Huffington broke the news that there was a new Wachowski movie, and she was appearing in it, by tweeting a series of pictures showing "how I'll look in 90 years." Including the one above and this one:

And Huffington also tweeted that it's a "futuristic movie on Iraq." (Presumably looking back at the Iraq war, not just about the country in general.)

No further details were forthcoming, even on Huffington's own site. Speculation among film bloggers is that the Wachowskis are simply doing screen tests for their next project. Cinematical's Erik Davis points out, in an email to Slashfilm, that the Wachowskis did option David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, parts of which take place in a post-apocalyptic future. In Cloud Atlas, a series of nested stories take us forward in time from the nineteenth century to the distant future. It's not clear right now if the Wachowskis are producing the film and reported director Tom Tykwer is still on board, or if the Wachowskis have taken over the directing reins.

Update: Chud insists, based on inside sources, that the Wachowskis aren't actually filming a new movie at all:

In fact, [Huffington]'s participating in tests for their next project. They're just shooting a couple of days this month, but it's all just test footage. As to what that next project is... well, I'm trying to find out. But in the meantime know that the Wachowskis are not shooting a secret movie... I should mention that these are likely camera tests. They're shooting on the RED.

Oh, and here's a picture of Huffington with Lana Wachowski and her parents:

[Slashfilm via Obsessed With Film]

Adams' latest anthology project is called Brave New Worlds, and it'll be published by Night Shade Books, which put out several previous Adams projects. According to Publisher's Marketplace, it'll consist of reprints covering "the best of dystopian fiction from best-selling authors."

But can Adams' new magazine publishing project, Lightspeed Magazine, help stave off the rise of dystopia in the world of short fiction? We can only hope. Published by Prime Books, which already puts out Fantasy Magazine online, Lightspeed will focus more on science fiction, posting four original stories per week. Says the press release:

Lightspeed will be edited by John Joseph Adams, the bestselling editor of anthologies such as Wastelands and The Living Dead, and Andrea Kail, a writer, critic, and television producer who worked for thirteen years on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Adams will select and edit the fiction, while Kail will handle the non-fiction.

Lightspeed will focus exclusively on science fiction. It will feature all types of sf, from near-future, sociological soft sf, to far-future, star-spanning hard sf, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and writers will be encouraged to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. New content will be posted twice a week, including one piece of fiction, and one piece of non-fiction. The fiction selections each month will consist of two original stories and two reprints, except for the debut issue, which will feature four original pieces of fiction. All of the non-fiction will be original.

Lightspeed will open to fiction submissions and non-fiction queries on January 1, 2010. Guidelines for fiction and non-fiction will be available on Lightspeed's website, www.lightspeedmagazine.com, by December 1, 2009.

The artworks include early watercolors of key scenes from the film, and then photomontages using actual location photos. Some of the photomontages are starkly disturbing, with pale gray landscapes where the only splashes of color come from flames and bolts of lightning. You can see how Kennedy took a fairly benign-looking beach and then imagined it strewn with bones, or a truck stop in ruins. Or a tunnel with loads of dead cars and graffiti at its entrance.

Now I'm twice as desperate to see this film. There's tons more at the link. [Hugh Marchant on Flickr, via Sci Fi Cool]

An article in today's Publisher's Weekly traces how the economic crisis and all the resulting social instability have led to two opposite but complimentary trends in book sales. On the one hand, there's the more obvious public interest in flights of fancy to happier, less complicated locales, which present clearer heroes and villains than what people get from the murky financial scandals that dominate the headlines. Seale Ballenger of HarperCollins's Eos Imprint explains:

"We are seeing the trend toward escapism across the board in all areas of publishing right now due to the faltering economy. People really want to focus on something other than the nonstop woes of the world. The escapist nature of SF and fantasy gives readers a doorway into a world very different from their own."

As we saw earlier, that mostly takes the form of urban fantasy. More traditional science fiction dominates the reverse trend, which has seen a huge increase in interest for dystopian fiction. Michael Homler, editor at St. Martin's, says:

"As a recession happens, there is a certain segment of the book population that likes to see it somehow mirrored in the entertainment that they buy....Paranormal, horror and especially apocalyptic-themed novels seem to draw a lot of attention. It hits home with some sort of psychological unease people have and also fits into our still-present fears of terrorism."

Though the impact has been on a smaller scale than that of, say, Twilight, the sales of such books have been exceptional relative to normal expectations. The article singles out the post-apocalyptic reprint anthology Wastelands as one such success story, which is heading into its fifth printing. The 30,000 copies already sold may not necessarily sound like much, but for its publisher, the relatively small Night Shade Books, that's far beyond even the wildest expectations. Another one of their big sellers, the zombie anthology The Living Dead, has already sold 45,000 copies in just six months, partially because readers respond to the thought of a zombie apocalypse, which Night Shade editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen says is really "a secular rapture." I don't know about that, but whatever the underlying motivations, readers are responding to some zombie gore, which can never be a bad thing.

Still, as much as it's tempting to draw a direct connection between social and literary trends, a lot of publishers think the truth is more complicated. The editor-in-chief of Penguin's Ace and Roc imprints, Ginjer Buchanan, says post-apocalyptic and dystopian ficton are more compelling to average readers because they're more instantly relatable than the latest space opera or science fiction offering:

"I'm not sure that the increasing market for apocalypse stories has much to do with the current state of the world....It's science fiction that's accessible to a wider readership. The singularity and nanotechnology can be hard to grasp, but people who have experienced a natural disaster or loss of electricity don't find it so hard to take the leap to thinking about the entire earth flooding, or about electricity not working anywhere."

