The Masks by Ray Bradbury

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

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

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

Irontown Blues by John Varley

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

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

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

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

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

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

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

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

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

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

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

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

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

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

The Plant by Stephen King

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

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

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

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

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

Ed Victor, a literary agent who represents the late author's estate, told British humor outlet Chortle that the BBC has Dirk Gently series in the works, although there's no telling when we could see such a show:

He said he had seen ‘a great script – not just a good script' for the planned adaptation, but warned: ‘With the BBC, it can take forever'.

In the books, Dirk Gently is a detective who solves crimes not by looking at the minutiae of evidence, but at the larger picture, figuring out the interconnectedness of everything. In the first book, he goes on the hunt for a missing cat and stumbles on a greater problem involving the ghost of an alien engineer, the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, time travel, and the very fate of humanity. The BBC previously adapted the Dirk Gently novels as a radio series in 2007.

Victor said the BBC has also expressed interest in remaking their The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy television series, but that would involve obtaining a license from Disney, which currently owns the Hitchhiker rights.

BBC plans Dirk Gently TV series [Chortle via Topless Robot]

Oh, and this is a completely spoiler-free review, apart from one quote from the book which doesn't reveal anything.

This will also be a fairly short book review, because I don't have much to say about And Another Thing... The publisher, Hyperion, gave us a copy of the first half of the book at Comic Con. I sort of expected we'd get a copy of the whole book in the mail at some point, but it never showed up. In any case, I've read the first half of And Another Thing... twice, not because it was so brilliant — but because I could not remember anything about it, when I sat down to write this review the other day. It was a total blank.

And Another Thing... is the continuation of Douglas Adams' indispensible Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series by Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl books I haven't read but have heard great things about. When we met Colfer at Comic Con, he seemed aware of what a tremendous undertaking he'd taken on, and said he'd only agreed to do it because Adams' wife and daughter had both asked him to. And he's definitely put his all into trying to conclude the saga of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian. The book "feels" like a Hitchhiker's book, with the periodic interjections from the Guide, and there are a few genuinely clever bits, most of them revolving around Zaphod.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with And Another Thing... If you want to revisit the universe Douglas Adams created, this book will give you more of the same. It definitely subscribes to the "more of the same" view of sequels. All of the characters are recognizably themselves, and all of the tropes are there, from Vogon poetry to the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive.

The main problem with Colfer's cover version of Adams is the humor: it falls incredibly flat, at least to me. Humor is incredibly subjective, so your opinion may vary. But Colfer's jokes feel simultaneously as though they're trying much too hard and also not quite trying hard enough. Where Adams' humor was subversive and weird and kept you constantly off balance with its cleverness, Colfer's feels labored and a bit too dependent on puns and sharp-elbowed nudges.

Here's a random entry from one of the book's Hitchhiker's Guide segments (not spoilery at all, but bear in mind I have an unfinished proof and the book may have been tweaked slightly before publication):

Guide Note: The notion that religions can be useful tools for keeping the rich rich and the poor abject has been around since shortly after the dawn of time, when a recently evolved bipedal frogget managed to convince all the other froggets in the marsh that their fates were governed by the almighty Lily Pad who would only agree to watch over their pond and keep it safe from gunner pike if an offering of flies and small reptiles was heaped upon it every second Friday. This worked for almost two years, until one of the reptile offerings proved to be slightly less than dead and proceeded to eat the gluttonized bipedal frogget followed by the almighty Lily Pad. The frogget community celebrated their freedom from the yoke of religion with an all-night rave party and hallucinogenic dock leaves. Unfortunately they celebrated a little loudly and were massacred by a gunner pike who for some reason hadn't noticed this little pond before.

The irony is so thick, you could... get bogged down in it, I guess.

After re-reading the first half of And Another Thing... and still being left with a very vague sense of empty calories, I started to wonder if I was viewing the original through a haze of nostalgia — was Adams really that much funnier? I flipped to a random page in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it was actually sharper and more subversive than I'd remembered. Honestly, if you're jonesing to visit the Hitchhiker's universe again, you're way better off rereading Adams' first couple of novels, when he was at the top of his game.

We're actually lucky enough to feature two chapters from the new edition of Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Neil Gaiman, pubilshed by Titan Books. The first chapter is from fairly early on in the book, and deals with the various stage adaptations of H2G2, including the absolutely disastrous Rainbow Theater run, in which a 3,000 seat venue failed to find a big enough hovercraft for the audience.

And then the second chapter we're featuring is from towards the end, and deals with the 2005 movie adaptation of Hitchhiker's, and the reasons why it was also not terribly successful. It's sort of a nice book-end.

Oh, and the new material in the 2009 edition of Don't Panic is written by author Guy Adams, who I believe is no relation to Douglas.

10 ALL THE GALAXY'S A STAGE

There have been three major productions of Hitchhiker's in the theatrical world. Two of these have been successful. The other was a disaster of epic proportions. It is somewhat unfortunate, in this case, that the disaster is the one that got noticed. The first production was put on at the ICA [Institute for Contemporary Arts] in London on 1st-9th May 1979, presented by Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool. ‘Staged' might be the wrong word for this production. The actors performed on little ledges and platforms, while the audience, seated on a scaffolded auditorium that floated around the ICA on air skates, filled with compressed air, was pushed around the hall at the height of 1/2,000th of an inch by hardworking stage hands.

The ninety-minute-long show was a great success.

Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters were on sale in the bar, and, for the eighty people who fitted into Mike Hust's airborne seating system, it was a great evening. Unfortunately, every hour brought 150 phone calls for tickets, all doomed to failure as the 640 tickets for the show's run had been sold out long before it opened. (Apparently an organisation with the same initials as the ICA, the International Communications Association, got so fed up with misrouted calls for tickets that they wound up closing their switchboard for a week, and stopped Communicating.)

The reviews were unanimous in their praise. A typical review from The Guardian, having praised the costumes and hovercraft, stated, "Chris Langham is an utterly ordinary Arthur… and is thus a beautiful counterpart to the cunning Ford (Richard Hope), the two-headed schizophrenic Beeblebrox (Mitch Davies and Stephen Williams, as a space-age version of a pantomime horse with two heads, two legs, and three hands) and the pyrotechnics of Campbell's production." At the time it was announced that they were hoping to revive the show "as soon as they could find a hall large enough to accommodate a 500 seater hovercraft".

Image from Douglas Adams fan page

This was, it should be borne in mind, before the publication of the book or the release of the first record, when nobody knew how much of a cult success Hitchhiker's was or was going to be.

The next performance began life some 300 miles due west in the Theatr Clwyd, a Welsh theatre company. Director Jonathan Petherbridge had taken the scripts of the first radio series and transformed them into a play, performed around Wales from 15th January until 23rd February 1980.

Announced as the "First Staged Production of Douglas Adams's Original Radio Scripts" the company would either perform two episodes an evening, or, on certain long evenings, the entire three hours of script in ‘blockbuster' performances, during which "essential space rations" were handed out to the audience at half-hourly intervals. (Not only did the bar sell Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, but the Coffee Lounge sold Algolian Zylbatburgers.) The Theatr Clwyd performance was so successful that they were offered the opportunity to take their production to London's prestigious Old Vic Theatre. Unfortunately, by this time Douglas had offered the stage rights to Ken Campbell, who had decided to stage another production at the Rainbow Theatre in London, a rock venue that seated three thousand people, in August.

Douglas Adams, displaying perfect hindsight, said, "I should have known better, but I had so many problems to contend with at that time I really wasn't thinking clearly. The thing at the Rainbow was a fiasco."
Douglas wrote additional material for the play (including the Dish of the Day sequence in Milliways, which subsequently found its way into the literary and televisual version of the show).

An article appeared in The Stage, the theatrical newspaper, about the Rainbow production, in July 1980:

A five-piece band backs the twenty-strong cast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a musical* based on the radio series that opens at the Rainbow for an 8 week run on July 16th 1980. Production has a £300,000 budget, and the front of the Rainbow will be redesigned as an intergalactic spaceport. Tickets £5, £4 and £3.

[footnote]* No, it wasn't a musical, although there was a backing group.

The foyer of the theatre is being converted into the control deck of a spaceship, with banks of video screens, flying saucers hanging from the ceiling, and possibly a talking computer to advise passengers when the trip is going to begin. There will be usherettes dressed like aliens - ‘Probably coloured green,' says co-producer Richard Dunkley - and a ‘space bar' selling galactic-sized burgers and the now famous Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

One of the diversions will be rock musician Rick Wakeman, soaring down from the roof on a flying saucer and dressed like the legendary Mekon, SF's most endearing little green man.

This week workmen installed a vast revolving stage while others completed a backdrop for the day the Earth gets demolished.

In California, the people who brought the Laserium to the London Planetarium were devising a spectacular new bag of tricks. Co-producer Philip Tinsley said, ‘This will be the first show since Rocky Horror to appeal directly to young people.'

As the publicity for the show gained momentum a twenty-five-foot inflatable whale was thrown off Tower Bridge into the Thames, and made almost no splash in terms of news. ("The police were very, very cross", said The Standard in the 3⁄4 of an inch they devoted to it.)

Then the show opened.

In retrospect this may have been a mistake. Such descriptions as "I cannot imagine a more tedious way to spend an evening" (Daily Mail), "clumsy without ever being cheerful" (Time Out), "embarrassing" (Observer), "never-ending and extremely boring" (Standard) melt into insignificance when placed beside the actual reviews, most of which dissected the show with fine and sharp scalpels and left nothing wholesome behind. A fairly average example of the put-downs was Michael Billington's in The Guardian, which stated that, "What happens on the Rainbow stage is certainly inchoate and barely comprehensible… Ken Campbell has directed this junk-opera and I can only say he gave us infinitely more fun in the days of his Roadshow when the highlight used to be a man stuffing a ferret down his trousers"*.

[footnote]* The man who stuffed the ferrets down his trousers was Sylvester McCoy, later the seventh televisual Doctor Who.

What went wrong? A number of things. The length, for one. The laser beams, sound effects and backing band for another. What was almost universally acknowledged as appalling acting for a third.

Douglas Adams explained it as, "The size of the Rainbow - a three thousand-seater theatre - and, because Hitchhiker's tends to be rather slow-moving and what is important is all the detail on the way… you put it in something that size and the first thing that goes out the window is all the detail. So you then fill it up with earthquake effects and lasers and things. That further swamps the detail and so everything was constantly being pushed in the wrong direction and all the poor actors were stuck on the stage trying desperately to get noticed by the audience across this vast distance. If you'd put the numbers we were getting into a West End theatre they would have been terrific audiences - 700 a night, or whatever. But 700 people isn't much when the producers are paying for three thousand seats. So the whole thing was a financial disaster."

Ken Campbell, a man almost impossible to get hold of, claimed the reason for the success of the ICA and failure of the Rainbow was simpler than that. "In the ICA we put everybody on a hovercraft. We just never found a hovercraft big enough for the Rainbow," he told me in the shortest interview I did for this book*.

Four weeks into the run the show was in financial difficulties.

On 20th August The Standard reported co-producer Dunkley as saying, "I think we should struggle on. The cast and crew agree with me, and a certain number of them agreed to wait for their money. We had a very negative press, and it wasn't known at the beginning how many Hitchhiker's fans there were." The next day, however, The Standard reported that, "Last night the big musical** version of the cult radio show did not go on and after playing at times to twenty percent capacity [ie. 600 people] its season has been ended three weeks prematurely. Richard Dunkley reported that everybody concerned had lost a lot of money, but it was impossible to say how much."

[footnotes]* That was it.
** It wasn't a musical, honestly.

It is easy to be wise after the event, but it would appear that the biggest mistake was that of trying to create a Cult Success. You don't gain a cult following for something big and bold and heavily hyped: a smaller, less flashy, less expensive production might well have succeeded where the galumphing Rainbow production failed.

