I'm dying to get into this volume, which does look staggeringly awesome. Writes Keith Brooke in the Guardian:

The word "classic" could justifiably be applied to many stories in this volume, which, as a tribute to the magazine and an introduction to some of the finest authors of fantasy, SF and horror, is a landmark anthology.

But while you're waiting to get your hands on a copy, you can listen to some of the writers who've made F&SF so classic, plus the magazine's current editor. According to book publicist and blogger Matt Staggs:

Peter Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, Mary Rickert, Jeffrey Ford, John Kessel, Delia Sherman, Ellen Klages, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, and Fantasy and Science Fiction publisher Gordon Van Gelder himself are among those interviewed.

You can listen to the first half of the interviews as part of Kleffel's regular podcast, Agony Column.

We were blown away by the second volume of Strahan's Eclipse series, not least because of Ted Chiang's Hugo-winning story "Exhalation." (At WisCon, I'm afraid I cornered Chiang and babbled inanely at him for five minutes about how great that story was.) But the table of contents for volume three actually sounds even more fantastic:

• The Pelican Bar, Karen Joy Fowler
• Lotion, Ellen Klages
• Don't Mention Madagascar, Pat Cadigan
• On the Road, Nnedi Okorafor
• Swell, Elizabeth Bear
• Useless Things, Maureen F. McHugh
• The Coral Heart, Jeffrey Ford
• It Takes Two, Nicola Griffith
• Sleight of Hand, Peter S. Beagle
• The Pretender's Tourney, Daniel Abraham
• Yes We Have No Bananas, Paul Di Filippo
• Mesopotamian Fire, Jane Yolen & Adam Stemple
• The Visited Man, Molly Gloss
• Galápagos, Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Dolce Domum, Ellen Kushner

That's a pretty incredible list of names right there. And yes, there do happen to be a lot of women on that list, including Karen Joy Fowler and Nicola Griffith — two authors we were just imploring to come back to science fiction.

Meanwhile, io9 contributors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer announced the table of contents for Last Drink Bird Head, their new anthology of flash fiction raising money for literacy charities, which will be available in time for the World Fantasy Convention. And befitting a book of flash fiction, there's a huge list of contributors, but it includes Gene Wolfe, Leslie What, Keith Brooke, Paul Di Filippo, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee, Jay Lake, and many others.

And finally, if you're tired of anthologies about vampires or zombies, then rejoice! Ekaterina Sedia, author of the masterful Alchemy Of Stone, is putting out an anthology of werewolf tales called Running With The Pack.

Here's the back cover blurb:

Remember the werewolves of old stories and films, those bloodthirsty monsters that transformed under the full moon, reminding us of the terrible nature that lives within all of us? Today's werewolves are much more suave and even sexy, and they moved from British moors to New York City lofts, shaved, and got jobs. But as the tales of these writers will show you, they remained no less wild and passionate, and they still tug at the part of our being where a wild animal used to be. RUNNING WITH THE PACK includes stories from Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman and C.E. Murphy, and they will convince you that despite their newfound gentility, werewolves remain as fascinating and terrifying as ever.

Standing here, in the middle of San Diego Comic Con, it's easy to feel as though the movie industry is a huge maw — sucking up every stray thought or tingle of creativity that anyone has ever had, and mashing them all into new reasons for Brad Pitt to grimace. Hollywood feels all-consuming, when you're surrounded by hype for upcoming comic-book and disaster movies.

I was actually going to do a list of "gloriously unfilmable books," but then I Googled to make sure io9 hadn't already done that post. We hadn't, but SciFiWire, Screenhead and hard-SF writer Mike Brotherton all have. And after I'd already started writing this post, Wired Magazine did one too. (And io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer and the CrazyMonk blog have great comments on the Screenhead post.) The unfilmable novels include some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, some masterpieces of thought-provoking science fiction, including Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Connie Willis, and some giant epics, like Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. I would add at least some of Iain Banks' Culture novels, some Joanna Russ, and a lot of Rudy Rucker's work.

(Incidentally, the movie of William Gibson's Neuromancer? Still definitely happening, according to inside sources I've talked to recently.)

