Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

This has been the dream of science-fiction fans and science-fiction authors since the days of "Clone Of My Own" (which is usually attributed to Isaac Asimov, but who knows if it's actually by him?) "Clone Of My Own" goes:

Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.

Clone, clone of my own,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.

There are about 29 versus more, but you get the idea. Actually, after reading authors like John Varley and Ursula K. Le Guin, the whole idea of the "opposite" sex has been thrown into question — surely, once we can all reconfigure our bodies at will, eventually we'll have some sort of sex tesseract.

But for now, here are the ways that science fiction offers, for us to meet our opposite-sex duplicates (and in some cases, have sex with them):

1) Cloning.

House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds:

Abigail Gentian, a wealthy woman, decides to explore the vastness of the stars — she she has herself cloned a number of times, and some of the clones are male while others are female. They all share Abigail's memories, and Abigail herself joins them without knowing which of them is the "real" her. And these "shatterlings" have sex — a lot. Especially in the novella Thousandth Night, there are tons of orgies in which all of the clones get together, making it a certainty that the "real" Abigail has been with her clones.

Time Enough For Love by Robert A. Heinlein:

Lazarus Long is the world's oldest human, and he decides not to undergo rejuvenation therapy, thus sentencing himself to death. His descendants convince him to keep on living, but he'll only do it if he gets to have a new experience — so two of his descendants become impregnated with opposite-sex clones of Lazarus. And after the opposite-sex clones of Lazarus are born, Lazarus raises them as his own daughters... and then has sex with them, of course.

"Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin:

This Nebula-nominated novelette, first published in Playboy, features a set of clones of a man named John Chow who died in a car accident, and some of them are female:

"All chips off the old block," Martin said valiantly. "But how can . . . some of you be women . . .?"

Beth took over: "It's easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It's trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually."

Sadly, nine out of ten clones are killed, forcing the remaining clone to deal with unaccustomed solitude.

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley:

The character Tweed has clones who are male and female clones of the same individual, called Vaffa or sometimes Hygeia. They're super-strong, super-big and lethal.

NYX and various other X-Men comics:

X-23, a female clone of Wolverine, first appeared in the X-Men: Evolution animated series, but then made the leap to comics, just like Harley Quinn. Despite looking kind of silly, she's manage to stick around long enough to get her own miniseries and have her backstory explained. I don't think she and Logan ever hooked up, but they have fought, which is almost the same thing when you come down to it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:

As Zaphod Beeblebrox explains, the girl Lintilla "has now been cloned over five-hundred-and-seventy-eight-thousand-million times - and has thus created a problem in some quarters." All of the Lintilla clones are female — but the anti-clones, sent to get rid of the infestation of female clones, are male versions of Lintilla called Allitnil. When a Lintilla and an Allitnil come together, he gets the Lintilla to "agree to cease to be" — but Arthur Dent takes a liking to one of the Lintillas, and kills her particular Allitnil.

Hunted by James Alan Gardner:

Edward York is an illegal clone of one of the Admirals on the High Council, and due to genetic problems he's a bit stupid. But a female clone of the Admiral, named Samantha, turns out super-smart and resourceful. Together, Edward and Samantha travel, as brother and sister, travel to the planet Troyen to try and negotiate a peace between two alien species, the Mandasars and the Fasskisters.

Kyle XY:

Kyle and his fellow vat-baby Jessi aren't strictly speaking clones, because I think they had different genetic stock — as far as I can remember, Kyle came from Adam and Jessi came from Sarah. But they do come from the same vat, and they resulted from the same super-baby program. So they could be considered akin to clones, sort of. Worth mentioning, anyway.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Clone Saga:

Can't believe I forgot this one, since I have the trades at home. In the Ultimate version of the Clone Saga, they clone Peter Parker several times... including a female version called Jessica Drew. And Jessica has all of Peter's memories — S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to erase Jessica's memories and set her up with a new identity, but she escapes and takes on the identity of Spider-Woman. Thanks, kwschuttler!

2) Alternate universes

Parallellities by Alan Dean Foster:

Max, the main character of this novel travels through the multiverse, and finally meets an alternate female version of himself — and has sex with her. Later, he manages to find an entire planet populated by copies of himself. As the back cover copy explains:

Now Max was lost in a virtual sea of collateral worlds, confronting man-eating aliens, dinosaurs, talking frogs, dead Maxes, girl Maxes, old Maxes, even ghost Maxes. His only chance to escape the space-time continuum was to find Boles and hope the loony genius could rescue him. But how could he be sure which world was real, which Max was Max, and which Boles was the Boles who could stop the madness—or trap Max in the wrong world forever. . . ?

Red Dwarf, "Parallel Universe":

Our gang finds a device that's supposed to transport them home to Earth instantly — but instead it zaps them into an alternate universe. There, they meet alternate versions of themselves, including female versions of Lister and Rimmer (and Cat's counterpart is a Dog.) Rimmer has to fight off his female counterpart's sexual advances, while Lister actually does wind up in bed with his female version, Deb. And because in this alternate universe, it's the men who get pregnant, Lister winds up carrying his alternate self's baby.

Sliders:

Thanks to Xicer for pointing out this one: in the episode "Double Cross," Quinn meets an evil female duplicate of himself from (of course) another universe, and almost makes out with her:

Transition by Iain Banks:

This dimension-jumping novel mentions that it's quite common to enter the body of your alternate-universe self and find that the alternate self is the opposite sex. This is a known syndrome, which causes some discomfort or confusion among the universe-hoppers whom it happens to.

3) Time travel

"All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein:

This story features a young man who's tricked into impregnating his younger, female self — because it turns out he had a futuristic sex change at some point, which the reader doesn't realize at first. And then it turns out that he's actually the child of that union, meaning that he's his own mother and father — the mother of all time paradoxes, in other words.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold:

Daniel Eakins travels backwards and forwards in time many times, meeting himself and having sex with himself — over and over and over. But after a ton of trips, he actually meets an alternate-universe version of himself who was born female, and they shack up together at the beginning of time. It goes great for a while, until they get fed up with each other, and then Daniel's time-traveling female counterpart manages to erase herself completely from Daniel's timeline, so Daniel can never find her again.

Needless to say, this post would not have been nearly as fascinating without TVTropes.org, the fountain of all greatness. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

Perhaps you've found a dog-eared copy of Ender's Game under your thirteen-year-old's mattress. Perhaps your progeny comes home one day and announces they're reading 1984 at school. Perhaps you've noticed someone has made off with your copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It's time to have "The Talk". It's time to tell your child about Science Fiction.

To assist with this, I've picked out list of books ranging from Science Fiction to Futuristic Fantasy, and various Dystopian coming-of-age novels. Note: I have not included Fantasy novels. You'll notice some things you'd imagine should be here are missing, like Dragonriders of Pern and His Dark Materials, because those fall into the Fantasy category.

Start with the classics. Verne's From The Earth To The Moon and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Well's The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds. A good grounding in the realms of space adventure and time travel is invaluable to any child. They'll thank you for it someday. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles are included on many school reading lists. If your school system isn't already on the previously-banned-books bandwagon, seek these books out and gift them to your child. These books are great, nay, essential reads for any kid interested in science fiction.

Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958)
Unlike Heinlein's later books with a progressively more adult tone, this is a strictly PG-13 outing aimed at younger readers, which takes elements of noir and adventure and drops them into a Sputnik-era vision of future space travel. Even taking the intended audience into account, this early novel sometimes suffers from Heinlein's workmanlike narrative style. Nevertheless, Spacesuit neatly treads the line between "hard" and "soft" Sci-Fi, presents a likable and gutsy teenage main character, assumes a technology that's dirty and lived-in, and ultimately involves alien contact which raises thorny questions about humanity. Recommended, especially for pint-sized fans of the history of science and Sci-Fi who will appreciate that these visionary elements (especially having been written in a time of gleaming rockets and apparent human domination of space) later turned up in everything from 2001 to Star Wars.

John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy (1967)
These books are truly unique in the YA Sci-Fi pantheon. This story of three boys pitted against the sinister overlords who have run Earth for more than a century explores subversive ideas about propaganda and totalitarian systems of government, the confusing interplay between adolescent ideals and the compromises of the grown-up world, and even the ethical nuances of the relationship between pets and their 'owners.' These books include several elements that are unusual for a YA series, such as an ending to the series that will definitely challenge the expectations of young readers raised on saccharine fairy tales, and a pronounced atmosphere of isolation and uncertainty for much of the series. Highly recommended.

Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome To The Monkey House, particularly Harrison Bergeron (1968)
Many kids nowadays read Slaughterhouse-Five or Cats Cradle in high school. I'd go so far as to recommend Vonnegut for discerning 7th or 8th graders. This was the age my friends and I discovered Vonnegut and we hungrily read everything from his collection we could get our hands on. My introduction was Sirens of Titan (which blew my everlovin' mind), but in retrospect I think Welcome To The Monkey House would have been a better jumping-off point. Vonnegut's short fiction is breathtaking, darkly humorous, and speaks quite well to discontented adolescents. Harrison Bergeronis a favorite of mine, and despite its dark ending it has a great message at its core about the power of the individual and how much courage it takes just to be yourself in a world that is constantly putting you down.

Daniel Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars (1979)
Many readers are more familiar with the author's equally original Lizard Music, aimed at slightly younger readers, but Mendelsohn, written three years later, remains nearly as accessible, while gleefully leaping even further into the weird, silly and downright hilarious reaches of the Pinkwater universe, a place populated with strange and dangerous bookstores, malfunctioning authority figures ranging from the well-meaning to the sadistic, and intelligent youngsters struggling to be themselves while avoiding utter invisibility, open hostility, or (possibly worst of all) unstable idealization from their more conventional peers. Highlights include a fierce satire of new-age seekers and self-help gurus (undercut by gentle reminders that reality cannot always be taken at face value), a not-so-subtle celebration of urban neighborhoods over suburban sameness, and a touching and deeply felt meditation on friendship as a means of broadening one's horizons.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy trilogy (1979)
At the tender age of thirteen I was handed a copy of the first novel in the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy. This became a life-long love affair with not only all of Adams' work, but with speculative fiction as a genre. For the uninitiated, Adams' comically misnamed trilogy is a series of five books chronicling the interstellar adventures of the last remaining Earthman, Arthur Dent, as he discovers the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. Adams' "trilogy" is a classic of satirical science fiction and a great tool for teaching kids how much fun it can be to explore the galaxy. Just don't forget your towel.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985)
Love it or hate it, Ender's Game has become something of a staple of YA Science Fiction. I include it mainly because I know so many folks who claim this is one of the first sci-fi books they ever picked up and have so many fond memories of it. And despite the vicious debates over its promotion of violence and its heroic depictions of the battle-field mentality, it holds up as a very well-written space adventure story. While there are certainly valid concerns about the ideals of both the book and its author (I would encourage any parent to have a dialogue with their child while reading this book), I don't really think reading Ender is going do your kid any more harm then playing HALO.

Jane Yolen's The Pit Dragon trilogy (1982)
Nominally Sci-Fi— taking place in the distant future on a distant planet— the overall feel of Yolen's Dragon novels is closer to fantasy, with the relationship between humans and dragons taking center stage throughout most of the series. Due to a romantic subplot, these books may draw slightly older readers, but the presentation is still fairly chaste and innocent. Yolen infuses her stories with a warm, feral emotional core, and the subtle interplay between the various characters is convincing. Recommended for kids who aren't afraid to get in touch with a more sensitive side of this beloved genre.

William Sleator's Interstellar Pig (1984)
Despite the rapid escalation of the storyline to planet-imperiling proportions, this briskly-paced novel, involving a young boy whose summer neighbors introduce him to a particularly unusual board game, is more of a romp than anything else. Will appeal to fans of teen detectives, and should nicely set up the young reader to appreciate the works of Douglas Adams. Recommended, especially for readers on the younger side with a taste for adventure and an active imagination. Caution: may lead to your kids making their own version of the titular board game.

Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring Of Endless Light (1980) and The Arm of the Starfish (1965)
These elegantly written novels will mostly appeal to older tweens and younger teens, dwelling as they do on themes of betrayal, love and death. Despite healthy ribbons of Sci-Fi, mostly centering on limb regeneration and ESP, most of both books deal with human relationships and frailties, even if the speculative elements help to cushion these themes somewhat. The characters here appear in several other L'Engle titles, but either book can be read on its own, or both can be read together as a water-themed duo. Recommended for slightly older readers who are ready for more emotionally challenging fare.

Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993)
I was assigned The Giver in sixth grade. It had come out only a few years before, winning the Newberry award and a permanent place on most middle-school reading lists. It was my first encounter with dystopian fiction and was one of the books that started me writing. Many YA Science Fiction novels deal with this same type of territory - most recently Scott Westerfield's Uglies trilogy – a story connected to the empowerment of the individual and his or her struggle against the uniformity of the community. At the "Ceremony of Twelve", young Jonas becomes the receiver of knowledge shared only by one other member of his community, The Giver, and discovers the terrible truth about the dystopian world he inhabits. A coming-of-age novel at its heart, The Giver is about the pain of growing up, of gaining knowledge of the world around you, and of facing the responsibilities of adulthood. It is no surprise that over the past fifteen years this has become essential reading for every twelve-year-old.

Jonathan Letham's Girl in Landscape (1998)
I'm a fan of Letham's more adult work, like Gun, With Occasional Music. His stab at a science-fiction coming-of-age story is bittersweet, heartbreaking and at times terrifying in its accuracy. It deals with many of the challenges of youth, from moving to a new place to the pain of sexual awakening, and the difficult adjustment to living in Martian environment run by hermaphroditic aliens. Ok, so maybe it's not exactly what everyone remembers about being a thirteen-year-old girl, but Letham's Girl perfectly captures the awkward transition from youth to adulthood, and what it's like to feel, well, like an alien during that tumultuous time.

M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002)
It's really the classic story. Boy meets girl, boy has a computer implant in his head, connected to the entire internet, to control his environment and spoon-feed him consumer culture propaganda. A cyberpunk tale of the next generation, this recent novel from the brilliant mind of M.T. Anderson is set in a corporate dystopian future-verse. It's a great read and a great tool for introducing your teen to the evils of consumerism and corporate monoculture and to the coolness of hacker culture. I'd particularly recommend it as a two-part gift for an older teenager, along with Naomi's Klein non-fiction work No Logo. I'm truly sad this book wasn't around when I was fifteen, although I made do with a stack of Adbusters under my mattress.
For the younger reader, I'd highly recommend M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales series, beginning with Whales On Stilts. Taking its cues from everything from The Tripod Trilogy to Mark Twain, the series follows the adventures of three best friends who are trying to save the world. The books harken back to an innocent, 1950's era of story telling and are an entirely engaging and endearing read for both children and parents alike.

Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy (2005)
I will openly admit that, despite its transparent analogies, I wish I'd had the Uglies trilogy around when I was twelve years old and felt as through I was a total outcast. It hits hard on all the classic themes of a modern coming-of-age novel; puberty, peer pressure, body image and the importance of individuality. In this dystopian world disguised as a utopia of beautiful people and seemingly unending bounty, children are born ugly and become uniformly beautiful by undergoing a complicated surgical procedure when they reach the age of sixteen. The novels follow a group of rebels who opt out of the procedure and embrace their individuality.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (2008)
Call me biased from living in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I think Little Brother is a great addition to this pantheon of classic YA science fiction. Apparently I am not alone, as the novel has been nominated for, and subsequently already won, a handful awards since hitting the shelves last year. For more information, check out Charlie Jane's review of Doctorow's new classic.

Of course, this Young Adult Sci-Fi reading list is by no means complete, and is simply meant to be used as a starter kit for introducing your child to realm of Science Fiction.

Additional reporting by Ian Ellison.

Oh, and this is a completely spoiler-free review, apart from one quote from the book which doesn't reveal anything.

This will also be a fairly short book review, because I don't have much to say about And Another Thing... The publisher, Hyperion, gave us a copy of the first half of the book at Comic Con. I sort of expected we'd get a copy of the whole book in the mail at some point, but it never showed up. In any case, I've read the first half of And Another Thing... twice, not because it was so brilliant — but because I could not remember anything about it, when I sat down to write this review the other day. It was a total blank.

And Another Thing... is the continuation of Douglas Adams' indispensible Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series by Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl books I haven't read but have heard great things about. When we met Colfer at Comic Con, he seemed aware of what a tremendous undertaking he'd taken on, and said he'd only agreed to do it because Adams' wife and daughter had both asked him to. And he's definitely put his all into trying to conclude the saga of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian. The book "feels" like a Hitchhiker's book, with the periodic interjections from the Guide, and there are a few genuinely clever bits, most of them revolving around Zaphod.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with And Another Thing... If you want to revisit the universe Douglas Adams created, this book will give you more of the same. It definitely subscribes to the "more of the same" view of sequels. All of the characters are recognizably themselves, and all of the tropes are there, from Vogon poetry to the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive.

The main problem with Colfer's cover version of Adams is the humor: it falls incredibly flat, at least to me. Humor is incredibly subjective, so your opinion may vary. But Colfer's jokes feel simultaneously as though they're trying much too hard and also not quite trying hard enough. Where Adams' humor was subversive and weird and kept you constantly off balance with its cleverness, Colfer's feels labored and a bit too dependent on puns and sharp-elbowed nudges.

Here's a random entry from one of the book's Hitchhiker's Guide segments (not spoilery at all, but bear in mind I have an unfinished proof and the book may have been tweaked slightly before publication):

Guide Note: The notion that religions can be useful tools for keeping the rich rich and the poor abject has been around since shortly after the dawn of time, when a recently evolved bipedal frogget managed to convince all the other froggets in the marsh that their fates were governed by the almighty Lily Pad who would only agree to watch over their pond and keep it safe from gunner pike if an offering of flies and small reptiles was heaped upon it every second Friday. This worked for almost two years, until one of the reptile offerings proved to be slightly less than dead and proceeded to eat the gluttonized bipedal frogget followed by the almighty Lily Pad. The frogget community celebrated their freedom from the yoke of religion with an all-night rave party and hallucinogenic dock leaves. Unfortunately they celebrated a little loudly and were massacred by a gunner pike who for some reason hadn't noticed this little pond before.

The irony is so thick, you could... get bogged down in it, I guess.

After re-reading the first half of And Another Thing... and still being left with a very vague sense of empty calories, I started to wonder if I was viewing the original through a haze of nostalgia — was Adams really that much funnier? I flipped to a random page in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it was actually sharper and more subversive than I'd remembered. Honestly, if you're jonesing to visit the Hitchhiker's universe again, you're way better off rereading Adams' first couple of novels, when he was at the top of his game.

We're actually lucky enough to feature two chapters from the new edition of Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Neil Gaiman, pubilshed by Titan Books. The first chapter is from fairly early on in the book, and deals with the various stage adaptations of H2G2, including the absolutely disastrous Rainbow Theater run, in which a 3,000 seat venue failed to find a big enough hovercraft for the audience.

And then the second chapter we're featuring is from towards the end, and deals with the 2005 movie adaptation of Hitchhiker's, and the reasons why it was also not terribly successful. It's sort of a nice book-end.

Oh, and the new material in the 2009 edition of Don't Panic is written by author Guy Adams, who I believe is no relation to Douglas.

10 ALL THE GALAXY'S A STAGE

There have been three major productions of Hitchhiker's in the theatrical world. Two of these have been successful. The other was a disaster of epic proportions. It is somewhat unfortunate, in this case, that the disaster is the one that got noticed. The first production was put on at the ICA [Institute for Contemporary Arts] in London on 1st-9th May 1979, presented by Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool. ‘Staged' might be the wrong word for this production. The actors performed on little ledges and platforms, while the audience, seated on a scaffolded auditorium that floated around the ICA on air skates, filled with compressed air, was pushed around the hall at the height of 1/2,000th of an inch by hardworking stage hands.

The ninety-minute-long show was a great success.

Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters were on sale in the bar, and, for the eighty people who fitted into Mike Hust's airborne seating system, it was a great evening. Unfortunately, every hour brought 150 phone calls for tickets, all doomed to failure as the 640 tickets for the show's run had been sold out long before it opened. (Apparently an organisation with the same initials as the ICA, the International Communications Association, got so fed up with misrouted calls for tickets that they wound up closing their switchboard for a week, and stopped Communicating.)

The reviews were unanimous in their praise. A typical review from The Guardian, having praised the costumes and hovercraft, stated, "Chris Langham is an utterly ordinary Arthur… and is thus a beautiful counterpart to the cunning Ford (Richard Hope), the two-headed schizophrenic Beeblebrox (Mitch Davies and Stephen Williams, as a space-age version of a pantomime horse with two heads, two legs, and three hands) and the pyrotechnics of Campbell's production." At the time it was announced that they were hoping to revive the show "as soon as they could find a hall large enough to accommodate a 500 seater hovercraft".

Image from Douglas Adams fan page

This was, it should be borne in mind, before the publication of the book or the release of the first record, when nobody knew how much of a cult success Hitchhiker's was or was going to be.

The next performance began life some 300 miles due west in the Theatr Clwyd, a Welsh theatre company. Director Jonathan Petherbridge had taken the scripts of the first radio series and transformed them into a play, performed around Wales from 15th January until 23rd February 1980.

Announced as the "First Staged Production of Douglas Adams's Original Radio Scripts" the company would either perform two episodes an evening, or, on certain long evenings, the entire three hours of script in ‘blockbuster' performances, during which "essential space rations" were handed out to the audience at half-hourly intervals. (Not only did the bar sell Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, but the Coffee Lounge sold Algolian Zylbatburgers.) The Theatr Clwyd performance was so successful that they were offered the opportunity to take their production to London's prestigious Old Vic Theatre. Unfortunately, by this time Douglas had offered the stage rights to Ken Campbell, who had decided to stage another production at the Rainbow Theatre in London, a rock venue that seated three thousand people, in August.

Douglas Adams, displaying perfect hindsight, said, "I should have known better, but I had so many problems to contend with at that time I really wasn't thinking clearly. The thing at the Rainbow was a fiasco."
Douglas wrote additional material for the play (including the Dish of the Day sequence in Milliways, which subsequently found its way into the literary and televisual version of the show).

An article appeared in The Stage, the theatrical newspaper, about the Rainbow production, in July 1980:

A five-piece band backs the twenty-strong cast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a musical* based on the radio series that opens at the Rainbow for an 8 week run on July 16th 1980. Production has a £300,000 budget, and the front of the Rainbow will be redesigned as an intergalactic spaceport. Tickets £5, £4 and £3.

[footnote]* No, it wasn't a musical, although there was a backing group.

The foyer of the theatre is being converted into the control deck of a spaceship, with banks of video screens, flying saucers hanging from the ceiling, and possibly a talking computer to advise passengers when the trip is going to begin. There will be usherettes dressed like aliens - ‘Probably coloured green,' says co-producer Richard Dunkley - and a ‘space bar' selling galactic-sized burgers and the now famous Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

One of the diversions will be rock musician Rick Wakeman, soaring down from the roof on a flying saucer and dressed like the legendary Mekon, SF's most endearing little green man.

This week workmen installed a vast revolving stage while others completed a backdrop for the day the Earth gets demolished.

In California, the people who brought the Laserium to the London Planetarium were devising a spectacular new bag of tricks. Co-producer Philip Tinsley said, ‘This will be the first show since Rocky Horror to appeal directly to young people.'

As the publicity for the show gained momentum a twenty-five-foot inflatable whale was thrown off Tower Bridge into the Thames, and made almost no splash in terms of news. ("The police were very, very cross", said The Standard in the 3⁄4 of an inch they devoted to it.)

Then the show opened.

In retrospect this may have been a mistake. Such descriptions as "I cannot imagine a more tedious way to spend an evening" (Daily Mail), "clumsy without ever being cheerful" (Time Out), "embarrassing" (Observer), "never-ending and extremely boring" (Standard) melt into insignificance when placed beside the actual reviews, most of which dissected the show with fine and sharp scalpels and left nothing wholesome behind. A fairly average example of the put-downs was Michael Billington's in The Guardian, which stated that, "What happens on the Rainbow stage is certainly inchoate and barely comprehensible… Ken Campbell has directed this junk-opera and I can only say he gave us infinitely more fun in the days of his Roadshow when the highlight used to be a man stuffing a ferret down his trousers"*.

[footnote]* The man who stuffed the ferrets down his trousers was Sylvester McCoy, later the seventh televisual Doctor Who.

What went wrong? A number of things. The length, for one. The laser beams, sound effects and backing band for another. What was almost universally acknowledged as appalling acting for a third.