Even so, it's probably fair to say that recent events have sadly made such scenarios more relatable to more people, and as a result these books now have a larger built-in audience than in the past. But it's not only a question of demand; the supply of potential books has definitely been affected, as publishers are now seeing far more pessimistic submissions:

"We're certainly seeing more submissions of novels with apocalyptic themes-whether it's the general feel of the world in which it's set, or specifically related to an apocalyptic event," says Orbit's [publisher Tim] Holman. "We're also noticing a definite trend toward fantasy that is more bloody, more brutal, and that doesn't end with a magical sword saving the day."

Don't dispair completely, fans of happy endings - the darkness of the setups for these books can also be to make the eventual triumph all the more heroic and inspiring. When the stakes in the real world seem so high and the odds of success so small, it's only natural fiction has to go even further to stay ahead. Also, much as it might be horrible to be stuck in a zombie apocalypse, at least one's goals are pleasingly simple: go kill some zombies. Night Shade's Jeremy Lassen probably puts it best:

"This isn't just about wanting to see people suffering. It's about seeing a protagonist overcome seemingly overwhelming obstacles; in this case, the complete breakdown of the social order. When people are losing their jobs, and banks are failing, and they have no agency or control over their lives, the fantasies of simple problems with simple solutions and of protagonists with agency are very alluring, and apocalypse literature has them in spades."

A final sidebar in the article also explores the current state of race in science fiction. A new boon to the ages-old struggle to improve the diversity of science fiction comes from the current boom market for escapism. Multiple publishers and editors point out the rather obvious fact that people of color are just as interested in escapist fiction as white people, and futuristic or fantastic settings overwhelmingly dominated by white people may not be ideal for that purpose. Verb Noire publisher Mikki Kendall distills the problem to its essence:

"Do we really believe that only white heterosexuals with no physical or mental impairments are worthwhile representations of our future?"

Taken as a whole, there still seems like there's plenty of territory for science fiction to explore, and readers might well be more receptive to the genre than any point in recent history. Although it does seem as though sprawling, morally ambiguous, science-heavy narratives might want to run and hide from the oncoming zombie hordes and dry-humping vampires, at least until the Dow Jones gets back to 9,000.

[Publisher's Weekly]

After meeting Bai Ling the other day, I was inspired to track down the DVD of The Gene Generation, which came out a few months ago. (Our intrepid columnist, Lisa Katayama, reviewed it last year.) The rest of the movie isn't quite as fantastic as this opening sequence, which sets up the whole DNA-rewriting, crazy tentacle-face premise. (The "cheap science fiction movie voiceover opening sequence" is an art form in itself. How many movies have them? I feel like it's become a standard feature.)

After this, the movie sort of descends into a bit of a tawdry melodrama in which Bai tries to save her degenerate gambler brother from the gangsters he owes money to. And then the brother, by coincidence, steals the prototype DNA transcoder, and wackiness ensues. On the plus side, there are golden showers and cool CG vistas, including flying sampans with giant video screens on them. It's very Blade Runner-ish, except if reinterpreted by Uwe Boll.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Lionsgate picked up distribution rights to the Hunger Games movie, which will be produced by Nina Jacobsen and her Color Force production company.

Collins, a former television writer, crafted a thrilling, twisted world where the chosen victims from across a fractured United States have to fight for their lives - while playing to the cameras and trying to win sponsorship deals. (Those sponsorship deals are pretty much the only way to get crucial supplies during those Running Man-esque fights.) The novel's main character, Katniss, is a rough-edged forest hunter, but she learns to pretend to a whole range of emotions, including love for her fellow gladiator Peeta, to win over the audience's sympathies.

We loved The Hunger Games when it came out last fall. And as I said, a movie version of the book sounds like a great idea at first - you can foreground the crazy media hype and oversaturated coverage of the Games, and show how Katniss gets sucked into becoming a packaged commodity even as she's fighting for her life. It could even be a bit Ed Neumeier-esque in its social satire.

But the more I think about it, the more it seems like a Hunger Games movie will inevitably miss the point. First of all, you won't be able to get inside Katniss' head and see how every time she shows emotion, she's inwardly calculating exactly what to show, in order to win over the viewers. (And after a while, she can't even tell what she's really feeling, because she's so busy putting on a performance.) On the movie screen, we'll be as taken in by her performance as those viewers, without any of the undercurrent.

Also, instead of simply seeing the Games from Katniss' point of view - with her aware of the cameras watching her all the time but not knowing how she comes across on camera - the movie will probably give in to the temptation to intercut between Katniss' experience, and how it looks to those outside viewers. Most likely, we'll see some of the events from the point of view of Haymitch, the drunken lout who won the Games before and is now Katniss' main advisor.

Obviously, I know that movies and books are different creatures, and what works in one medium seldom works in another. And usually, I'm the last person to worry about a movie's faithfulness to the book - I'd way rather have a movie that works well as a movie, on its own terms. But this time around, I can't help feeling that the heart of the story will be jettisoned in the transition, and what remains will be barbaric and superficial - the very essence of the world the novel subverts so elegantly. Let's hope I'm wrong.

Recently re-released by Golden Gryphon Press as a trade paperback, Budayeen Nights is a vivid collection of nine tales set in the futuristic Middle Eastern city Effinger created for the Marîd Audran novels he penned from 1987 to 1991. Marîd is hands down one of my favorite science fiction anti-heroes, but more on that brain-blazed bastard later. Richard K. Morgan's writing often captures a similar noir sensibility, but his gritty underworlds can't quite match the Budayeen. Effinger really put the Punk in Cyberpunk. Virtual realities and mirrorshades are swell, but you only get a fully realized urban hellhole from a writer who's really lived one.

