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]

So now that the first two hours of AMC's remake of The Prisoner have already aired, you've had a chance to form your own impressions of the sandy, angsty reimagining of the 1967 classic. (The remaining four hours air tonight and tomorrow night.)

Maybe it's unfair to compare this show to the original — but if the producers didn't want that, they should have called it something different. And honestly, even if you pretend that the original show never existed, this snorefest still wouldn't be winning me over, with its vacuous mysteries and uninvolving plot twists. After reading the comments on my preview post yesterday, I'm aware that some people are really enjoying this remake so far, and I'd love to hear more about what you liked about it. Maybe you'll even change my mind — but for now, I'm still on the side of the haters.

So here are the six main changes from the original that really didn't work for me at all.

6) Humanizing Number 2. I really would have loved to have seen Sir Ian McKellen portraying Number 2 as he was in the original series — especially the Leo McKern version. Instead, we got McKellen playing a much more human figure, who's got a comatose wife and a rebellious teenage son. I can see how this felt like a great idea, because it lets McKellen do more Acting, switching from smiling patriarch of the Village to tormented father and husband. But it also kind of erases the point of Number 2, which is that he's a kind of archetypal authority figure. I also couldn't quite bring myself to care about Number 2's son, and his relationship with Number 2. There was just too much staring into space for my liking.

And when Number 2 managed to be more like the classic version, it was great. The bit where Number 6 says "If I open my mind, you'll take it away from me," and Number 2 responds "Maybe we will. But we always give it back," was great and left me wishing for more of those moments. Why couldn't we have had more of a battle of wills — and wits — between 6 and 2? Which brings me to:

5) Wimpifying Number 6. Science-fiction author Steven Barnes puts it best: This show should have given us Jason Bourne in the Village. If you're going to update the premise, give us an updated James Bond-esque superspy battling against the one enemy he can't overpower: excessive normality and niceness.

Instead, we get a Number 6 who's just sort of a schlubby, ordinary guy, a pencil pusher at some big corporation who resigned because he felt kinda bad about stuff. And nobody even cares why he resigned anyway, they just want him to settle in and live in the Village. It's all a bit underplayed — and because Number 6 is so non-formidable, the Village becomes less scary as well. It doesn't take that much to keep this Number 6 down, and that means the Village doesn't need to muster much power or cleverness.

4) Bringing in the evil corporation. I get it — the Cold War is over, and now the biggest threat to our individual liberty is evil corporations. Which is why they've become such a cliche of late. But the evil SummaKor, the company that Number 6 resigns from, feels like the blandest stereotype of a corporate monster, and we never really fear it. We never really know who's behind the original 1967 Village, but it feels like Brave New World mashed up with 1984. Knowing (or at least suspecting, after two hours) that Enron is the Big Bad this time around just feels a bit cheap somehow. Good job, Ralph Nader.

3) Toning down the surrealism. Every now and then, this show lets rip with the surrealistic, bizarre touches. I love the fact that the only food that you can eat in the Village is "wraps" — it's like my worst airport food nightmare. I utterly adore the psychiatrist and his weird doppelganger in episode two. And I'm completely obsessed with the freaky soap opera that everyone in the Village watches obsessively.

If the whole show had been more like that, I would be singing its praises. But those moments are few and far between, sadly, and the rest of the show feels too pedestrian and, weirdly, too anchored in our reality. There are basically two ways to go with a Prisoner reboot — in an era that's already seen David Lynch and David Cronenberg, you can try to out-Lynch Lynch and go for the full-on crazy. Or you can go for a more conventional spy thriller, of the type Patrick McGoohan would have sneered at. But this show didn't really commit to either direction.