So instead of doing a list of unfilmable novels, let's discuss the whole idea of a book being "unfilmable." First of all, is it true that there are "unfilmable" books (as opposed to books that shouldn't be filmed?). And what makes a book unfilmable? And finally, what do these supposedly unfilmable books tell us about the process of translating a book to film?

Jeff VanderMeer makes a really fascinating point in his response to the Screenhead post. He writes:

I also think this brings up a serious point: more novels should be unfilmable. Because this speaks to what about the form cannot be replicated in other art forms. When I was writing Shriek, one thing I had foremost in my head was to create something that couldn't be filmed (well, except for little excerpts of it...).

Yes, there are unfilmable books.

So is there such a thing as an unfilmable book? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "Yes." Sure, people used to say Lord Of The Rings and Watchmen were unfilmable, and they were proved wrong. But those two examples don't disprove the existence of the unfilmable book, as a species. Some books are too abstract, too complex, too idea-driven, or too non-mainstream to become a Hollywood movie, or any kind of movie for that matter.

Take Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and its sequel, Hylozoic. They're fresh in my mind because I just read Hylozoic recently, and there's so much in those novels that you could never possibly convert into a series of sounds and visual images. You have the nano-machines, the "nants," devouring the entire world and porting everybody to a virtual Earth simulation called "Vearth." And after the nants are turned back, you have a kind of global awakening via a network of Orphids, machines which turn every object fully interactive. And soon, everybody on Earth is quasi-telepathic and able to spy on each other via the OrphidNet. And people can expand their consciousness by connecting to a kind of group mind called the Big Pig. Oh, and they create plastic self-aware robots called Shoons, and contact giants from another plane of existence (the Hibrane) who show them how to "unroll the Lazy Eight" dimension. I feel like I'm barely scraping the surface here, and any Hollywood scriptwriter would need a week in a sensory deprivation tank after trying to turn this into a screenplay.

We went to a reading and booksigning for Jacqueline Carey a while back, and she mentioned, with obvious glee, that her magnificent "Kushiel" books couldn't be made into movies. Partly, that's because of their huge scope and complexity — but mostly, it's because of the subject matter. Especially in the first three books, the main character is a sacred prostitute who can turn pain into pleasure (I'm oversimplifying a bit), and sex work and S/M are woven into the story so deeply, you can't remove them without the whole thing falling apart. Not to mention, the fact that her story takes place in alternate France that worships the bastard son of Jesus Christ, who teaches that you should "love as thou wilt," including S/M as well as homosexuality. There are many ways to make a terrible movie of Kushiel's Dart, but no way to make a good one — at least within Hollywood.

Some books just aren't visual enough to make good movies — take Le Guin's The Dispossessed. You could, I suppose, make a somewhat lifeless film about a physicist from an anarchist planet who travels to a capitalist one. But it would be missing everything that makes The Dispossessed brilliant, from its exploration of the limits and virtues of Annares' utopia, to its dead-on depiction of academic politics, to the investigation of physics and philosophy that lie at the core of the development of "simultenaeity physics." How do you make a compelling movie about someone coming up with a new way to think about space/time?

Watchmen and Lord Of The Rings, by contrast, are both action/adventure stories. They were already woven into the fabric of tons of other superhero and fantasy movies long before they came to the silver screen. Turning them into movies required a deft touch, to be sure, but there was nothing in either work that was antithetical to the needs of the movie form. (Except, possibly, Watchmen's giant alien squid.)

And novels that are even more unfilmable than the ones mentioned above also exist. Some of them aren't particularly great as books either — there are novels that are so dreadful, so dull, or so pointlessly offensive that you'd go mad trying to adapt them. I've read many of these books, so I know.

I should add a caveat: even if a book really is unfilmable, you can always make a movie with the same title and one or two character names, with nothing else in common with the original. If you include works loosely inspired by a book, then yes, anything is "filmable."

Are there books that can be filmed, but shouldn't?

As to whether a science fiction novel shouldn't be turned into a film, that's slightly more of a value judgment than the question of whether it can. Many people — myself included — argued that Watchmen shouldn't be a movie. In my case, I was groping towards the theory that a movie that was faithful to the graphic novel would be both too dark and too dull. I wrote:

I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?... The Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Looking back at what I wrote, I'm not sure I made the case conclusively — I focused too much, in that essay, on discussing the things that Watchmen does that are unique to the graphic novel form, and discounted the possibility that the movie could do similar things in a different way. I didn't talk enough about the story itself, and the things about it that could, or could not, make for a good movie.