As indeed, it has. Helping the fans and public to get over the Rainbow disaster was the Theatr Clwyd production. It surfaced again quietly a year later, and has been regularly and successfully staged by other theatre companies since. This adaptation, which, alone of all post '79 versions includes the Haggunenon sequence, and indeed actually has an inflatable Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, is uniformly popular with critics and public alike, and will, one hopes, still be revived and performed when the Rainbow fiasco has completely been forgotten.

FORD AND ZAPHOD: Zaglabor astragard!
Hootrimansion Bambriar!
Bangliatur Poosbladoooo!
ARTHUR: What the hell are you doing?
FORD: It's an ancient Betelgeuse death anthem. It means, after this, things can only get better.
THEY START TO SING AGAIN.
THE COMPUTER BANK EXPLODES.
END CREDITS.
- Alternative version.

(Image from 2003 San Francisco staging of H2G2, via Laughing Squid.)

At least twenty amateur stage productions are known to have been performed around the world over the years, variously adapted from the novel, the radio scripts or the Petherbridge script. Hitchhiker's has been presented on stage as far afield as Bermuda, Australia, Hawaii and Germany; it has been performed once as a one-man show and once as a musical*. There was also a stage production of Douglas's novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - retitled Dirk - in Oxford in 1995, which has enjoyed periodic revivals.

[footnote]* This actually was a musical, although the audience wished it wasn't.

34 POSTCARDS FROM DAVELAND

"It seems to me that we can either slip into the traditional stereotypes - you're the studio executive who has a million real-world problems to worry about, and I'm the writer who only cares about seeing his vision realized and hang the consequences - or we can recognize that we both share the same goal, which is to make the most successful movie we possibly can.

"You have a great deal of experience nursing major motion pictures into existence. I have a great deal of experience of nursing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into existence in every medium other than motion pictures… Why don't we actually meet and have a chat?"
- Excerpt from a letter written by Douglas Adams to David Vogel at Walt Disney Pictures, as reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt.

On 28th April 2005 a rather startling thing happened. A big budget* movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy appeared in cinemas. Unfortunately, to quote that most remarkable of source material, "this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

[footnote]* Well, relatively big budget anyway, the word ‘big' when relating to cinema budgets enters a whole new sense of scope which the human mind cannot truly encompass. Certainly it cost the sort of money that if found on one's doorstep one morning, say in several large skips guarded by men with machine guns, would force you to delicately lose your mind for a month or two, just while you decided what country to buy.

Douglas had spent many years trying to make such a thing happen. In fact, many years, many phone calls, many draft scripts, many contracts, many lawyers arguing about those contracts, many directors signed up, many directors signed off again, and much moving to LA then moving back to Islington because LA just wasn't very nice then moving back to LA again anyway because, well, you live in hope and at least the sun shines there…

It is forgivable to assume a project stranded so long in Development Hell (that peculiar creative graveyard where movie ideas go to have the spirit beaten out of them by film producers) will never see the light of day. Jay Roach, director of the first two Austin Powers movies as well as Meet the Parents and its ‘Focking' sequel, was attached to the project for many years, ultimately stepping down from the director's chair (due to other commitments) but retaining a role as producer. Roach passed Douglas's last script draft on to Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are. He declined the offer to shoot it, but suggested Hammer & Tongs, a British production company comprised of director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, known for their innovative pop promo work. And there the film finally took root.

The script was passed to screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, writer of the stop-motion animation movies Chicken Run and James and the Giant Peach, to produce a final version to put in front of the cameras.

The casting seemed rock solid, with Stephen Fry as the Voice of the Book, Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod* and Zooey Deschanel as Trillian. The only slightly controversial choice - and it must be clear here that when we say ‘controversial' we mean ‘likely to get people who know a little about movie-making saying belligerent things online' - was actor turned rap artist turned actor again Mos Def as Ford Prefect.

[footnote]* Who claimed, somewhat jovially, in the DVD extras that the only reason he got the part was that they couldn't afford Jim Carrey.

Much was made in the movie's press releases about how closely the film was based on Douglas's own most recent draft, though caveats were given with regard to the film's divergence from established Hitchhiker's narrative (like we needed to be told. Since when has one form of Hitchhiker's shown the least concern for how similar it is to the last? We really don't care…). Robbie Stamp, Douglas's friend and CEO of The Digital Village, was an executive producer on the picture* and, in an interview on the Slashdot website, said, "All the substantive new ideas in the movie… are brand new Douglas ideas written especially for the movie by him… Douglas was always up for reinventing Hitchhiker's in each of its different incarnations and he knew that working harder on some character development and some of the key relationships was an integral part of turning Hitchhiker's into a movie."

[footnote]* As was Douglas himself, the film also being dedicated to him.

Which is no doubt true, but doesn't change the fact that the film doesn't really work.

One can level a number of criticisms at Douglas's writing. Yes, the comment about character development is valid, as would have been an accusation of flimsy plotting. But to mention these flaws is rather to miss the point of Douglas's writing. When he does it, it works. Douglas is one of those inspired creators who is impervious to such overarching technical issues - his genius lay in the detail. And it is precisely in the film's adherence to the broad, sweeping generalities of Douglas's work, rather than paying attention to what it was in the minutiae that made it so effective, that it fails.

In the same Slashdot interview, Robbie Stamp commented that, "I know how easy it is to see every decision to cut a scene as ‘studio' pressure, but it was always much more to do with pacing and rhythm in the film itelf." And here we see perhaps the most telling issue with converting Douglas's work to the big screen. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy never much concerned itself with the need to be fast-paced. The gems found in both the books and the radio series are often in the asides, the guide entries, the small moments of absurdity. The rhythm of Douglas's writing is that of a comedy writer hitting his punchlines; an obsessive ear for comic dialogue and the best way to sell his unconventional ideas.

It is this rhythm and pacing that the film loses, sticking instead to telling the story in a dynamic fashion. Jokes were cut, dialogue was trimmed and, arguably, this is where the spirit of Douglas's writing fell by the wayside.

Perhaps it is a sad fact that Hitchhiker's just doesn't work well in a visual medium. Certainly the BBC TV series was Douglas's least favourite incarnation of the work. Film places different demands on its source material and in doing so it played to Hitchhiker's weaknesses rather than its strengths.

The film performed adequately at the box office and was released later the same year on both a single disc DVD and a double disc gift set (which included a copy of the original novel). It is unlikely that we shall ever see a sequel.

Don't Panic © 1987, 1993, 2002, 2009 Neil Gaiman.

Be glad that when you were a teenager, you didn't have an aunt like the person who wrote to the Journal's "Book Lover" column to ask this question:

My 13-year-old nephew is a voracious reader, but he tends to limit his reading to science fiction. He recently read "Brave New World," because he thought it was sci-fi. Any suggestions on how to expand his horizons to include other genres?

Anyone with half a lick of sense will know that a 13-year-old who's voluntarily reading Huxley is doing just fine and does not require an intervention. But the WSJ's book columnist, Cynthia Crossen, is a nicer person than I am, since she refrains from telling the aunt what an idiot she was being.

Instead, Crossen gives auntie a smart (if slightly muddled) lecture on the wrongness of misplaced snobbery, and admits that not all SF is equally great. Then she recommends that instead of stopping the allegedly trash-loving nephew from reading SF, the aunt should steer him towards the good stuff:

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.

I think there's an argument to be made that lawyers are underrepresented in science fiction, at least relative to their prevalence in other genres. Compared to, say, doctors, who show up all the time in pretty much every science fiction show (as an earlier post on this very site once examined), you generally need a pretty specific reason to bring a lawyer onto the scene, and a lot of the time even a trial won't do it.

After all, how many times have science fiction protagonists found themselves in kangaroo courts, forced to offer their own best defense? There's apparently not much of a right to legal representation in the future. For instance, roughly half of all Doctor Who stories find the Doctor under arrest for one reason or another, and I can't name a single character in the entire history who could really be considered a lawyer (with the possible exception of the Valeyard, which I'm not counting for so many reasons).

That's not to say there aren't any great lawyers in science fiction - far from it. Here are some of the best.

Samuel T. Cogley, Star Trek

In most of the trials seen over the course of the Star Trek franchise's long history, the defendants simply represented themselves. This probably had something to do with the fact that the characters were all in the military, but it's just as likely that this made it easier to give the show's stars big dramatic speeches. (Seriously, check out this list of the show's "lawyers" from Memory Alpha. It's basically just a list of the various shows' captains and first officers.)

But, when Kirk found himself faced with a case even he could not theatrically bluster his way out of - and keep in mind we're talking about William Shatner at the height of his hammy powers here, so this is a seriously impossible case we're talking about - he turned to super-lawyer Samuel T. Cogley to lead his defense. Famous for his Luddite tendencies, which included such eccentricities as reading books on paper instead of on computer. Not one to do anything halfway, Cogley's spirited defense included references to "the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, the Magna Carta, the United States Constitution, the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies and the Statutes of Alpha III", all of which I plan on citing as precedents should I ever find myself standing before a judge.

Cogley's defense didn't exactly lead to an acquittal, but it did provide Kirk and Spock enough time to prove the man Kirk had supposedly murdered was, in fact, alive and well and tampering with the ship's systems. With his case concluded, Cogley decided to move on to defending Kirk's supposed victim, noting he felt very good about his chances.

And let's also give a quick shout-out to Worf's grandfather, who was also called Worf, for his thankless job advocating for Kirk and McCoy at their Klingon show trial in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Although I must admit that that throwaway cameo originally left me with the mistaken impression that Lieutenant Worf was about 150 years old by the time of The Next Generation.

Romo Lampkin, Battlestar Galactica & Joseph Adama, Caprica

Easily the best of Battlestar Galactica's later season additions (with all due respect to noted neurosurgeon John Hodgman), Romo Lampkin combined the sort of lovable sleaziness central to any Mark Sheppard performance, mixed with a brilliant if fractured legal philosophy. Seemingly just a mercenary lawyer taking on the obviously indefensible defense of disgraced president Gaius Baltar, he proceeded to build a case equal parts audacious (such as changing Baltar's plea to guilty just to make a point) and ludicrous (such as calling Lee Adama, his own partner on the defense and the son of one of the judges, to the stand to testify - this is a perk of trying a case in front of ship's captains instead of actual legal experts, I guess). Oh, and he's also a kleptomaniac and was briefly President of the Colonies. Although, quite honestly, who wasn't President of the Colonies towards the end?

In time, Lampkin reveals that he learned many of his best tricks from Joseph Adama, famous (some would say infamous) civil liberties lawyer back on Caprica. Much of his story remains to be told, as he will be the central figure of the prequel series Caprica, but it has already been revealed that he also defended members of the Ha'la'tha crime syndicate, which he had to do to repay them for funding his legal education. Still, he also defended the so-called "worst of the worst" partly out of a more altruistic need to air out society's failings. He always said his trademark silver lighter brought him good luck and made him unbeatable whenever he took it with him to court, a claim both his son and grandson later took much comfort in as they took the lighter with them on their most dangerous missions.

The law firm of Wolfram & Hart, Angel

The main adversaries for the mostly reformed vampire Angel, Wolfram and Hart represents the Earthly interests of an ancient group of demons. Beyond engaging in a variety of extracurricular activities that run the gamut from unscrupulous to criminal to utterly detestable (and, whenever possible, all three at once), the law firm also makes a point of representing society's most reprehensible slime, such as corrupt politicians. Supposedly, Wolfram & Hart would not exist without the evil inherent to all people. If I may make an exceedingly easy joke, I'm not clear how this distinguishes it from any other law firm.

Stephen Byerley, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov's landmark collection of robot stories features two tales that might not actually have any robots in them at all. These two stories, "Evidence" and "The Evitable Conflict", focus on Stephen Byerley, a successful prosecutor currently running for Mayor of New York City. His enemies in the Quinn political machine accuse him of being a robot, forcing Susan Calvin and the rest of US Robots and Mechanical Men to attempt to verify that claim. Their various tests prove inconclusive, and Byerley refuses to prove his humanity on the grounds that that is not something any human should have to prove.

