I could hook them up with gigs or send along their scripts or if I give them the e-mail of the producers so they could talk to them about this great idea they had. You know what would have happened if I had done any of that? If you say "oh, you'd probably have gotten fired," you'd be absolutely correct. It would have been frankly insane for me to jeopardize my gig that way. I ended up putting up a note telling people to stop asking, but I still to this day get people who think that it's somehow logical to ask a complete stranger who knows nothing about them (and who they know nothing about) to carry water for them.

When you ask a favor of a writer, you're asking her to take time from her own work and/or her own life. You are asking her to assume you're not crazy or won't turn spiteful or angry when she can't give you 100% of what you want. You are asking her to assume that 10 years from now you won't sue her because something she's written is somewhat tangentially related to something you asked her to read. You're asking her to assume that continually pestering her own contacts on behalf of people she doesn't know at all won't jeopardize her own relationships with those contacts. And so on.

So there you go: Your unproduced screenplay may actually be the greatest thing since the invention of cameras. But hard-working, lawsuit-phobic writers still don't want to see it.

Criminal Activity

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Involuntary time travel comes with plenty of disadvantages, not the least of which is finding yourself suddenly and unexpectedly naked without any money. Fortunately, the predestination paradox can be a handy survival tool. Time traveler Henry often finds himself sent to the same points in time and space as his younger self, and teaches him how to find clothing, pick locks, and steal wallets. It's sort of like illicit father-son bonding, just with himself.

The Joy of Sex

The Time Traveler's Wife: Another unexpected side effect of time travel is that a horny, adolescent Henry is every now and then confronted with a nearly equally young, equally horny duplicate of himself. This makes for some rather spectacular instances of masturbation, but it's really awkward when his father walks in on him.

—All You Zombies— by Robert Heinlein: The Unmarried Mother was an intersex, though apparently female, teenager who was seduced by a mysterious older man. Many years and a sex change later, she, now he, is sent back in time, where he meets and makes love to a very familiar girl.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold: Daniel Eakins is the sort of time traveler who throws caution to the wind, sampling all that time travel has to offer: foiling assassinations, visiting great moments in history, and using his knowledge of the future to bet on the ponies. So it's no wonder that when he meets up with the same- and opposite-sex versions of himself, he tends to get it on with them.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: When the alien nudists get a hold of the time travel code tattooed on Fry's rear end, they're mostly interested in stealing artifacts from 20th Century Earth, although they do at one point take a time out for Nudar-on-Nudar nookie.

How to Win a Fight

The Kid: Russel Dritz's dirtbag ways may go back to his childhood, when he was picked on by bullies and lost his mother to illness. When Rusty, his younger self, ambles into Russel's life, he finds there are some subtle ways that he can change the past. First on the agenda: Getting the kid into a boxing ring so he can learn how to throw a punch.

How to Become Rich and Powerful

Back to the Future, Part II: The 2015 version of Biff decides that all of his troubles would be solved his he had been extremely wealthy in the past. So he steals Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean and, with a 2015 sports almanac in hand, travels to 1955, when he gives the almanac to his younger self. And it seems to work: Biff is rich beyond his wildest dreams, he's quietly had his rival George McFly murdered, and he's married to George's now artificially-endowed widow Lorraine. Of course, it all goes to hell when that pesky Marty McFly appears on the scene.
Gargoyles "Vows:" In move that revealed the entire series as one big predestination paradox, David Xanatos travels back in time on his wedding day to give his younger self a collection of priceless gold coins, along with instructions on how to invest the proceeds from their sale. Is it cheating? Probably, but in Xanatos's mind, it makes him the very definition of a self-made man.

By His Bootstraps by Robert Heinlein: When Bob is pulled thirty thousand years into the future by a slightly older, though no wiser version of himself, he discovers that humans have become a primitive, compliant people. Diktor, a fellow native of the 20th Century, explains that a technologically advanced person could easily become king of these sheep-like folks, and gives Bob a list of 20th Century items to bring to the future. Bob complies, but travels to a point ten years before he meets Diktor. It takes Bob a shockingly long time to realize that he's in a Heinlein story and that he is himself Diktor.

How to Win the Girl of Your Dreams

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: Fry is distraught when Leela, the love of his life, is won over by an older and more mature stranger named Lars. When Lars is revealed to be Fry's older (and this time wiser) duplicate, Fry should probably recognize that he could woo Leela if only he'd successfully reign in his adolescent nature. But it being Fry, he fails to take the lesson to heart, and quickly moves on to another girl.

