"Ancient Superbeasts" from Reign of Fire
As you can see in our clip of the trailer from Reign of Fire, above, this movie looked really good in principle. A futuristic world invaded by dragons who squirt really cool fire, Matthew McConaughey is bald, Christian Bale is scruffy and sarcastic, the world is in ruins, and everybody is hiding out in bunkers. There's even a hint that there might be a dragons vs. helicopters moment. Unfortunately, it was about as goofy as Doomsday, but without all the ninjas and race cars and punk rock cannibals from Glasgow. Plus, the helicopters never fought the dragons, the way they did in D-War. Still, you take what you can get. This is the only movie you will ever see that combines dragon-slaying with crumbling, futuristic, post-apocalyptic London. Many points given just for trying.

Ghidorah AKA Monster Zero
Of course, Godzilla is probably the original science fiction dragon. The Big G squirts fire, is seriously spiny, and comes into town to stomp the shit out of everything (a very dragon move). He's also some kind of "ancient creature from beneath the sea" re-awakened by human meddling (in this case, atomic tests). But if you want to go full-on scifi dragon, you have to wait until Ghidorah the three-headed monster enters the popular kaiju franchise. Ghidorah comes from space (even you non-Japanese speakers can recognize the word "UFO" in that headline in the trailer for Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah above). Like most good dragons, Ghidorah has a breath weapon (lightning), golden scales, and giant leathery wings. In case you were still wondering about his scifi bonafides, he later becomes MECHA Ghidorah, complete with cyber head and body armor (kaijugasm!!!).

"Psychic Friends" from Dragonriders of Pern series
Anne McCaffrey's classic Dragon Riders of Pern book series is about the civilization created by of a bunch of humans on an alien planet called Pern. It's hinted that long ago, the humans colonized Pern and never left. Dragons, complete with fire-breathing and psychic powers, are their companion species on Pern. In fact, dragons are necessary to its ecosystem, which is invaded every 200 years by killer "thread," spores from space that consume everything in their path. Only the dragons can kill the spore with their firey breath. Human riders of the dragons lead the charge against thread, and also form special psychic bonds with their mounts. The society on Pern is pretty medieval, with dragons serving as the main technology.

"Heroin Bulls" in the Dragon Temple Saga Trilogy
Janine Cross' harrowing, revisionist homage to the Pern series is the Dragon Temple Saga, about an alien planet strongly divided up along racial and nationalist lines. Dragons are the cornerstone of the economy: they provide transportation via flight, and food via their tasty eggs. Their venom is also the source of a powerful drug that many people on the planet are secretly addicted to. Our hero is a woman whose mother comes from the outcast "piebald" race on the planet, and she has to fight poverty and slavery to finally earn the right to be a dragon master. Along the way, she has amazing battles and, um, some sexytime with dragons. Not for the faint of heart, this series will rip your brain out and make you feel strange for weeks afterwards.

Old Lace in Runaways
In the comic book series Runaways, created and mostly written by Brian K. Vaughan, a group of teenagers discover their parents are supervillains and decide to run away to form their own group that seeks great justice. At one point, the purple-haired nerd Runaway named Gertrude discovers that her time-traveling parents have stashed a psychic dinosaur/dragon to take care of her. She names it Old Lace, and it always answers her mental call.

The T-Rex in Jurassic Park
No list of scifi dragons would be complete without a nod to Jurassic Park, whose resurrected dinosaurs are basically dragons for the genetic engineering age. Excellent as a book, fun as a movie, Jurassic Park is about what happens when a wealthy entertainment entrepreneur decides it would be a really awesome idea to recreate dinosaurs from DNA found preserved in amber. They dinos are supposed to be sterile, but unfortunately nature takes its course and soon the fun Jurassic Park island is overrun with deadly creatures, fresh from the petri dish. Some of the dinos are clearly just dinos, but when the T-Rex arrives with his deadly stomping and long teeth, you know you've got a Genomic Age dragon on your hands.