"Evidence" never exactly reveals one way or the other whether Byerley is, in fact, a robot, but the clues probably point to a cautious "yes." (Whether or not he is a robot isn't even at issue in "The Evitable Conflict", where he has moved on from Mayor of New York to the only slightly more powerful position of World Coordinator.) This is qualified by the fact that Susan Calvin argues convincingly that a robot could never be a lawyer, as the unshakable parameters of the First Law of Robotics would prevent a robot from ever understanding the complex concept of "justice."

His detractors' claim that he only prosecutes those that he is certain are guilty is rejected by Dr. Calvin, as Byerley could never get past the direct harm of imprisoning a man if he were a robot. The story makes a number of satirical points, such as pointing out that someone everyone thinks is a robot because he or she appears to follow the Three Laws of Robotics might simply be a very good person, as the Three Laws are essentially a simple code of ethics. Whether Asimov intends any further syllogism to be made when he suggests a robot could never be a lawyer is up to the reader to decide.

Livia Beale, Journeyman

The short-lived 2007 series followed Dan Vasser, a San Francisco reporter who travels randomly in time. During its brief run, Journeyman also introduced Vasser's former fiance, Livia Beale (played by Terminator Salvation's Moon Bloodgood), who had seemingly died in a plane crash. She was actually another traveler in time who was originally from 1948. Finding herself stuck in our time period seemingly for good, she decided to become a lawyer and make a new life for herself. She has to leave all this behind when the plane crash makes her resume her time jumping, although she is now able to help Dan in his own travels.

Linda Ziegler and Dale Rice, Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer

Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is one of the best when it comes to examining the ethical implications futuristic ideas. His courtroom drama Illegal Alien pits prosecutor Linda Ziegler against famous civil rights lawyer Dale Rice in just the latest trial of the century to hit Los Angeles. This time, it is the alien Hask of the Tosok race who finds himself facing murder charges, and Rice takes it upon himself to clear the alien of the charges. Both his and Ziegler's arguments are as much based upon slick theatrics and larger questions of alien rights as they are the pertinent facts of the case (which, as they so often do in science fiction stories, point to a larger conspiracy).

Nathan Petrelli, Heroes

Although Nathan Petrelli started out as a lawyer in the New York City District Attorney's office, this is pretty much behind him before the show even starts. Like many real-life lawyers, he used his legal career as a springboard into politics, with the first episode of Heroes already showing him as a Congressional candidate.

The law firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero, Century City

This 2004 show mostly came and went without anyone noticing, and it hasn't even picked up the modest following of something like Journeyman. Still, the show deserves plenty of credit for being probably the closest thing to pure legal science fiction ever shown on TV. Set in 2030, a time when Oprah Winfrey is president, the moon is colonized, and there is universal health care for all, Century City looks at the various cases undertaken by the four partners at the law firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero.

These cases touch on everything from the ethics of cloning to identity theft that actually entails stealing entire personalities. It only ran for four episodes before CBS canceled it. Perhaps we'll just have to wait for the seemingly indestructible Law & Order franchise to make a futuristic spin-off (it can be called Law & Order: Futuristic Spin-Off!) for legal science fiction to get a real foothold in the TV landscape.

Harvey Birdman, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

What Century City tried to do for all of science fiction's many tropes and elements, the Adult Swim classic Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law did far more successfully for the rather more narrow field of sixties Hanna Barbera cartoons. The washed-up hero turned barely qualified lawyer Harvey Birdman was probably the sanest person at his largely psychotic law firm, and he too was in all probability certifiably insane, which had mixed results when it actually came time to go to trial. (The fact that the judges themselves were also completely bonkers was a big randomizer.)

The show's science fiction credentials weren't always particularly strong, but it did retain enough of a flavor of Birdman's old job as a third-rate superhero for me to feel comfortable including it on this list. The show also occasionally featured cases that highlighted some of Hanna Barbera's more obviously science fiction programs, including the Jetson family (from the far future time of 2004!) suing the past for destroying the environment and forcing their entire society to live high above the clouds of the destroyed Earth.

Judiciary Pag, Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

His High Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed, might technically be more of a judge than a lawyer, but I'll still include him for a couple of reasons. One, he probably started out as a lawyer, and two, he's easily my favorite minor character in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga. Judiciary Pag was most famous for sentencing the people of Krikkit some ten billion years ago to imprisonment in a Slo-Time seal after they tried to kill everybody in the entire universe (which, he points out, he feels like doing the same thing some mornings).

He was hated by pretty much all of his colleagues for his unprofessional manner and supremely laid-back approach to the law. (For instance, he marked what he rightly recognized as the most important moment in legal history by sticking some gum under his chair.) He got away with all this because he was, in fact, the greatest legal mind the cosmos would ever know. Pag or, as he preferred to be known for reasons that made sense only to him, Zipo Bibrok 5 × 10⁸, handed down his ruling on the Krikit matter to great acclaim and thunderous, which he would have been around to receive if he hadn't already slipped away with one of the more attractive members of the jury to whom he had slipped a note about a half hour beforehand.

A whole bunch of characters from Marvel and DC Comics

There's no shortage of lawyers among the superhero community. As superhero (and villain) origin stories go, former lawyer was particularly popular in the Golden Age. The first costumed crimefighter, Brian O'Brien was a former district attorney who took a more direct role in meting out justice when he became the masked vigilante The Clock in 1936. Numerous others followed, including the Quality Comics character Mouthpiece, the Timely Comics hero Laughing Mask, and the original version of the Batman foe the Thinker.

In more recent years, Marvel has created a bunch more lawyers, including Sharon Ginsberg, Cameron Hodge, and Black Bishop - and those are just the ones who are X-Men villains. There's also the X-Men's own attorney, Evangeline Whedon, who can turn into a dragon, the rather obscure seventies superhero Dominic Fortune, and Captain America's ex-girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal.

But Marvel's two most famous lawyers really have to be Matt Murdock and Jennifer Walter, better known respectively as Daredevil and She-Hulk. Matt Murdock's legal career has probably been a more consistent part of his character over the years, but Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk arguably did the most sustained (and most fun) exploration of the intersection between superheros and the law, as Jennifer Walter (and, quite explicitly, not She-Hulk) is hired by the law firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway to help defend heroes whose vigilante activities lead to all too common misunderstandings with more traditional law enforcement.

On the DC side of things, the most famous lawyer would probably have to be Harvey Dent, who of course was Gotham City's district attorney before he became Two-Face. In the current Batman: Reborn event that is launching Dick Grayson's tenure as the Caped Crusader, Gotham's new DA is Kate Spenser, better known as the vigilante Manhunter. An even more brutal lawyer-turned-crimefighter was the eighties version of Vigilante, who in his civilian life was New York City prosecutor Adrian Chase. Other lawyers in the DC universe include the Atom's very estranged and now villainous wife Jean Loring, Power Company hero Josiah Power, the mostly immortal Resurrection Man, and, reaching a bit further back into DC lore to the wonderfully ludicrous times before Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Robin of Earth-Two.

The Hyper-Chicken, Futurama

Is there any greater lawyer in all of science fiction than this simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid? Tasked with some of the thirty-first century's most impossible cases, he does about as well as can be expected, which is to say he doesn't completely lose all of them. He did help Bender beat the rap for non-drunk driving after he crashed a dark matter tanker into the Pluto penguin sanctuary (although he wasn't nearly as successful in his own trial for that there "incompetence"). He helped Fry and Bender avoid serious jail time after they unwittingly abetted a bank robbery by successfully arguing they were both insane, offering the simple evidence that they had hired him as their lawyer.

In his prosecution of Zapp Brannigan for blowing up DOOP headquarters, his oddball legal tactics ranged from the brilliant (like calling the jury, which was entirely composed of DOOP delegates, to the stand just so they could confirm they were going to convict Zapp) to the somewhat less brilliant (like his insistence on establishing whether or not Leela was wearing a hoop skirt at the time). A deleted scene from the most recent Futurama movie finally provided the name Matcluck for the character, but really he'll always simply be the Hyper-Chicken, and that's all he needs to be. Just don't mention badgers in front of him.

Most people have experienced text adventures (also known as interactive fiction) in some way: the phrase "you are likely to be eaten by a grue" still strikes fear into many hearts. The same way a well-written novel can conjure up detailed and engrossing pictures in the mind of a reader, so, too, can a good text adventure.

The first experiment with interactive fiction, ADVENT (or Colossal Cave Adventure), and the first commercial text adventure, Adventureland, were the model for future games of this format. Both were fantasy games with increasingly widening worlds to explore. From there, though, one company dominated the text adventure market: Infocom.

In addition to their humor, their unconventional packaging (including "feelies," odd little artifacts from the game), and their innovative interface, Infocom also developed a reputation for creating large and strange virtual worlds. They also inspired independent creators to take up the mantel of creating text-based worlds. Here are some of the most expansive and iconic of those worlds.

Zork

The first version of Zork was written in the late 70's, but since then, the world of Zork has expanded into something giant and complex. The game is divided into three parts, all set in the vast Zork universe. In part 1, throughout your quest to collect treasures and become the Dungeon Master, you explore a fiendishly complex maze, an ancient ruined temple, a portion of the "Land of the Dead," and a flood control dam, all part of a great Underground Empire.

An that's all just part 1. Parts 2 and 3 take you to more mazes, a carousel, a volcano, a museum, an immense "Land of Shadows," and more, encountering wizards, thieves, and the infamous grue. The tone of the games is lighthearted and full of jokes. The combined effect makes the Zork trilogy totally engrossing, one of the first fully immersive virtual worlds. (Play part 1 here)

Bureaucracy

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams worked closely with Infocom to create two different games. The first, and more well known, was based off of his famous Hitchhiker series, but the second was set in an entirely different, entirely scarier world.

It's called Bureaucracy, and in it, you are a confused citizen trying to file a change of address card. This simple task spirals into a complex, infuriating adventure in a fully formed world disconcertingly similar to the real one. In the world of Bureaucracy, your lunch order is lost due to a computer crash, your mail is scattered throughout the various houses you visit, you are almost eaten by a tribe of cannibals, and you eventually enlist the help of a hacker to finally get your address changed.

The thing that makes the world of Bureaucracy so engrossing is that it starts as a routine exploration of the town you find yourself in, but it quickly develops into a giant web of confusion and manipulation. It feels a little like waking up and finding yourself in a parallel world where everyday tasks take a SWAT team to accomplish.

Trinity

Trinity opens on a quiet English park about to be blasted by a nuclear explosion. Your job is to escape into a parallel universe of sorts and explore the mystery of how the bomb came to be launched at the park that day. What follows is a journey through nuclear test sites of the past and future and the surreal landscapes of another dimension, a sort of speculative history and future of the development of nuclear weapons.

Trinity is an unabashedly political game. It was released in 1986, and it's a commentary on the nuclear age. But it's also an exploration of a strange dimension with it's own rules, a blend of fiction and reality. Figuring out these rules means fully delving into Trinity's strange world.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

In a strange experiment with the virtual worlds of text adventures, A Mind Forever Voyaging presents a laboratory creating its own simulated virtual world. This research team has created a virtual city to model a new plan for economic and social development. You control an artificial intelligence named PRISM, and your job is to delve into the virtual town to observe conditions under this new plan.

The game progresses through years in the simulated city, and you observe the slow growth of dystopia. It's an unconventional entry in the text adventure canon. There are very few puzzles and the ultimate goal seems merely to observe and learn from the failures of the research team. The game essentially presents you with a declining world for you to explore and try to understand.

Curses

With the fall of Infocom in the late 80's, text adventures and interactive fiction seemed to be on the decline. But there was a minor resurgence in the format not long after. Graham Nelson's 1993 game, Curses, is considered a standout in that resurgence.

