Science fiction is filled with examples of folks who can't get laid without total weirdness transpiring. We've divvied these themes into five categories, and here are some of our favorite post-eroticapocalyptic worlds.

1.) The Worst Crimes Are Love Crimes!
This kind of erotic dystopia deals with societies in which the populace is horny as hell, but draconian laws force them to keep their pants on.

- In the 1977 softcore scifi musical Cinderella 2000, rutting is verboten for all but the upper crust of society. Unfortunately for sober viewers, the film's sexually oppressive overlords did not ban hippy-dippy, free-love musical numbers that would make Wavy Gravy vomit a psychedelic rainbow in disgust. It's also worth mentioning that Cinderella meets Prince Charming at a gang-bang.

- 1972's Z.P.G. tells the tale of an Earth at an Malthusian crisis point - a global edict bans reproduction for 30 years. Although sex isn't banned per se, mind control and unnerving Animatronic babies discourage citizens from diddling.

- George Orwell's 1984 is the granddaddy of sex-free dystopias. Party members are forbidden to fornicate, the Anti-Sex League encourages the sublimation of the libido into Big Brother worship, and Party scientists research ways to annihilate the orgasm.

2.) The Best Orgies Are Killer Orgies!
This dystopia is the near opposite of the above. Free love is encouraged by the powers that be, but the untrammeled privilege to put your appendages into someone else's holes comes at a sinister price.

- For the humans in the domed city of Logan's Run, life is a non-stop swingfest of orgy chambers, getting loaded on hallucinatory gas, and jumpsuits, jumpsuits, jumpsuits! Too bad the ruling computer executes everyone once they hit 30.

- Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic Brave New World describes orgy-porgies, or massive societally sanctioned sex parties. Of course, relationships beyond the fleetingly sexual are frowned upon and everyone's sterile anyway. To paraphrase the Buzzcocks, Huxley's characters are a bunch of orgasm addicts.

- In the 1968 youthsploitation flick Wild in the Streets, America is conquered by free-loving counterculture young'uns. All citizens over 35 are placed in internment camps, where they're dosed with LSD until they ride the Magic Bus to Valhalla.

3.) We Reproduce With Machines And Pills!
In these dystopias, thrusting and fluid exchange are replaced with newer, weirder forms of sexual reproduction.

- Oh, Demolition Man. You're so goddamn awful but I love you regardless. Every time you pop up on Saturday afternoon basic cable, I have to watch you, even if you're on Univision. Who can resist the stilted VR sex scene between Sandra and Sly?

- In the 1984 Polish comedy Seksmisija (Sexmission), the film's cryonically frozen male protagonists wake up in a post-apocalyptic 2044. All men are dead from radiation and women produce via parthenogenesis. The female overlords give the heroes chase once they refuse a government mandated sex-change operation.

- 1968's Barbarella depicts a 40th century Earth where humping has been replaced with exaltation transference pellets and psychocardiogram readings.

- In the movie and comic book series Surrogates, humans make love robosexually using comely cybernetic surrogates. The human operators? They stay virginally cloistered in their apartments.

- In Thomas F. Monteleone's short story Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep, gelatinous beings create children while humans have hands-free sex using machines that interpret their brainwaves.

4.) Sex? No Thanks, I'm Good.

- In these scenarios, no one's interested in boning. This is generally achieved through pharmacological means - citizens must take anti-sex medication or risk breaking the law. George Lucas' THX 1138, Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Welcome To The Monkey House," and Lois Lowry's children's book The Giver all delve into dystopias that prescribe an RDA of anti-Viagra.

- And in the other corner, there's John Boorman's 1974 documentary Zardoz, which has so much limp-dick chicanery going down I don't know where to start. All you need to know is that the gun is good, the penis is evil, and Sean Connery is the only man on the planet who can get a boner.

-1989's softcore romp Flesh Gordon 2: Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders is about an alien planet under the thrall of a supervillain with an impotence ray, but that's not even scariest part of the film. No, that honor's reserved for the claymation cock creature. NSFW here, readers.

5.) Fuck This Slob...Or Humanity Dies!
Denizens of these dystopias have the unenviable task of breeding with some mook, lest the entire human species goes the way of the dodo.

- In the 1988 Rowdy Roddy Piper star vehicle Hell Comes To Frogtown, all humans are either sterile or amphibiously homely. Scoundrel Sam Hell must impregnate the kidnapped virgins in Frogtown - if he fails his mission or goes rogue, the bomb strapped to his male bits will explode. If sex with Rowdy Roddy isn't your fancy, well, there's always Commander Toady and his "three snakes."

- Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog is the timeless, heartwarming tale of a nuclear wasteland, a nomadic teenage hornball, his telepathic dog, and the subterranean society of women who only like the guy for his semen.

- In Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, escape artist Yorick Brown and his capuchin Ampersand are the last male mammals on Earth, which is problematic for both A.) the human race and B.) heterosexual women who like their men decidedly non-neurotic. (Awesome Silver Age Y cover courtesy of Mightygodking.com)

We've collected various book covers from a number of classic science fiction novels to see how different artists have interpreted the same book. The covers are sometimes surprisingly pulpy, others are elegantly minimalist, and still others are variations on the same theme. Some of these are actual covers from various editions of the books, and some are concept designs created by individuals — on spec, for a class project, or just for fun. Bear in mind that a few of the actual book covers may not be work-safe.