First, there are the excellent fuzzy 20-sided dice for your rear view mirror, available through ThinkGeek.

You can get a silver necklace with a picture of a 20-sided dice on it from SplitReason.

Over on Etsy, pawandclawdesigns offers a necklace made with a real 20-sided dice. And beepbeephello offers 20-sided dice earrings that are lovely.

And just yesterday, I heard a rumor that soon there will be 20-sided dice socks available from the wonderful people who bring you RobotSocks. Maybe even by next month! WIN!

MIT image via Eric Schmeidl via Laughing Squid.

This takes us onto the Physical and Mental Mutation tables, full of exotic adaptations to the new brave new world ("Quills/Spines", "Pyrokinesis" "Multiple Body Parts"), and the occasional dark side of genetic damage ("Hemophilia," say, or "Epilepsy").

When it arrived in stores in the early 1980s, Gamma World was announced like this:

The first world is lost in the mythical past, the second was destroyed by apocalyptic energies, and now a whole new world awaits you - GAMMA WORLD!

...or would we!? Because maybe we'd still be around, and everything would be messed up in a cool way. When I was playing Gamma World in junior high, it seemed vaguely plausible that in a few years we'd have tattoos, and cool rubble to climb around on. There would be tribes!

Gamma World's principal architects were Gary Jaquet and James M. Ward - the latter of whom must be touched by some visionary quality, since his name is on Metamorphosis Alpha and Deities and Demigods. It's patterned more after science fantasy than science fiction proper - the creators cite The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's marvelous Wizards, a post-apocalypse subgenre boiled down and codified into 56 pages of narratively generative charts'n'tables.

Players set out into an America remade as a country of mutants, rural communities, and the mystery-shrouded ruins of a prior civilization. Robot farms, nomadic tribes, ancient spaceports, mutated forests and radioactive desert dot the landscape as well as the Cryptic Alliances, crackpot factions contesting for the fragments of what used to be.

As a context for storytelling Gamma World gets full marks. Gamma World's crazy mix of high-tech and ruined-garden aesthetics is still my preferred vision of the post-Reaganite era. In Mad Max, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the post-nuclear world is a humorless burned-out husk, but Gamma World is lush and green, a hothouse full of unwholesome life - like dropping the bombs just kicks everything up a notch.

It combines that neo-tribal waste-land adventure with a Riddley Walker, Motel of the Mysteries vibe - familiar artifacts become strange to us, the present day world we walk around in becomes a strange and distant past, a lost technological climax instant for the human race. Poignant and thrilling at the same time.

But Gamma World never caught on in a big way. Some X-factor was missing - maybe it lacked D&D's potent fantasy urtexts. Or maybe it was in the game design? GW's character creation lacks the hard-wired archetypal structure of D&D's class system - sure, mutations are fun, but it doesn't bring the ready-made type-casting of fighter vs magic user vs thief.

And the reward schedule isn't there. You don't go up levels - in Gamma World your base stats go up, and you can find artifacts, and there's a thin chance of further mutation (here I consult the Radiation Matrix), but you don't find that steady treadmill of advancement that keeps D&D and WoW players grinding onward and opening up new areas in the game mechanics.

And of course the nail in the coffin is the post-Reagan New World Order itself, which let the air out of our collective investment in a grim post-nuclear endgame.

But Gamma World keeps being remade, even unto the Sixth Edition. Cormac McCarthy, along with Jericho, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and even Al Gore, show that the devastated future Earth still has a place in the contemporary imagination. I like to think McCarthy would appreciate the final pages of the 1981 manual, a 100-item treasure table full of poignant relics as "57. Jungle gym - fair condition, used," or "1859 Swiss Infantry Sabre - excellent condition, well polished blade." Gamma World is a future with a past that includes the world we see around us, which ought to mean as much as a bunch of halflings.