2) Toning down the totalitarianism. The Village should be oppressive and conformist, and above all creepy, with everyone playing their parts with apparent cheer and good humor. Instead, everyone in the 2009 Village seems a bit grumpy, and nobody is particularly subtle about their dislike of the place. It's never entirely clear how these people are being kept down, also — we glimpse the giant balloon, Rover, a few times, but not enough to make the single bubble seem like enough to keep everyone down. Every now and then, someone is dragged off to the Clinic or other terrible locations, never to be seen again — but the Village just doesn't feel powerful enough to keep down the resentment that emanates from every single person in it. These people don't seem to be co-opted enough, for the Village to feel believable. (And generally, the show is so low-energy, that you wind up wondering if people are just too sleepy to fight back against the Village.)

1) That whole "OMG the Village is hollow and I haz touched the sky" thing. When I said yesterday that there was one major change that bothered me more than any other, this is what I meant. We're hit over the head, in those first two hours, with the idea that everyone in the Village believes it's the only place in the world. You might as well believe in aliens as believe there's such a place as New York or London, Number 2 says at one point.

For various reasons, this just doesn't work for me at all, and feels like a really bad decision — if the Village is the only place in the world, then escape really is impossible. And questions like whether Number 6 is a number and why he resigned become sort of academic — the only context in which Number 6 could ever exist is here. It also makes the Villagers seem a bit idiotic, since they never ask the obvious questions like where all their food and gadgets and things come from — we never see enough farms or factories to make all that stuff.

But mostly, it turns the conflict between Number 2 and Number 6 into a debate over whether the outside world exists. Which feels really dull and done to death, in ways that the original 2-versus-6 conflict never did. We've gotten a million stories where people are stuck in an isolated enclave and taught that nothing else exists, and it's one of the dullest plots you can do. Plus, for us the viewers at home, there's never any doubt that yes, New York does exist. So any potential ambiguity or ability for us to identify with the Villagers goes out the window.

But enough of my blasphemous free-thinking critiques. What did you guys think?

Interviewed by Terry Bisson, Robinson explains:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we're trying for as a civilization.

It's a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells's stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

There are a lot of problems in writing utopias, but they can be opportunities. The usual objection-that they must be boring-are often political attacks, or ignorant repeating of a line, or another way of saying "No expository lumps please, it has to be about me." The political attacks are interesting to parse. "Utopia would be boring because there would be no conflicts, history would stop, there would be no great art, no drama, no magnificence." This is always said by white people with a full belly. My feeling is that if they were hungry and sick and living in a cardboard shack they would be more willing to give utopia a try.

And if we did achieve a just and sustainable world civilization, I'm confident there would still be enough drama, as I tried to show in Pacific Edge. There would still be love lost, there would still be death. That would be enough. The horribleness of unnecessary tragedy may be lessened and the people who like that kind of thing would have to deal with a reduction in their supply of drama.

So, the writing of utopia comes down to figuring out ways of talking about just these issues in an interesting way; how tenuous it would be, how fragile, how much a tightrope walk and a work in progress. That along with the usual science fiction problem of handling exposition. It could be done, and I wish it were being done more often.

[Shareable via Resilience Science]

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 novel is Terminator: From The Ashes, by Star Wars veteran Timothy Zahn, published by Titan Books. And the comics are called simply Terminator Salvation: Official Movie Prequel (although the storyline appears to be called "Sand In The Gears." The comics are published by IDW, and they're written by Dara Naraghi and drawn by Alan Robinson. There's also a comic called Terminator Salvation #0, which appears to be a comic-book adapation of the first 20 minutes of the movie.

In From The Ashes, we catch up with John Connor and his wife Kate, in the bleak world of 2018. John's squad includes the super-bad foot-soldier Barnes (played by Common) and the master-dogfighting pilot Blair (Moon Bloodgood). They figure out where Skynet is going to launch its next Terminator attack against the human survivors, and they hatch a plan to capture Skynet's supply base while all its Terminators are distracted by the attack. But Connor doesn't know that the survivors who are Skynet's next target include the young Kyle Reese and his friend, the mute little girl Star (played by Jadagrace in the movie).