Douglas Adams explained it as, "The size of the Rainbow - a three thousand-seater theatre - and, because Hitchhiker's tends to be rather slow-moving and what is important is all the detail on the way… you put it in something that size and the first thing that goes out the window is all the detail. So you then fill it up with earthquake effects and lasers and things. That further swamps the detail and so everything was constantly being pushed in the wrong direction and all the poor actors were stuck on the stage trying desperately to get noticed by the audience across this vast distance. If you'd put the numbers we were getting into a West End theatre they would have been terrific audiences - 700 a night, or whatever. But 700 people isn't much when the producers are paying for three thousand seats. So the whole thing was a financial disaster."

Ken Campbell, a man almost impossible to get hold of, claimed the reason for the success of the ICA and failure of the Rainbow was simpler than that. "In the ICA we put everybody on a hovercraft. We just never found a hovercraft big enough for the Rainbow," he told me in the shortest interview I did for this book*.

Four weeks into the run the show was in financial difficulties.

On 20th August The Standard reported co-producer Dunkley as saying, "I think we should struggle on. The cast and crew agree with me, and a certain number of them agreed to wait for their money. We had a very negative press, and it wasn't known at the beginning how many Hitchhiker's fans there were." The next day, however, The Standard reported that, "Last night the big musical** version of the cult radio show did not go on and after playing at times to twenty percent capacity [ie. 600 people] its season has been ended three weeks prematurely. Richard Dunkley reported that everybody concerned had lost a lot of money, but it was impossible to say how much."

[footnotes]* That was it.
** It wasn't a musical, honestly.

It is easy to be wise after the event, but it would appear that the biggest mistake was that of trying to create a Cult Success. You don't gain a cult following for something big and bold and heavily hyped: a smaller, less flashy, less expensive production might well have succeeded where the galumphing Rainbow production failed.

As indeed, it has. Helping the fans and public to get over the Rainbow disaster was the Theatr Clwyd production. It surfaced again quietly a year later, and has been regularly and successfully staged by other theatre companies since. This adaptation, which, alone of all post '79 versions includes the Haggunenon sequence, and indeed actually has an inflatable Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, is uniformly popular with critics and public alike, and will, one hopes, still be revived and performed when the Rainbow fiasco has completely been forgotten.

FORD AND ZAPHOD: Zaglabor astragard!
Hootrimansion Bambriar!
Bangliatur Poosbladoooo!
ARTHUR: What the hell are you doing?
FORD: It's an ancient Betelgeuse death anthem. It means, after this, things can only get better.
THEY START TO SING AGAIN.
THE COMPUTER BANK EXPLODES.
END CREDITS.
- Alternative version.

(Image from 2003 San Francisco staging of H2G2, via Laughing Squid.)

At least twenty amateur stage productions are known to have been performed around the world over the years, variously adapted from the novel, the radio scripts or the Petherbridge script. Hitchhiker's has been presented on stage as far afield as Bermuda, Australia, Hawaii and Germany; it has been performed once as a one-man show and once as a musical*. There was also a stage production of Douglas's novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - retitled Dirk - in Oxford in 1995, which has enjoyed periodic revivals.

[footnote]* This actually was a musical, although the audience wished it wasn't.

34 POSTCARDS FROM DAVELAND

"It seems to me that we can either slip into the traditional stereotypes - you're the studio executive who has a million real-world problems to worry about, and I'm the writer who only cares about seeing his vision realized and hang the consequences - or we can recognize that we both share the same goal, which is to make the most successful movie we possibly can.

"You have a great deal of experience nursing major motion pictures into existence. I have a great deal of experience of nursing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into existence in every medium other than motion pictures… Why don't we actually meet and have a chat?"
- Excerpt from a letter written by Douglas Adams to David Vogel at Walt Disney Pictures, as reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt.

On 28th April 2005 a rather startling thing happened. A big budget* movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy appeared in cinemas. Unfortunately, to quote that most remarkable of source material, "this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

[footnote]* Well, relatively big budget anyway, the word ‘big' when relating to cinema budgets enters a whole new sense of scope which the human mind cannot truly encompass. Certainly it cost the sort of money that if found on one's doorstep one morning, say in several large skips guarded by men with machine guns, would force you to delicately lose your mind for a month or two, just while you decided what country to buy.

Douglas had spent many years trying to make such a thing happen. In fact, many years, many phone calls, many draft scripts, many contracts, many lawyers arguing about those contracts, many directors signed up, many directors signed off again, and much moving to LA then moving back to Islington because LA just wasn't very nice then moving back to LA again anyway because, well, you live in hope and at least the sun shines there…

It is forgivable to assume a project stranded so long in Development Hell (that peculiar creative graveyard where movie ideas go to have the spirit beaten out of them by film producers) will never see the light of day. Jay Roach, director of the first two Austin Powers movies as well as Meet the Parents and its ‘Focking' sequel, was attached to the project for many years, ultimately stepping down from the director's chair (due to other commitments) but retaining a role as producer. Roach passed Douglas's last script draft on to Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Where the Wild Things Are. He declined the offer to shoot it, but suggested Hammer & Tongs, a British production company comprised of director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, known for their innovative pop promo work. And there the film finally took root.

The script was passed to screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, writer of the stop-motion animation movies Chicken Run and James and the Giant Peach, to produce a final version to put in front of the cameras.

The casting seemed rock solid, with Stephen Fry as the Voice of the Book, Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod* and Zooey Deschanel as Trillian. The only slightly controversial choice - and it must be clear here that when we say ‘controversial' we mean ‘likely to get people who know a little about movie-making saying belligerent things online' - was actor turned rap artist turned actor again Mos Def as Ford Prefect.

[footnote]* Who claimed, somewhat jovially, in the DVD extras that the only reason he got the part was that they couldn't afford Jim Carrey.

Much was made in the movie's press releases about how closely the film was based on Douglas's own most recent draft, though caveats were given with regard to the film's divergence from established Hitchhiker's narrative (like we needed to be told. Since when has one form of Hitchhiker's shown the least concern for how similar it is to the last? We really don't care…). Robbie Stamp, Douglas's friend and CEO of The Digital Village, was an executive producer on the picture* and, in an interview on the Slashdot website, said, "All the substantive new ideas in the movie… are brand new Douglas ideas written especially for the movie by him… Douglas was always up for reinventing Hitchhiker's in each of its different incarnations and he knew that working harder on some character development and some of the key relationships was an integral part of turning Hitchhiker's into a movie."

[footnote]* As was Douglas himself, the film also being dedicated to him.

Which is no doubt true, but doesn't change the fact that the film doesn't really work.

One can level a number of criticisms at Douglas's writing. Yes, the comment about character development is valid, as would have been an accusation of flimsy plotting. But to mention these flaws is rather to miss the point of Douglas's writing. When he does it, it works. Douglas is one of those inspired creators who is impervious to such overarching technical issues - his genius lay in the detail. And it is precisely in the film's adherence to the broad, sweeping generalities of Douglas's work, rather than paying attention to what it was in the minutiae that made it so effective, that it fails.

In the same Slashdot interview, Robbie Stamp commented that, "I know how easy it is to see every decision to cut a scene as ‘studio' pressure, but it was always much more to do with pacing and rhythm in the film itelf." And here we see perhaps the most telling issue with converting Douglas's work to the big screen. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy never much concerned itself with the need to be fast-paced. The gems found in both the books and the radio series are often in the asides, the guide entries, the small moments of absurdity. The rhythm of Douglas's writing is that of a comedy writer hitting his punchlines; an obsessive ear for comic dialogue and the best way to sell his unconventional ideas.

It is this rhythm and pacing that the film loses, sticking instead to telling the story in a dynamic fashion. Jokes were cut, dialogue was trimmed and, arguably, this is where the spirit of Douglas's writing fell by the wayside.

Perhaps it is a sad fact that Hitchhiker's just doesn't work well in a visual medium. Certainly the BBC TV series was Douglas's least favourite incarnation of the work. Film places different demands on its source material and in doing so it played to Hitchhiker's weaknesses rather than its strengths.

The film performed adequately at the box office and was released later the same year on both a single disc DVD and a double disc gift set (which included a copy of the original novel). It is unlikely that we shall ever see a sequel.

Don't Panic © 1987, 1993, 2002, 2009 Neil Gaiman.

Antennae
The Pathetic Rationalization: Snails are already kind of alien, right? They're French, which is like being from another planet. And you can sort of imagine them twitching — which they never do, since they're glued to a guy's forehead. But if you squint, they sort of twitch. And back in the day, there was something kind of meta about using a television with an antenna to watch a guy with an antenna on his head.
The Reality Check: Sadly, those are the only nice things we can say about the antennae. They're totally silly looking, and your head will hurt trying to imagine a species that evolved looking just like us, except for the funny antennae.

Weird Ears
The Pathetic Rationalization: They're sharp. They're classic. We wouldn't find Spock nearly as slashfic-worthy without them. And hey — maybe a lot of species just evolved with extra sensitive hearing because there were a TON of really quiet predators on their worlds? And the pointiness or crinkliness makes the ears extra-sensitive? You know it makes sense.
The Reality Check: Ummm... They're just glue-on fake ears. Actually, Spock gets a free pass, but everyone who's sported potstickers or omelettes stuck to their ears since then has no excuse. None. It's unoriginal and cheap-looking.

Corrugated Foreheads
The Pathetic Rationalization: When the Klingons first started getting knobbly on their heads back in 1979, it was a step above the weird engine-grease-on-face look they had before. And it's definitely a step towards putting the "oid" in "humanoid." And think about it — all of those lumps probably provide amazing protection against getting head-butted, or hit on the head with an anvil. Befitting a warrior species, really.
The Reality Check: So let's just give Klingons a pass, Why not? Trying to sort out their cranial discrepancies gives us something to do on long evenings (even with the Manny Coto retcon.) But everybody else who's gotten the cornfield-on-head thing has to find a new gimmick, stat. It's gotten so there's an infinitely diverse cosmos full of different head injuries. Trek is, of course, the worst offender — but by no means the only one. Let's just agree that a head blob is not a species marker.

Body Paint
The Pathetic Rationalization: Who would want to diss the green women? After all, they're a staple of science fiction, with their Shakespeare appropriating, sexy-dancing ways. And if it wasn't for greasepaint, how would we ever have learned not to hate the half-black, half-white people? Plus, it makes total sense: On other planets, the sunlight is probably harmful at other wavelengths besides UV, and so people need to have green pigment to protect themselves against the UltraLime rays. Right? Right?
The Reality Check: Okay, come on. Any alien whose face looks like a five-year-old who got to go to the face-painting tent at the county fair is not passing muster.

Extra Heads Or Limbs
The Pathetic Rationalization: We all love Zaphod Beeblebrox (and we were deeply saddened when the long-awaited movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy didn't even try to give us a proper, convincing two-headed President Zaphod.) And the book makes it clear the extra head and arm are just a prosthetic decoration that Zaphod decided to try out, so it's not strictly an alien biology thing anyway. Plus, why wouldn't humanoids have an extra redundant bit here or there?
The Reality Check: In practice, it just looks ridiculous — just look at the TV version of H2G2.

Random Mythological Drag
The Pathetic Rationalization: Oh wow. It turns out all our myths about Kali/Shiva/Santa Claus/Satan/Patient Zero are based on a real being, who visited our world at some point in a time when people were easily impressed by fake horns. Dude, it actually makes total sense. It's not just an alien who happens to look like Papa Smurf, it's the alien whom all the Papa Smurf legends are based on. Can you not see it?
The Reality Check: Cheap Devil costume looks cheap. Also, the aliens-gave-us-our-mythology storyline is almost as tired as the humans-visit-prehistoric-Earth-and-become-Adam-and-Eve thing. Mostly, though, it's just a cheap gimmick for recycling terrible Halloween costumes as aliens.

Funny Glasses/Weird Contact Lenses
The Pathetic Rationalization: Umm... well, maybe they're really kind of reptilian but they're disguised as humans, except for the eyes. See above, about UltraLime radiation — maybe you need weird eyes to see in UltraLime light. (Not to be confused with ultra-limelight.) Plus who doesn't love the alien who looks like us, until he takes off his Ray-Bans? Communists and Anti-syndicalists, mainly.
The Reality Check: Umm... contact lenses? Silly glasses? Is there any way for that not to look cheap and ridiculous? That's actually not a rhetorical question — we'd like to know.

Biker Gear
The Pathetic Rationalization: Okay, so it makes total sense for aliens to come to Earth disguised as bikers. Like maybe their physiology is really really different than ours, but they just put on leathers and helmets so they'll fit in. That totally makes sense. Also, if you think about it, motorcycle gear looks a lot like a spacesuit. I bet you never thought of that. It only just occurred to us, actually.
The Reality Check: There's really only one question that applies here: Is your alien named Lobo? No? Then you just lost your only justification for making him/her/it look like a biker. End of story. Seriously, it looks cheap.