How to Travel Through Time

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter: In Baxter's sequel to H.G. Wells The Time Machine, we learn that the Time Traveller didn't build his device completely unaided. A mysterious benefactor gave the Traveller a sample of a radioactive substance to study, a substance that ultimately makes time travel possible. Of course, like all mysterious strangers in time travel stories, the Time Traveller's benefactor is, in fact, an older version of himself.

How to Save the World

Heroes "Five Years Gone:" One of the great things about the power to travel through time is that if you get that whole "save the world" business wrong the first time, you can just keep trying. And Hiro Nakamura has the added benefit of traveling through time to change events himself, and leaving instructions for his much less bad-ass past self.

Doctor Who "Time Crash:" The Doctor meets up with himself a great deal, if for no other reason than two or three or five Doctors are better than one. But sometimes it's just to ensure a little predestination paradox magic. The Fifth Doctor watches the Tenth Doctor create an artificial supernova that cancels out a giant hole in fabric of reality. Naturally, the Tenth Doctor only knows how to do this because he watched himself do it when he was the Fifth Doctor.

Doctor Who "The Parting of the Ways:" Rose Tyler gets her own predestination paradox going when she looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS gives her the power to transcend time and space, letting her leave the message "Bad Wolf" to herself in the past that ultimately lead Rose and the Doctor back to this time and place.

Teen Titans "Titans Tomorrow:" When the Teen Titans travel to the future, they're eager to see what they're like as adult superheroes. But the future is unexpectedly bleak, with many of the Titans turned to violence and destruction, tearing the United States in two and turning the Western half into a police state. Fortunately, the Titans are able to learn from their future selves what set these events in motion, and are able to prevent their dystopic future.

Babylon 5: To add another wrinkle in the predestination paradox, Jeffrey Sinclair finds that his entire life is being guided by his future self from the past. Sinclair eventually learns that he is the great Minbari historical figure Valen, and Sinclair must eventually travel back in time, become Valen, and write the prophesies that will guide Sinclair's life in the future. Fate, or proof that his talents transcend time and space?

Sometimes a viral marketing campaign gets so weird that it becomes its own art form.

The move, referred to on Twitter and elsewhere as "AmazonFail," stripped the Amazon rankings from large numbers of books over the past few months, but it only came to light this past weekend. An Amazon rep wrote to author Mark Probst:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

But many of the books that were de-ranked, such as David Gerrold's The Martian Child and Nicola Griffith's Ammonite, had no adult themes whatsoever. Non-fiction science books such as Biological Exuberance, a study of homosexuality among animals, were also de-ranked.

By the end of the weekend, after a storm of internet protest, Amazon apparently changed its story and told Associated Press the de-rankings were the result of a "glitch" that was being fixed. (This explanation was greeted with some skepticism online, as the appearance of a Twitter hashtag called "glitchmyass" showed.) When the L.A. Times asked why this "glitch" only affected books with certain types of content, an Amazon.com rep declined to comment.

As a result of stripping the sales rankings from these books, they also disappeared from some searches on Amazon. (It seems as though these books still turn up if you search under "books," but not under the default search, "all departments.") Also, the books disappeared from any bestseller lists. The move did not seem to affect the Kindle editions of any of those books, just the print ones.

Whether the move was a glitch or a deliberate policy that blew up in Amazon's metaphorical face, it affected a decent number of science fiction and science books. Authors like Nicola Griffith and Katherine V. Forrest saw all their science fiction books disappearing from Amazon search results. Also removed were science books like Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality And Biological Diversity. Curiously, David Gerrold's orgiastic The Man Who Folded Himself was unaffected, but his chaste book The Martian Child was erased. Similarly, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren seemed unaffected, but most editions of The Einstein Intersection were.

We asked Gerrold what he thought of the move, and he said:

It's silly. They've removed The Martian Child from their page rankings which was based on an award-winning novelette about how I adopted my son and was the source for a warm-hearted movie starring John Cusack. Meanwhile, they've left The Man Who Folded Himself ranked, which is a far more explicit novel about a man who explores a number of unique sexual possibilities. Obviously, they didn't think this through. Amazon says it's a glitch. Let's hope they fix it soon.