The Budayeen is a neighborhood in an unnamed city somewhere in the Levant of the 23rd Century CE. This is a future where the nations of the West and the Far East have torn themselves apart into myriad tiny squabbling fiefdoms leaving the Muslim world supreme. Thronging with thieves, prostitutes, lunatics and hustlers of every stripe, the Budayeen is a thinly disguised version of New Orleans' French Quarter, and some of it's seedier denizens who Effinger knew and loved. The residents of the Budayeen are the cast-off or disaffected from across the globe. Whether a member of the Transgender Continuum, an artist desperate for a muse, or just dedicated to an extralegal career path; they all find an uneasy oasis amidst the stringent demands of Islamic culture. There are no mosques in this anything-for a-buck neighborhood, but plenty of bars and graveyards that never lack for custom, "Business is business, and action is action", is the oft-repeated mantra here. In a swirl of drugs, crime, and decadence, people can live as they choose - but probably not as long as they'd like.

Along with his cultural twist to the film-noir setting, Effinger had a unique take on computer/brain interfaces that makes these stories stand out from (and age better than) the many offerings of the Cyberpunk style of the 1980's. Virtually every aspect of life in this dystopia is affected by the ubiquitous chip-in brain augmentations. Barbara Hambly describes the origin in her introduction to the story "Marîd Changes His Mind":

The technology itself, [George] said, had been designed for treatment of neurological damage. But like all technology, it was immediately seized upon and exploited by the entertainment and pornography industries so that its original intent was almost forgotten.

With an add-on or "daddy" plugged into the back of your skull, you temporarily can possess any knowledge. Need to speak perfect English or Bantu for that big meeting, repair a sewage treatment plant, or bone up on Transoxanian tax codes? No problem. There are even special daddies that turn off your body's need to eat or sleep. The more comphensive "moddys" go in the anterior implant plug at the top of your head. With one of these you can suddenly be a fearless super-soldier or plow through hours of filing and data entry without becoming bored. Total personality moddies transform you into your favorite fictional character. No surprise that the porno moddy industry is enormous. Recordings of superstar Honey Pílar have been voraciously enjoyed by over five billion fans. Moddy addiction begs the question: are these people even whole individuals anymore, or just frameworks for elaborate scripts to run on?

I was glad of the inclusion of Effinger's Hugo, Nebula, and Seiun winning "Schrödinger's Kitten," even though this opening story in Budayeen Nights stands apart from the rest of the collection in tone and setting. It portrays a Muslim woman's very personal relationship with quantum mechanics, faith, and history. If her fate is truly fixed by the will of Allah, what does that mean to He who is All-Wise and All-Knowing? Although still brutally violent, this odd and compact little story will open the mind to interesting thoughts.

The most of other stories deal more with Marîd Audran and the Tilt-a-Whirl filled with broken glass that is his world. Marîd starts out a small-time street punk with delusions of adequacy, a pill-popping coward and pansexual libertine. Vain and cocky, he thinks of himself as a rugged individualist and unwilling Defender of the Downtrodden. He's constantly thrust into situations of ever-increasing responsibility and danger by Friedlander Bey, who rules the Budayeen by that whole iron fist/velvet glove method. The two-hundred year old crime lord Bey is both an avuncular mentor and unforgiving master. He effortlessly justifies his vast empire of influence and finance with the teachings of the Prophet, may Allah's blessing be upon him and peace. Bey does not suffer Marîd's moral lapses lightly, and takes pains to enlighten him.

Against all his better instincts, Marîd must become - if not a hero, then less of a screw-up. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest reading Marîd's exploits in the three kick-ass novels When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss. Look for the recent trade paperbacks from Tor/Orbit with the covers by Howard Grossman and gorgeous illustrations by Craig Mullins.

Effinger's original dialouge really blows me away. The hard-boiled action crackles with language inspired by the noble Qur'an and the poetry of Omar Khayyam. The meticulous research of every detail Muslim culture weaves seamlessly with fully realized portraits from the mean streets. Tough-as-nails corrupt cops and transgender hookers conduct their business with all the formalized flourishes of Arabic ettiqute. Like Turkish coffee, it fills the atmosphere with a rich complexity and leaves you more than a little wired.

Two more Marîd Audran novels were planned and tantalizing fragments of both are in the Budayeen Nights collection. Of course, we can only wonder what might have been. George Alec Effinger died in his beloved New Orleans in 2002, impoverished after many years of painful health problems. In her forward and story introductions, Hambly, who was briefly married to Effinger, rather harshly describes some of the flaws and agonies that plagued a smart, decent and all too mortal man. He went to some very dark and strange places, and met a lots of interesting people there. These encounters fueled the creation of the Budayeen and the weird, dangerous and very human beings who still live and breath in these pages. Go ahead, they won't bite. Unless you pay for it.

Grey_Area is known among the robots as Christopher Hsiang. He means you no harm - he's just here for the books.

The above quotes, from the London Times, come from actors, the director and a producer, during the making of the trippy movie, which contains four interlocking stories. One of the four stories takes place in Meanwhile City, a weird Blade Runner-esque place where you're required by law to believe in a religion - any religion - and an atheist superhero named Preest (Ryan Philippe) flouts the religious authorities.

The good news, says the Times, is the finished product actually makes total sense and the interlocking strands come together in a narratively satisfying final act. (Besides Preest's story, the other stories involve a jilted lover named Milo (Sam Riley), his childhood sweetheart Sally (Eva Green) and a suicidal video artist (also Eva Green). And somehow, Emilia lives in the same building as Preest, even though he's a superhero from an alternate universe. But even though it all comes together in the end, director Gerald McMorrow hints you may have to see the movie twice for it all to make sense.

Honestly, the trailer looks so visually stunning - and so do these newly released stills - that I'm more than willing to go along for the trippy ride. It doesn't hurt that Franklyn combines Blade Runner-esque dystopia and weird/arty urban romantic drama. Even if it never quite makes sense, or god forbid, fails to fall neatly into a pigeonhole, I'm totally there anyway.