Crazy Hair
The Pathetic Rationalization: Well, a lot of species evolve to look kind of similar, except that they don't evolve the same kind of styling foam we do. Or maybe the water on their planet is more impure, so shampoo doesn't work the same way it does here. Did you ever think about that?
The Reality Check: Okay, really? Silly hair? That's all you've got? Manic Panic is a gateway to a strange new world? Let's just agree that a little dab will not do a whole new species. Our personal favorites are Doctor Who's Movellans — granted, they're robots, but we're supposed to think they're aliens at first, and what makes them an alien species? Silver Bo Derek hair. Yay!

Baldness (with Optional Buttcrack Attachment)
The Pathetic Rationalization: Maybe this species never evolved hair? Plus, it totally makes sense, if you ponder all the totally bald people you know in your own life — they're all kind of aliens, aren't they? Their heads are so shiny! And have you ever noticed that a fully bald person can raise his/her eyebrows much higher than the rest of us? I witnessed a bald man's eyebrows hovering around the top of his head the other day. And if you ever meet a woman who's got zero hair on her head, it really is true that she's from a nymphomaniac species that kills with sex. It's not even a metaphor, it's just true. Follicles dampen your sex drive (in women, anyway.)
The Reality Check: This is the absolute worst. We can give you the elf-ears, the eventful foreheads, the snail feelers. But baldness? Really? Also, given how frequently bald aliens also have anuses on their heads... it's just not a good idea.

Seriously, VFX industry. You gave us Gollum. You gave us Spider-Man swinging through the city without looking arthritic or epileptic. You gave us Doug Jones. You even managed to make Kelsey Grammer-as-blue-furry-guy look kind of acceptable. What the hell?

The party included a whole Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy-style screen full of explanations of common terms in the series, but nobody got a good picture of that.

Colfer talked to us about how he'd been incredibly reluctant to take over the Hitchhiker's series, but finally acquiesced after Adams' widow and daughter both asked him to do it. He has absolutely no plans to do any more Hitchhiker's books, and this isn't the first volume in a whole new series of adventures for Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and company — just a one-off. But Colfer does feel there's a lack of fun, silly space opera in the world right now, and he'd love to see more of it. He hinted he may try and write some more in that genre at some point. He's also hoping his book will introduce Adams' original books to the readers who follow him from the Artemis Fowl novels.

The party also included black hand towels with (what else) "Don't Panic" written on them, suitable for framing, or using to dry your hands.

There was a "Tweet to the Galaxy" interface, which allowed you to Twitter and have your tweets sent out into space. I'm still not entirely sure how this was supposed to work, but you can try it out for yourself here. So far, no aliens have responded to people's tweets about three A.M. hookups or dental hygiene, although that doesn't mean they're not reading.

Here's Colfer, tweeting actual Vogon poetry out to the presumably horrified galactic community. And in the background, you can see the bar, where they were serving actual Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. Which, we have to admit, didn't cause any feelings of gold bricks with lemon slices smashing into our head. We asked the bartender what's in a real-life Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, and basically it's vodka, lemonade and a bit of seltzer. Zaphod would have been sad.

Star Trek: The Federation may have given us huge advances in transportation and energy-matter conversion, but their toilet technology is decidedly dull. The most advanced feature on the brig toilet seen in The Undiscovered Country is that it pops out of the wall. And, sadly, Federation loos are hardly immune to wear and tear; at one point during the Voyager's journey, the ship was down to a mere four functional lavs. And, if Jonathan Frakes is to be believed, the situation on the Enterprise-D is even more dire:

Galaxy Quest: In a bit of oversight, the creators of the non-existent television series Galaxy Quest failed to include even a single bathroom in the official blueprints for the NSEA Protector. Fortunately, a deleted scene reveals that, despite mistaking the TV episodes for actual historical documents, those ingenious Thermians recognized the need for mammalian waste extraction. It probably works, but by the time you figure out how, it would be far too late:

Dr. Lazarus - Galaxy Quest

Lexx: Off-beat space opera Lexx never shied away from toilet humor, so it figures that the ship's toilet would be, well, humorous. The titular living ship naturally has an organic lavatory, complete with a tongue, so you can finish your bowel movement with that fresh, just-licked-by-a-giant-space-bug clean feeling.

Babylon 5: The Babylon 5 space station plays host to a number of species, many with unique physiological properties. While human males can opt for the classic urinal, station toilets come equipped with attachments to accommodate other anatomies. As for species with more offensive excretory processes – such as the carrion-eating pak'ma'ra – they get their own facilities.

Firefly: As a general rule, everything on the smuggling ship Serenity is always breaking down, but the toilets seem to be the only things Kaylee isn't constantly repairing. Perhaps that's because they're the model of simplicity: sleeping-car style cans that, like the Federation brig toilets, pull out from the wall.

My Teacher Glows in the Dark by Bruce Coville: When Peter Thompson travels through space to meet with an interplanetary council, he discovers that the most difficult part of the mission may not be convincing the aliens not to destroy humanity, but figuring out how to use the facilities:

Give me the code for a bathroom, please," I said to the URAT.

"Insufficient data."

"What do you mean?" I cried, crossing my legs.

"I do not know what kind of bathroom you need. We have fifty-three different types of facilities."

I remembered the octopi toilets, or whatever they were, that I had seen on the first chart. Given the variety of aliens I had met already, it made sense that the ship needed a lot of different bathrooms.

"I'm glad I'm not the plumber for this place," I muttered.

"Yes," agreed the URAT, "that would be a disaster."

"Look, I don't need to be insulted by a machine. Just tell me how to find a bathroom!"

The URAT informed me that it needed to know more about me. After it had asked fifteen or twenty questions, some of them very personal, it finally gave me a bathroom code.

Not a moment too soon! I thought, as I punched the code into the control pad. I stepped into a bathroom that was only mildly odd – which is to say that it only took me about five minutes (five desperate minutes) to figure out how to use it.

Battlestar Galactica: The bathroom holds particular dramatic significance for BSG's doctor/Cylon collaborator/nymph squad prophet Gaius Baltar. It's where Laura Roslin asks him to be her vice president – and where she later threatens to hang his presidential portrait. It's also where he gets stared down by a supremely pissed-off (and audibly pissing) Starbuck. Of course, while the toilets in the Colonial Fleet seem to work, there's never enough toilet paper and the stall doors just won't stay closed.

Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams: The Starship Bistromath does away with the need for plumbing altogether. By placing the teleportation cubicles in the bathrooms, Slartibartfast has ensured that any toilet issues can be resolved by simply teleporting the offending substances elsewhere.

Star Kid: When Spencer Griffith finds an alien Cybersuit, the issue isn't whether the suit's functions (including one for waste collection) work, it's whether Spencer can think of the proper term for communicating his rather urgent needs to the suit's AI (starting at 9:58):

I think there's an argument to be made that lawyers are underrepresented in science fiction, at least relative to their prevalence in other genres. Compared to, say, doctors, who show up all the time in pretty much every science fiction show (as an earlier post on this very site once examined), you generally need a pretty specific reason to bring a lawyer onto the scene, and a lot of the time even a trial won't do it.

After all, how many times have science fiction protagonists found themselves in kangaroo courts, forced to offer their own best defense? There's apparently not much of a right to legal representation in the future. For instance, roughly half of all Doctor Who stories find the Doctor under arrest for one reason or another, and I can't name a single character in the entire history who could really be considered a lawyer (with the possible exception of the Valeyard, which I'm not counting for so many reasons).

That's not to say there aren't any great lawyers in science fiction - far from it. Here are some of the best.

Samuel T. Cogley, Star Trek

In most of the trials seen over the course of the Star Trek franchise's long history, the defendants simply represented themselves. This probably had something to do with the fact that the characters were all in the military, but it's just as likely that this made it easier to give the show's stars big dramatic speeches. (Seriously, check out this list of the show's "lawyers" from Memory Alpha. It's basically just a list of the various shows' captains and first officers.)

But, when Kirk found himself faced with a case even he could not theatrically bluster his way out of - and keep in mind we're talking about William Shatner at the height of his hammy powers here, so this is a seriously impossible case we're talking about - he turned to super-lawyer Samuel T. Cogley to lead his defense. Famous for his Luddite tendencies, which included such eccentricities as reading books on paper instead of on computer. Not one to do anything halfway, Cogley's spirited defense included references to "the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, the Magna Carta, the United States Constitution, the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies and the Statutes of Alpha III", all of which I plan on citing as precedents should I ever find myself standing before a judge.

Cogley's defense didn't exactly lead to an acquittal, but it did provide Kirk and Spock enough time to prove the man Kirk had supposedly murdered was, in fact, alive and well and tampering with the ship's systems. With his case concluded, Cogley decided to move on to defending Kirk's supposed victim, noting he felt very good about his chances.

And let's also give a quick shout-out to Worf's grandfather, who was also called Worf, for his thankless job advocating for Kirk and McCoy at their Klingon show trial in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Although I must admit that that throwaway cameo originally left me with the mistaken impression that Lieutenant Worf was about 150 years old by the time of The Next Generation.

Romo Lampkin, Battlestar Galactica & Joseph Adama, Caprica

Easily the best of Battlestar Galactica's later season additions (with all due respect to noted neurosurgeon John Hodgman), Romo Lampkin combined the sort of lovable sleaziness central to any Mark Sheppard performance, mixed with a brilliant if fractured legal philosophy. Seemingly just a mercenary lawyer taking on the obviously indefensible defense of disgraced president Gaius Baltar, he proceeded to build a case equal parts audacious (such as changing Baltar's plea to guilty just to make a point) and ludicrous (such as calling Lee Adama, his own partner on the defense and the son of one of the judges, to the stand to testify - this is a perk of trying a case in front of ship's captains instead of actual legal experts, I guess). Oh, and he's also a kleptomaniac and was briefly President of the Colonies. Although, quite honestly, who wasn't President of the Colonies towards the end?

In time, Lampkin reveals that he learned many of his best tricks from Joseph Adama, famous (some would say infamous) civil liberties lawyer back on Caprica. Much of his story remains to be told, as he will be the central figure of the prequel series Caprica, but it has already been revealed that he also defended members of the Ha'la'tha crime syndicate, which he had to do to repay them for funding his legal education. Still, he also defended the so-called "worst of the worst" partly out of a more altruistic need to air out society's failings. He always said his trademark silver lighter brought him good luck and made him unbeatable whenever he took it with him to court, a claim both his son and grandson later took much comfort in as they took the lighter with them on their most dangerous missions.

The law firm of Wolfram & Hart, Angel

The main adversaries for the mostly reformed vampire Angel, Wolfram and Hart represents the Earthly interests of an ancient group of demons. Beyond engaging in a variety of extracurricular activities that run the gamut from unscrupulous to criminal to utterly detestable (and, whenever possible, all three at once), the law firm also makes a point of representing society's most reprehensible slime, such as corrupt politicians. Supposedly, Wolfram & Hart would not exist without the evil inherent to all people. If I may make an exceedingly easy joke, I'm not clear how this distinguishes it from any other law firm.

Stephen Byerley, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov's landmark collection of robot stories features two tales that might not actually have any robots in them at all. These two stories, "Evidence" and "The Evitable Conflict", focus on Stephen Byerley, a successful prosecutor currently running for Mayor of New York City. His enemies in the Quinn political machine accuse him of being a robot, forcing Susan Calvin and the rest of US Robots and Mechanical Men to attempt to verify that claim. Their various tests prove inconclusive, and Byerley refuses to prove his humanity on the grounds that that is not something any human should have to prove.

"Evidence" never exactly reveals one way or the other whether Byerley is, in fact, a robot, but the clues probably point to a cautious "yes." (Whether or not he is a robot isn't even at issue in "The Evitable Conflict", where he has moved on from Mayor of New York to the only slightly more powerful position of World Coordinator.) This is qualified by the fact that Susan Calvin argues convincingly that a robot could never be a lawyer, as the unshakable parameters of the First Law of Robotics would prevent a robot from ever understanding the complex concept of "justice."

His detractors' claim that he only prosecutes those that he is certain are guilty is rejected by Dr. Calvin, as Byerley could never get past the direct harm of imprisoning a man if he were a robot. The story makes a number of satirical points, such as pointing out that someone everyone thinks is a robot because he or she appears to follow the Three Laws of Robotics might simply be a very good person, as the Three Laws are essentially a simple code of ethics. Whether Asimov intends any further syllogism to be made when he suggests a robot could never be a lawyer is up to the reader to decide.