In the "Sand In The Gears" comic, meanwhile, John Connor is only peripherally involved, and none of the movie's other supporting cast appears. The main storyline involves a a group of Resistance fighters who launch a two-front operation against Skynet, in Niger and in the United States. The Niger operation involves an Arab resistance fighter, Yusuf, who must learn to trust Lysette, a French doctor who hasn't bothered to learn any Arabic, and who used to treat only the important people at the local mining company. Now that civilization has collapsed, can these two set their differences aside and work together? The answer may not surprise you. And in the U.S. part of the anti-Skynet operation, an old guy named Jackson whose family died in a Terminator attack seeks revenge, while Elena, a woman who's in love with John Connor realizes he'll never see her as anything but a good soldier.

The most interesting thing about both the novel and the comics is the portrayal of human survivors who haven't joined the resistance. In From The Ashes, Kyle Reese and Star go to live at Lost Mouldering Ashes, a community of about 250 people who are sheltering in a ruined building, trading gasoline for supplies and food. The community's leader, Grimaldi, is a former corporate executive who's used to being in charge but has no idea how to deal with a military struggle. And Grimaldi wrongly believes that Skynet will leave his community alone if the humans don't offer any provocation. When other communities have been attacked, Grimaldi believes the resistance brought Skynet's wrath down on them. The community's other main leader, former Marine Sgt. Orozco, realizes that Grimaldi is wrong about Skynet, but he has his own reasons for not wanting to join the Resistance.

Meanwhile, in "From The Ashes," another group of human survivors refuses to help Elena's operation against Skynet. Their leader, old man Jackson, says: Every time your joke of a Resistance pays us a visit, you're that much more likely to bring the damn Terminators down on us.... We'd rather just live our lives under the radar. The war is over. We lost. All's I care about is the survival of my family. It's only after Terminators wipe out his family that he swears revenge against Skynet and decides to help Elena's operation.

The other plot strand that these prequels set up is John Connor's struggle to get the Resistance to take him seriously. In the novel, particularly, he launches an ambitious plan to capture - not destroy - a Skynet supply/repair facility, because he needs to prove himself to the Resistance. The orgnazation is run by former generals and admirals, and has a relatively good supplies and ammunition. But they don't entirely trust Connor or see him as a valuable part of the fight against Skynet. At the end of the novel, he's finally proven himself enough to get brought into the Resistance chain of command proper, but he's still just one link in that chain, without much authority - even though he knows more about Skynet and Terminators than anyone else.

If you're only going to get one Terminator Salvation prequel, I'd recommend From The Ashes - for one thing, it does introduce the movie's main cast, except for Marcus Wright. For another, it's a pretty engaging war story, with enough cool action set pieces to keep you turning the pages. It gives a nice sense of how the world of 2018 works, with all the different types of Terminators running around, all networked to Skynet - so it knows whatever they know.And the main extra character, Sgt. Orozco, is an interesting enough chraacter that I was sorry he doesn't pop up in the movie (according to IMDB, anyway). Orozco's struggle to save a community he knows is doomed is pretty compelling, and his battle of wills with the stuffed shirt Grimaldi will no doubt remind you of all the delusional middle managers you've encountered in your own life. From The Ashes doesn't reinvent the war novel, or anything, and I couldn't honestly tell exactly what was supposed to be going on in about half the fight scenes. But all the sequences where Blair flies around and outwits Hunter-Killers (earning the name Hunter-Killer Butt-Kicker, or Hickaback for short) are pretty thrilling.

"Sand In The Gears," meanwhile, feels more non-essential. There were long stretches where I felt like Dara Naraghi wanted to write a story about Arab and French people learning to understand each other, and decided to use this opportunity to get it in front of a lot of Terminator fans. On the other hand, the stuff with Jackson's delusions that Skynet will leave his group of survivors alone were a nice compliment to Grimaldi's in the book. And the comic includes some great scenes of a T-600 trying to impersonate a human, with mixed success. There are some nice panels of T-600s squashing people's heads and running rampant through the post-apocalyptic landscape. But you won't have a great aching void in your life if you skip the prequel comic.