New Franklyn images from SciFi Cool. [Times Online]

I'm pretty much a noir addict, especially the works of Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Stark and MacDonald. (I also loved Frank Miller's Sin City comics, back in the day.) There's tons of science fiction noir out there, but it's rare for an SF book to hit my noir sweet spot quite as well as Hammond's first two novels, KOP and Ex-KOP. Hammond avoids any hint of pastiche or satire in his tale of over-the-hill bruiser Juno Mozambe. And he never makes Mozambe remotely loveable or even cool. Mozambe's just as revolting and broken as the world he inhabits.

That's the world of Lagarto, an Earth colony that's gotten royally screwed over by the rest of the human race. It's sort of a New Orleans-esque place, mixed with some third-world country. Lagarto's brandy-making industry collapsed years ago, taking the planet's economy with it, and now all that's left is tourism and vice, which usually turn out to be the same thing. Offworlders come to Lagarto and treat it like their own private playground, and all the locals are corrupt, from the slumdogs of Tenttown to the local money-skimming elites. In a neat metaphor for Lagarto's fuckedness, the steamy planet includes particularly aggressive flies that lay their eggs inside of an open wound within seconds. Any time people get injured, or even nicked, they'll have maggots breeding inside their wounds in no time. There's also something called "the rot" that can eat you alive if you're not careful.

When we first Mozambe, he's a bag-man for the police department, going around collecting protection money from brothels, smack dealers and gambling parlors. He kids himself that he, and the corrupt squad he works with, are helping to keep the city safe by working with organized crime and preventing the city's criminals from running amuck. But Mozambe's just kidding himself, plus the nice stable crime organization he's used to working with is on its way out, and nothing but chaos and worsening corruption are coming in its place. Good honest poppy farming and ass peddling are giving way to snuff films and human trafficking. Mozambe's a dinosaur, increasingly unable to throw his weight around the way he used to. By the second book, Mozambe is pretty much a punching bag for all the lowlifes he used to terrorize. (But it's not much of a spoiler to say Mozambe always comes out on top, mostly because he's still more vicious and cunning than everyone else.)

At times, you could almost kid yourself you're reading a regular noir detective story, because Lagarto is a low-tech backwater, where criminals and cops both use knives and fists a lot of the time. But Hammond uses science-fictional elements to add to the bleakness and paranoia, rather than just at random. The offworld visitors to Lagarto are perfect physical specimens, with lily white skin and chiseled physiques in contrast to the locals, who are all mixed-race and show their ages. The offworlders frequently have enhanced muscles, super-genitals and built-in defenses (like electrocution and poison claws) making them almost impossible to beat in a fair fight. Pretty much every offworlder we meet is a sadistic fuck, who toys with the locals for temporary amusement.

And there are other science fiction touches, as well. Like the holograms people use to communicate, which always wear an eerily happy face no matter how freaked out or pissed off the person's voice may be. And the occasional bits of surveillance technology that the hardscrabble cops manage to scare up.

The main glimmer of optimism in both novels comes from Maggie Orzo, a spoiled rich girl who becomes a police officer and tries to convince Mozambe to help clean up the sewer of the police department. She's young and idealistic, but you also never forget that she's almost as privileged and sheltered as those psychotic perfect offworlders.

Both KOP and Ex-KOP are super fast reads, with enough brutality and corruption to keep you riveted, while they still offer up the occasional glimmer of hope that Mozambe (and Lagarto) can be redeemed. You can probably read either book in one or two sittings. A warning, though: They're not especially well-written, and KOP in particular has some super clunky exposition. At his absolute worst, Hammond doesn't just tell instead of showing. He tells, and then he tells using slightly different words, and then he comes back a page or two later and tells again a couple more times. At his best, his writing is pulpy and cheesetastic, as in this scene, where a kinky pornstar is trying to seduce Mozambe (unsuccessfully):

"Ooh, is it interrogation time?" Liz turned on her "Liz Lagarto: Porn Star" persona. "I don't know anything about any of that, offither." She little-girl lisped the word officer...

I felt weak as I took in her parted lips, her jasmine-smelling hair, her erect nipples... "I said stop it." The words came out limp, as another part of me was becoming anything but.

Really, the writing is no worse than a hundred other detective novels. I used to consume crime fiction like popcorn, and I've encountered far worse prose. The saving grace of KOP and Ex-KOP are the unrepentant nastiness of Mozambe - even when he's trying to be a better person, he expresses it by being a foul bastard - and the slow spectacle of this lifelong asskicker becoming the world's hacky sack. Plus the unrelentingly cruel worldbuilding that goes into Lagarto, which is dystopian and unrelentingly horrible, and almost beyond saving. Supposedly, Hammond is working on a third Mozambe book, and I'm totally on board. [Amazon]

Elton has written about a dozen novels, in between working on comedy TV shows like Blackadder and musicals like the Queen-themed We Will Rock You. His books are a lot bigger in the U.K. than in the U.S., but you can definitely find them here. They're all outrageous, if somewhat obvious, political satires, with broad caricatures of British social "types," but they're also screamingly funny and crazy. (Often approaching Blackadder at its best.) And they frequently include science fictional storylines.

In particular, I'm a huge fan of his early novels, like Stark, Gridlock and This Other Eden. In Stark, it's the near future and the Earth is being destroyed by earthquakes and other disasters, so a handful of rich people decide to build a fleet of rockets and escape to the Moon, to found a new colony there. In Gridlock, an inventor named Geoffrey invents a cheap, environmentally harmless hydrogen-powered car, and so the car industry decides to have him murdered. (In a zany ironic twist, the novel's climax revolves around all the characters trying to get away but being stuck in a traffic jam.) And in This Other Eden, someone invents a type of biosphere called a "Claustrosphere," which allows air, water and other resources to be recycled endlessly, thus allowing its inhabitants to escape from the environmental devastation of the rest of the Earth.