Livia Beale, Journeyman

The short-lived 2007 series followed Dan Vasser, a San Francisco reporter who travels randomly in time. During its brief run, Journeyman also introduced Vasser's former fiance, Livia Beale (played by Terminator Salvation's Moon Bloodgood), who had seemingly died in a plane crash. She was actually another traveler in time who was originally from 1948. Finding herself stuck in our time period seemingly for good, she decided to become a lawyer and make a new life for herself. She has to leave all this behind when the plane crash makes her resume her time jumping, although she is now able to help Dan in his own travels.

Linda Ziegler and Dale Rice, Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer

Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer is one of the best when it comes to examining the ethical implications futuristic ideas. His courtroom drama Illegal Alien pits prosecutor Linda Ziegler against famous civil rights lawyer Dale Rice in just the latest trial of the century to hit Los Angeles. This time, it is the alien Hask of the Tosok race who finds himself facing murder charges, and Rice takes it upon himself to clear the alien of the charges. Both his and Ziegler's arguments are as much based upon slick theatrics and larger questions of alien rights as they are the pertinent facts of the case (which, as they so often do in science fiction stories, point to a larger conspiracy).

Nathan Petrelli, Heroes

Although Nathan Petrelli started out as a lawyer in the New York City District Attorney's office, this is pretty much behind him before the show even starts. Like many real-life lawyers, he used his legal career as a springboard into politics, with the first episode of Heroes already showing him as a Congressional candidate.

The law firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero, Century City

This 2004 show mostly came and went without anyone noticing, and it hasn't even picked up the modest following of something like Journeyman. Still, the show deserves plenty of credit for being probably the closest thing to pure legal science fiction ever shown on TV. Set in 2030, a time when Oprah Winfrey is president, the moon is colonized, and there is universal health care for all, Century City looks at the various cases undertaken by the four partners at the law firm of Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero.

These cases touch on everything from the ethics of cloning to identity theft that actually entails stealing entire personalities. It only ran for four episodes before CBS canceled it. Perhaps we'll just have to wait for the seemingly indestructible Law & Order franchise to make a futuristic spin-off (it can be called Law & Order: Futuristic Spin-Off!) for legal science fiction to get a real foothold in the TV landscape.

Harvey Birdman, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

What Century City tried to do for all of science fiction's many tropes and elements, the Adult Swim classic Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law did far more successfully for the rather more narrow field of sixties Hanna Barbera cartoons. The washed-up hero turned barely qualified lawyer Harvey Birdman was probably the sanest person at his largely psychotic law firm, and he too was in all probability certifiably insane, which had mixed results when it actually came time to go to trial. (The fact that the judges themselves were also completely bonkers was a big randomizer.)

The show's science fiction credentials weren't always particularly strong, but it did retain enough of a flavor of Birdman's old job as a third-rate superhero for me to feel comfortable including it on this list. The show also occasionally featured cases that highlighted some of Hanna Barbera's more obviously science fiction programs, including the Jetson family (from the far future time of 2004!) suing the past for destroying the environment and forcing their entire society to live high above the clouds of the destroyed Earth.

Judiciary Pag, Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

His High Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed, might technically be more of a judge than a lawyer, but I'll still include him for a couple of reasons. One, he probably started out as a lawyer, and two, he's easily my favorite minor character in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga. Judiciary Pag was most famous for sentencing the people of Krikkit some ten billion years ago to imprisonment in a Slo-Time seal after they tried to kill everybody in the entire universe (which, he points out, he feels like doing the same thing some mornings).

He was hated by pretty much all of his colleagues for his unprofessional manner and supremely laid-back approach to the law. (For instance, he marked what he rightly recognized as the most important moment in legal history by sticking some gum under his chair.) He got away with all this because he was, in fact, the greatest legal mind the cosmos would ever know. Pag or, as he preferred to be known for reasons that made sense only to him, Zipo Bibrok 5 × 10⁸, handed down his ruling on the Krikit matter to great acclaim and thunderous, which he would have been around to receive if he hadn't already slipped away with one of the more attractive members of the jury to whom he had slipped a note about a half hour beforehand.

A whole bunch of characters from Marvel and DC Comics

There's no shortage of lawyers among the superhero community. As superhero (and villain) origin stories go, former lawyer was particularly popular in the Golden Age. The first costumed crimefighter, Brian O'Brien was a former district attorney who took a more direct role in meting out justice when he became the masked vigilante The Clock in 1936. Numerous others followed, including the Quality Comics character Mouthpiece, the Timely Comics hero Laughing Mask, and the original version of the Batman foe the Thinker.

In more recent years, Marvel has created a bunch more lawyers, including Sharon Ginsberg, Cameron Hodge, and Black Bishop - and those are just the ones who are X-Men villains. There's also the X-Men's own attorney, Evangeline Whedon, who can turn into a dragon, the rather obscure seventies superhero Dominic Fortune, and Captain America's ex-girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal.

But Marvel's two most famous lawyers really have to be Matt Murdock and Jennifer Walter, better known respectively as Daredevil and She-Hulk. Matt Murdock's legal career has probably been a more consistent part of his character over the years, but Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk arguably did the most sustained (and most fun) exploration of the intersection between superheros and the law, as Jennifer Walter (and, quite explicitly, not She-Hulk) is hired by the law firm of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway to help defend heroes whose vigilante activities lead to all too common misunderstandings with more traditional law enforcement.

On the DC side of things, the most famous lawyer would probably have to be Harvey Dent, who of course was Gotham City's district attorney before he became Two-Face. In the current Batman: Reborn event that is launching Dick Grayson's tenure as the Caped Crusader, Gotham's new DA is Kate Spenser, better known as the vigilante Manhunter. An even more brutal lawyer-turned-crimefighter was the eighties version of Vigilante, who in his civilian life was New York City prosecutor Adrian Chase. Other lawyers in the DC universe include the Atom's very estranged and now villainous wife Jean Loring, Power Company hero Josiah Power, the mostly immortal Resurrection Man, and, reaching a bit further back into DC lore to the wonderfully ludicrous times before Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Robin of Earth-Two.

The Hyper-Chicken, Futurama

Is there any greater lawyer in all of science fiction than this simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid? Tasked with some of the thirty-first century's most impossible cases, he does about as well as can be expected, which is to say he doesn't completely lose all of them. He did help Bender beat the rap for non-drunk driving after he crashed a dark matter tanker into the Pluto penguin sanctuary (although he wasn't nearly as successful in his own trial for that there "incompetence"). He helped Fry and Bender avoid serious jail time after they unwittingly abetted a bank robbery by successfully arguing they were both insane, offering the simple evidence that they had hired him as their lawyer.

In his prosecution of Zapp Brannigan for blowing up DOOP headquarters, his oddball legal tactics ranged from the brilliant (like calling the jury, which was entirely composed of DOOP delegates, to the stand just so they could confirm they were going to convict Zapp) to the somewhat less brilliant (like his insistence on establishing whether or not Leela was wearing a hoop skirt at the time). A deleted scene from the most recent Futurama movie finally provided the name Matcluck for the character, but really he'll always simply be the Hyper-Chicken, and that's all he needs to be. Just don't mention badgers in front of him.

Most people have experienced text adventures (also known as interactive fiction) in some way: the phrase "you are likely to be eaten by a grue" still strikes fear into many hearts. The same way a well-written novel can conjure up detailed and engrossing pictures in the mind of a reader, so, too, can a good text adventure.

The first experiment with interactive fiction, ADVENT (or Colossal Cave Adventure), and the first commercial text adventure, Adventureland, were the model for future games of this format. Both were fantasy games with increasingly widening worlds to explore. From there, though, one company dominated the text adventure market: Infocom.

In addition to their humor, their unconventional packaging (including "feelies," odd little artifacts from the game), and their innovative interface, Infocom also developed a reputation for creating large and strange virtual worlds. They also inspired independent creators to take up the mantel of creating text-based worlds. Here are some of the most expansive and iconic of those worlds.

Zork

The first version of Zork was written in the late 70's, but since then, the world of Zork has expanded into something giant and complex. The game is divided into three parts, all set in the vast Zork universe. In part 1, throughout your quest to collect treasures and become the Dungeon Master, you explore a fiendishly complex maze, an ancient ruined temple, a portion of the "Land of the Dead," and a flood control dam, all part of a great Underground Empire.

An that's all just part 1. Parts 2 and 3 take you to more mazes, a carousel, a volcano, a museum, an immense "Land of Shadows," and more, encountering wizards, thieves, and the infamous grue. The tone of the games is lighthearted and full of jokes. The combined effect makes the Zork trilogy totally engrossing, one of the first fully immersive virtual worlds. (Play part 1 here)

Bureaucracy

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams worked closely with Infocom to create two different games. The first, and more well known, was based off of his famous Hitchhiker series, but the second was set in an entirely different, entirely scarier world.

It's called Bureaucracy, and in it, you are a confused citizen trying to file a change of address card. This simple task spirals into a complex, infuriating adventure in a fully formed world disconcertingly similar to the real one. In the world of Bureaucracy, your lunch order is lost due to a computer crash, your mail is scattered throughout the various houses you visit, you are almost eaten by a tribe of cannibals, and you eventually enlist the help of a hacker to finally get your address changed.

The thing that makes the world of Bureaucracy so engrossing is that it starts as a routine exploration of the town you find yourself in, but it quickly develops into a giant web of confusion and manipulation. It feels a little like waking up and finding yourself in a parallel world where everyday tasks take a SWAT team to accomplish.

Trinity

Trinity opens on a quiet English park about to be blasted by a nuclear explosion. Your job is to escape into a parallel universe of sorts and explore the mystery of how the bomb came to be launched at the park that day. What follows is a journey through nuclear test sites of the past and future and the surreal landscapes of another dimension, a sort of speculative history and future of the development of nuclear weapons.

Trinity is an unabashedly political game. It was released in 1986, and it's a commentary on the nuclear age. But it's also an exploration of a strange dimension with it's own rules, a blend of fiction and reality. Figuring out these rules means fully delving into Trinity's strange world.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

In a strange experiment with the virtual worlds of text adventures, A Mind Forever Voyaging presents a laboratory creating its own simulated virtual world. This research team has created a virtual city to model a new plan for economic and social development. You control an artificial intelligence named PRISM, and your job is to delve into the virtual town to observe conditions under this new plan.

The game progresses through years in the simulated city, and you observe the slow growth of dystopia. It's an unconventional entry in the text adventure canon. There are very few puzzles and the ultimate goal seems merely to observe and learn from the failures of the research team. The game essentially presents you with a declining world for you to explore and try to understand.

Curses

With the fall of Infocom in the late 80's, text adventures and interactive fiction seemed to be on the decline. But there was a minor resurgence in the format not long after. Graham Nelson's 1993 game, Curses, is considered a standout in that resurgence.

In Curses, you are a wealthy Englishman searching through the attic of your recently inherited house for a map. Of course things get complex from there, but the bulk of the richness of the environment comes from the clearly carefully conceived mansion, Meldrew Hall. In exploring the house, it seems to come alive with its own history. Curses is worth checking out for this section alone. (Play it here)

These games, among others, show the power of text to develop immersive and complex virtual worlds.

Further reading: The Cursor Is Your Friend In Scifi Text Adventure Games

The absolute best sequence of killer robots being confounded must come from Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe And Everything. It's not quite as great as Adams' first two books in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series, but it's still better than almost anything else. The warlike robots of Krikkit have discovered Marvin the Paranoid Android, whose brain (he's fond of reminding us) is the size of a planet. So it seems like a fantastic idea to plug him into their computer system. Unfortunately:

Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and neither was the central intelligence core of the Krikkit War Computer.

The Krikkit robots who had salvaged this pathetic metal creature from the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta had done so because they recognized almost immediately its gigantic intelligence, and the use this could be to them.

They hadn't reckoned with the attendant personality disorders, which the coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness and the loneliness were doing nothing to decrease.

It was not happy with its task.

Apart from anything else, the mere coordination of an entire planet's military strategy was only taking up a tiny part of its formidable mind, and the rest of it had become extremely bored.

Luckily for Zaphod Beeblebrox, Marvin is paying attention when a killer robot tries to off him shortly afterwards:

Zaphod's head snapped round (the other one was looking hawkishly in entirely the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal killer robot directly behind him seize up and start to smoke. It staggered backwards and slumped against a wall. It slid down it. It slipped sideways, threw its head back and started to sob inconsolably.

Zaphod looked back at Marvin.

"You must have a terrific outlook on life," he said.

"Just don't even ask," said Marvin.

And that, kids, is how you mess up an army of killer robots.