And then there's Terminator Salvation #0, which is an adaptation of the movie's beginning. It has a lot of the lines of dialogue you've heard in the trailers, including "If you can hear this, you are the Resistance," and "This is not the future my mother warned me about." It starts out with Marcus Wright in the 1990s, about to be executed for killing someone. A woman comes to him and offers him one more chance to donate his body to an experimental research program, and he finally says yes in exchange for a kiss. Then he's executed, and the next thing he knows, it's 2018 and Los Angeles has gone way downhill. He's about to become toast, until Kyle Reese and Star swoop down and save him. ("Come wiht me if you want to live," Kyle says.) Meanwhile, the Resistance leaders are suspicious of John Connor - again. He's the only survivor of an assault on a Skynet facility. (He escaped in his helicopter, with the dead pilot, just as everything blew up, while a Terminator clung to the helicopter skids.) Other Resistance fighters stand up for Connor and say they're sure he's not a collaborator. Plus, they found a purported list of Skynet's main human targets, and John Connor's name was second on the list. Top of the list was some random teenager named Kyle Reese. Connor says the Resistance leaders are being too cautious to win against Skynet, trying to outsmart an enemy a thousand times smarter than they are. He and the Resistance brass have this great conversation;

Random stuffed shirt: The men say you're going to lead the Resistance some day. You expect us to just hand over control to you, is that it?
Connor: No, I expect Skynet to kill you. I'll have to fight alongside whoever's left.

The Resistance has a new plan to defeat Skynet: a signal that will basically turn off all of the machines, everywhere. A secret "off button" that was installed before Skynet even took over. And they want Connor to test it. Oh, and the new timeline is so bad, that the horrible future John Connor's mother used to describe to him seems mild by comparison. "The future I used to dread is the only hope I have left," he says in a voiceover caption.

All in all, reading all this preview material has made me more excited for the movie, which I was already looking forward to. It's in the nature of prequels (and media tie-ins generally) to be non-required reading - although it sounds like the new Star Trek movie makes more sense if you've read the prequel comics. But these tie-ins are like most: they provide a bit of extra backstory and give you an extra story to sate your cravings in between the movies or TV shows. But From The Ashes is a pretty bracing war story about an army fighting without support from the last few remaining civilians, which is always a good basis for a tale.

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]

Last Friday's episode of Dollhouse might actually be my favorite so far. (Yes, even better than "Man On The Street.") If it had aired any other week, it might have beaten out Sarah Connor Chronicles for best hour of television of the night. I think it hit me harder than any hour of Dollhouse so far, because it was so character-driven. Almost all of our characters revealed something surprising about themselves, including Echo as well as all the Dollhouse's various cogs.

It didn't start off terribly promisingly, of course — we launch into a twisty episode with a scene of Echo programmed as a dominatrix, lecturing Boyd about her profession. Sure, I cringed. But replay their conversation after you watch the rest of the episode, and it takes on a new significance. It's not about pain, it's about trust — letting go and trusting someone else. And it's up to Boyd to deliver the episode's moral in advance, in a moment worthy of Kerr Avon: "In my experience, trust usually leads to pain."

So in the episode's main plot, someone has infiltrated the Dollhouse and has installed a tiny piece of hardware designed to meddle with Topher's brain imprints. So if Topher programs someone to be a cheerleader, this other person can make that Doll a cheerleader-assassin. Or an assassin who cheers. (This person would not only need to have access to the equipment, but also the knowledge to add parameters to Topher's programs, which is why I'm wondering if this episode's final explanation really is final.)