We also talked to Griffith about how this move would impact her as a writer, as well as the place of queer writers in science fiction generally, and here's what she said:

Amazon's policy is idiocy of the highest order. Some thoughtless manager OK'd the low-hanging-fruit approach. ("Hey, if you want to protect Moral Americans from na-s-s-s-ty sexual content, then deleting all queer books from the rankings—and therefore the bestseller and some search listings—will get lots of 'em at once! Woo hoo, straight Christians will be safe!") That manager should be fired.

And then I want a public apology from Jeff Bezos.

This is important. A quick and quiet revocation of the policy is not enough. I want a public acknowledgement and a pledge to never again try to shove queers under the carpet. It's the only way to counter the perception queer readers and queer writers don't count.

Being invisible is dangerous. It ruins careers and it puts young readers at risk.

Writing is my only source of income. No listing = no sales. Taken to its logical extreme, this policy could mean I starve—that I starve because I'm queer. It also means putting some editors in a terrible position. What if I write a story in which women kiss, send it to an editor, and he feels he must refuse it because its inclusion in his anthology might get the book labelled LGBT and so kill sales for everyone else in the book?

Countless readers (okay, dozens) have told me that my fiction has helped them through tough times. Two readers have told me that one of my novels literally saved their life. Imagine—again, I'm taking this thought to its logical extreme—if these readers hadn't found my books; they'd be dead.

I'm being extreme because the people I'm trying to reach are either not exactly thinky types or their corporate communication is screwed. As my partner, Kelley Eskridge (a current Nebula nominee and a management training specialist, see Humans at Work) said so succinctly, "they're an online business getting massacred by an online uprising, and they're not responding online... Someone needs to get behind the wheel over there."

Slow River won a Nebula. Ammonite won a Tiptree. Bending the Landscape: Fantasy won a World Fantasy Award. Will SFWA and the Tiptree Motherboard and the World Fantasy Convention meekly take this shunning of their own? I doubt it. But, oof, think of the time these organisations are going to have to spend dealing with this.

An online retailer thinking in 20th century terms. Laughable as well as dangerous.

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

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

[Oxford University Press via Abe Books]

The Purple Cloud: In M.P. Shiel's 1901 science-fiction classic The Purple Cloud, a Scottish preacher warns that God doesn't want us to explore the North Pole, and will strike down anyone who tries. But an explorer named Jeffson doesn't listen, and somehow he unleashes a deadly purple cloud, which wipes out the entire human race, except for Jeffson and a hawt young woman. Shiel sent this masterpiece off to a publisher, William Blackwood And Sons - which rejected it, but then published a very similar novel under the title The End Of An Epoch, Being The Personal Narrative Of Adam Godwin, The Survivor, by A. Lincoln Green. In Green's book, a man named Adam goes to work for a microbiologist, Dr. Azrael Falk, who claims he can immunize the body against all diseases - but he's actually developing a super-baccilus that will kill everyone. Meanwhile, Adam's fiancee Evelyn is traveling to the North Pole with her father. When the super-germ gets released, only Adam (who's immunized) and Evelyn (who was in the North Pole during the epidemic) survive. (Do you see what he did there? Adam and Evelyn?) Shiel cried foul, but had no recourse. Luckily, the Purple Cloud got a more worthy copy years later, when Stephen King used it as a major inspiration for The Stand. (Unlike Green, King acknowledges borrowing from Purple.) And then, in turn, author Robert R. McCammon was accused of stealing from The Stand for his book Swan Song.

Phantoms: Two sisters, Dawn Pauline Dunn and Susan Hartzell, wrote a couple of books, The Crawling Dark and Demonic Color, under the name Pauline Dunn. Too bad both books - especially Crawling - stole huge chunks of prose, plus ideas, from Dean R. Koontz's novel Phantoms, about a whole town that disappears overnight. The publisher withdrew the book (although it's on Amazon for 40 cents) and Koontz forced them to take out a half-page ad in Publisher's Weekly apologizing.

Star Crash: Peter David recounts (via Scott Edelman) that he was working for a publishing house, Elsevier Nelson, which put out a novel called Star Crash by an unknown author. Turns out it was copied, word for word, from a 1960s novel by comics writer Gardner Fox.

We wound up getting back the entire advance from the plagiarist and sending it to Fox, along with any future royalties and a guarantee that the book would carry his name on it should it go back to press. DC put us directly in touch with Gardner. Considering the circumstances, he was extremely gentlemanly about it. His attitude was that it was found money for him; the book had been out of print for ages and all of a sudden it was generating new revenue for him.