In Curses, you are a wealthy Englishman searching through the attic of your recently inherited house for a map. Of course things get complex from there, but the bulk of the richness of the environment comes from the clearly carefully conceived mansion, Meldrew Hall. In exploring the house, it seems to come alive with its own history. Curses is worth checking out for this section alone. (Play it here)

These games, among others, show the power of text to develop immersive and complex virtual worlds.

Further reading: The Cursor Is Your Friend In Scifi Text Adventure Games

The absolute best sequence of killer robots being confounded must come from Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe And Everything. It's not quite as great as Adams' first two books in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series, but it's still better than almost anything else. The warlike robots of Krikkit have discovered Marvin the Paranoid Android, whose brain (he's fond of reminding us) is the size of a planet. So it seems like a fantastic idea to plug him into their computer system. Unfortunately:

Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and neither was the central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer.

The Krikkit robots who had salvaged this pathetic metal creature from the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta had done so because they recognized almost immediately its gigantic intelligence, and the use this could be to them.

They hadn't reckoned with the attendant personality disorders, which the coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness and the loneliness were doing nothing to decrease.

It was not happy with its task.

Apart from anything else, the mere coordination of an entire planet's military strategy was only taking up a tiny part of its formidable mind, and the rest of it had become extremely bored.

Luckily for Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin is paying attention when a killer robot tries to off him shortly afterwards:

Zaphod's head snapped round (the other one was looking hawkishly in entirely the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal killer robot directly behind him seize up and start to smoke. It staggered backwards and slumped against a wall. It slid down it. It slipped sideways, threw its head back and started to sob inconsolably.

Zaphod looked back at Marvin.

"You must have a terrific outlook on life," he said.

"Just don't even ask," said Marvin.

And that, kids, is how you mess up an army of killer robots.

But first, let's lay down the ground rules as to what I would call the "destruction" of one's planet:

I. If the character's planet explodes, that definitely counts.
II. If the planet in question is rendered instantly uninhabitable (due to, say, nuclear war), that probably counts, assuming the character (and any other survivors) had to then find a new planet on which to live.
III. If the planet's destruction was more gradual (like due to environmental collapse) and there was time to evacuate most of the planet, I'm not going to count that, if only because there's nothing particularly special about the character's survivor status. However...
IV. If the character in question is the only survivor, then whatever the circumstances of the planet's demise, I'm counting that.

With all that in mind, here's the list...

1-11. Superman (and every other alien in DC Comics)

Obviously, Superman is pretty much the originator of this archetype in modern science fiction, what with him being the Last Son of Krypton. That said, the last few years in comics have seen the (re)introductions of a fully Kryptonian Supergirl, a "third Kryptonian" who survived Krypton's brief foray in interstellar warfare, General Zod, Ursa, Lon, a whole gaggle of Phantom Zone criminals, Christopher Kent, and most recently 100,000 Kryptonians released from Brainiac's imprisonment. So for someone who for so long was defined by his cosmic uniqueness, the Man of Steel is now part of a very, very big crowd.

Superman is far from alone in the DC Universe when it comes to surviving the death of his home planet. The Martian Manhunter is one of only a tiny handful of his people, the Green Martians, to survive the destruction of Mars (although there are significantly more of their brother species, the White Martians). Admittedly, J'onn J'onzz is somewhat dead at the moment, but after Superman he's the most iconic survivor of a dead world in all of comic books.

You might also want to count Superboy-Prime and Power Girl as separate cases from the other Kryptonians, as they were first the only survivors of Krypton in their respective universe before the Crisis on Infinite Earths (well, Power Girl also had the Superman of Earth-2, but work with me here) and are now the only survivors of their entire universes, not to mention two of the only people who trace their origins back to the original, infinite multiverse.

The Legion of Superheroes members Element Lad and Blok are the only living members of their respective races, while Kilowog, the lovable Green Lantern with a fondness for calling people "Poozers", is the only survivor of Bolovax Vik. There's also the planet another Green Lantern, John Stewart, accidentally blew up back in Cosmic Odyssey. The destruction of Xanshi turned one of its princesses, who was being educated off-world at the time, into the villain Fatality.

Teen Titans stalwart Starfire was next in line to rule the planet Tamaran before it imploded in a war with the Psions. Recent events also saw the destruction of Throneworld, the home of the other other other Starman, Prince Gavyn, at the hands of Lady Styx. Oh, and then there's always Lobo, last of the Czarnians, who exists pretty much to parody all the other examples on this list, as he blew up his own planet on a whim.

Clearly, the creative types at DC have a thing for blowing up planets, but there at least a few other examples of this in the rest of science fiction. Let's take a look at those now.

12-14. Arthur Dent and company from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Saved from the Vogon constructor fleet's demolition of Earth by the alien travel writer Ford Prefect, Arthur Dent lacks a lot of the internal angst and survivor guilt of most of the people on this list, probably because he's just so easily befuddled. Along with Trillian, a beautiful young woman Arthur was doing a halfway decent job of flirting with before Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only slightly insane President of the Galaxy, whisked her away, he is now one of the only two Earthlings left in the entire universe.

Well, at least until the Magaratheans finish building another one or before he spends a decade stuck in prehistoric Earth with a bunch of hairdressers or until the dolphins do whatever it is they did in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish to restore the planet. But then the Vogons finally finish the jobs through the multiverse (or the whole sort of general mishmash, as Douglas Adams preferred to call it) in Mostly Harmless, finally and completely destroying the Earth, taking Arthur and Trillian along with it. But Eoin Colfer's upcoming continuation of the saga, And Another Thing, will likely resurrect them in some capacity, as otherwise it would be a pretty uneventful book.

Though he never appears in the books themselves, one might also count Ford Prefect's father, who was the only person to survive the mysterious Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758, which probably destroyed the planet of Betelgeuse Seven, although Ford's father was always rather hazy on the details.

15-19. Spock (and at least a couple other aliens from Star Trek)

One of less than 10,000 survivors of Nero's destruction of the planet Vulcan in the new Star Trek movie (told you there was a massive spoiler in here), Spock might now be the most famous example of this particular trope. I'd also wager Spock is going to be pretty much the only Vulcan seen in future movies, what with the older, Leonard Nimoy version of Spock keeping all the other survivors busy rebuilding their civilization on New Vulcan.

You can't mention the new Spock without also acknowledging Nero and the crew of the Narada are the only survivors of Romulus. Well, then again, all their time traveling left them dead and the fate of Romulus in the new timeline is now uncertain, so maybe they only count in the original timeline.

There's also Guinan from The Next Generation, who had survived the destruction of her planet El-Auria at the hand of the Borg. There are also a lot of planets, particularly in The Original Series, that seemed to have a single inhabitant (mostly of the godly or energy being variety), but I won't count those as the planets themselves seemed mostly unaffected.

OK, I'll make an exception for Bele and Lokai from the legendary episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", in which the consuming racial hatred of their two peoples (one's skin is black on the left and white on the right, while the other is black on the right and white on the left) has left those two the last survivors of a war that has destroyed their planet Cheron. Admittedly, they don't survive for very long, not when there's an opportunity to finally kill each other.

20-26. The Doctor from Doctor Who (and maybe a couple others)

Spock isn't the only famous alien to get the Superman treatment in recent years; Russell T. Davies and company blew up Gallifrey before the new Star Trek movie was still in the earliest planning stages. Actually, between the Doctor and Spock both losing their planets in recent revivals of their series, you'd maybe think there's some sort of trend in modern science fiction that finds lone aliens more interesting than entire alien cultures. And I'm not sure they're entirely wrong.

Anyway, The Doctor is one of the most angst-ridden survivors you could imagine, which I suppose is understandable considered he kind of was the one responsible for destroying Gallifrey. Of course, it also turned out The Master survived (at least for a little bit, pending an inevitable resurrection) by running away to the end of the universe, and there are ever so slightly more credible than usual rumors that the Rani will return in the next series played by Gillian Anderson. But either way, the Doctor is for now the Last of the Time Lords, and he'll be the first one to tell you that. (No, seriously - he really could tone down how much he mentions that, as it's kind of a downer.)

Still, the Doctor wasn't the first person to occupy the TARDIS who had survived the destruction of an entire people. That tragic distinction goes to Nyssa, who watched her planet Traken be destroyed by the bizarrely universe-spanning threat in Logopolis. To her credit, she's much more stoic about this than the Doctor, although that might have been because the show's writers never really bothered to come up with a cohesive character for her.

Gallifrey also isn't the only planet the Doctor blew up, as he quite decisively destroyed the Dalek homeworld of Skaro back in the unspeakably awesome seventh Doctor story Remembrance of the Daleks. Although new series Daleks like the one in Dalek or Dalek Sec might plausibly claim to be "the last of the Daleks", probably the best candidate to call a "survivor" of Skaro's destruction is the lone black Dalek at the end of Remembrance, left all alone in the entire universe after the destruction of all his comrades on Earth and the rest of his race back on Skaro. Of course, the Doctor then uses the overwhelming despair of fact to literally talk him to death, but for a good five minutes there he was indisputably the Last of the Daleks, at least until they came back. Again. And again. And again...

The classic City of Death, written by Douglas Adams, introduced Scaroth, last of the Jaggaroth. Four billion years ago, he and a few other last refugees of his warlike race fled the destruction of his planet and came to primordial Earth. He then proceeded to accidentally kill of the rest of his race when his spaceship exploded. The decidedly less class The Hand of Fear showed Eldrad, a genocidal outcast of his silicon-based race, who had survived the extinction of his species by being encased in rock for 150 million years (well, that is one way to do it). And let's not forget The Cybermen - the original versions, anyway - who survived the destruction of their planet Mondas in The Tenth Planet and became the marauding terrors of the galaxy (or, if not exactly terrors, then certainly minor annoyances, depending on how well the particular story was written).

27. Princess Leia

The full impact of this gets lost in the shuffle of all the action in the original Star Wars, but Princess Leia is forced to watch her entire planet be destroyed, leaving her quite possibly the only survivor of Alderaan in the entire universe. (Well, there are probably a few diplomats on Coruscant and elsewhere, but the movies don't give any evidence to support this. The Expanded Universe says there were about 60,000 Alderaanians off-world at the time of its destruction.) Admittedly, she's technically not from Alderaan at all, as she was born in space to a mother from Naboo and a father from Tatooine, but she spent all but the first twelve or so hours of her life as the daughter of the Organas, rulers of Alderaan, so there's no way she doesn't count.

Also, Princess Leia is probably the best example of the kind of cognitive dissonance Douglas Adams talked about when he described Arthur Dent's reaction to losing his planet - it's too big a tragedy to really comprehend, and thus impossible to properly grieve. Leia never really seems to deal with her Alderaan's destruction, although I suppose she could have worked through her emotions during the year or so between the events of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Honestly, it's sort of weird how Alderaan is just completely forgotten in the later movies. You might think "Remember Alderaan!" would be an effective battle cry for a rebellion trying to remind people of the Empire's monstrous crimes. Bit of a lost marketing opportunity there. But I digress.

28-29. The Survivors of the Twelve Colonies and the Final Five on Battlestar Galactica

OK, it might be a bit of a stretch to count the Galactica and the rest of the fleet as quite the same thing as the others on this list. After all, none of the Twelve Colonies were exactly destroyed, but the Cylon-launched nuclear bombardment did make then uninhabitable to humans in very short order (and thus my reasons for Rule II become obvious). Sure, Helo, Anders, and a bunch of other survivors managed to live on the charred remains of Caprica for a few months, but it was clear they had no long-term future on that world, even if they did manage to escape the Cylons indefinitely. Perhaps a stronger case can be made for The Final Five, who used an orbiting satellite outfitted with their recently rediscovered resurrection technology to survive the destruction of Cylon Earth some 2000 years before the events of the series.