So first the Dollhouse's head of security, Lawrence Dominic (played by the brother from Journeyman! This may be the last time I can point out this fact) has the oft-abused Doll Sierra programmed with super-spy skills. And for about ten shining minutes, this show finally lives up to the stereotype that it's Alias with brain imprints. It turns out the NSA has really, really bad security (and computers whose screensavers read "NSA") and Sierra gets in and out with no trouble, along with a file containing the name of the spy in the Dollhouse.

But meanwhile, Echo actually comes to the brainmaster, Topher, and asks him to imprint her with a personality that can help. I think I went to the Attic for a moment when I saw that: Echo is self-aware enough to know what Topher is doing in his zappy room, but also enough to ask him to do it to her. WTF?

Through Echo's detectiving, we get to peel back more layers of the lies and soul-rot within the Dollhouse. Topher is not just an arrogant jackass, but also (not surprisingly) deeply insecure and craving approval. His assistant Ivy is at least as smart as he is, and will probably destroy him one day. Dr. Claire Saunders never leaves the Dollhouse — she's there 24/7, tending to the Actives. (Does she use their co-ed showers? The mind boggles.) And Boyd Langdon breaks it down, in another great Avon-ish moment: "We're pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way." (Seriously, just imagine Paul Darrow reciting all of Boyd's dialogue. It works!)

And meanwhile, the Doll November (Miracle Laurie) returns to her life as Mellie, the good-natured and cuddly neighbor of FBI agent Paul Ballard... but she's been programmed with another extra parameter. This time, Mellie suddenly busts out with a warning that she's a Doll, that she's spying on Ballard, and that he needs to find the deeper purpose behind the Dollhouse. And yes, once again, Ballard needs to wear a bib so he doesn't make a stain when he's constantly being spoonfed information. (At least he has the cool wall file, showing that he is actually doing his own research.) At the same time, I really felt for Paul, finding out the one meaningful relationship in his life was with a Doll.

So Lawrence Dominic, who turns out to be the NSA mole inside the Dollhouse, tells Adelle that he's actually been protecting the Dollhouse for real, and that Ballard would have found the Dollhouse by now if not for him. Is Dominic lying? Are these "secret messages" that Dolls keep giving Ballard just keeping him off the trail? Or is Dominic not the person who's been sending these messages to Ballard? (Plus, how does this connect with Alpha, the other person who was spoonfeeding Ballard.)

But the most startling character moments in the episode involved Victor and Adelle DeWitt. When Adelle first left at the start of the episode, for a Rossum corporate retreat, I assumed actor Olivia Williams was busy and they'd written her out of the episode. And when Victor gave the flowers to his elderly "Miss Lonelyhearts" client, and then suddenly drove away, I assumed he was going off mission — maybe due to another hacked imprint. But no.

I'm sorry, I have to say it: Adelle DeWitt is not only the president of the Dollhouse, she's also a client. And the scenes between her and Victor were genuinely heart breaking. He's Roger, her ideal man, who accepts her messed-up life and the fact that she's gone from growing replacement organs to working for an organization of "philanthropic pimps and killers." He challenges her and holds her and kicks her ass at fencing, and throws her phone away, and tries to get her to run away with him and open a bar.

And Adelle knows, better than anyone, that Roger's only a ghost of a real person. There's a real person in there somewhere, or fragments of several real people, that Victor has assembled into a comprehensive profile. But Roger can never be real to her, and no real person can understand her or accept her the way he can. (Of course, on the upside, nobody but Adelle will remember the weekends she and Roger spend together.) In these scenes, we see a vulnerable, open side to Adelle that we've never seen before — so of course, she gets kicked in the teeth, repeatedly by betrayal. (And the phone-tossing turns out to have been a really bad idea. What if the mole had programmed Roger to kill her?)

The final scenes, of Adelle standing there with a gunshot wound to the stomach and not even caring, were totally brutal. She's realized who she has to be to survive this ugly, ugly house she's gone to work for. She has to be the biggest monster of them all, able to watch her former friend and associate mentally wiped from existence, consigned to a hellish dementia, without even blinking. The pain in her stomach is nothing. Even before she tells Topher to retire the "Roger" persona, we already know she's not going back there again.