Probably a lot of people's eyes glaze over when they see the words "political" and "satire," but Elton's writing is genuinely funny and demented. It's full of sentences like, "Old Big Beard was as mad as a man with no head who gets a collection of balaclava helmets for Christmas." (I did mention it was very Blackadder-y, didn't I?)

Some of the funniest parts of Gridlock, in particular, deal with the main character Geoffrey, who suffers from cerebral palsy. Elton goes out of his way to base physical comedy around Geoffrey's disability, which might make you uncomfortable — in which case Elton has succeeded in his goal. A running theme in Gridlock is that Geoffrey is able to hide from the auto-industry execs who want to kill him to suppress his hydrogen-powered motor, because nobody ever paid any attention Geoffrey's private life or thought he was capable of anything much, due to his disability.

Geoffrey is a confrontational disability activist who almost changed his last name from "Peason" to "Spasmo," and who tried to start a wheelchair branch of the Hells Angels. He spends a lot of the book outwitting thugs and occasionally actually killing them using only his wits and an assortment of odd gadgets. In the book's best scene, two guys come to kill Geoffrey at his home, and he kills one of them with a robotic arm he's invented to open wine bottles. (The robotic arm stops right next to the man's rear end, and then the corkscrew shoots inside him and pumps tons of compressed air into his arteries.) And then the second man levels his gun at Geoffrey just as another robotic arm lowers Geoffrey's coffee pot full of steaming hot coffee towards the man's head:

As the man cocked his pistol the coffee pot appeared from behind him and levitated upwards until it hovered above his head. Geoffrey had literally only seconds in which to act, but to his lasting credit, he found the time to be cool. Making a huge effort to gain control of his voice he enquired: "Do you take sugar?"

Without waiting for a reply, Geofrrye again hit the button on his remote, and a pint of boiling coffee descended on Frank. Fortunately, Frank did not fire, instead he screamed in agony and began to hop about. Geoffrey's plan, as far as he had one, was at this point to try to get out the door, praying he would have time to stumble out before Frank recovered sufficiently to kill him. However, as Frank hopped about, fate hopped in beside Geoffrey and offered him an altogether more satisfacotry course of action. Frank's agonized jumps had landed him bang on top of the explosive lifting platform. Geoffrey had intended the platform to be used for purposes such as getting wheelchairs into buses, or the paralyzed into bed, but he had no objection to it being employed to fight murderers. It was the work of a moment for Geoffrey to hit his remote for a third time. There was an explosion and the unfortunate Frank sailed out of the window — following exactly the same trajectory that Geoffrey's suitcase had done on the previous occasion. He landed head-first in a flower bed and broke his neck.

It's pretty much all incredibly silly stuff, and you can cut the political lecturing with a spoon. But Elton's novels also whiz along at a hundred miles per hour, with lots of loopy writing, and they carry you along. Well worth tracking down the omnibus volume of Stark and Gridlock, which should take you an afternoon to read.

Actually, it sounds as though Robert Edwards is mostly offended by the anti-Christian themes in Atwood's seminal story of a future theocratic society which uses women as breeders.

But he's latched on to the book's violence, foul language, sexual degradation, "brutal situations," and "prostitution" as reasons to remove it from the classroom. After all, some of the language in the book is stuff students would be expelled for saying in the hallways, so why is it okay to read a book containing it?

"I'm not looking to ban books," says Edwards, who's launched a formal procedure to get the book removed from the school. He considers himself religious, and says that if the school board is going to include books criticizing one faith, then all faiths ought to be opened up for criticism. (Including Zoroastrianism?) A "review committee" is considering the book and will make a recommendation to the "director of education."

In the meantime, Edwards' 17-year-old son, who had been studying the book with the rest of his classmates, will instead study Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a book with no disturbing sexual situations at all. And he'll get to step out of class during discussions on Attwood's book. (In other words? Free period!) [Edmonton Sun]

Note: I'm not suggesting that any of these things are actually planks on John McCain's campaign platform, any more than the "liberal dystopias" I posted a while back were Obama's positions. Neither candidate is running for president on a "dystopia now" slogan, as far as I know. As with the liberal dystopias, this is a collection of broad-brush conservative ideas taken to their furthest extreme. Okay? Then here we go:

Corporations will own your ass.

I couldn't really put this vision of the future better than The Onion:

Having read the futuristic accounts of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, the path our future shall take will be bleak, indeed — but in a much different way.

When the ongoing trend of corporate mergers reaches critical mass in 2030, the scant handful of corporations that remain will be too powerful to resist and will ultimately supplant all government. National borders will crumble, replaced by warring corporate armies who deploy vat-grown Yakuza assassins to take down enemy CEOs in the name of commerce.

I literally could not possibly list all of the corporate-dominated dystopias in science fiction. Think Blade Runner, Neuromancer, or Metropolis. This site argues passionately that a weakened state and the rise of super-powerful corporations which are practically states in themselves is a crucial component of cyberpunk. Walter Jon Williams' books Hardwired and Voice Of The Whirlwind are both about soldiers of fortune and fighters who live in worlds ruled by corporations.

Wikipedia's list of corporate-dominated dystopias in film includes the Alien films, Charlie Jade (TV), The Final Cut, Fortress, Hardware, The Island, Johnny Mnemonic, Max Headroom, One Point O, Parts: The Clonus Horror, Resident Evil, RoboCop, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Super Mario Bros., Tank Girl, Total Recall and The Truman Show.