And then, a year ago today, I saw a bunch of footage and talked to Zack Snyder, and came around to the idea that his movie could work — it could be about the history of superhero movies, in the same way the graphic novel was about the history of comics. On the other hand, the actual movie that resulted really was a bit lifeless, as I'd originally feared — especially in the final act.

You'll find no shortage of novelists who feel their books shouldn't be movies, that too much would have to be sacrificed to the crudeness of the movie form.

But actually, thinking about it some more, I think it's a lot harder to argue that something shouldn't be filmed than that it can't be. If you're going to argue that it's possible to make a movie of your favorite book, but too much would be lost in the adaptation, you're shouldering the burden of proof. You have to identify just what elements would be lost — and make a stab at understanding how a work gets ported from "book" to "movie."

What does the process of adapting a novel to films tell us about movies and books?

Much of what Alan Moore said, in arguing that Watchmen shouldn't become a movie, is true of all printed works. You read a book at your own pace, with the ability to flip back and forth as you notice connections between things that happened in the previous chapter and things that are happening now. You do much more of the work of imagining the world in your head — even if there are illustrations. The book is frozen; the reader moves. It's the opposite of a film, in a sense.

I think people who believe that any novel that's brave, or complicated, or emotionally rich, will automatically make for an unfulfilling movie are slightly selling the medium of film short. You can do a lot in visual shorthand in movies, and there's a lot more scope to convey information in a way that will go over the heads of some viewers but resonate with others. Any film worth its photons works on multiple levels, for different audiences. A decent actor can convey a whole chapter's worth of backstory with a meaningful look.

Maybe, when adapting a book to a movie, there's something like T.S. Elliott's "objective correlative": you can put in visual cues, props and hints that stand in for complicated ideas and emotions inside a book.

My favorite book-to-film projects include Adaptation, which takes Susan Orlean's introspective work of journalism The Orchid Thief and turns it into a bizarre pomo story of two screenwriter brothers struggling with an inscrutable story. And then there's American Splendor, the film which adapts Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics the only way you could: with a mixture of documentary and reenactment, with the two crossing over in a surreal fashion.

Of course, both of those movies experiment with the movie format to try and do justice to a quirky, unusual book. It's hard to imagine a science fiction movie doing something similar, unless it was a low-budget indie like Primer or Moon. Certainly, the kind of big-budget movie that a book like, say, Neuromancer demands is not going to support much in the way of stylistic experimentation. But maybe there are other ways of doing what those films do — bringing in some of the metatextual quirks of the books by adding a narrative voice-over, say, or a Verhoeven-esque set of fake commercials.

But really, that brings us to the biggest problem with adapting movies to books — big-budget Hollywood film genres are much more restrictive than book genres, at least right now. You have superhero films, disaster films, space-horror films and the occasional space opera. But that can always change — it was only a decade ago that you could count the number of satisfying superhero films on one hand, and now it's the "it" genre.

So maybe instead of hoping that your favorite book never becomes a movie, you should hope it does — and in the process of being filmed, it expands, just a bit, the circumference of Hollywood's narrow sphere of possibility. After all, it never hurts to be optimistic.

It's funny, when you think about it, that so much attention gets paid to the McCarthys, Atwoods, Lessings and Roths of the world, who are known for their lit writing but try their hand at speculative fiction here and there. There are really just a handful of them who've made an impression, whereas there are tons of SF authors who've gone the other way — and yet, people seldom talk about it.

Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe are all writers whose names come up a lot when you talk about science fiction authors who have become beloved of the lit-mongers. To some extent, I think Shelley, Wells, Verne and Poe predate the genre-ification of SF, since they were writing at a time before the term was invented. In any case, they've all long since been embraced as fully literary. (Well, mostly. Of Poe, critic V.S. Pritchett famously said he was "a second class writer, but a fertilizing exclaimer.") "I get the sense that Wells in his day was a "novel of ideas" guy/polemicist who was later gerrymandered into SF," says Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics.