Death In The Spirit House: Two writers, Ron Montana and Craig Strete, collaborated for a time, and then Montana later accused Strete of ripping off his novel, Death In The Spirit House. The case became a huge brou-ha-ha, with writers taking both sides, but author Sheldon Teitelbaum investigated and decided that it was more a misunderstanding than a case of out-and-out theft. (And Teitelbaum, who seems to have some history with Harlan Ellison, blamed Ellison for escalating the feud and hooking Montana up with his attorney.)

The "Rum Tum Tugger" fiasco: Writer Ann Melrose copied a Chet Williamson story, "To Feel Another's Woe," including large passages verbatim. She did change the story from first to third person, and her characters are auditioning for Cats instead of Streetcar Named Desire. Melrose had the nerve to send her re-engineered story off to editor Ellen Datlow - who had published the Williamson original, and immediately recognized the inferior copy.

Future Cop: Remember the classic TV series Future Cop, starring Ernest Borgnine as a human police officer who teams up with an android? Me neither. But Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova sued, saying it was too similar to their short story "Brillo," also about a human teaming up with an android cop. (Isn't that also awfully similar to Asimov's Caves Of Steel?) They won a "piffling" $285,000 settlement, according to Ansible, which added: "I am waiting keenly for Dr. Who or some such huge-budget production to plagiarize my own 'Sex Pirates and the Blood Asteroid.'"

Alien: Author A.E. Van Vogt sued 20th Century Fox, claiming the movie Alien ripped off his classic novel The Voyage Of The Space Beagle. Fox supposedly settled out of court.

The Unfriendly Ghost Writer: When people accused Lanaia Lee (aka Mary Kellis) of stealing wholesale from David Gemmell's book Dark Prince for her novel Of Atlantis, she stood by the originality of her work. At first. Then she blamed her agent, Cheryl Pillsbury, who had hooked her up with a ghostwriter, Christopher Hill. Hill "fixed up" Lee's novel, by patching it with some bits of Gemmell. Lee tried to play on people's sympathies, pointing out she was a stroke victim, and Pillsbury threatened her critics with "wiccan curses."

Beware Falling Suns: Cecelia Holland accused author William James of ripping off a few of her novels for his space-opera trilogy. It's not like he did anything obvious, like calling one of his novels Before The Sun Falls, when one of her books was called Until The Sun Falls. Oh wait. He did.

The Third Eye: A woman named Sophia Stewart accused Warner Bros. and a bunch of other people of ripping off her 1983 story, The Third Eye, for both The Terminator and The Matrix. She said she had provided it to studio people, and also sent it to the Wachowskis in response to a 1986 ad seeking science-fiction stories for them to turn into comic books. She also posted some Matrix-looking excerpts on her site:


It was reported in 2004 that Stewart had won her case, but apparently it was actually dismissed because she failed to show up for a hearing and had produced no evidence.

The Invisible Rip-off: Someone who has a bit more standing to accuse The Matrix of copying is Grant Morrison, author of comics series The Invisibles. Morrison told an interviewer that it's well known the Wachowskis gave copies of the Invisibles collections to their designers and told them to copy from them:

It's not some baffling 'coincidence' that so much of The Matrix is plot by plot, detail by detail, image by image, lifted from Invisibles so there shouldn't be much controversy. The Wachowskis nicked The Invisibles and everyone in the know is well aware of this fact but of course they're unlikely to come out and say it.

He added that the main problem with the two sequels was that the Wachowskis didn't steal enough from The Invisibles this time around.

There Can Be Only One: When a 12-year-old Quebecois girl, Marie-Pier Cote, wrote a novel, Laura L'immortelle, everyone greeted it as a precocious miracle. She got lots of attention in the news media - until someone uncovered that she hadn't written the book at all - she had plagiarized a Highlander fan fic. That's just embarrassing, on so many levels.

Terminator With A Glass Hand: Harlan Ellison sued James Cameron and the makers of Terminator, claiming the movie ripped off a couple of Outer Limits episodes he'd written: "Demon With A Glass Hand" and "Soldier." Cameron and producer Gale Ann Hurd, and put an ad in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Says Ellison's own website: "Ever since then, Cameron is said to go ballistic if Ellison's name is mentioned."