Oh, and this post is probably work-safe, unless your coworkers are looking over your shoulders at the words on your screen. Or unless you start reading aloud. Some of the videos are a bit saucy, but they're from YouTube.

Tuvok (from Star Trek: Voyager):

Vulcans are automatically sex on legs, because of that whole repressed emotion thing, and the fact that it explodes - erupts! - every seven years with Pon Farr. But Tuvok is especially primed for slash fiction, because of all the smouldering glances he shared with Tom Paris and Chakotay, among others. Plus he's kind of an exhibitionist:


There's a whole web page devoted just to Tuvok slash fiction, with titles like, "Tuvok and Chakotay make a deal. But is it worth it?" Tuvok goes into Pon Farr a lot. There are even multiple stories of Tuvok hooking up with the mirror-universe Bashir, from Deep Space Nine. And Tuvok and Gul Dukat hooking up. Yay!

Jayne (from Firefly):

Jayne, you ignorant slut. For some reason, all of the men aboard the tiny ship Serenity are drawn to the manly brusqueness of the mercenary who would kill them for a nice hat. This Firefly Slash archive is full of Jayne/Mal, Jayne/Simon, Jayne/Mal/Simon. And there's more here. But no Jayne/Wash? Anyway, the Simon/Jayne pairings are surprisingly sweet and tender, with River giving Simon dating advice and Jayne admitting he really wants to turn the doctor out, instead of turning the doctor in. Here's a great passage from one story':

Simon arched his back, pushing up to meet Jayne's caress. His nails dug into Jayne's arm as he moaned low in his throat and shifted sinuously on the bed, spreading his legs wider. Jayne grinned down at him before taking his mouth again, his hand moving with delightful slowness, tongue stroking deep inside him, over and over, possessing without force. Simon gasped against Jayne's mouth, unable to summon any other response to this sure and gentle claiming.

His head felt like it was swathed in cotton and he stared dreamily as Jayne broke their kiss. Jayne watched him with a small, strange smile and nuzzled his cheek, making a satisfied noise under his breath. His hand tightened deliciously.

"Oh god," Simon gasped. "Yes, just like that!"

(Jayne pic from evinou)

Prowl (from Transformers Animated):

There have been a lot of Transformers named Prowl, but the latest version is a robot who turns into a police motorcycle. And for some reason, that's just unutterably sexy to a whole generation of slash-fic writers. Here's Prowl seducing Optimus Prime:

But Optimus a fast learner, and once he calmed, Prowl was quick to reward him. He turned his head inwards, placing careful, soft nips along the thin white plates of Optimus's jawline. So delicate-no wonder he wore the mask during battle. Removing a hand from Optimus's hip joint, Prowl ran it up the other mech's side, palm resting against the smooth curves of headlights as his fingers teased at the underseam of red chest plates. Optimus shuddered, whispering his approval in an unconscious reversion to a heavily accented, uniqe Cybertronian dialect that was so different from the formal, bland Cybertronian used by the Elite Guard.

And here's a debate about the Prowl/Jazz pairing, with links to some great stories. And here's a great essay on Transformers porn someone wants to see.

Miles Vorkosigan (from Lois McMaster Bujold's novels):

Miles Vorkosigan may have been pretty busy, rising above his tragic family life and his disability, to become one of the greatest heroes of ImpSec. But it turns out he's had lots of spare time to hook up with his handsome but dim-witted cousin Ivan Vorpatril, and his stepbrother, emperor Gregor Vorbarra. A treasure trove of Vorkosigan slash stories is here. And there are even more here. And there's the epic slash novel A Deeper Season, which you can read here.

Neroon (from Babylon 5):

Neroon is part of the warrior caste of the Minbari Star Riders clan, and a fearsome adversary. But he's also a legendary lover, especially when it comes to Marcus Cole, the human he fights in a deadly one-on-one battle. The two warriors come to respect each other and (in the minds of slash-fic writers, anyway) to embrace passionately. (Maybe that's why Marcus was a virgin for so long? He was waiting for the right guy to come along?) There are tons of Marcus/Neroon stories here, including this passage:

The feel of Neroon's warm lips caressing his caused Marcus to whimper, feeling the love that Neroon held for him.

"This is our first time together, Marcus. I would have it a memorable and pleasurable experience for you, my beloved."

Marcus bowed his head and then smiled shyly up at his husband. "I love you, Neroon and I will admit that I am nervous about tonight but I know that with you here beside me I can face anything. I want this, Neroon. I've waited all of my life for this moment. I love you, Neroon and I am ready for our first night together. One of which will be repeated for many years to come," Marcus said with a teasing smile as he leaned up and kissed his beloved.

Neroon growled low at the feel of his lover's lips against his as he took Marcus into his arms. Slowly he began to kiss his way down Marcus' neck causing Marcus to moan in pleasure at the feel of Neroon's lips across his skin. Slowly Neroon's hands removed the silk robe from Marcus' shoulders.

More here. And here.

Molly Millions (from Neuromancer):

Okay, so there are only a couple of stories about the heroine from William Gibson's Neuromancer, including a steamy hookup with 3Jane. But we want more! Someone write some, and send us the link.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars):

He may be kind of a dick, but at least the Jedi master is generous in bed. Around the time Phantom Menace came out, there was a craze for Obi-Wan/Darth Maul slash, showcasing how the Jedi and the Sith Lord could have worked out their antagonism. Here they are, dancing around together and trading longing glances:



But he's also hooked up with his teacher, Qui-Gon, his grown-up student, Anakin, and pretty much anyone else who comes by the Jedi temple.

Ford Prefect (from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy):

Ford Prefect shows Arthur Dent the wonders of the universe, but what else does he show him? And why exactly was Ford so eager to take Arthur with him when he fled the doomed Earth? Story synopses include "The Earth blows up, the boys get it on." Or: "Aliens force Ford and Arthur to have sex." Find out more here. And here. Ooh, and here. Oh, and if you're dying for pregnant Arthur Dent, try here.

Susan Calvin (from Asimov's Robot series):

There are only a few slash fic stories featuring Asimov's misanthropic heroine that I could find, but they come highly recommended.

Rodney McKay (from Stargate Atlantis):

Our favorite silly nerd character from Stargate has been keeping busy in the slash fiction world. Apparently there's a whole shipper community called McShep, for McKay and Sheppard. One story has the intriguing synopsis, "John and Rodney must refrain from having sex for twelve hours." In another story, "John gets caught with his hand in the Rodney jar." Oh my! More here. And here. And here. Ooh, and here's a video:

Aeryn Sun (from Farscape):

She may have had a tumultuous relationship with John Crichton on the TV series, but in the world of slash fic, she's gotten together with Zhaan, Chiana and a host of others. A typical passage:

Aeryn pressed her fingers over the nipples and began to manipulate them lightly, using the friction of the cloth to give Zhaan added pleasure. Letting go of the sensitive peaks, she slid her hands up over them. Zhaan's nipples traced circular patterns over Aeryn's palms. I'm going to make you mumble too, she thought, I won't be alone in that.

Zhaan arched her back, pushing her breasts into Aeryn's hands. Aeryn let go and pressed her own breasts into Zhaan's, pulling the priestess over for another deep kiss. As they slid together into the motions of the kiss, their tongues languidly caressing, their bodies moved closer, breast against breast, belly to belly, sex to sex.

The priestess nudged Aeryn back against the wall, still continuing to kiss her. Aeryn was melting—she was sure of it—the cold wall against her back, the warm woman in front, and every part in between aching for Zhaan's touch. Her hands stroked Zhaan's back, then moved lower, cupping her ass.

The best television show endings don't just provide a satisfying conclusion to a serialized drama - they give you the sense that you've traveled, and arrived somewhere. They tie up at least some of the loose ends, and give some thematic resolution. But more importantly - they kick you in the ass and shock you. They make you go, "Wha? That's where this was heading?" By startling you, they make you view the whole series that's gone before in a new light.

Here are the top 10, in my book, from worst to best:

10) Doctor Who. By the late 1980s, the original Doctor Who had run out of steam, with silly storylines and weak production values. But the show's final season saw a bit of a renaissance, with a couple different storylines that addressed the theme of evolution in different ways. The final story, "Survival," brought back the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, and placed him inside a story about "survival of the fittest." Meanwhile, the Doctor's traveling companion, Ace, started evolving herself, reaching a kind of conclusion in this episode where she becomes more than human. The whole thing ends with a nice speech as the triumphant Doctor tells Ace they've got work to do.

9) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The TV series, encompassing the first two books, and several large chunks of the radio series, ends on a lovely note. Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are back on Earth in prehistoric days, and they get the question that goes with the final answer of life, the universe and everything... only it's slightly wrong. Still, it's a beautiful day, and they walk off through the prehistoric meadow as Louis Armstrong sings "What A Wonderful World."

8) Sapphire And Steel. A lot of this British show about two time travelers, played by David McCallum and Joanna Lumley, feels dated and slow now. But the final four part episode, in which the agents get caught in a time trap, is still as eerie and scary as it was originally. They're stuck in a roadside cafe where time appears to have stopped, along with a handful of people who claim to be from 1948. Normally, Sapphire and Steel can solve time-displacements just by using their wits, but this time they're out of their depth. "I saw the future... and it was our future."

7) Space Island One. This show about the crew of a commercially run space station had its ups and downs, but its last couple of episodes were among the best television I've ever seen. The company that owns the space station is trying to decide between shutting it down and just pulling the plug. And the station's best crewmember, Dusan, has already found a new job. But before Dusan goes, the company orders an unwise series of tests, which overload the station's equipment and cause it to go down in a blaze of glory, which not everybody survives.

6) Quantum Leap. Okay, all the commenters talked me into watching this finale, which I barely remembered. It's pretty great stuff, including Sam traveling back to where it all started and meeting a bunch of the people from his past jumps... And the bartender has some revelations for Sam that he struggles to take on board. So Sam makes one last jump, to the wife of an old friend... and you fade out to that message, "Beth never remarried. She and Al have four daughters... Dr. Sam Becket never returned home." Classic stuff.

5) The Prisoner. This is the most polarizing ending of them all - anyone who expected an actual explanation for the craziness which had come before would have been horribly disappointed. But anyone who wanted to see the craziness elevated to the level of Dada, and Number Six's latent egomania turned into the whole point of the series, found "Fall Out" an episode that just gets more rewarding the more you watch it.

4) Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is actually the textbook case of how to do a decent ending to a serialized show, and one that people reference all the time. After a couple of increasingly bland seasons, the show comes back with an episode that ties in with its original pilot as well as giving us a glimpse of the characters' possible futures. It feels grand and epic in a way the series mostly didn't feel after season five.

3) Babylon 5. Famously, this show filmed its Hugo-nominated final episode before the rest of its final season, allowing for some grand thematic resolution instead of a simple pay-off. "Sleeping In Light" takes place 20 years after the end of the Shadow War, and Sheridan is dying at last. He visits Babylon 5 on the eve of its decommissioning and destruction in a last blaze of glory, then prepares for death... except that a new adventure is waiting for him instead.

2) Blake's 7. Yet another show whose final season was drek, but then the actual final episode represented a huge return to form. Not only does the show's ostensible star, Roj Blake, come back from the dead, but we finally see a showdown between Blake and Avon, which seems to come directly out of all the mistrust and warped love the two shared during the first two seasons. You suddenly realize that, despite Blake being absent for nearly half the show's run, it really is all about Avon and Blake, the idealist and the uber-cynic. And it's never going to end well. (And for the record, Avon dies in the end. So there.)

1) Life On Mars. (British version.) I'm putting this at the absolute top because it redeemed the time-traveling cop show for me. Honestly, I was starting to lose interest in this show, even after only a dozen or so episodes. How many times can there be a crime, and Gene jumps to the wrong conclusion and tries to force it using barbaric methods, while Sam stands back and critiques Gene's racism and sexism? (And then, of course, the case turns out to have some connection to Sam's childhood.) I was dying for an episode where Gene was right and Sam was wrong. But the last couple of episodes totally redeemed the show for me, by asking: "How far will Sam go to get back to the present?" And then that turns out not even to be the right question, since the real question is, "Will Sam be happy when he finally gets back to his nice, sanitized boring future"? I have no idea how the American version will end, but somehow I doubt we'll see the American Sam Tyler killing himself, and it especially won't be portrayed as an understandable choice. Apparently this was voted #1 in a list of the 50 greatest TV endings. And apparently the show's makers just wanted to end it with him jumping off the roof.