1984 by George Orwell:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham:

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick:

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Neuromancer by William Gibson:

We by Yevgeny Zamyain:

The Space Merchants by by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess:

War of the Worlds by HG Wells:

Be glad that when you were a teenager, you didn't have an aunt like the person who wrote to the Journal's "Book Lover" column to ask this question:

My 13-year-old nephew is a voracious reader, but he tends to limit his reading to science fiction. He recently read "Brave New World," because he thought it was sci-fi. Any suggestions on how to expand his horizons to include other genres?

Anyone with half a lick of sense will know that a 13-year-old who's voluntarily reading Huxley is doing just fine and does not require an intervention. But the WSJ's book columnist, Cynthia Crossen, is a nicer person than I am, since she refrains from telling the aunt what an idiot she was being.

Instead, Crossen gives auntie a smart (if slightly muddled) lecture on the wrongness of misplaced snobbery, and admits that not all SF is equally great. Then she recommends that instead of stopping the allegedly trash-loving nephew from reading SF, the aunt should steer him towards the good stuff:

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.

Yesterday, the Libertarian Party announced the launch of its “1984 Campaign,” and by today, each Member of Parliament will have received a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four from volunteer members of the grassroots campaign. The books will be inscribed with the admonition: “This book was a warning, not a blueprint.”

But some MPs have been angered by the comparison between modern day Britain and Orwell’s dystopian nightmare. Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow, received his copy of the book a few days ago. In his blog, Harris railed against the intended message in his blog:

[T]here seem to be an awful lot of people out there - perhaps dozens of them - who seem to get strangely exercised at the prospect of a “police state”. Except that what they define as a “police state” is a million light years from what Orwell himself described. CCTV cameras in the street? That’s just like Nineteen Eighty-Four, when families were monitored in their own homes, 24 hours a day! Can’t use racist terms to vilify people any more? Well, surely that’s thought crime, just like Orwell predicted!

What rubbish. As I’ve written here before, this is all paranoid fantasy, and why so many people get off on it, I’ll never know. I recently had the latest in a series of requests from constituents regarding CCTV. Requests to have the cameras removed? No, no, no… Requests for more cameras…

We live in a democracy, and just because those — including my anonymous benefactor — who get excited about such things are unhappy that Labour is in power, that does not make us anything other than a democracy. And democratically-elected governments govern with the consent of the people. Yes, even this one!

The UK government may be democratically elected, but with four million CCTV cameras, Britain is the most-surveyed nation in the world. And censorship of online material, and legislation like the 2006 Terrorism Act, have put increasingly severe restrictions on speech. It might be worthwhile for British legislatures to take this opportunity to pause and reflect on what kind of country they're creating.

Press Release Libertarian UK [via The Labour Party via Reddit]

George Orwell is the ultimate crossover writer: loved by both liberals and conservative, travel and SF writers, and above all journalists seeking to ape Eric Blair's vision of subject.

In Orwell's science fiction fantasy land, the year is 1938. Sent by writer L.H. Myers to Morocco, Orwell had found himself in Marrakech (he'd later pen an essay by same name), which was supposed to be a good place for the Spanish Civil War vet to rest. In response he would churn out Coming Up for Air, a novel of speculative fiction which would discuss the impending conflict known as the Second World War.

Orwell is above all the great observer, and he describes the areas he travels in anthropologically, even drawing sketches of the most interesting local customs in his diary. Last week, he blogged a diagram of an Arab drill he discovered. He speculates on what it might be for.

His encounters also take on the tone of the fantastic just because of where and who he is, such as when he sniffs the underside of a tortoise:

Caught a water-tortoise, about 8” long, outside the small zoological gardens here (evidently it had not escaped from within, though of the same kind as those kept inside.) It was in an irrigation ditch, swimming against the current & only succeeding in remaining about stationary. When turned onto its back it was unable to turn over. It smelt abominably, though active and apparently in good condition.

Best of all, this impromptu sci-fi novel has illustrations from Google Maps.

We recommend Orwell stop getting bogged down in the minute details. Do I need a twitter every time he sees a bird? If the bird isn't sentient, don't bother, George!

If that's not enough, Orwell is already getting ripped in the comments of his blog. This seems roundly unfair, since he can't fire back in his imitable style. Still, you'd think he could get around to putting us on his blogroll.

Another Violent Dust Storm, Followed By Rain [Orwell Diaries]

Why did you decide to adapt Brave New World into a movie, why do you want to make this story?

I didn't choose to do it, someone came to me with it. In fact it was Leo's [Leonardo DiCaprio's] production company that came to me with that. And it's a big challenge, in fact. Because when you look at the two players or visionaries in the field, at that moment [it] would be Huxley and it would be Orwell and that was 60 or 75 years ago. They were predictions in a way, they weren't aware at the time, but they were predictions. One could argue that Orwell kind of got there first and Orwell was closer to the notion of "big brother," [with the] Cold War. But I don't think that's it, I think that big brother may be the internet. I don't know but I think that's the way it's going to go. And so the Aldous Huxley's [novel] literally what is called Brave New World that's a very hard adaptation. So we're still dancing with that one, but it's a challenge.

Have you finished the script or are you close?

No, no no we're still struggling with that one. I have 40 things on the go at once. But that's a very important one. And sometimes, some surface faster than the others. It's partly luck of the draw. Even with a good writer, he'll do it and screw up. So then you go back to the table and start all over again, it's hard. The hardest single thing is getting it on paper.

I'm very excited about Leo's involvement.

Oh yeah, he is perfect for it.

So while we wait for what will undoubtedly be an amazing look into a classic story, and find out what kind of new spins Ridley will throw in (will there still the year of "our Ford"?) Scott's new movie Body of Lies is out October 10th.