The Super-Lawsuits: As we detailed in this post, the Man Of Steel has been a tireless champion... of his own intellectual property. Fox Publications hired Will Eisner to create their own Superman, who was called Wonder Man. Eisner also created the Superman-ripoff Master Man for Fawcett. National Publications was energetic in pursuing all of these wannabe-Kryptonians in court.

Eragon's Destiny: George Lucas has never sued, but Christopher Paolini's Eragon books, also known as The Inheritance Cycle, are widely acknowledged as a Star Wars ripoff. The similarties extend to some very minute details (although Paolini undoes the part where the Luke character's father is the Darth Vader character, instead making the Obi-Wan character his dad.)

Nosferatu: The 1922 film Nosferatu movie could be generously called an "unauthorized remake" of Dracula, because F.W. Murnau and company couldn't get the rights to Stoker's novel.

Elementary Plagiarism: That Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Data and Geordi take on Professor Moriarty on the holodeck? Technically plagiarism, because the Sherlock Holmes canon hadn't passed into the public domain yet, something that took the writers by surprise when they received an angry letter from the Arthur Conan Doyle estate. (The Trek writers were able to settle the matter enough to use Moriarty in a follow-up episode.)

The Trouble With Flatcats: Writer David Gerrold might have accidentally lifted the Tribbles (from Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles") from the flatcats of Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones. Heinlein read the script, and sent a note back saying "I felt the analogy to my flat cats was mild enough to be of no importance," and that the idea wasn't really original with him in any case.

Miniature: The Twilight Zone episode "Miniature" (starring Robert Duvall) was shelved for twenty years, after an author sued for plagiarism. It was finally reaired in 1984.

J.K. Rowling has been accused of plagiarism many times - most notably by Nancy Stouffer, a woman who claimed she'd invented the word "muggle." (Even though it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as dating back to 1205.) She lost so badly, the judge ordered Stouffer to pay $50,000 and never accuse Rowling of plagiarism again. (I also saw something about a woman who sued Stephen King, saying he flew past her house in his private airplane and took pictures of her writings, so he could copy them. But I couldn't find any details.)

The Island Horror: Director Robert Fiveson accused Michael Bay's The Island of being a straight-up rip-off of his 1970s schlock fest Parts: The Clonus Horror. Fiveson sued, and Dreamworks settled out of court for $1 million.

Player Piano: Kurt Vonnegut said he "cheerfully ripped off" the plot of Brave New World for this novel - and Aldous Huxley, in turn, stole it from Eugene Zamatian's We.

Is plagiarism getting worse in science fiction? Samuel Delany seems to think so. He says, in his book About Writing:

[E]ven the nature of plagiarism has become a new order of problem in the last thirty years. From the eighties through the present, writers from age fifteen to age thirty-five have regularly handed me stories that were pastiches of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, or, more recently, Rowling's Harry Potter. Many do not even bother coming up with new names for the characters. Some have actually been quite skillfull. But all these young writers were quite surprised when I told them there was no hope of publishing such work outside a specifically fan context. More than one told me: "But whenever you read about movies or television, or even best sellers, everyone always says what producers and publishers want is something exactly like something that's been successful. That's what I thought I'd done..."

Of course, there's nothing wrong with lifting a few ideas here and there. Isaac Asimov explained, in an interview, that he doesn't mind people borrowing his ideas, as long as they don't steal his stories:

As a matter of fact, we authors in SF are more or less friends; we inhabit a small, specialized world in which we are comfortable, and the general feeling is that ideas are common property: if one SF writer thinks up something which is very useful, another may put it into his own words and use it freely. Nobody in SF is going to accuse any other person in SF of using his ideas; in fact, we borrow so generously that there's no way of telling whose idea it was originally. For instance, in my novel The Caves Of Steel, it was very important to the plot to have moving sidewalks, with an elaborate system of side strips that enabled you to work up to the speed of the sidewalks or to work down to the surrounding, motionless medium. This had already appeared some years before in Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll." Well, I borrowed it without any worry at all. I'm sure that Heinlein in reading my novel would have recognized his system, but who knows where he got it from? He never said anything. It'd be different if I used the details of his plot and worked up a story that was so like his that nobody could fail to see it - that's plagiarism. But just to use the idea and build your own plot or story about it - why, we do that all the time. And they do it from me, too - you know, they use the three laws of robotics - and they're welcome. I have no objection.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Of course, plenty of original movies do get turned into books - but they're usually rushed novelizations, written in a month by someone who's juggling ten other deadlines and adding speech tags to the movie script. If you're lucky, you get a few extra insights into the characters and one or two scenes that the adapter added, or which were cut from the movie before or after filming. Plus, of course, the movies that get their own book adaptations aren't usually ones which could benefit from a really smart dose of storytelling. Movie adaptations of books, meanwhile, are usually disappointing for a whole different set of reasons.