(And the whole Adelle subplot, I think, finally answered once and for all, the question of why people need to spend so much money to hire Dolls. It's not just closeted gay people, or kinky people who are ashamed of their needs, as Claire Saunders tells Boyd — it's anyone who needs to experience a vulnerability (or power) that they can't afford to experience in their "real" lives. Because those experiences would destroy them if they were "real." The urges that drive you to pay huge sums to the Dollhouse are almost always self-destructive impulses. )

And yes, the whole "sending Lawrence to the Attic" thing was monstrous and terrifying, and kind of awesomely intense.

But the most interesting thing, for me, was the whole debate over who Echo is. Is she going to "erase" the Dollhouse, like Dominic thinks? Will her growing awareness and cleverness finally bring the house down around her? Or will she save the Dollhouse, as Adelle believes? Could they both be right? Or neither of them?

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.

Writing in the New York Times the other day, Robert J. Shiller says that the same kind of understanding of the way people behave seems to have helped journalist Johannes Steel predict World War II in 1934, and Obama aide Lawrence Summers to predict our current economic meltdown in 1989:

Rather than depending exclusively on quantitative analysis, this method relies on a "theory of mind" - defined by cognitive scientists as humans' innate ability, evolved over millions of years, to judge others' changing thinking, their understandings, their intentions, their pretenses. It is a judgment faculty, quite different from our quantitative faculties.

This sounds somewhat less statistically based than the theory of psychohistory, as expounded by Isaac Asimov, but still somewhat similar in terms of trying to predict mass behavior using psychology as well as other factors:

Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along the curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years that must elapse before a struggling new Empire could emerge from the ruins.

Certainly, Asimov turns out to have been a major influence on one of the current crisis' most prescient forecasters, Princeton economist Paul Krugman. From a recent profile in Newsweek:

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the "Foundation" series-"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism'."

[via Change.org]

- Sleep Dealer director Alex Rivera, talking to Wired.

Image by Edward Burtynsky.

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.

"What I would like to see is more movies where we see the apocalypse, but then we ALSO see how hard work, changing our life-style, and being supportive can bring communities together. I don't want just a "look we saved the day by killing the enemies" ending or a "we found the cure that saved the world" ending, but I want a film full of actual steps toward making our world a better place to live in. How do we do that?" [Beer And Scifi]

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]

The show's director and stars met the press and showed off some clips at a press tour.

The good news? The footage sounds cool. And the show will keep some of the trippy edge from the original, although it's not a straight-up remake. You may want to have some acid handy, says co-star Lennie James (from Jericho.) And "Rover," the deadly balloon, definitely makes an appearance. The bad news? Among the changes is the fact that Number 2 has a rebellious son — bringing to mind visions of Scott Evil from Austin Powers.

Here are the scenes the press saw:

Number Six (James Caviezel) wakes up in the Truman Show-esque Village, and is startled when Number 313 (Ruth Wilson) tells him his name is Number Six now. A cab driver, Number 147 (James) drives him around.

Then we meet Number 2 (Ian McKellen), a popular leader who wears pristine white suits and laughs a lot, and his estranged son, Number 11-12 (Jamie Campbell Bower). Number 313 tells Number 2 that Number 6 feels "alone," and Number 2 says "That's good." Then Number 6 tells 313 that his only problem is that he's being held here against his will.

At first 147, the cab driver, is happy in the Village, but he begins to doubt the paradise he lives in. And Number 6 starts to work on using 11-12's estrangement as a weapon against Number 2.

There's also an intense scene — which may be a dream sequence. Number 6 is tied to a pole in the desert. Number 2 walks up and taunts him by pouring some water on the ground. Then Number 2 puts a grenade in Number 6's mouth, pulls out the pin, and walks away. [IGN]

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.