30. Cale Tucker and the rest of humanity from Titan A.E.

And finally, we have this somewhat forgotten 2000 animated film (co-written by Joss Whedon!), which considers the fate of humanity in the year 3028. The race of energy beings known as the Drej have destroyed Earth in retaliation for whatever the humans discovered in the mysterious Project Titan. The survivors are now nomads who are generally ignored or looked down upon by the rest of the galaxy. Ultimately, Cale Tucker, the son of one of the scientists responsible for Project Titan, helps lead humanity back from the brink of extinction and comes up with a plan to create a new Earth. I mean, of course he does - after all, he's voiced by Matt Damon, and that guy can do anything.

In any event, that's more than enough to get this list started. Who else is out there in science fiction nursing the unimaginable pain and survivor's guilt of being the last of one's kind and without a planet to call one's own?

On April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic, the most technologically advanced ship of its time, struck an iceberg, and sank beneath the Atlantic ocean during the early hours of the 15th. Radio calls went unheeded, and over fifteen hundred people perished, with only seven hundred and six of the passengers surviving the wreck.

The wreck of our high-tech ocean-conquering liner has captured our imaginations ever since, especially after explorer Robert Ballard rediscovered the ship in 1985. Here are the classic science-fiction stories that feature the good ship Titanic:

Starship Titanic, Terry Jones & Douglas Adams
First a game, then a book based on the game, this story follows a main character whose home has been destroyed by a crashing space ship, the Titanic. Players solve puzzles, and the book, co-written by former Monty Python member Terry Jones (who also provided voicework for the game) collects a number of the story's subplots together. If you're interested, you can read the entire book online, although the words have been reordered to be in alphabetical order. Read it here

A Flight to Remember, Futurama Episode
Futurama also tackled the Titanic storyline, with Episode 10 of Season 2, "A Flight to Remember." The crew takes a vacation on the newly built Titanic, the most advanced ship in the universe, piloted by Zapp Branigan, and chrisined with the head of Leonardo DeCaprio. Predictably, things go south when Zapp pilots the ship between black holes, which he describes as Icebergs in the sky, and much of the plot spoofs the film Titanic.

Raise the Titanic!, Clive Cussler
Raise the Titanic! is the third book in Cussler's popular Dirk Pitt series, published in 1976. While mainly an action novel, there are some science fictional elements to it, as the protagonist seeks out the RMS Titanic to recover a shipment of minerals that would be used to power a top secret weapon, the Sicilian Project, being built by the US Defense Department. Pitt is tasked with raising the ship while intelligence and governmental agents clash, at the height of the Cold War.

Voyage of the Damned, Doctor Who episode
"What? What?!" So ended the third series of the current Doctor Who, as the Titanic crashes into the side of the Tardis. The third Christmas special, Voyage of the Dammed, finds the good Doctor on board the Titanic, a ship modeled after the real one, from the planet Sto. Along the way, he partners up with Kylie Minogue, goes down to modern-day earth, comes across some aliens and when the ship starts to crash into the planet, the Doctor saves the day. Business as usual.

The Ghost from the Grand Banks and the Deep Range, Arthur C. Clarke
This novel takes place in 2012, where two groups are attempting to raise the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean for the centennial event, where technological rivalries and egos ensure, while Astronaut Walter Franklin has been tasked as a submarine warden, and uncovers dangers under the sea while doing so.

Distant Waves: A Novel Of The Titanic, by Suzanne Weyn
This urban fantasy, released today by Suzanne Weyn on Scholastic Press, follows four daughters and their mother, as well as journalist W. T. Stead, scientist Nikola Tesla, and industrialist John Jacob Astor. One of Tesla's inventions dooms them, while another could save them.

Ghostbusters 2
The Titanic makes an appearance in the 1988 movie Ghostbusters 2, where a ghost Titanic lands in New York City, piloted by a number of ghosts.

The Cursed Tuba Contingency, The Middleman Episode
Last year's short-lived but amazing superhero show, The Middleman, featured the Titanic as well, with a cursed Tuba - when played, anyone who heard it would be fated to drown in the Atlantic. In the episode, the Middleman and Wendy attent a yacht party to attempt to prevent the instrument from being played.

Titanic: Adventure Out of Time
Adventure Out of Time was a 1996 computer game developed by Cyberflix. In the story, starting in 1942 during the London Blitz, players are sent back in time to 1912 as a secret agent, who is tasked with retrieving the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The story features a number of subplots, and by completing the missions, the player changes history, and prevents the Second World War from happening, as well as several other outcomes based on the player's performance.

Ghost Hunters
Tonight, SciFi will air a Ghost Hunters special on the Titanic, where the team will be investigating ghosts from the Titanic, at an exhibit of Titanic artifacts. This will be airing on the SciFi channel at 9 and 11 pm.

Panspermia is the term for the most scientifically plausible version of this concept, but it isn't necessarily what science fiction usually presents. The panspermia hypothesis holds that the building blocks of life are not found exclusively on planetary bodies but are instead found scattered throughout the cosmos, and it is these spaceborne particles that are at least partly responsible for life on Earth. There's a little circumstantial evidence for the theory (although far, far more to support the reliable old "Life comes from Earth" hypothesis), and there is something undeniably fascinating about the subtext – the aliens are already here, and we are they. But science fiction barely ever depicts the actual theory of panspermia, mostly because it's just a physical process that takes billions of years to play out and is pretty boring unless you're willing to get really mystical.

What science fiction more properly deals with is exogenesis, which simply states that humanity or its genetic ancestors didn't always live on Earth. That generally means one of two things – either an ancient alien race introduced life to a previously dead Earth (sometimes as part of a larger directed panspermia project) or a bunch of humans from some other civilization colonized Earth, a fact that somehow slipped the minds of their descendants (you know…us). Plenty of science fiction deals with both, including two of the big science fictions works currently in the news. (The occasional spoiler may lie ahead.)

Outlander
One of the most satisfying little details of everybody's favorite Vikings vs. aliens epic is its answer to why Jim Caviezel's character, the alien Kainan, looks exactly like the Norsemen and how he can possibly speak their language.Outlander solves both of these problems by revealing Earth is an "abandoned seed colony" of Kainan's spacefaring civilization. Unfortunately, the whole notion that Earth was colonized by an interstellar race really opens up a far bigger plot hole than the one it was meant to fill. After all, Kainan's people would have had to have "seeded" Earth eons ago. If they could pull off planetary engineering on that sort of scale way back then, you'd think they wouldn't have so much trouble with a bunch of bioluminescent dragons. In the end, it's probably best not to think too much about the logistics of the whole abandoned seed colony concept. Because, ultimately, the very inclusion of the idea in the first place is, like so much of Outlander, awesome.

Battlestar Galactica
In both the original and new versions of the series, humans originally came from Kobol, the legendary planet of the gods, and Earth is just the fabled lost colony. The new series is busy dealing with Earth, so it's entirely possible a couple "What the frak?" moments still lie ahead that will reveal humanity actually did come from Earth. The original series, however, left no doubt that Kobol was where we all came from, as the no-budget god-awfulness that is Galactica 1980 established contact between the Galactica and contemporary Earth. Flying motorcycle chases ensued.

Star Trek
The Next Generation episode "The Chase" sought to acknowledge and explain the genetic improbability of a galaxy full of nothing but humanoid aliens with rubber foreheads. The solution – ancient aliens who, upon finding themselves all alone in the galaxy, seeded various planets with their genetic codes – is surprisingly deft, and actually turns a three-decade failure of imaginations and budgets into something almost elegaic. As one would expect, Picard takes this existence-altering revelation in his usual stride, while the Cardassians look a bit grumpy.

Stargate
Honestly, between all the genetic engineering, forced relocations of ancient humans, and universe-altering civil wars between godlike aliens it all gets a bit difficult to keep track of which species actually came from where. In short, a bunch of plague-decimated demigods maybe used this thing called the Dakara superweapon millions of year ago to shoot their genetic information throughout the Milky Way, which maybe had something to do with humanity's evolution. Or maybe not.

Babylon 5
Since we might as well finish off the sweep of nineties science fiction, the Centauri initially tried to dismiss Earth as one of their lost colonies. Sure, this probably wasn't true, but how else are you going to haze the new interstellar species?

Isaac Asimov
Most aliens seem to create life on Earth for slightly more practical (well, relatively speaking) reasons than the Star Trek aliens' "monument to our existence." Asimov imagined Earth as an eons-old alien experiment not once but twice – in "Jokester", the aliens did it to explore the concept of humor, while in "Breeds there a Man…?" the aliens are engaged in a more vague exercise in genetics. There’s also "Death Sentence", where an anthropologist for the Galactic Federation discovers that a previous civilization created a planet of robots as part of a larger psychological experiment. Realizing the Federation will surely have to destroy the planet as a potential threat, he decides to take his dire warning to one of the robots' biggest cities: New York.

Wildstorm Comics
The Kherubim people sent their genetic seed throughout the universe in a bid to conquer the universe without their genetic descendants even knowing it, which they then followed up by actually conquering much of the universe.

Ringworld, by Larry Niven
It turns out we're all part of a larger plan by the Pak race to create a galaxy full of ultra-lethal, ultra-intelligent superhumans. Apparently, the plan failed because there wasn't enough of the right kind of fruit.

Mission to Mars
In this Brian de Palma stinker, a bunch of Martians that didn't flee their dying planet shot the neighboring Earth – then a barren chunk of rock – full of the building blocks of life because…um, because they wanted to take Gary Sinise on a tour of the universe? (And that was probably the least nonsensical part of that movie.)

Salvage Rites, by Eric Brown
One of the very few times when a race made from directed panspermia confronts their creators, this short story finds a group of Benedictine monks in a cathedral-shaped starship seeking out what is, for all intents and purposes, God.

South Park
In easily the most awesome use of the concept, the anniversary episode “Canceled” revealed Earth for what it really is – one giant reality show. At least in South Park, someone is actually bothering to watch.

Starliner, by David Drake
In this 1992 novel, the narrator explains that no one bats an eyelid at botanists cross-breeding plants from different worlds because panspermia is "no longer a hypothesis but simple observation." Not the most earth-shattering application of panspermia, but still.

Ej-es by Nancy Kress
A rather less mundane spin on that same idea, as members of an interstellar marine corps realize a deadly plague on one planet threatens all the intelligent species in the universe – because panspermia makes them all genetically related.

Doctor Who
The classic "City of Death" features a more accidental case of aliens creating life on Earth. In the midst of all the ridiculously complex art forgery, random acts of violence, Monty Python cameos, and endless location shots that prove the thing really was shot in Paris, writer Douglas Adams somehow squeezes in the origin of all life on Earth. As it turns out, an exploding Jaggaroth ship kickstarted the whole "life" thing. That was nice of them.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Speaking of Douglas Adams, his most famous work envisions the noblest version of the alien-built Earth. Indeed, the emphasis here is on "built", as Earth is not a planet at all but instead a ten million year old computer program supervised by hyper-dimensional mice designed to determine the question to life, the universe, and everything. Of course, as is so often the case, this wondrous philosophical pursuit was interrupted by a bunch of hairdressers, TV producers, and telephone sanitizers from the planet Golgafrincham, who obliviously managed to replace the native humans and almost wreck the entire program. All of which rather neatly leads us back to wandering, forgetful colonists.

The Hainish Cycle, by Ursula K. Le Guin
In ancient times, colonizers from the planet Hain came to Earth and, for a time, coexisted with its native hominids. Whether the settlers ultimately killed the native Earthlings or simply bred them out of existence is anybody's guess, but the Hainish now consider modern humans their descendants.

Women of the Prehistoric Planet
This MST3K entry builds a whole parable of post-War American-Japanese relations around two rival alien races, time dilation, and giant iguanas, with plenty of sixties-era chauvinism left to go around. After a whole lot of silliness (as that previous sentence probably suggested) the marooned lovers Tang and Linda settle down on the titular prehistoric planet, which they decide to call…well, I think you can guess, but it rhymes with "Mirth."

