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.

Endgame: Bronx Lotta Finale is what Samuel Beckett would have done, if he'd been clever enough to think of monkey guys with machine guns. (And if he'd been albe to let go of that whole "trashcan" obsession.) Yet another classic Italian Mad Max ripoff, in the vein of 2019: After The Fall Of New York and Bronx Warriors, Endgame is a cut above the rest. First of all, there's the title. What does "Bronx Lotta Finale" mean? It's not the Italian title, which is either Endgame: Gioco Finale or Il Mutanti. (According to Google Translate, "Lotta Finale" is Italian for "Final Fight." But I still think someone thought it sounded good in English, like "It's not just a little finale, it's a lotta finale!")

Anyway, this movie has everything. If it's not there, it's obviously something movies don't need. In a nutshell, it's a post-apocalyptic future, and the tattered remains of society are kept entertained by a Running Man-esque game where a handful of guys track the most dangerous prey in an urban environment... and whoever survives is the winner. There's plenty of post-apocalyptic city chasing and fighting action, and then a telepath named Lilith recruits the baddest urban gladiator to help her and her fellow mutants get out of the city, to reach a kind of sanctuary thingy. They have to travel across the post-apocalyptic landscape, full of evil mutants, to reach their goal. But first, our hero, Shannon, has to go around recruiting people to be on his team. People with names like "Ninja" and "the sharpshooter with the eyepatch." Cue dialogue like, "His name is Ninja. And he doesn't socialize."

After many unfortunate post-apocalyptic run-ins, the telepath Lilith gets captured and tied up by a fish-headed mutant, who says stuff to her like, "You sure know how to turn a guy on." And then he falls asleep, at which point the good guys rescue her and kill the fish guy. (As you can see in the clip above.) And they face the eternal dilemma: what do you do about the guy the mutants have embedded in concrete except for his hands and face?

But anyway, despite having everything, Endgame is at heart a Mad Max clone, so you get some amazing rumble-in-a-quarry sequences like this one, where everybody looks at each other for like ten minutes before they all jump on their motorcycles, dune buggies, space cars and RVs, and try to kill the shit out of each other. Oh, and this second clip is probably NSFW, due to a glimpse of mostly naked people wearing yellow socks on a post-apocalyptic dune buggy:

Why are they all just staring at each other? Are they like, "Should we do this? I don't know if we should do this or not. Do you want to do this? I wish I'd put sparklers on my bike wheels if I'd known today was going to be gravel-quarry-rumble day." Oh, and I love the monkey guy in the turtleneck. He's on his way to an art gallery opening after this.

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.

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.

Not according to Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomat school. Like Ernest Callenbach's seminal book Ecotopia, Panarin foresees the Western states splitting off to form their own independent Republic of California. But he sees them either becoming part of China, or under Chinese influence, not becoming an eco-friendly paradise. Meanwhile, the midwestern states will become part of Canada or under Canadian influence, the states around Texas will become part of Mexico or under Mexican influence, and the East Coast liberal elites will finally join Europe. (Oh, and Russia gets Alaska back, making Sarah Palin's boast that she can see Russia a reality at last.)

It's all pretty fanciful stuff, although I think the timetable is what makes it especially ludicrous. If he'd placed his predictions of fracturing in the 2020s or 2030s, it would be somewhat harder to dispute them. What makes Panarin's doomsaying somewhat more significant is that the Russian state-owned media has been pushing it hard, and he's been invited to lecture on it constantly. So the real news is that Russia is promoting these crackpotty views as quasi-official state futurism.

Panarin compares himself to the people who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union a decade or two before it happened — which may be the real reason his views are so popular in Russia now. It's our turn to feel the ground collapse out from under us. I'm just imagining the poor Europeans getting stuck with the hellhole of Conneticut, and having no idea what to do with it. [WSJ]

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.

[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."

Six of One, the Prisoner fan page claims that Ian McKellen will play one of the men in charge of The Village, Number 2. Also shooting starts the first week of August in Namibia, South Africa. There will be total of 6 one-hour episodes written by Bill Gallagher (scribe for Conviction).

The original Prisoner followed a former spy known only as Number 6 (Patrick McGoohan) who's imprisoned inside the futuristic town-prison named The Village. Everyone who is taken to this remote location was brought there to keep their knowledge away from the public and to have their secrets discovered by the mysterious jailers. Number 6 can't escape and doesn't know why he's there, and he ends up spending a majority of his time trying to uncover who his captors are.

Yay, finally a new scifi remake that deserves some attention. It's a simple idea that can easily be translated and updated without butchering the plot or ideas of the original. Bring it on I say, especially with McKellen as the crafty Number 2. [Six Of One and Wired]

[NMT's AutoFish, via Vision Systems Design]

There's been a nuclear holocaust ("They baked the Big Apple," one character remarks) and now New York is full of punk-rock mutants, whom the ruling Eurasian bastards hunt on horseback. There hasn't been a child born in nearly 20 years, but this woman with the awesomely feathered hair has viable eggs, so the rebels want to spirit her away to Alpha Centauri with a whole host of virile men. (But via test tube, not the old-fashioned way.) This clip also includes the great sequence when the evil cyborg leader gets a new eyeball, with crushed ice on his face, because... well, just because, okay? Anyway, final proof the post-apocalyptic genre has gained a bit more dignity since 1983.

According to the tween novel, when 'The Builders' built the city of Ember they knew that the generator would eventually start to run out. So they left a mechanical box with instructions that would open 220 years later when it was safe to leave the city again. Of course the box is forgotten about and found in the year 241 by a couple of kids. The present Ember is a troubled city with constant blackouts. It's up to the children to find a way out and to the surface. We only hope Saoirse Ronan is a better sleuth in this movie than she was in Atonement.

As we mentioned before, there have been a ton of young-adult postapocalyptic novels, many of them quite disturbing and hardcore. (And our list didn't even mention Uglies or Tripods.) And, Glenn adds:

I can think of a dozen post-apocalyptic movies that I saw as a teen, in the '80s, at the Harvard Square and Orson Welles theaters — including "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and sequels, "The Omega Man" (1971), "Sleeper" (1973), "Death Race 2000" (1975), "A Boy and His Dog" (1975), and of course "Road Warrior" (1981). As hard as it is to believe that adults would go to see "Death Race 2000," though, these movies weren't intended for teen audiences. So they don't count.

There have also been a couple of post-apocalyptic TV shows that seemed aimed at teens: the original "Battlestar Galactica," for example, not to mention "Planet of the Apes." I've never seen "Jericho," so I can't say whether it's aimed at teens. Oh yeah, in England, in the 1980s, there was a short-lived TV adaptation of John Christopher's excellent "Tripod" trilogy.

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Will City of Ember be the first Post Apocalyptic Children's film? [Quiet Earth]
Post-Apocalyptic Kiddie Movies [Boston Globe]

Here's the official synopsis:

Veteran-turned-mercenary Thoorop takes the high-risk job of escorting a woman from Russia to China. Little does he know that she is host to an organism that a cult wants to harvest in order to produce a genetically modified Messiah.

[SciFiCool]

Diaz's character appears to be traveling, with a bunch of other Travelers, down a highway at night, but it's not clear where they're going or why. It's a pretty horrendous existence, that much is clear, and every now the transport stops at a depot and everyone "reforges". Here's the most jarring and futuristic passage:

Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.