But every now and then, a movie comes along down the pike that actually cries out for a smart, interesting book that brings out the ideas simmering below the surface. Here are ten movies that I'd love to see a really smart book version of, and the authors who would write them in my fondest dreams.

Twelve Monkeys. Cole (Bruce Willis) travels back in time from a plague-ravaged future to try and discover the source of the virus, but he ends up tangling with his own past in unpredictable ways. I was torn between listing this one and director Terry Gilliam's other dystopian epic, Brazil. But of the two movies, I think I'm more desperate to read a really thoughtful novel of Monkeys, preferably written by someone who watched the film with Gilliam a few times. There's so much confusing stuff in this movie, especially Cole's causal loop - is he creating his own dystopian future, or is he simply trapped in the logic of already-existing events? Did the scientists send Cole back on purpose to make sure their plague-ridden timeline "happens," as some have suggested? (In which case, why would they be worried about that, given that it's already happened?)
Who should write it: Marge Piercy, author of Woman On The Edge Of Time. She knows all about time travel, madness and the long reach of dystopia.

The Fountain. Meredith suggested this one - there's already a graphic novel adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's original screenplay, the one he never got to film. But there's no prose novelization of the actual movie, which I found to be a huge let-down despite its sprawling, ambitious plot. Judging from the results of our recent poll, many of you consider The Fountain an underrated masterpiece. Maybe a book could flesh out some of the confusing stuff about the present-day cancer cure and just what's going on with that weird tree-in-space sequence.
Who should write it: I'm going to go with Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn. He might be able to ground the present day stuff and add some life to those lifeless characters, and when he's channeling Philip K. Dick, he does weird-and-fantastical quite well. Maybe it would all feel epic and personal, the way I think the film was supposed to.

The Brother From Another Planet. John Sayles' story of an escaped slave with weird feet who lands up in present-day New York is one of my favorite films, although I haven't seen it all the way through in a decade. Joe Morton is fantastic as the mute escapee, who has a strangely close relationship with technology.
Who should write it: Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose, has dealt with themes of slavery and alien cultures in a lot of his writing.

Sleeper. Wikipedia claims this film is loosely based on the H.G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes, but I would say "loosely" is the operative word. And this is such a crazy slapsticky subversive novel, complete with humans impersonating robots, Orgasmotrons, a fake utopia and nose-cloning. And so much more.
Who should write it: Douglas Adams, if he was still alive? Actually, I'm going to go with io9 contributor Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible), just because I think he could nail the neurotic Woody Allen tone, while doing a lot to flesh out the absurdity of this freaky dystopia.

Possible Worlds This little-known film stars Tom McCamus as a man who keeps journeying through different alternate universes and having a relationship with the same woman (Tilda Swinton), which always seems to end badly. And then there's a twist, which I won't reveal here but which we gave away in a found footage.
Who should write it: Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife.

S1m0ne. Andrew Niccol's most disappointing film totally deserves a novel told from the point of view of Al Pacino's character, a third-rate movie director who creates a virtual actress to save his troubled movie - and then has to deal with her becoming a superstar. A novel might be able to make the movie's premise more believable and dispense with some of the VFX problems that dog the movie, and a tight focus on Pacino's POV would allow us to probe the psychology of a man who brings to life an irresistible virtual avatar, in a cross between Pygmalion and Cage Aux Folles.
Who should write it: Amy Thompson, author of Virtual Girl, who manages to make that novel's skeezy programmer who creates a gynoid and then tries to enslave her actually sympathetic.

The Matrix Trilogy. No, not just the first movie. I want to see the whole trilogy as one sprawling, insane novel about cyber-avatars. I want all of the lame discussions about free will in the second movie and all of the lame everything in the third movie to be beaten into submission, and the whole disappointing mess transformed into a seamless whole, the story of humans trapped in a virtual world rising up against their machine overlords, while a virtual man-in-black becomes a megalomaniac.
Who should write it: That's the hard part. There are so many cyberpunk authors I'd like to see try their hand at it. But in the end, I'm thinking Charles Stross.
He does sprawling post-human stories really amazingly well, and might add a whole extra conceptual layer to the Wachowskis' somewhat facile world-building.