Earthsearch
The classic BBC radio series had one of the best twists on this idea, as the four teenaged survivors of the massive starship Challenger search for Earth-like planets to colonize. It's slowly revealed that the planet they call Earth has some rather unrecognizable geography, but that the Earth-like planet they finally do discover, with its saltwater oceans covering two-thirds of the planet, sounds very familiar.

The Twilight Zone
But stories don't get much more familiar than the 1963 episode "Probe 7, Over and Out." Astronaut Adam Cook finds himself stranded on a faraway planet just as nuclear war is breaking out back home. He encounters Eve Norda, an alien who cannot understand his language. The pair ultimately agrees to start a new life together on the planet that Eve keeps calling "Irth." Judging by their first names, I’m guessing they'll do just fine.

He Was Abducted by Aliens

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: Arthur Dent, one of the token Earthlings traveling through the stars, discovers a Tennessean singer with the initials “EP” at an alien bar called “The Domain of the King.” Dent and Ford Prefect buy a pink spaceship from the fellow and tip him an obscene amount for singing “Love Me Tender.”

Animaniacs “Space Probed”: One fateful night, the Warner siblings find themselves aboard an alien spacecraft. A quick inspection of the ship proves that they’re not the ship’s first Earthling guests. Elvis has beaten them to the punch, along with Amelia Earhart, Bigfoot, and Jimmy Hoffa.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, insists he never laid a hand on Mr. Presley, no matter what some pub quiz game says. Chances are that Elvis either is flipping patties at a Burger Lord in Des Moines, or was abducted by aliens who thought him too good for our world.

He Is an Alien

Men in Black: If MIB taught us anything, it’s that anyone you’ve ever suspected of being from another world actually is, from Dennis Rodman to your kooky third grade English teacher. As for the King, he didn’t die, Agent K coolly informs us; he just went home.

“The Bride of Elvis” Kathleen Ann Goonan: Elvis wasn’t just the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll; he was a King, a royal member of an alien race. Fearing his party-hearty ways on Earth would lead to his premature demise, his caretakers, known as “Brides,” place him in a death-like coma until their ship returns to take him away.

He Faked His Death

Bubba Ho-tep: Weary of his fame, Elvis decides to take a breather and find someone else to endure his endless public adoration. He exchanges lives with the world’s most convincing Elvis impersonator, but when the facsimile dies on the can, no one believes that Elvis is the genuine King. He lives out his remaining days in relative peace, at least until the mummies and vampires start showing up.

Death Becomes Her: All individual who partake of Lisle von Rhoman’s immortality elixir must eventually disappear from the public eye. But Elvis can’t resist the occasional tabloid photo op.

Preacher by Garth Ennis: Jesse Custer picks up a number of hitchhikers as he heads towards the Alamo, but perhaps the most memorable is the shadowy Southerner who rhapsodizes on his long-surrendered fame. He never says his name, but reveals his identity as soon as he slides into Custer’s car with a “Thangyu Verrmuch.”

The Chronicle “The King is Undead”: In an episode written by The Middleman’s Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the journalists of tabloid newspaper The Chronicle discover that all Elvis impersonators are, in fact, vampires. And it seems that when the King learned this horrifying truth, he faked his death, adopted the name of his stillborn twin, and became the world’s foremost hunter of the Elvis-themed undead.

The X-Files: In “Shadow,” conspiracy-obsessed Fox Mulder jokes that Elvis Presley was the only man to successfully fake his own death (Andy Kaufman apparently bit it for real). But when the Lone Gunmen investigate an Elvis impersonator only to discover that he isn’t actually Elvis, the trio begins to worry that the King may truly be dead.

He’s Alive and Well, in an Alternate Universe

Armageddon: The Musical by Robert Rankin: A group of aliens become frightfully distressed when their favorite soap opera – the planet Earth – is about to be canceled due to Armageddon. To extend Earth’s airtime, they decide to create an alternate plotline in which Earth’s destruction is delayed. So they send Barry the Time Sprout back in time to persuade Elvis Presley to resist the draft, thus averting US involvement in Vietnam. The time-traveling Elvis ends up creating some alternate histories of his own, including one in which he’s worshipped as God.

He’s Been Copied

Thriller by Robert Loren Fleming: The short DC series features Kane Creole, an Elvis clone turned bank robber. Creole’s none too pleased with the way his creators desecrated the original Elvis’ remains and angrily kills them off.

What If? “What If Thanos Changed Galactus Into a Human Being?”: In this hypothetical tale, Thanos responds to Galactus’ attack on him by transforming the planet eater into a human being. But the remade Galactus isn’t just any human; he’s a perfect copy of Elvis Presley – before the weight gain and the undignified toilet death. Galactus can even sing and dance like the King, and when Galactus is offered the chance to return to space godhood, opts instead to remain on Earth and keep Elvis’ legacy alive.

He’s Really Dead. Honest.

Elvissey by Jack Womack: Elvis may be dead, but that doesn’t stop a cult from emerging in the year 2033 claiming him as semi-divine. In an attempt to maintain their monopoly on the human consciousness, a multinational corporation sends two of its agents to retrieve a young Elvis Presley from an alternate history’s past. But the Elvis they bring back is less “King of Rock” than “sexual predator.”

Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries by Charlaine Harris: Elvis hasn’t made it into True Blood yet, but in the source material, the King was discovered very slightly alive by a vampiric morgue attendant. The misguided vamp decides to make the overdosed Elvis undead, but the resulting creature, answering only to “Bubba,” is somehow brain damaged by the process. The other vampires treat him as a dimwitted errand boy, and try to keep him clear of any household pets.

“You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” by Stephen King: Presley is the mayor of the ironically named town of Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven, a spot in the afterlife where all the great, tragically deceased rock stars of the world gather and subject “normal” residents to interminable concerts for all eternity.

Odd Thomas Series by Dean Koontz: Elvis numbers among the ghosts who befriend the specter-spotting Odd Thomas. Elvis is reluctant to leave the world of the living because he’s not prepared to face his mother’s spirit.

Six-String Samurai: After a Russian nuclear attack destroys an alternate America, Elvis becomes the literal king of a chunk of the American Southwest. After four decades of rule, he dies, and America’s remaining musicians vie to fill his rhinestone-covered shoes.

RoboCop 2: Lest we had any doubt about the King’s demise, RoboCop 2 settles it. The megalomaniacal drug dealer Cain has Elvis’ skeleton, which is sealed inside a glass coffin.

The Twilight Zone “The Once and Future King”: Not only is Elvis unequivocally dead in this Twilight Zone episode, he actually died long before 1977. Gary, an Elvis impersonator, gets sent back to 1954 and meets his idol. But when he tries to prematurely introduce Elvis to rock music and his famous shaking hips, a baffled Elvis becomes enraged and Gary is forced to kill him in self-defense. Gary then takes on Elvis’ identity and spends the next two decades living out every Elvis impersonator’s dream.

Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1993): A continuation of Prelude to Foundation, it continues the life of psychohistorian Hari Seldon as he develops his theory to create a society to replace the crumbling Galactic Empire. Like the original Foundation, it consists of a series of interconnected stories.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The first three stories in Forward the Foundation were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine prior to his death in 1992. By the time Asimov succumbed to kidney and heart failure, he had a complete, albeit unedited, draft of the book. Asimov’s third memoir, I, Asimov was also published after his death, as was a final collection of short stories and It’s Been a Good Life, a compilation of Asimov’s diaries and personal correspondences collected by his wife Janet, which for the first time revealed that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion a decade before his death.

Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K. Dick (1976): Nixon stand-in Ferris F. Fremont occupies the White House and has turned the United States into a police state, by inventing a fictitious group of home-grown terrorists. Science fiction writer Phil Dick finds himself the target of this new paranoia while his friend, record executive Nick Brady, starts hearing voices from an alien entity that may be God. And the entity, Valis, is prodding Brady to overthrow the corrupt commander-in-chief.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? Dick submitted the manuscript (under the title Valisystem A) to his editor, Mark Hurst, who sent the novel back for minor revisions. But rather than make the changes, Dick reworked the concepts into an entirely new novel, VALIS. Dick gave the Valisystem A manuscript to fellow science fiction writer Tim Powers, and eventually Arbor House acquired the rights to publish it, but retitled it to avoid confusion with VALIS. Dick’s early rejected non-science fiction works, Gather Yourselves Together and Voice from the Street also enjoyed posthumous life.

For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939) by Robert Heinlein: Heinlein’s first novel outlines a roadmap from America’s Great Depression to a futuristic utopia. Engineer Perry Nelson experiences a bad car accident in 1939, and wakes up in the year 2086. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman, is reprogrammed to remove his outdated sexual mores and jealousy, and learns about the technological and social advances that have passed him by.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The book was rejected by several publishers, possibly due to its depictions of nudity and sexual liberalism. Although the ideas in For Us, The Living fed some of Heinlein’s later works, he was not eager to see this early effort come to life. He attempted to destroy every copy of the book. But Heinlein did give the manuscript to at least one friend, and Robert James, a Heinlein scholar, eventually found it stashed away in a garage. And so, despite the author’s best efforts, it found its way into print.

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002): The unfinished novel, collected with other Adams works in a volume of the same name, promised to be the third volume of the Dirk Gently series, but Adams was considering remaking it as another volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? While Adams was still deciding what to do about Salmon, he suffered a fatal heart attack, and now we’re left with Eoin Colfer to give us a new Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl (2008): In Clarke’s final novel, 15 year-old Ranjit Subramanian achieves fame when he publishes the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Meanwhile, an alien empire realizes that humans have developed nuclear weapons and decides the planet must be wiped out.
Why wasn’t it published while Clarke was alive? As Clarke was working on The Last Theorem, his health began to deteriorate. So he tapped his longtime friend, Frederik Pohl, as his collaborator. Clarke sent Pohl 100 pages of notes, only 40 to 50 pages of which contained fully written text. Even Clarke had difficulty deciphering the notes, but Pohl wrote out the manuscript, the final version of which Clarke reviewed just days before his death this past March. But Clarke offered a more direct farewell to fans in the form of his 90th birthday video:

As you probably know, options for downloading non-DRM music on the internet are sparse. Wherever possible, I've provided links to YouTube music videos to ease your pain and give you a taste of the sound. Most of these songs should be fairly easy to track down for your personal collection, if you like them enough to spend a bit of money.

Radiohead - Paranoid Android

I never thought it was possible to make a creepy, provocative, and truly genius piece of music that takes its title from a sardonic robot in a classic work of humorous sci-fi. Radiohead showed me that it was. In fact, the body of the song came to Thom Yorke after he spent a horrific night at a bar with a bunch of cokeheads: "The people I saw that night were just like demons from another planet," he revealed in an interview. If that isn't a perfect way to describe alienation, I don't know what is. And nobody knows alienation better than Douglas Adams's magnificent creation Marvin the "Paranoid Android," whose malfunctioning circuits have given him a clinical depression that's second to none. What Radiohead's expressing here is utter bewilderment at reality — the essence of science fiction.

David Bowie - Space Oddity

David Bowie just might be the most talented musician to ever have a sci-fi fixation — and if you don't believe he's got a sci-fi fixation, I urge you to give another listen to "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." Seriously. (Definitely don't miss "Five Years" — inspired by a doomsday dream of Bowie's, it's a chilling bit of musical soothsaying.) 1969's "Space Oddity" was where it all started; Bowie recorded it such that its release would coincide with the moon landing, and the song shot him to stardom. Now, given that, the fact that he once played The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the fact that he can make dancing look good past the age of sixty ... are we certain he's not an alien?