H.P. Lovecraft was clearly a genre writer in his time, thanks to his association with Weird Tales and other magazines. Nowadays, he's the subject of a book-length essay by fancy-pants French guy Michel Houellebecq, and the prestigious Library Of America has collected his stories.

Stanislaw Lem. A few science fiction authors have gotten published in the New Yorker, but Lem was a regular fixture there for years. Lem's satires, in which Ijon Tichy encounters weird time paradoxes, surrealistic societies and philosophical dead-ends, are tailor made for the lit crowd.

Gene Wolfe also got his work published in the New Yorker, as well as other fancy literary magazines. He's been compared to Proust, G.K. Chesterton and Dickens by critics in the Washington Post and other places. (I read a bunch of Wolfe's short stories the other day, and the Dickens comparison seemed particularly apt — they felt almost too 19th century for my taste, but he was clearly doing a good job of capturing a certain smoky industrial revolution feeling to his otherworldly stories.)

Ursula K. LeGuin is another author that nobody even questions the literariness of any more. Her latest book, Lavinia, has been greeted as a pure work of literature, with tons of articles about her contributions to the literature of ideas. The Cleveland Plain Dealer names it one of the best books of 2008, without regard to genre.

John Crowley is the uber-example of someone who crossed over — his earliest novels (The Deep, Beasts and Engine Summer) were pure SF and fantasy. His fourth book, the fantasy novel Little, Big, not only won the World Fantasy Award for best novel, but also praise from mega-critic Harold Bloom. He's since won a American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and he teaches at Yale.

Octavia Butler is another obvious choice. Just look at this gigantic list of journal articles about her, which appears to be outdated in any case. Including things like "Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred," from the journal Contemporary Literature.

Philip K. Dick is another one I barely feel the need to justify. Just read this disturbing excerpt from an article in Lingua Franca:

WHEN THE NOVELIST PHILIP K. DICK DIED IN 1982, THE INFLUENTIAL literary theorist Fredric Jameson eulogized him as "the Shakespeare of science fiction." At the time of this encomium, Dick was hardly famous. The author of more than fifty books, he had an enthusiastic following among science fiction fans. But he was rarely read by anyone else.

These days, Dick is far better known. Vintage publishes his fiction in a uniform paperback edition. Hollywood filmmakers transform his stories of imaginary worlds and conspiratorial cartels into movies like Screamers and Total Recall. Meanwhile, academic critics laud him as a postmodernist visionary, a canny prophet of virtual reality, corporate espionage, and the schizoid nature of identity in a digitized world. Indeed, beginning in the last years of his life and continuing to the present, these critics have played a key role in the canonization of Philip K. Dick.

But did Dick return the favor? Not exactly. To their considerable anguish, Dick's academic champions have had to contend with the revelation that their hero wrote letters to the Federal Bureau of Investigation denouncing them. In these letters, Dick claimed that Jameson and other literary theorists were agents of a KGB conspiracy to take over American science fiction. When he sent these messages, Dick was not in the best state of mind: He frequently heard voices and saw visions, often bathed in a mysterious pink light. Even so, the news of his surreptitious campaign against his academic admirers has left some of them deeply disturbed.

Harlan Ellison shows up in a surprising number of college syllabi, including a lot of science fiction writing classes but also a lot of generic "advanced composition" and English classes. His most commonly assigned story seems to be "Repent, Harlequin! Said The Tick-Tock Man." It's assigned often enough that there's a study guide for it. And as his bio proudly notes, he had a story in the 1993 Best American Short Stories.

Samuel R. Delany has easily become a lit-nerd must-read, thanks to his dense, challengiang narratives. It also didn't hurt, notes Wolk, that he's written smut and literary theory as well. "I've quoted him in a theory context," Wolk says. Check out this progression of Delany book covers, from lurid to literary:

William Gibson was heading for literary status for ages, thanks to his cyberpunk classics like Neuromancer and Count Zero. But when he switched to writing books set in the present, with Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, it became fashionable to talk about him as influential in his own time. The New York Times called Spook Country "the first post-post-9/11 novel." He was interviewed in the California Literary Review, and people started talking about the quality of his prose.