Primer. This knotty time-travel movie actually stands on its own remarkably well, but I'd still like to see a smart, thoughtful novel that deals with all the of the intersecting timelines and unraveling protagonists.
Who should write it: David Gerrold, author of The Man Who Folded Himself, still possibly the weirdest time-travel novel of all time.

Slither. You might think this is just another over-the-top body horror movie, about alien parasites who infect a town's residents. But this movie goes so much further, showing how a woman can't escape her abusive husband. The parasite infects her husband first, and then all of the people whom it infects afterwards speak with the husband's voice, so she's constantly trapped. It's up there with Society and Dead/Alive in the disturbing horrific social commentary sweepstakes.
Who should write it: The great d.g.k. goldberg, if she was still alive. Otherwise, I would say Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl In The Ring.

Sunshine. The screenplay is available in book form, but there's no novelization. I loved this film, but many people don't seem to agree, and maybe a really strong novelization could help win over the doubters, especially if it made the slasher-movie third act feel like it grew naturally out of the rest of the story.
Who should write it: I'm thinking maybe Stephen Baxter, who's shown a talent for writing madness as well as planetary disasters and space exploits.

Note: I was going to include Galaxy Quest on this list - but realized it already has a novelization, by Terry Bisson. Who, by amazing coincidence, is probably exactly who I would have chosen to novelize that movie. Has anyone read Bisson's Galaxy Quest novel, and is it as good as it ought to be? It's only one cent on Amazon (plus a few bucks' shipping, of course.) Also, did you know that Christopher "The Prestige" Priest has novelized David Cronenberg's Existenz?

To make the episode, Gerrold teamed up with the fan crew behind Star Trek: Phase II, a web series that's intended to be the fourth season of the original series. He dusted off his gay-themed script, called "Blood and Fire," and also directed it. Originally, "Blood and Fire" was written for Star Trek: TNG, and approved by series creator Gene Roddenberry, but executives at the network balked. Gerrold says they told him they were worried they'd lose their advertisers because "mommies" would call in to complain that they'd seen gay people on Star Trek.

For the webisode, Gerrold re-wrote the script to bring it up to date with issues like gay marriage, and also to make the characters more openly gay. In the original, they were portrayed as friends - the only hint that they were gay was one character asking them how long they'd been together. In the new version, as you can see in the clip below, there's no question that they're lovers.

The episode is about the Enterprise responding to a distress call, and dealing with scary "bloodworms." It introduces a new character, Peter Kirk, the gay nephew of the captain.

According to AfterElton's Brent Hartinger, who has seen the full episode:

There’s tension between Peter and his famous uncle, who is determined to keep him out of harm’s way, even if it means treating him differently than the other crewmembers. Eventually, Peter reveals the real reason he requested a stint on the Enterprise: to be near his boyfriend, Alex Freeman (Evan Fowler). When the couple make plans to marry, Kirk agrees to officiate, but only “after the away mission” — which may or may not bode well for the future of this relationship . . . The portrayal of Peter and Alex's romantic relationship is treated no differently than any of the dozens of heterosexual relationships the various Star Trek incarnations have included over the decades. Indeed, the storyline is incorporated so naturally as to make the “official” Trek's inexcusable lack of gay characters even more obvious.

The first half of "Blood and Fire" goes online this Saturday on the Star Trek: Phase II website. The second half airs in February.

You can see more images and a longer clip at AfterElton.