Eisley - Invasion

When I clicked on the music video for this song, I thought I had accidentally-on-purpose opened an X-Files episode instead. Wide shots of foreboding forests, sinister out-of-focus figures surrounding the screen, handheld shots of an invisible menace — clearly this Texas family band has alien takeover on the brain. When they perform this song in concert, they always tell the audience to go see Invasion of the Body Snatchers; that's what I call true rockstar nerds! This is the closest to pod people music we're ever going to get, and it's fantastic.

The Byrds - Mr. Spaceman

With so much fearmongering about alien invasions, it's nice to get a dosage of good old-fashioned fascination from the people who brought us that charming cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man." After Mr. Tambourine Man came Mr. Spaceman — and just as the Byrds begged the first for a song, they ask the second, "won't you please take me along for a ride?" Anyone who's stayed up all night reading L'Engle or Clarke knows they would do the same if green lights appeared outside. We just can't help ourselves.

Jonathan Coulton - The Future Soon

Cyborgs! Talking dolphins! A robot bride! Jonathan Coulton sure knows exactly what it means to be a hopeless sci-fi geek, and he dreams that in the future "the things that make [him] weak and strange get engineered away." Don't we all. Even though this starts out as a sad story of love for a girl with bionic eyes, ultimately it's about optimism — just like the best sci-fi stories. And I have to give him points for his musical use of robotic beeps and modem sounds; clearly, like a true nerd, he understands their beauty.

Flight of the Conchords - Humans Are Dead

This song actually isn't intended for human listeners, as the New Zealand folk parody duo will point out before its performance. No, "Humans Are Dead" is a victory shanty from the future, sung by androids in robot bars everywhere after they've killed us all. It's a future in which computers are no longer overworked, elephants need have no fear of mistreatment, and, apparently, there are no stairs. You'll have to listen to the song to learn more about it — and as a bonus, you'll get to hear Jemaine Clement's machine voice and Bret McKenzie's solo in binary.

Zager and Evans - In the Year 2525

You might recognize this song from 1992's Alien³, but you probably haven't heard it since then; its predictions of the future were so dark that Clear Channel Communications included it on a list of music banned after September 11, 2001. As ever, though, this bit of forbidden art provides illuminating glimpses about the truth of human society, and it explores quite a few familiar sci-fi danger warnings. In the year 3535, for example, according to Zager and Evans, "Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today." To musicians in the 1960s, this future probably seemed far away — but 2525 looks a lot closer from this side of the millenium.

T-Bone Burnett - Humans from Earth

Here's an interesting twist on the alien contact theme — T-Bone Burnett wrote a song for us Earthlings to play when we conquer other planets. "You have nothing at all to fear," he croons, with more than a hint of menace; "I think we're gonna like it here." The sound of the song is appropriately ominous, too ... exactly what one would imagine invading human rockstars would be like. Let's hope it never comes to that; thanks, T-Bone, for reminding us to try for the status of universal good guys.

Dan Bern - No Missing Link

If you've always thought Charles Darwin didn't give us the full story, Dan Bern knows how you feel. He's provided us all with a satisfying and sufficiently foul-mouthed answer to the question of our existence in this rock ditty of fiber optics, digital remastering, and limited access freeways. Bern has doubtless produced prettier songs — his time-travel ballad "God Said No" will moisten the eyes of even the most heartless cynic — but "No Missing Link" includes a background chorus belting out the words "genetic mutation," so it's a sure choice for any sci-fi mixtape.

Bree Sharp - David Duchovny

We've covered all of the most compelling aspects of science fiction: speculation about our future, the mystery of our own existence, the hope of our own exploration ... but we missed one, and the one we missed is the dizzying exuberance of fandom. Whether or not you've ever experienced any inexplicable lust for Agent Fox Mulder, you'll certainly be able to understand the obsession with the fantastic that lies between the lines of Bree Sharp's lyrics. Maybe we each wonder different things when we look up at the sky, but in the end we're all stargazing. And Bree, I would happily curl up under the covers and watch sci-fi TV with you anytime.

Here endeth the mixtape, at least for now. Thanks to sci-fi music enthusiasts Melissa, Heather, Becca, Stephen, Ellen, Mary, Katie, Jana, Lily, and Ken. Even with their expert help, though, I'm sure I've just scratched the surface. As always, I say: Let me know what I've missed!

The upcoming BBC radio adaptation of Long Dark Tea-Time will act, in part, as a bridge between the two series:

“There is definitely Hitchhiker’s/crossover,” explains Dirk Gently adapter-in-chief and director Dirk Maggs. “In this second series there is one particular idea from Douglas’s notes for the third [unfinished] Dirk Gently book which at one point he thought might be a Hitchhiker’s book. It’s a very simple idea that puts one of the Hitchhiker’s characters in the same universe as Dirk Gently in a way that I thought had enormous potential. In this series we find that the characters in both universes are inhabiting the same world, and I think where we’re going with this is something that actually resolves later on in Hitchhiker’s. It’s turning into a bit of a prequel!”

The radio adaptation of the novel is due to be broadcast on UK BBC Radio 4 before the end of this year.

EXCLUSIVE Dirk Gently 2 to feature Hitchhiker's crossover [SFX]

Here's a perfect example of a needless and annoying "grimly," from Bruce Sterling's story "Maneki Neko" (from The Locus Awards: Thirty Years Of The Best In Science Fiction And Fantasy):

Louise frowned grimly. "That's right, wise guy. Make jokes about it. You're involved in a malicious software attack on a legal officer of the United States. You'll see."

It's almost too obvious to point out, but "frowned grimly?" You don't think "frowned" might have worked on its own? And even "frowned" seems like surplus here.

And here's a more run-of-the-mill use, from David Weber's 2004 novel The Stars At War:

"Send it Priority One," Hausman said grimly, and settled back in his chair as the light-speed burst transmission sped across the vacuum.

The reason I highlight Weber's use of "grimly" is because it's so typical: it's often used in a military/action context. It shows us that the situation is serious, and it also shows us that Hausman is a serious guy who means business. If this were a TV show, the dramatic music would swell as Hausman settles back in his chair, but there's no music in a book. So "grimly" has to serve as Weber's orchestral sting.

At it's worst, a "grimly" overdose looks something like this passage from Wilbur Smith's historical novel The Sound Of Thunder:

"You're drunk!" She accused grimly.
"Oh foul libel! Oh monstrous untruth." Saul backed hurriedly out of range.
"All right, Sergeant." She turned grimly on Sean. "Where is it?"

You'll be shocked to learn that Mercedes Lackey is addicted to "grimly." And so are a bunch of other fantasy authors. Isaac Asimov liked him some "grimly" as well, and most collections of "classic" science fiction of the 1930s through 1960s contain a fair number of grimlys. (Grimlies?) But once you start looking for it, you find "grimly" in a lot of recent stuff as well.

Douglas Adams satirizes this style of writing in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

"Get it moved," he repeated grimly, and bustled grimly back through the door grimly hauling up his trousers and coat in preparation for the grim ascent.

It gives you a sort of, I don't know... a grim feeling, doesn't it?

To be fair, there's an issue of changing tastes here. According to Google books, D.H. Lawrence loved to have people speaking "grimly" and someone takes some news "grimly" in a Joseph Conrad book. And they're generally regarded as pretty good authors.

The real problem with words like "grimly," of course, is that they're a substitute for real characterization. Here's Martin Amis, discussing the wealth (ha) of character development in Michael Crichton's The Lost World:

The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. ‘Dodgson shook his head irritably’; ‘ “Handle what?” Dodgson said irritably.’ So Dodgson is irritable. But ‘ “I tell you it’s fine,” Levine said irritably.’ ‘Levine got up irritably.’ So Levine is irritable too. ‘Malcome stared forward gloomily.’ ‘ “We shouldn’t have the kids here,” said Malcolm gloomily.’ Malcolm seems to own ‘gloomily’; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving ‘gloomily’ too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving ‘irritably.’ Forget about ‘tensely’ and ‘grimly’ for now. And don’t get me started on ‘thoughtfully.’

I definitely think "grimly" isn't quite as ubiquitous in science fiction as it used to be, but it still turns up way, way too often. And part of the problem is that today's SF writers grew up seeing it everywhere. So it's part of their familiar vocabulary, cozy and soft like an old sweater. And it is a quick and dirty (so, so dirty) shorthand for character and action, and a certain suspenseful mood.

Plus it's sort of a "space adventurer" sort of word — it's emotional but stoic. You can have any emotion grimly, and it becomes more serious and muted, yet also more important, than a regular emotion. It's got the power of grimly!

Here's a list of fairly recent SF writers who have used "grimly" pretty recently:

• Charles Stross (although mostly in his fantasy writing),
• John Scalzi (in Old Man's War and The Last Colony),
• Richard K. Morgan (in Altered Carbon),
• Greg Bear (in many many works),
• David Brin (including the great sentence "'That wasn't me,' Beta assured grimly."),
• Cory Doctorow (including a "smiled grimly"),
• John Shirley (including "Satan chuckled grimly" in his Constantine novelization),
• John Varley (but not since 1983's Millenium),
• Connie Willis (a lot),
• Orson Scott Card ("laughed grimly," "smiled grimly," and the phrase "grimly determined" appears in two different books.)

The sprawling saga that loses the thread is a more common problem in fantasy books than in science fiction — think the Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time, or Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books. But science fiction still has its own never-ending stories that really ought to end. Here are the biggest problems:

Changing the rules: When I first read To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer, I was incredibly excited by its story of an artificial planet where everybody who's ever lived comes back to life. Until I got to the end of the book and realized it was actually Book One in a long series, and none of my nagging questions about the resurrection planet, Riverworld, would be answered for another three or four books. I was even more annoyed when a friend of mine told me that Farmer changes the rules of Riverworld after the first book, to make it easier to keep spinning out tales. I think there my have been some book-throwing involved.

The heir apparent. As I mentioned, a reviewer coined the term "Herbert's Syndrome" in 1984, when Frank Herbert was still alive and had yet to publish his sixth Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune. The reviewer defined it as when "a large advance induces a good writer to extend a successful series beyond its natural span." You may have your own opinions about whether six Dune books were too many — but since Herbert's death, his son Frank and his collaborator Kevin J. Anderson have already written seven Dune books, with more on the way. Say it with me: "The cash must flow."

The neat trilogy that becomes a messy tetralogy, and more. The first two Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books by Douglas Adams seemed pretty well-rounded, encompassing more or less the same arc as the original radio series and TV series. So I was a little nervous about the third book, Life, The Universe And Everything, but it was still a fun ride and seemed to move things forward. I was less thrilled by the fourth volume in what Adams called "the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's trilogy." So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, felt sort of anemic, as if Adams really didn't have any more ideas for the series, but he needed the Ningis. And then I think I read the fifth volume, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.

The need to explain the meaning of everything. Feminist science fiction blogger Liz Henry says this is where many series break down:

People write a series, and then they feel the need to finish it off and Explain it and they go all mystical and metaphysical. [They] try to solve every giant Burning Issue of Existence and good and evil, and why does the universe exist at all, and [the meaning of] utopia. So often, you get the underlying Manifesto or attempt to come up with a coherent philsopy of the author, but all too often, you sure wish they hadn't. By the time Herbert hits God Emperor of Dune, he has gone compeltely mad, trying to explain Everything, and there is no plot any more.

The random left turn. Isaac Asimov gave into fans' pressure, after a thirty-year gap, and started writing more Foundation novels again. And few would argue that Foundation's Edge or Foundation And Earth are in the same league as the original trilogy. One major problem: a slew of new characters, including one who's introduced right at the end of Foundation And Earth, who might have played a bigger role in a final Foundation book, had Asimov written one. But in the end, it just feels as though Asimov is floundering a bit, in the unnecessary sequels.

The miraculous save. In Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue series, there's a clan of women and children who become language experts, and learn a ton of alien languages so they can serve as translators. But over time, they create their own secret language that the men don't understand. Which is great, but then in the third book, suddenly the women discover that they can eat sounds. They can survive by ingesting noises — sort of like a plant's photosynthesis, except noisier.