Probably my favorite corporate-dominate dystopia is in Max Barry's Jennifer Government, where your job is the most important thing about you and your last name is the name of the company you work for. (This is also Superman's favorite book.) There's still a government, but it's weakened and has very little enforcement power over the big corporations, which have grown ever more immoral. To the point where they'll pay someone to organize a "gang-related" shooting at a Nike product launch to give the newest Nikes more cache. Anyway, Jennifer Government writer Max Barry has created an online game called NationStates, and one of the fictional nations includes The Corporate Dystopia Of Wu Corporation:

The Corporate Dystopia of Wu Corporation is a massive, economically powerful nation, renowned for its complete absence of social welfare. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical population of 6.219 billion are ruled with an iron fist by the corrupt, dictatorship government, which oppresses anyone who isn't on the board of a Fortune 500 company. Large corporations tend to be above the law, and use their financial clout to gain ever-increasing government benefits at the expense of the poor and unemployed.

Another favorite dystopia: The Company, in the Doctor Who story "The Sunmakers." Everybody works for The Company, which houses everyone on Pluto and supplies artificial suns and a habitable biosphere, and in return you have to work all the time. The Company levies extra taxes for everything including your death. (Yes, it's a satire of excessive taxation, but it's also a corporate-dominated world.) There's also the awesome dark alternate universe in Charlie Jade, where corporations control everything, chip implants are mandatory, and people are divided into castes. Really, I could be here all year listing corporate dystopias.

It's God's country, and you just live here (unless you blaspheme.)

Church and state are no longer separated, and the state becomes a golden throne for the church to look down on the huddled masses from. One of the classic theocratic dystopias is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, where a quasi-Christian theocracy overthrows the U.S. government and imposes sumptuary laws governing how woman can dress. Pre-marital sex is illegal, and sexual deviance is punishable with corporal — or capital — punishment.

There's also the newly published young adult novel Bad Faith by Gillian Philip, which her husband (I think) describes as "an eerily good picture of what I imagine the USA would be like if Sarah Palin was in charge." In the gloomy future, the One Church runs everything, and gangs of extremists run around beating up anyone who defies the One Church's authority. In the Robert Heinlein story "Revolt In 2100," a small band of Americans rises up against an evil future theocracy. Suzette Haden Elgin's Judas Rose series also includes an evil Christian theocracy that oppresses women.

Allen Steele's novel Coyote also starts out in an authoritarian right-wing theocratic version of the United States, known as the United Republic. (It later collapses in on itself.) Besides religious fanaticism, the other factor driving the rise of the Republic is the paranoid fear of terrorism. And then in Cave Of Stars by George Zebrowski, the Pope takes over the world! And it's bad.

And then there's the fantastic government of the Reverend Jimmy Joe II, who oppresses you in the name of the Lord. Lordy! His regime involves throwing people in prison, where they get beat up by dominatrixes, in the fantastic movie Storm Rebel. You can watch a couple of amazing clips from it here.

You support the troops (by letting them stomp all over you.)

In novels like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a militaristic future Earth is at war with alien bugs, and the military wields great power. (In Troopers, you can't exercise full citizenship, and vote, unless you've served in the military.) There's also the all-male militaristic society of A World Without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pyun.

And then there's Star Wars, especially episodes II and III. George Lucas wasn't exactly subtle in his depiction of a society that gets dragged into an endless war, and the state needs more and more power to pursue its enemies. Freedom dies, not in silence, but to thunderous applause, yadda yadda. And there's the anime movie Ellcia, where unscrupulous people dig up the remains of a super-advanced society and use its advanced technology to found a new militaristic dystopia called Megaronia. No, really — Megaronia.

In Marge Piercy's feminist science fiction classic Woman On The Edge Of Time, our heroine travels to a happy shiny feminist utopia, where men breastfeed and everybody wears hemp underwear. But she also visits an alternate future, a horrendous dystopia where the military control everything.

There's also the whole swathe of narratives where the security state gets out of control, and everyone trades their freedom for security. People are under constant surveillance by a thuggish leadership, as exemplified by Alan Moore's graphic novel V For Vendetta.

We're all forced to go back to some horrendous idealized version of the 1950s.

Just think Pleasantville — a monstrous idealized version of the repressive, horrendous past, when people still thought Doo-wop was music. In this movie, Spider-Man gets a special remote control from a weird old guy, and it zaps him and his sister inside his favorite sitcom, which is an obvious Leave It To Beaver riff. At first, Spidey is overjoyed, but he eventually sees how repressive that B&W conformity really is, and he finally joins his sister in rebelling against the crushing sameness. Luckily, you can make a tree burst into flames just by masturbating.

We didn't sign the Kyoto Accord, and now the planet is trashed.

You could argue that the huge genre of eco-disaster SF represents a dystopia where conservatives have triumphed over nature, our greatest enemy of all. There are almost too many eco-disaster SF stories to list, from Wall-E to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. I went to a reading by Kim Stanley Robinson a while back, where the theme was ecological destruction, and he said he'd written too many works on that topic to choose just one. So he read selections from seven different eco-catastrophes he'd written. There's no shortage of thrilltastic science fiction ecology disaster movies, including The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld.

For ease of reference, we've divided the liberal dystopias into a few major categories:

Political correctness conquers the universe.

In other words, imagine the movie P.C.U. (or better yet, rent it and watch it, it rules) only taken to a much worse extreme.

George Orwell's 1984 might not be quite as much fun as P.C.U. (although the Eurythmics rock the movie soundtrack) but it's in many ways the original template for political correctness with its newspeak and use of language to sanitize everything. It's not, however, such a great example of what we currently mean by political correctness, since the oppressive super-state doesn't display much concern about offending minorities or oppressed groups.

Instead, we should look to Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, about a future dystopia where everybody has to be "average," and if you have any special abilities, you have to suppress them. Are you smarter or more beautiful than other people? The state will use special devices to remove those advantages, so everyone's equal. It's been a TV movie and it's soon to be a major motion picture, 2081. A similar take on an egalitarian dystopia is Facial Justice by famous literary author L.P. Hartley, in which the women of a post-apocalyptic world are encouraged to get a standardized "beta face" so they'll all be equally beautiful. "Go Beta and you won't have to beautify!" the state says.