And, seriously, as futures go, would you rather the boring old Singularity, or Gamma World? Do you really want to float around in space chatting with Farsc4pe_Guy_21 or do you want to explore a secret bunker shattered by nuclear fire, to learn the truth of our elder civilization? Leporinoid art by David Trampier.

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• Gygax spent his formative years reading science fiction authors Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber as well as the fantasy world of Conan the Barbarian via Robert E. Howard's books.
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• In 1953 Gygax first played Gettysburg by Avalon Hill, and later ended up ordering blank hexagonal mapping paper from the same company.
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• In 1966 he founded the International Federation of Wargamers with friends, and in 1967 he organized a 20 person gaming get-together in his basement that was later billed as Gen Con 0. Gen Con is now the world's largest hobby-gaming convention.
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• He founded the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, which was a military miniatures society. This guy sure loved his Associations, Federations, and groups.
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• In 1971, he and Jeff Perren wrote Chainmail, a medieval miniatures game, which later featured a supplementary set of rules featuring magic spells and other fantasy elements.
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• After playing Gettysburg, he became obsessed with finding ways to generate random numbers rather than using traditional six-sided dice. He found a set of the five platonic solids in the back of a school supply catalog and ordered several sets, and later introduced them into gaming in D&D. In fact, owning your own dice and keeping them in a little velvet bag was a sign of geek coolness, back then.
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• In 1974 he formed Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye and released the first set of Dungeons and Dragons rules, and their first run of 1,000 hand-printed editions sold out in nine months, and were later passed around college and high school campuses across the nation.
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• In 1976, TSR introduced the game Metamorphosis Alpha, which later became Gamma World. The game was inspired by Brian Aldiss' novel Starship, and later crossed over into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world with the "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" module. Gygax said the module was meant to show what would happen if a ship like one in Metamorphosis Alpha crashed into a D&D world.
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• In 1982 TSR followed the scifi vein with Star Frontiers, which featured swashbuckling space adventure through the unexplored worlds of the Frontier. This was actually my first introduction to role-playing games, and I have to admit that I loved this game a lot more than D&D. In fact, I'm tempted to dig through trunks to see if I still have the rulebook.
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• Gygax left TSR in 1984 during changes to management, and began working on the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon show.
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• In 1987 Gygax developed Cyborg Commando, a science fiction roleplaying game "set in 2035 at a time when the earth is invaded by aliens called Xenoborgs intent on subduing humanity and taking control of the planet. Luckily humanity has developed a new kind of solider: the Cyborg Commando, a mechanical/electronical man-like structure that can be implanted with a willing human's brain." Unfortunately it was later criticized as "the worst role-playing game ever written."
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• In 1999 he introduced Lejendary Adventure, which was meant to be a return to less-complicated gameplay with an emphasis on fun, although it explored the familiar gaming territory already well-covered by D&D. One of the last projects he had been working on was an expansion module for Lejendary called "Lejendary AsteRogues", as sort of "fantastical science RPG." According to Gygax, "The Lejendary AsteRogues game is actually in the "Fantastical Science" area, not true SF. It is a sort of mix of steampunk and super science with a leavening of Napoleonic Era military material." Sounds pretty scifi to us.
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• He wrote two science fiction short stories, "Pay Tribute" and "The Battle Off Deadstar," which were published in the scifi anthology The Fleet and Breakthrough (The Fleet, Book 3).
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• He has a strain of bacteria named after him: "Arthronema gygaxiana sp nov UTCC393." We hope it's not flesh-eating.
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• In 2000 he appeared as himself on an episode ofFuturama along with Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, and Stephen Hawking. He rolls the dice to determine which greeting to give to Fry.
  

The plot is right out of a Pearl Jam song, or the headlines of a newspaper. When two bullies at school start knocking Ben around for his milk money, the lines between game and real life become blurred. Epect some angsty teen ass-kicking and emo music. Flemish director Nic Balthazar is working on the U.S. version of the film, and he is searching for "The new Leonardo DiCaprio" to star.

Balthazar to remake 'Ben X' in U.S. [Variety]