• The Marshalls were stuck in a place that existed outside or normal space and time. During their stay in the Land of the Lost, they encountered a Confederate soldier, found the bones and diary of a soldier from the Revolutionary soldier, a glider pilot from the future, the weird invisible, telepathic alien named The Zarn, and Holly even met a future version of herself.
• There were Pylons scattered around the Land (hatches, anyone?) that were larger on the inside than the outside (TARDIS, anyone?). Their sole purpose was to house these funky crystal matrix chessboard tables which did everything from control the weather to open time doorways. Sadly, the Marshalls never really figured out how to work them right.
• The Sleestaks had a Library of Skulls, which contained the sentient skulls of their ancestors, who could still speak and dispense knowledge, despite being just a skull. They could also predict the future, show visions, and annoy the hell out of people who just wanted a straight answer. Plus they ran things for the Sleestaks and told them what to do. Kind of like that mysterious Jacob ghost/spirit/whatever the hell thing on Lost.
• If you screwed up a Pylon or it started malfunctioning, these bizarre flying shapes would appear in the sky and flash the colors that you'd need to arrange on the matrix table in order to fix things. Rick Marshall dubbed them Skylons, and they appeared to be some form of automated repair units with limited artificial intelligence. Black smoke monster, anyone? Bueller?
• The Sleestaks were descendants of the Altrusians, an alien race who lived a thousand years before the Sleestaks. They were shorter than them, had an extra digit on each hand, and had limited psionic abilities. Plus they weren't nearly as creepy.
• The Land of the Lost existed inside its own closed universe. The Marshalls once tried to take the river out of the land, but found that it looped around and put them back right where they started. In another episode, Holly descended into a pit on a rope, and found herself dangling upside down over the Land. Just like the Hotel California and the island on Lost, you can check in, but you can never leave.
• David Gerrold's backstory for the series explains that the Altrusians actually built the Land as a way-station intended to let travelers cross between various places. The time doorways are gateways which allow users to cross into the Land on their way to their destination. The reason that travel through the time doorways is unpredictable, at best, is that the Land has fallen into disrepair in the time since it was built.
• While the Sleestaks might have been scary as hell, they only had three of those rubber suits, so they couldn't have more than that on the screen at the same time. The producers had to rely on the miracle of editing whenever they wanted it to seem like a Sleestak army was on your ass. Fairly ironic because the Library of Skulls says that the Sleestak number about 7,000.
• The furry Pakunis on the show actually had their own language, created by Professor Victoria A. Fromkin from UCLA, who also created the vampire language for Blade. Keep in mind, this was a Saturday morning kids show that had its own invented language. Not too shabby.
• Sleestaks were played by UCLA basketball players, because they were tall enough to fit the suits. Future Detroit Pistons star Bill Laimbeer famously played a Sleestak for awhile.
• Harlan Ellison submitted a treatment for a Land of the Lost script, but it was never produced. However, you can read a copy of it here.
• David Gerrold who wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles" episode of Star Trek and science fiction writer Larry Niven of Ringworld fame were both writers on the series. Gerrold even served as story editor.
• The intelligent and friendly Sleestak named Enik first appeared in a script written by Walter Koenig of Star Trek fame, and was supposed to be named Eneg. This was a tribute to Gene Roddenberry, since it was his name spelled backwards, but the producers nixed it.
• In order for something to leave the Land of the Lost, something of equal mass had to enter. The show used this in both clever and idiotic ways. At the end of Season One, the Enik explains to them that they can leave, but in doing so they also cause the event that brings them into the Land of the Lost in the first place, so they're stuck inside a repeating loop forever. They did this in case the show didn't get picked up after its first year, but then they never explained how they broke the loop in Season Two. That's the fairly clever way.

  The dumb way was in that the actor who played Rick Marshall left the show after Season Two, so in Season Three an earthquake accidentally knocks him into a time doorway (it was actually one of the producers seen from behind and wearing a wig) and he vanishes. However, moments later the Marshall's Uncle Jack (Rick's brother) appears. Seems like he's been looking for them since they vanished. How very convenient.

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• If reading this has made you want to go back and rewatch this entire series, or maybe see it for the first time (like it did for me), you can pick up all three seasons in a DVD box set for fairly cheap. Just don't blame us when you get sucked in.

Image by The UncredibleSkulk

You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. The entire point of The Man Who Folded Himself is to fly right in the face of typical time-travel logic, which says you're never supposed to meet yourself, let alone get busy. Maybe it was the influence of the 1970s Me-Generation that made Gerrold decide to turn time travel into a fleshpot of egotism. No matter what the reason, he manages to write one of the most compelling, daring, and funny stories about time travel I've ever read.

Though it begins as a sex romp, The Man Who Folded Himself winds up being a meditation on trying to find yourself when there are so many possible selves you could have. At one point, the main character Dan travels so far outside his own time-frame that he meets the female version of himself and tries to make a life with her in a primeval world at the edge of history. There are never any anxious questions raised about why the only people Dan wants to be involved with are versions of himself, and that allows Gerrold to take us on a strange ride indeed. Definitely worth checking out, especially with the movie version of Gerrold's memoir about being a gay dad, The Martian Child, soon to hit theaters.