Similarly, Rob Grant wrote a novel called Incompetence, which takes place in a future United States Of Europe where you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of ability — at all. You have to hire people to do jobs they're not capable of doing, because otherwise you're discriminating. There's also a take-off of Brave New World called Fair New World, in which feminism and super-carefulness are crushing the human spirit.

And then there's The Alphabet Challenge by Russian émigré Olga Gardner Galvin, which is set decades in America's future, when political correctness has taken over. At one point, Howell Langston Toland's business gets vandalized, and he calls the authorities:

He heard a prerecorded message. “If you have a complaint about PeopleCare’s actions, press 1. — If your place of business was rendered unusable by our activists, press 2. — If you plan to file charges, we’d like to inform you that your place of business had been found in violation of a number of the New York City office regulations and/or zoning laws. You are free to file charges, but we’ll be forced to file countercharges. We have a full list of your violations on file. If you want to know what violations, press 3. — If you have any other questions, please stay on the line.”

Howell stayed on the line. A polite young lady looked up the name of his business and the date it was trashed and confirmed that it had indeed been found in violation of several regulations, among them lack of shutters to block out sunlight to accommodate UV-sensitive customers. She also advised Howell that penalties for vandalism were much lighter than for violation of the New York City office regulations and/or zoning laws. Somehow, Howell believed her.

But he later gets his own back, by starting a movement that claims people whose names begin with letters later in the alphabet are victims of terrible discrimination, which the state should remedy.

There's also Liberality For All, the recent comic-book series, where among other things a new set of "Coulter Laws" ban hate speech.

The "nanny state" bans guns, tackle football and sexy dancing.

The classic "nanny state out of control" novel is Rash by Pete Hautman. It's 2076, and the United States of Safer America has outlawed dangerous activities, obesity and verbal abuse. You can't even run a track meet without wearing bulky safety equipment, which slows down runners' times. Bo gets a lengthy prison sentence for spreading a rash through his school.

There's also the awesome future of Demolition Man, where anything nice is illegal, including alcohol, caffeine, contact sports, and unhealthy food. Murder is unheard of, but the price is high: everybody's sort of infantilized and dumb. I also think Christopher Lambert's movie Fortress belongs in this category: it's about an evil future where the government controls how many children you can have.

You could put A Clockwork Orange into this category, both the novel and the film, because of the Ludovico technique, the aversion therapy which the government uses to make Malcolm McDowell's character incapable of any violent or sexual actions. Also, Pandagon argues that you could say Wall-E is about humans being "coddled" by a nanny state from cradle to grave.

Sex and drugs for everyone — whether you want it or not!

The classic oppressive hedonism story, of course, is Brave New World, one of a whole category of stories about "false utopias." People are constantly spouting mottos like, "Better a gram than a damn," and "orgy porgy." And it's soon to be a major motion picture! (With Gattaca's Andrew Nicoll writing and maybe directing, OMG.) There's also Logan's Run, which is all about a world where it's a non-stop party with easy sex and bouncy Prell hair — until you reach a certain age, and then you're dead.

J.G. Ballard also created the Burning Man-esque dystopia of Vermillion Sands in his novel of the same name. In the post-apocalyptic world Vermillion Sands, every pleasure is available, but nothing is true. You could also argue the movie Idiocracy is a dystopia showing what will happen after another 500 years of liberals degrading our culture.

Religion is brutally suppressed, and/or science is the new religion.

In THX-1138, religion is illegal, and you're supposed to work for the government. (And everybody works for the government one way or another, which also puts THX in the final category of socialist dystopias.) And in the famous story "God Pulp," by Pakistani journalist and writer Nadeem F. Paracha, everybody lives under "Astro-Marxism." There's no more hunger or poverty, but religion is banned because it's useless and violent. Only some plucky robots still believe in God, and they head off on a pilgrimage to the planet where they believe God resides.

And then there's the novel Silenced by Jerry Jenkins:

Following World War III, religion is banned. Although a believer, double agent Paul Stephola works for the government agency responsible for persecuting Christians, the National Peace Organization (NPO). He has to keep his faith secret from his wife, Jae, because he is not sure if she will turn him over to her father, a high official in the NPO. Paul want Jae to also become a believer, but will she have the courage to find God amidst persecution?

Also, it turns out that the Emperor banned religion in the Warhammer 40K universe — but he was still worshiped after his death. Irony! And religion is also banned in the future dystopia of Maria V. Snyder's Poison Study. Worship is also illegal in the corrupt future city of Tachames in Sierra St. James' novel Time Riders.

Socialism abolishes private property and radical environmentalists take over.

We touched on some of these awesome stories in our post on conservative science fiction a while back: in particular, there's the fantastic Atlas Shrugged, where America is overrun by liberals who want to "feed the poor
and crush innovation." In Falling Angels by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the "Greens" take over the world and do such a good job of controlling greenhouse gases, the world is gripped in a terrible new Ice Age.

If you want a straight-up Communist takeover of the U.S., there's always C.M. Kornbluth's paranoid Not This August. And then there's the British 1907 classic What Might Have Been: The Story Of A Social War, which recounts an alternate future where the Labour Party takes power for the first time and seizes private property to fund the insatiable demands of the Welfare State, leaving good poeple with no alternative but to rise up and revolt.

Long-running space-opera Star Trek isn't strictly about time travel of course. But it's amazing how often Starfleet's crews seem to travel back in time — Kirk and friends visited the 20th century on a few occasions, and stopped by planets that looked just like 20th century Earth on several others. Voyager went to 1990s Earth and matched wits with Evil Bill Gates. And two of the Trek movies so far have featured trips back to our present or near future.