The shrinking protagonist. Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books become less and less fun, as his roguish protagonist, Slippery Jim DiGriz, becomes more and more of a pussycat. But worse yet is when we get a new protagonist whose story cheapens our original hero, like Bean in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow.

To be fair, why shouldn't novels go on and on and on? It's what movies do, with their endless sequels. And TV series — who really thinks Smallville deserves an eighth season? On the other hand, the thing that makes novels superior to other media is the fact that they have a single author, who puts his/her stamp on them. When that one person runs out of ideas, the novels themselves start to deflate.

With TV, movies, comics and other media, as long as the corporate copyright-holder can find another Akiva Goldsman or Roberto Orci to spin out a new idea, you can have endless installments. In theory, no TV series ever needs to go stale, as long as the writers have the grace to leave when they run out of ideas. (Which almost never happens.) It's a bit harder with books though — and I like picking up a novel and discovering a new universe for the first time.

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• The Holtzman Effect: In the Dune series, the spice melange was able to increase your lifespan, heighten your senses, and let you see safe paths through the space-time continuum. Of course, in order to use this last benefit, you had to live in a micro-gravity environment while being constantly saturated with spice. Plus, it would mutate your body into something fairly hideous. However, in order to actually fold space and make this travel happen, you'd need a Holtzman Drive, which used subatomic energy fields to fold space and let you travel over vast distances in the blink of an eye. Without a navigator, you might not make it to your final destination.
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• The Infinite Improbability Drive: In order to get around traveling over the enormous distances in space, Douglas Adams created this drive in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to avoid "all of that tedious mucking about in hyperspace." It was invented by a student who was sweeping up after a party, and decided that if such a machine was a virtual impossibility, then it had to logically by a finite improbability and went from there. Basically, when you activate the drive (which is an electronic brain hooked up to a Brownian motion generator... like a cup of tea) it causes you to pass through every point in the universe at exactly the same time. Then you just drop down the improbability levels, and hope you come out where you need to be.
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• The Stargate: In the universe of Stargate, you can travel over huge interstellar distances simply by stepping into the giant Stargate, and popping out on the other side where another giant gate exists. You could select which gate you wanted to travel to by dialing a "code" on the gates and locking the nine different chevrons into place. They were constructed as a network by a race of ancient alien beings, and basically open up wormholes for travelers to jaunt through.
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• Jaunting: In Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt" (found in the Skeleton Crew anthology) the technology exists to teleport people over huge distances. However, you have to be put to sleep for the trip, and revived on the other end. If you travel through while awake, very bad things happen. In fact, they send a convicted murderer through while awake, in exchange for him getting a full pardon. When he comes out the other end, he mutters "It's eternity in there" and then dies of a massive heart attack. In the story, a father tells his children about these bad things, and of course the son holds his breath when they hose them down with sleeping gas, so he can see what it's like. It ain't very pretty.
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• Artificial Black Holes: In the movie Event Horizon, the ship (of the same name) creates artificial black holes by using a gravity drive, and this allows them to fold space in order to travel large distance quickly. As usually happens with a technology like this, something goes wrong along the way. In this case, the ship literally ends up in hell, and seems to become possessed by an evil entity. Everyone goes a little bit nuts, Sam Neill tears his own eyes out, and that's about enough to make you not want to try out this method of travel.
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• Cryogenic freezing/sleep: In Alien and countless other science fiction books/movies, travelers often enter a suspended animation hypersleep so they don't go insane from space madness when their trip takes 40 years to complete. The downside is, everyone else you know in the world will continue aging at a normal rate, while you're frozen in place. This is why all of Ripley's friends and her daughter were dead once she was found drifting in Aliens some 57 years later. This doesn't mean that the ship you're in will be traveling faster than the speed of light, but when you wake up on the other side it'll feel pretty instantaneous, which is what really matters.
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• The Wave Motion Engine: Whether you know it as Starblazers, or under the original title Space Battleship Yamato, they both traveled the same way via the Wave Motion engine. This enormous device powered the entire ship, allowed them to fire the Wave Motion Gun, and also had to ability to make them jump quickly through space using tachyon energy. Since they had to travel 148,000 lightyears to bring back a device that would cleanse the earth of deadly radiation, this came in pretty handy. However, this could not be used constantly, since both the place of origin and the destination had to be locked in "phase," and if this wasn't done correctly the ship could destroy the universe.
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• FTL Drives: In the world of Battlestar Galactica, the ships of the colonial fleet and the Cylons alike both travel over large distances by using FTL drives. While a bit of a misnomer, since the ship actually teleports instantaneously rather than rocketing at speeds great than the speed of light (a la Star Trek) to a new destination, it still has the desired effect. The process by which this works is not actually discussed on the show, but we do know that the drives are powered by the ore Tylium, and that ships can even jump out of a planet's atmosphere. The constantly jumping episode "33" shows just how much they rely on this technology, and how the Cylons use it to stay a step behind, or a step ahead in some cases.
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Baio writes:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

We also learn that the software infrastructure of the game might have actually become a character in the game itself. Designer Stu Galley wrote in an email:

I've been talking with Tim Anderson about using the New Parser in this game. It still needs a lot of development, and in the end it may prove to be slow in operating, but it promises to be very capable. Now here's the question: should the game itself make a big deal out of the New Parser? For example, the game could begin with the parser introducing itself to the player, asking the player to type a few sentences to "warm up" the parser, before getting on with the story itself. The parser could take on a personality, explaining that this is its first job, that it means well but it may not succeed. Perhaps it gets depressed and refuses to work at all. Perhaps the parser is in fact Marvin's new aural interface module, depressing him even further.

Time Cop. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only one who can safeguard history against those who would change it for their own evil ends. But a corrupt U.S. Senator (Ron Silver) is messing with the timeline in order to become president in 2004. Van Damme quickly figures out what's going on. But then Silver changes history some more, so when Van Damme returns to his present, everything has changed and Van Damme no longer has a job. It's up to Jean-Claude to go back once again and change the past a second time, getting rid of Silver in the process. Weirdly, this is one of the best movies about time travel in spite of its action-movie star.

(Versions of Van Damme's Time Cops show up a lot in SF, including the ChronoGuard in Jasper FForde's Thursday Next novels, and the temporal police from the 29th century, who show up in Star Trek: Voyager a few times. Stephen Hawking has famously theorized that some kind of temporal police must exist, to prevent the horrendous paradoxes that would otherwise happen. In Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, they're referred to as the "Quantum Angels.")

Primer. Abe and Aaron create a time machine, which requires you to lay inside it for as long as you want to go back for. They go back and start meddling with their own pasts, speculating on the stock market and tinkering with other things. But soon they're making more serious changes — knocking out their past selves and taking their places. They live through the same day or two over and over again, creating alternate timelines with subtle differences each time. Eventually, Abe and Aaron start trying to counter each other's interference, but keeping up with which version of Abe or Aaron you're seeing gets trickier and trickier.

Back to the Future Part 2. When "Doc" Brown carelessly leaves his Delorean time machine unguarded, that big lunkhead Biff goes back in time to 1955 and gives his younger self the means to become rich and powerful far beyond his pathetic dreams. Our hero, Marty, has to go back in time to 1955 for the second time in a row — except instead of changing Biff's future as he did in the first movie, he's just trying to undo the changes that Biff has already made.

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. Jud Eliott III gets a job as a time courier, showing tourists the wonders of history. But some of his crazy colleagues start messing around with the timeline and wrecking history, so he has to keep going back and trying to fix the damage without attracting the attention of the Time Patrol. And then he falls in love with a time paradox named Pulcheria, his own great-great-great-great-grandmother, and it all goes to pot.

The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Harlan belongs to a time agency called Eternity, which exists outside of time itself. He and his fellow agents go around changing history to reduce human suffering. But then Harlan has a falling-out with his bosses over his girlfriend Noÿs, whom they want to erase from history. Harlan is supposed to help one of his colleagues, Cooper, go back to the 24th century and become the scientist whose discoveries later make the Eternals possible. In a fit of pique, Harlan sends Cooper back to 1932 instead, so he can't lay the groundwork for Eternity and Eternity will never exist. Finally, after the Eternals un-erase his girlfriend, he agrees to go back and rescue Cooper from the past — but then his girlfriend Noÿs reveals that Eternity's secret purpose is to edit history to make sure humans never colonize the stars. So instead Harlan helps her to change history so that humans discover atomic energy earlier, and start down the path of space exploration. As a consequence, Eternity ceases ever to have existed.

Lightning by Dean Koontz. Laura has a guardian angel who shows up to help her whenever she's in danger, but then it turns out other people are trying to undo the "angel's" work. Some evil Nazi time travelers are trying to destroy Laura. As Laura's son explains:

They can hopscotch around us.. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like... if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic.

Doctor Who. For a show all about time travel, Doctor Who doesn't have that many stories where the Doctor and another time-traveler are both changing the timeline back and forth, surprisingly. But the Doctor and his fellow Time Lord the Master get into some duels on a few occasions. The most over-the-top is in the comedy special "Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Death," where the Master and Doctor meet up in a castle. The Master goes back in time and bribes the architect to put a trapdoor right where the Doctor happens to be standing. But then it turns out the Doctor also went back in time, and bribed the architect even more — to put the trapdoor where the Master is standing instead.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a lot of cris-crossing back and forth in Reg Chronotis' time machine (much of which is lifted somewhat from the episodes Adams wrote for Doctor Who. In particular, the ghost of the last surviving Salaxian possesses a disgruntled literary magazine editor, inspiring him to go back in time to repair the Salaxian spaceship before it can explode, back at the dawn of life on Earth — which will have the effect of making sure life never develops on this planet. The instructions for fixing the ship are buried in the second half of Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan." But Chronotis and Dirk Gently, our detective hero, go back to Coleridge's time and ensure he never finishes that poem, so the instructions are lost and the alien plot is foiled.

Terminator. The Terminator movies and TV show are all about people and cyborgs traveling back in time to change, or safeguard history. The machines want to kill Sarah Connor before she can ever give birth to future resistance leader John Connor, so John sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect him — and Kyle becomes John's daddy. And then, the machines send more cyborgs back to kill John, and eventually Kyle's brother Derek ends up back in our time hanging out with his friend/nephew as well. And Sarah Connor either dies of cancer or travels forward in time past her own death date and somehow avoids it. Maybe in the second season of Sarah Connor Chronicles the machines will figure out they just have to wipe out the Reese brothers as kids, and all their problems go away.

Time After Time. H.G. Wells and Jack The Ripper battle each other in the bizarre future of 1979. Once they both reach the future, time travel doesn't play that much of a part in the story — except that at one point, Wells travels forward in time three days with his girlfriend Amy, only to find Amy's obituary in a newspaper. They have to travel back again and prevent Jack the Ripper from making Amy his fifth victim. (In the end, it turns out the obituary was mistaken, and it was Amy's friend who was murdered.) And then Amy goes back to the 19th century and marries Wells, changing history at least somewhat.

Meet The Robinsons. An animated Disney film, very loosely based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson. Tom Selleck invents a time machine. (We'll just pause to let you absorb that piece of info.) And then a villain named Bowler Hat Guy travels back in time to sabotage a memory-scanning machine that a kid named Lewis has invented, which gave rise to all the amazing inventions in Tom Selleck's utopian future. ("Tom Selleck's Utopian Future" will be my next band name.) So Tom Selleck's son Wilbur has to travel back in time to our time, to make sure Lewis repairs the memory-scanning machine.

Crime Traveler. In this British TV series, a physicist named Holly Turner invents a time machine, and a lazy detective named Slade uses it to travel back in time and solve crimes before they happen. But in the final episode, a criminal gets his own time machine, and travels back in time to give himself an airtight alibi for a couple of murders. Slade has to travel back as well, to catch the other time traveler in the act.

Research by Nivair Gabriel