Kurt Vonnegut caused some debate among the people I asked about this topic. Was this literary idol ever considered a science fiction author? On the pro side, people cited the ultra-pulpy original covers of Player Piano and Sirens Of Titan, his first two books. "Where do you think [his fictional science fiction author] Kilgore Trout came from?" asks science fiction critic Mike Berry. On the other hand, his early stories appeared in Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. If anything, one person suggested, Vonnegut is going the other way: He used to have literary cache, but now lit-snobs find him embarrassing. So it goes.

Jonathan Lethem got suggested by several people including Susan Marie Groppi from StrangeHorizons. It took me a while to remember that Lethem actually did start out as a science fiction author, before becoming a literary darling. (Check out his story collection The Wall Of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye, which contains a bunch of stories that wouldn't be out of place in a typical issue of Asimov's or Analog. And at least one, "Vanilla Dunk," was in Asimov's.)

Ray Bradbury belongs on this list, if only for Fahrenheit 451, which is taught in college lit classes everywhere. Type the term "fahrenheit 451 sparknotes" into Google and you get 9,000 results, thanks to desperate term-paper-writing kids all over. (I didn't even type in that phrase. Google auto-suggested it.)

Weird-cyber author Rudy Rucker pops up on college syllabuses you'd expect, for science fiction writing classes. But also classes in rhetoric, and philosophy.

James Tiptree, Jr. gets on the list, if only because the male persona of writer Alice Sheldon has garnered lots of attention from gender theorists. The recent award-winning biography by Julie Phillips sparked more interest in Tiptree's life in the mainstream media, but also started people paying more attention to Tiptree's mind-bending stories, especially "Houston, Houston, Do You Read."

Neal Stephenson is another author who seems like an obvious inclusion. His latest book, Anathem, was greeted everywhere as a serious novel, not particularly as a science fiction book. Here's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post:

For the past 30 years I've been a zealous advocate for literary science fiction and fantasy, arguing that writers such as Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, John Crowley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Howard Waldrop and a handful of others are significant American authors, as well as artists of the first rank ... Neal Stephenson has established himself as one of these genre-transcending gods, read passionately by geeks and fans, but also admired as a novelist of ideas, a 21st-century Thomas Pynchon.

(He goes on to say that Anathem is a bit of a disappointment, actually.)

To be honest, I'd forgotten about Thomas M. Disch until I read the above quote, and then smacked my forehead. Before he died, Disch was as well known for his criticism (The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of) and poetry as for his fiction, a surefire way to get literary cache. The Telegraph even called him "excessively literary by the standards of his time."

Dan Simmons is in the process of transitioning to literary icon, according to some of my friends who monitor such things zealously. (They have a monitor board, and it lights up when a previously-tagged author starts to swim upstream towards the literary spawning grounds.) His use of literary allusions, especially Keats, probably doesn't hurt. Salon.com proclaimed him a literary master in 2002.

Howard Waldrop is as well known in lit circles as he is in speculative fiction circles. Dirda, once again, champions him as up there with Dick and other postmodern storytellers.

Carol Emshwiller won an NEA grant and a Pushcart Prize, and has had her stories in lit journals like McSweeney's and the Voice Literary Supplement.

Methodology: To some extent, this is just based on years of reading critics, and seeing who actually gets published in literary magazines and stuff. I also did a search on college syllabuses to see which authors are actually getting taught in college lit classes. And I polled my Twitter and Facebook homies.

(I'm leaving out some "urban fantasy" ish writers like Kelly Link, China Mieville or Neil Gaiman, in the interests of keeping this list from being too long. Plus once you get into magic and fantasy elements, you have to talk about the "magical realism" vogue of the 1990s and how that intersected with lit fiction and fantasy. And this is a blog post, not a book.)

Also: I'm not talking here about mainstream success, or having your books made into movies, or becoming a household name. I'm talking about acclaim from lit-nerds, a community that's just as insular as science fiction fans. As a member of both communities, I know they both have their odd grooming rituals and fetishes. An author like Philip K. Dick has long since passed the point of being "cool" for lit-nerds to discover. Now, if you're a lit-nerd and you haven't read Dick, your compadres just look at you pityingly. Ditto for Le Guin or Delany. Nobody in lit circles bothers to call them literary any more, they just are.

Finally, as I said above, this is a partial list. Feel free to suggest other people I left out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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