The core problem with Dollhouse, I decided, isn't that it's not a good idea, or even a good take on a good idea (although I'll leave you all to discuss that latter one); it's that it's not an idea that can sustain itself as an ongoing television show. Either we're supposed to swallow that Echo (a) tends to break down a lot on missions, (b) tends to be given missions that are especially exciting and/or violent and (c) this is all apparently standard-operating procedure, considering the fact that, for all the weekly back-at-the-office in-fighting scenes, Echo still gets sent out on missions that will go wrong and involve her breaking down in some way week after week... or we're supposed to believe that all of this is going somewhere. The problem is, the only somewhere it can go that could be satisfying for the audience involves Echo remembering/realizing who and what she is and doing something about it, and in the most important sense - no matter what the outcome of that may be - that finishes the story. Yes, the series can continue, obviously, whether Echo suddenly has self-awareness and can access all these different personalities, or whether she gets reset, or the series shifts onto other characters... but the story we're all watching now will be finished. Same thing with the Ballard subplot - either he finds out that the Dollhouse exists, finishing the story, or he doesn't, and he's an idiot.

Dollhouse, ironically enough considering the ratings, may be too finite a story for its own good as a Friday night Fox show. For it to have the depth and weight that Whedon (and the show's fans, for that matter) think it has, it's not enough to continually show the sexism and everyday abuse that surrounds us, week after week - Surely, at some point of doing only that, the show stops being an ironic commenter on that and simply complicit in it? - but, instead, come to some kind of conclusion about it... but can it really do so in the format it's in?

Watching the show, I'm reminded of comic writer and editor Mark Waid's commentary about DC Comics' Final Crisis series:

I know that sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I promise I'm not. I felt the same way about FC that a lot of people seemed to—I tried to follow it from issue to issue and my head hurt. A lot. And I was confused and baffled by the series. BUT—when I read it all in one sitting, I got it. Its ideas were clear to me (though they required some mental work from me, which is fine—so do stories spanning the scale of "literature" from James Joyce to J.G. Ballard to last Friday's episode of Battlestar), and I thought they were stunningly innovative and clever and, most importantly, were fresh and unlike anything else I'm gonna get from a random superhero comic... I maintain that the story itself is pretty comprehensible. Should it not have taken the form of a seven-issue series, then? In retrospect, probably not. In an entire lifetime of reading comics, I've never experienced a disconnect so astounding as what I got out of reading it as it came out versus what I got out of reading it straight through. That alone fascinates me and is something worth studying.

So is Dollhouse the Final Crisis of television; something that can't fully be appreciated until it's over? And if so, shouldn't it really be a movie...?

I'm only semi-joking with that last question. With Watchmen coming out next week, I'm getting worryingly obsessed with the idea of stories being told in the most suitable format and medium; after all, Watchmen the movie can never be Watchmen the book for too many reasons - not least of which is the fact that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created the book in part to explore the differences between comics and movies - but does that mean that there's no reason for the movie to exist? I'm still in two minds; while I tend to lean towards the "No" side of the argument, and wish that Zack Snyder and David Hayter had come up with something original, instead, I still harbor this vague hope that the Watchmen movie can be something as wonderful and poignant as its source in its own right. A few exceptions aside, cross-media adaptations tend to prove how well-suited stories were to their original homes, after all; even something like, say, Serenity just makes you want to watch more Firefly, if that makes sense, because of the potential for new stories that those characters and that world had.

We like to think that the creators of our favorite stories know what they're doing, or at least what they're writing for, and that after-the-fact continuations are fun, but not really the same thing because they're... well, off somehow; Buffy's comic continuation may have all the same writers, but it's lacking the performances that elevated the material, or Star Trek's 1970s cartoon dumbing down material for the kids. But, occasionally, even the greats can slip up; Morrison on the Final Crisis serialization that confused even the pros, or Whedon on Dollhouse's off-putting, repetitive format.

I keep coming back to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy, each iteration of which - well, apart from the comic, perhaps - worked in and of itself, and added to the overall strange tapestry of the story, with Adams writing the radio shows, novels and television episodes and continually refining and reshifting the ideas to fit into the different forms. Perhaps that's what Whedon needs to do to Dollhouse; step back, rethink what he's trying to say with it, and then reapproach it from scratch with a definitive ending - or, at least, coherent point - in mind.

The Toronto Raptors represented a glorious first step for the science fiction nickname movement. Sure there's the Nashville Predators of the NHL, but they haven't taken the initiative to go invisible on the ice, and that is disappointing. The Raptors went dino after picking from a short list of Beavers, Bobcats, Dragons, Grizzlies, Hogs, Raptors, Scorpions, T-Rex, Tarantulas, and Terriers.

Former Blockbuster magnate Wayne Huizenga is selling his majority stake in the Miami Dolphins, one of the most storied franchises in football, to New York real estate developer Stephen Ross for $1.1 billion. Considering their one-win season last year, now might be the time for an image change. When the Miami franchise was established in 1965, fans chose between the Mariners, Marauders, Mustangs, Missiles, Moons, Sharks, and Suns. There's clearly a precedent for starfaring water mammals in this town, and they have a perfect model in the wonderful world of David Brin's gregarious, sexually-charged dolphins. Perhaps eventually they can uplift the Dolphin fans into sentience as well.

Los Angeles-area moguls have been promising a return to the NFL for the city since Rams moved from L.A. to St. Louis in 1995. They'll need a new name for a new franchise. Do they have any idea how much of a hit Cylons would be? Plus with Battlestar Galactica soon to be off the air, many of the real Cylons will be looking for work. Edward James Olmos is already drooling at what he'll net in related autograph sessions. The NFL at that point can work on getting actual Cylons to replace their terrible referees.

Seattle first professional baseball team was called the Pilots. Clearly the flying meme didn't work out because the Pilots were moved to Milwaukee and renamed the Brewers by now-commissioner Bud Selig. Baseball promised Seattle another team, and the nickname became the Mariners, a franchise that has never made the World Series in its history. For our part, we blame it all on the team's current mascot, The Mariner Moose. Gifted with the perfect model of an actual Mariner in Marvel Comics hero-villain Namor, this franchise chose a Moose. We suggest that 100 losses in a season should have them rethinking this, and opting to append a Sub- to that Mariner. Namor shall be ignored no longer!

The increasing speed at which planes now cross the Atlantic has made Europe an option for a new generation for U.S. born players. NBA commissioner David Stern has talked loosely about establishing the first European franchise in order to mine a lucrative market. What better name for the solitary, constantly traveling franchise than the Hitchhikers? You could sell The Guide next to team trinkets and jerseys, and Marvin's head kinda looks like you could be dribbling it anyway. You play clips from the radio show on the loudspeaker during time-outs; hell throw in Roger Waters' The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking during time-outs. Tell me you wouldn't root for that team.

The lucky Douglas Adams resurrector will be Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl novels, which I haven't read but which sound extremely "cheeky" and nowhere near as subversive as the original HG2G series was. Colfer's novel, ...And Another Thing, is due out in October 2009, and sounds as though it'll include Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android, among all the other fave characters. Given that the article announcing this new piece of Hitchhiker's tie-in merchandise mentions that Adams regretted not ending the saga on a more "upbeat" note, I'm guessing you can expect a bright happy ending. And Colfer says he wants to capture Adams' style while adding some of his own voice.

I'm not actually as horrified as I sound by this business venture, because I plan to ignore it as much as possible. The same way I have any of the James Bond novels not written by Ian Fleming (with the possible exception of Kingsley Amis' Bond novel.) I'm only mildly worried that other people won't follow my example, and I'll be hearing about this new Hitchhiker's-related consumer item endlessly a year from now. Bottom line, though: if Adams couldn't recapture the magic of that one time and place, in the BBC in the late 1970s, then what hope does this other guy have? [Times via Timelordthewhite]

Space construction from science fiction:

Science fiction is full of lavish descriptions of objects being built or assembled in space, from small robots to structures the size of a solar system. And many mega-structures described in science fiction must have been built in space, since they're too big to have been put together inside a gravity well.

Probably the most famous instance of outer space construction comes from Star Trek. There's a huge controversy over whether the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 (without any bloody A, B, C, D, or E) was built in space or not. And the long-simmering debate was boosted into a roaring flame-war by the teaser trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie, which appeared to show the starship being constructed on Earth. There's evidence on both sides: supposedly Trek creator Gene Roddenberry stated the Enterprise was built in orbit, but there are also sources that said it was built in San Francisco. But we do know the earlier Enterprise, the NX-01, was built in space, and so were the NCC-1701-D and USS Voyager. Here's a picture of the Utopia Planitia shipyards, from Memory Alpha:There are also tons of other shipyards in space, including the famous "Mon Calamari Shipyards" and several other orbital shipyards in Star Wars. Pictured at the top of this post are the orbital shipyards of Kuat, from the Wookiepedia. And of course, the massive Death Star had to be constructed in space.

Science fiction is full of space elevators and other "megastructures" that must be built, at least partly, in space. Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise and Charles Sheffield's The Web Between The Worlds both involve a kind of "skyhook" or orbital tower, which connects the Earth's equator to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. In the Clarke book, eventually five more "spokes" are built from Earth, to form a structure resembling a ship's wheel.

Other space megastructures, such as ringworlds, discworlds, Dyson Spheres and artificial planets, would be impossible, or near-impossible, to build inside an existing gravity well. In the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, we get to see the massive planet-building area hidden in hyperspace and accessible through an opening in the planet Magrathea:

In Asimov's I, Robot, the robot QT (aka Cutie) deduces that he's superior to the humans, partly because he has no memory of being assembled in space, from parts built on Earth. As far as he knows, he just turned up in space, fully formed.

"Something made you, Cutie," pointed out Powell. "You admit yourself that your memory seems to spring full-grown from the absolute blankness of a week ago. I'm giving you the explanation. Donovan and I put you together from the parts shipped us."

Cutie gazed upon his long, supple fingers in an oddly human attitude of mystification. "It seems to me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation than that. For you to make me seems improbable."

In R. Cordwainer Smith's "Think Blue, Count Two," he specifies that the massive solar sails which people use to sail across the universe were constructed in the vaccuum:

Before the great ships whispered between the stars by means of planoforming, people had to fly from star to star with immense sails - huge films assembled in space on long, rigid, coldproof rigging.

Real-life applications:

So what are the real-life applications of the idea of building in space? We've already proved we can put together a space station in orbit, but we're not likely to be building dozens of those any time soon. It's entirely possible that more robots like Dextre, with complex and multi-jointed arms, will be built in space to handle satellites and space junk. We're definitely not likely to be building space elevators, Dyson Spheres or orbital stations any time soon.

But here are a few other ideas that are being batted around for big space construction projects. Some of them relate to mega-environmentalism. Some people claim we can halt global warming in its tracks by building mega-structures, such as space mirrors, or giant nanofiber "sun shades," in orbit. These would deflect some of the sunlight reaching Earth, and they'd need to be constructed in space.

Also, a mooted solar power satellite, which would collect solar energy from orbit and beam it back to Earth, would almost certainly need to be constructed in orbit. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency wants to have one of these up and running by 2030.

Also, when we get around to building long-range spaceships to explore or colonize outside our solar system, we'll have to build them in space. Some observers argue that these large ships could be constructed using some Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) as raw materials and maybe also as a shell for human habitats.

But a lot sooner than that, big and expensive satellites may be constructed in orbit, to save on launching costs. Last year, some small Japanese "spider robots" successfully crawled out along a net linking three satellites in orbit. They only functioned for a short time, but scientists saw the test as an important proof of concept. In a few years, we could be launching big antennas and solar panels into space in pieces, using small, cheap rockets. And then tiny robots could assemble them in space.

So for the sake of the human race, let's hope J.J. Abrams' Trek movie comes down on the side of the Enterprise having been built in orbit. Our future as a species may depend on getting people used to the idea of large-scale outer space construction.

We're dividing human-A.I. buddy-comedy or buddy-cop friendships into four main categories: sarcastic, flirty, grudging or eager.

Sarcastic:

Knight Rider. KITT gives Mike shit, but he's also Mike's best homey. He doesn't just chauffeur Mike around, he helps him bamboozle the bad guys and even helps him pick up hot ladies. (He's a wingman and a get-away car, all in one!)

The Doctor may have had one of the most servile A.I.s of all time — the robot dog K-9 who had to call everybody "Master" — but Doctor Who also included a few examples of A.I.s that could stand up for themselves. Like D-84, the robot secret agent who teamed up with the Doctor in "Robots Of Death." He started out suspecting the Doctor of being involved in the robot murders, and never stopped giving the Doctor a hard time, as befits an undercover robo-agent.