At the other end of the spectrum from Trek is the Terminator franchise, which has always featured visitors from a shitty future coming back and trying to tinker with events in the present. Usually revolving around John Connor, the future hero. There's a nice moment in a recent episode of the Sarah Connor Chronicles where Brian Austin Green and the rest of his scruffy mob of freedom fighters appear (naked as usual) in the present, and marvel at how clean and nicely built everything. It's a half-remembered dream from their youth.

Both Star Trek IV and Terminator involve people (and things) journeying back from the future to the 1980s. But in Trek, the present is a crude time, when people practice "medieval" medicine and go around talking about their asses all the time. Kirk and friends have a hard time fitting in, because they're so advanced. In the Terminator, meanwhile, the danger comes from the future. The people of the mid-1980s are backward technologically, and refuse to believe the truth about the coming Skynet takeover. But they're also living in a promised land compared to the world Kyle Reese comes from.

Terminator 2 also features a visitor from the messed-up future bringing danger, plus another visitor bringing salvation, as they both try to mess around with the timeline. But it also introduces the idea that the seeds of the horrible future are already here, in the form of the nascent Skynet and Cyberdyne.

Similarly, in First Contact, Trek finally travels back into a past where things are fucked up — even worse than the present — but the seeds of the wonderful future are already present, in the form of Zephram Cochrane's warp-travel experiments and the first meeting with the Vulcans.

And, of course, time travel apparently plays a huge role in J.J. Abrams' upcoming Trek movie, due out in May. People who've seen the new full-length trailer say it includes young Spock (Zachary Quinto) and old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sitting hand in hand, watching the Enterprise sail past. (Okay, they don't hold hands.)

I would be shocked — well, mildly surprised — if the movie doesn't include a scene where old Spock tells young Spock how great the future is going to be, and how wonderful his life with Jim will turn out. Not to mention how nice the Next Generation-era Federation is going to be. That's sort of an obligatory scene in the visitor-from-a-lovelier-future school of science fiction.

Does Terminator 4 include time travel? We don't know yet. It does take place in our future, after the rise of Skynet. So if there is any time travel, it'll mean visiting our future. (In much the same way that Abrams' Trek is visiting our future, but the franchise's past.) I suspect there will be a time-travel element of some sort in the movie, judging from this bit in the official synopsis:

But the future Connor was raised to believe in is altered in part by the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a stranger whose last memory is of being on death row. Connor must decide whether Marcus has been sent from the future, or rescued from the past.

Rumor has it that Marcus is from the past, the product of a cyborg experiment by Skynet. But he could be from further in the future, for all we know.

With both Star Trek and Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins opening next May, we'll see dueling time-travel narratives. Or really, we'll see dueling versions of the future. Trek will show us the start of Starfleet's golden age, when James Kirk is just on his way to becoming a captain and a century of radness lies ahead. And TSTFB (not the greatest acronym) shows us John Connor at the start of the most hellish period of Skynet domination, when everything has already been wrecked and he's having to lead the resistance against the machines.

Which version of the future will audiences prefer? Star Trek's sunny future, including a pointy-eared visitor from an even sunnier future? Or Terminator's bleak and horrendous dystopia, which may include a visit from an even more dystopian time further in the future? I guess we'll find out next May — but a lot depends on how we feel about our present. If we see ourselves as living in a backward, messed up era, like the "present" that Captain Kirk regularly visits, then maybe we'll gravitate towards Trek's vision that things get better. If we see ourselves as living in a brief patch of sunshine before things get worse, then we'll embrace the Terminator worldview. (And yes, whether we prefer J.J. Abrams or McG as a director could have something to do with it too, I guess.)

[Deathrace Official Site via IESB]

Here are the top 10 books to read to save the world, according to Sci Fi's visitors:

• 1. 1984 by George Orwell
• 2. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
• 3. Dune by Frank Herbert
• 4. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
• 5. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• 6. The Stand by Stephen King
• 7. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• 8. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• 9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• 10. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

Similarly, the TV choices include a lot of paranoia, anti-authoritarianism and apocalytic narratives, with a dash of optimism further down the list:

• 1. Firefly
• 2. Battlestar Galactica (2004)
• 3. The X-Files
• 4. Heroes
• 5. Stargate: SG-1
• 6. Doctor Who
• 7. Star Trek: The Next Generation
• 8. Babylon 5
• 9. Star Trek
• 10. Buffy The Vampire Slayer

And here are the top movies. I'm not sure what the world-saving message of Jurassic Park is, other than "don't clone dinosaurs." There's a definite optimistic strain in a couple of these choices, like 2001 and Close Encounters, but otherwise it's pretty much doom across the board. Science goes too far, humans ruin the Earth, we're too violent and ignorant, and we're likely to become slaves of machines. Or enslave our own creations.

• 1. Blade Runner (1982)
• 2. The Matrix (1999)
• 3. The Terminator (1984)
• 4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• 5. Jurassic Park (1993)
• 6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• 7. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
• 8. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• 9. Children of Men (2006)
• 10. Armageddon (1998)

So what do you think? Can 20,000 readers be wrong?

The 20,000 respondents in the Sci Fi poll voted "reading" the number one thing to do to save the world, so the Visions For Tomorrow initiative will partner with Booksfree.com, the internet's biggest paperback and audiobook rental service. If you sign up for Booksfree through Sci Fi's Visions For Tomorrow site, you get an extra 20 percent discount. The other activities that could save the world included recycling, giving blood, voting, eating healthy and being kind.

Visions For Tomorrow is the Sci Fi Channel's public affairs campaign, which aims to use the power of science fiction to inspire people and organizations to "meet the growing challenges of the future."