Joel had a pretty snarky relationship with Crow, Servo and Gypsy on MST3K. It wasn't quite a buddy-cop relationship, but definitely a kind of Odd Couple-y buddy-comedy relationship. They're cooped up on this space station and forced to sit through a nearly endless selection of awful movies, and there's sort of an Oscar-and-Felix vibe to it. Sort of.

Fry and Bender have been roommates, coworkers, co-conspirators, and occasionally enemies, on Futurama. As long as you appeal to Bender's worse nature (worse programming?) you'll be fine.

I want to put R2D2 from Star Wars into the "sarcastic" category, because I always imagine him telling Luke Skywalker just where he can stick the Force. At least, C-3PO always seems shocked by whatever Artoo's tweetling means. Artoo rides with Luke, but he's always giving him lip from the shotgun seat.

Star Cops featured an A.I. named Box, who was always giving space detective Nathan Spring a hard time for his dumb or inexplicable decisions. Box was literally just a box-shaped pocket computer, but he was deceptively simple, since he was a rare prototype that could access pretty much any computer anywhere.

Poor H.E.R.B.I.E. is the robot assigned to look after Reed Richards' son Franklin in the Son Of A Genius comics. But Franklin ends up dragging H.E.R.B.I.E. into one mess after another, Laurel and Hardy style, while H.E.R.B.I.E. tells him off. The bot even gets de-evolved into a toaster at one point.

Hymie the robot is an indispensible part of the Control team on Get Smart, as anybody who's seen the recent movie (and DVD spinoff) already knows. But what you might not know from the latest movie is that Hymie is kind of a jerk — he's easily offended and is constantly saying pissy things like, "It's the same old story. Nobody cares about a robot. Just wind him up, turn him loose, and grease him every thousand miles."

Flirty:

SELMA, the pocket computer in Time Trax, totally had the hots for Darien, the future cop stranded in the 1990s. Her holographic projection may have looked like a librarian, but she was always pouring some sugar on Darien. If that show hadn't gotten canceled way too early, there would have been some holographic lovin.

Rommie is the gynoid avatar of the starship Andromeda Ascendant in Andromeda. She's part of the ship's A.I., which also manfiests via viewscreen images and holograms, but she has her own separate personality to some extent. She enjoys having physical form, and even falls in love with the "avatar" of another starship at one point.

The Vision in Marvel Comics may act like an uptight android, but he's just playing hard to get — and it works, since he managed to hook up with the Scarlet Witch. In the Ultimate universe, the Vision drops the coy act and gets reconfigured as a hawt naked gynoid.

Another Marvel Universe android, Jocasta, was originally known as the Bride of Ultron since the killer android created her to stand at his side. But she became sort of an Avengers groupie, even turning herself into Tony Stark's smart house at one point, so she could watch him sleep and stuff.

Dr. Theopolis is always giving little sly compliments to Buck on Buck Rogers, and the little medallion computer constantly acts as though he'd really like to be hanging around Buck's neck instead of on that little cockbot Twiki. If Dr. Theopolis was dangling on Buck's hairy chest, under one of those puffy pirate shirts Buck is always wearing, they could go out on the town together and have adventures! Dr. Theopolis would be more fun for Buck than a while army of disco skaters! Really! He doesn't have to play doctor, he is a doctor! Buck? Buck? Buck, where are you going?

Beautie is a living android Barbie doll in Kurt Busiek's Astro City comics, who joins up with other superheroes in the Honor Guard to fight crime. When she's not doing that, she's busy accessorizing and looking fantastic. Too bad she doesn't have any genitalia, just like a regular Barbie doll.

Indigo joins the Outsiders (a DC Comics superhero team) and seems to be a sexy fembot from the future, whose memory has been erased. She's cute and friendly, and even strikes up a romance with one of her teammates, Shift. Too bad she turns out to be more than meets the eye, in a bad way. Another kinda-evil A.I., the Eradicator, joined the Outsiders for a while as well, but he was way less cute.

Grudging:

Marvin the Paranoid Android didn't have to do the humans' bidding in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, but if you listened to him complain about his pathetic life for long enough, you could convince him to do you a favor. He had a sort of uneasy partnership with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and the others. Just don't talk to him about life. Brain the size of a planet, and they ask him to open the door.

Ida is the most sarcastic android in the universe, in The Middleman TV show and comic. She looks like a 1950s housewife, but she's more like a mean police sargent, giving the Middleman and Wendy their instructions and scanning the police band for trouble (sometimes literally.) She gives MM almost as much grief as she gives Wendy, but he eats it up.

The third Hourman, the time-manipulating android from the 853rd century, travels back to our present to learn from the Justice League... but he gets bored easily and uses his time-warping abilities to skip past the boring conversations with his buddies in the League. In his (vastly underrated and awesome) solo series, Hourman gets a human sidekick, former League mascot Snapper Carr, who teaches him humility and stuff. Other android members of the League include Red Tornado and Tomorrow Woman (who became buds with Hourman when he brought her back from the "dead.")

British scifi series Blake's 7 had two all-knowing computers: the Liberator's ship's computer Zen, and the even more amazing supercomputer Orac. And neither of them were much interested in being helpful. The more desperately our heroes need help from one of these computers, the more likely Zen is to say something like: "Wisdom must be gathered. It cannot be given." Or the more likely Orac is to announce that he's too busy to help. Avon and Orac, in particular, develop a grouchy squad-car banter akin to Sammo Hung and Takeshi Kaneshiro in buddy-cop movie Don't Give A Damn.

Lopez is the grouchy android member of the Red team in the machinima series Red Vs. Blue, who hates his staff sergeant Dexter Grif. He eventually defects to the Blue team when his Red teammates mistake him for an enemy and try to kill him. Nobody can understand his broken Spanish, even when he begs for death in later episodes.

The Caves Of Steel by Isaac Asimov is sort of the Rush Hour of science fiction detective novels — a tough cop who hates robots has to join forces with a robot detective, R. Daneel Olivaw, to investigate a murder of a Spacer. Olivaw is curious about humanity, and even though he's a bot, he turns out to be a good private dick. So Elijah Baley and Olivaw end up teaming up for a few more outings — just like the Rush Hour movies, actually.

Ross Sylibus is another robot-hating cop who has to team up with an android — Naomi Armitage — in the Armitage III anime series. But then they fall in love and Ross eventually even goes renegade for Naomi. It's like the buddy-cop show MacGruder and Loud.

The NBC show Mann & Machine was about — you guessed it — a cop who hates androids, but has to team up with a new android partner. Good thing she looks incredible in a bathing suit (and is apparently waterproof). Does Mann finally learn to love machine? Hmmm... what do you think? The episodes mostly revolved around getting the gynoid to go on dates with suspected serial killers and use her android body to get the truth out of people. But in one episode, Mann's apartment is destroyed and he moves in with the android, Eve.

In the anime Heat Guy J, the detective Daisuke Aurora doesn't exactly hate androids, but his parents were murdered by one. And he has to team up with an android partner, known only as "J." Do they learn to respect each other? Hmm....

Chuck Norris has no friends because he's the last honest cop in Detroit, in the movie Code Of Silence. But Chuck doesn't need friends, because he's got a new partner — the experimental police wrecking robot, the Prowler. Actually, I think even the Prowler doesn't really like Chuck, but they get the job done together.

Holmes and Yo-Yo is a 1970s comedy show about a clumsy, screw-up cop who's always injuring his partners. So the force gives him a new partner — an android named Yo-Yo. "You're not a person!" Holmes tells Yo-Yo, who dances whenever he gets shot at. They have to learn to work together, and Holmes (wait for it) teaches Yo-Yo about being human.

The android detective Batou has a generally pretty good relationship with his human partner Togusa in the Ghost In The Shell series, but they have their ups and downs, especially in Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, where Batou shuts Togusa out.

Eager:

Bumblebee and the other Autobots are super keen to become best friendies with Sam Witwicky in the first Transformers movie, which is a big part of their charm. Bumblebee is the cool car every dorky teen wishes he/she could have, AND he turns into a cool robot that wants to be your friend. AND you can make out with your ridonkulously hot girlfriend on his hood.

The Golden Warrior Gold Lightan, from the anime series of the same name, has a pretty similar relationship with Hiro to the Sam/Bumblebee friendship. Except that Lightan turns into a gold lighter that sits in Hiro's pocket, and he only turns into a humongous robot when Hiro activates him, to fight other giant robots. It's an equal partnership, since Lightan really needs a pocket to chill out in when he's a tiny lighter.

Data and Geordie share pretty much everything on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Geordie's always happy to take an hour to explain humor or dating or inappropriate touching to Data, who's always got time to help Geordie with whatever. There are other relationships between humans and A.I.s in Trek, but the bromance between Data and Geordie will never die.

Johnny 5 is pretty happy-go-lucky in Short Circuit, and is pretty stoked to make friends with Ally Sheedy. They're on the run from Johnny's creators, who want to turn him into a weapon or melt him down or something, and it's sort of like Nuns On The Run. If one of the nuns was a robot.

Danny One is sort of like Johnny 5, actually — he's the friendly robot that Jack Jameson gets for his 10th birthday in the book My Robot Buddy by Alfred Slote and Joel Schick. The duo have to team up to deal with some robot-nappers. (Who aren't narcoleptic robots, but people who steal robots.)

The Iron Giant is a surprisingly great book by Ted Hughes about a boy who befriends a super-powerful giant robot, but in the hands of Brad Bird (The Incredibles) it becomes a surpassingly wonderful movie about a kid who joins up with a robot on the run.

Melfina in Outlaw Star is such an eager friend and companion, she serves as navigator and chef for the Outlaw Star crew. She's sort of a mom figure to Jim Hawking.

The cartoon Cubix features Connor, a kid who wants to join the "Botties" club of robot wranglers — but first Connor has to prove himself, by fixing Cubix the Unifixable Robot. Cubix starts working just in time to save Connor from the evil Dr. K and the giant robot Kolossal. After that, Cubix becomes Connor's dorky friend, repeating everything he says.

Dr. K doesn't succeed in taking over the world, but what about Professor K? He's the mad scientist villain of anime series Saikou Robot Kombock, and the only ones who stand in his way are Ichiro and his robot partner Kombock.

Robotboy is the most advanced robot in the world — but he has to learn how to be a real boy. So he teams up with a 10-year-old, Tommy Turnbull, who protects him from the evil scientists who want to use him to take over the world in this French series that airs on the Cartoon Network in the U.S.

The Zeta Project has another kid/robot teamup — Zeta aka Zee is an escaped military holomorphic robot that can appear human, who's on the run from the NSA. And 15-year-old runaway girl Ro Rowen helps Zee search for his creators. All of these teamups between children and robots are like the equivalent of Burt Reynolds' Cop And A Half, with the robot being the cop.

Long-running webcomic Argon Zark! features a hacker who creates a portal into cyberspace via "Personal Transfer Protocol," and his robot sidekick Cybert.

And finally, Mycroft Holmes aka Mike doesn't side with the law in Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, but he does team up with humans and become their homey in the struggle for freedom.

Additional reporting by Lauren Davis.

The categories in the chart should be pretty self-explanatory. But here's some explanation anyway:

We love our heroes to be super rich, and to have an excuse for self-pity. If your fabulously wealthy parents got killed in front of you when you're a kid, so much the better. (Seriously, a tragic past seems to be a crucial ingredient for many escapist heroes, because it lets you project all your own real-life pain onto your hero, even as you're imagining rising about that pain and becoming a mega-adventurer. )

And it makes us happy when our heroes have two or more devoted acolytes/sidekicks, who follow almost without question, and awesome gadgets. Superhuman powers means what it says. "Gets laid" doesn't just mean your hero hooked up one time.

"Marked for greatness" requires slightly more explanation. If your hero is the subject of a prophecy (like Starbuck), or is "the One" like Neo, then he/she is marked for greatness. Captain Kirk wasn't marked for greatness on the original Star Trek TV show, but we have a strong suspicion that the new Trek movie, by revisiting his origins, will show that he was marked for great things from the beginning.

"Not tied down" doesn't just mean being single: it means that you get to roam around having adventures. And at the end of an adventure, you jump in your spaceship and zoom off to the next adventure somewhere else. Captain Kirk wasn't tied down, but Captain Sisko was.

"Becomes a god or king" means your character ends up with a lot of people looking up to him/her. The Hulk, for example, is destined either to become a ruler, the Maestro, or the last survivor of Earth. Captain Kirk becomes an admiral, but more importantly he becomes a legend in his own time. The Doctor becomes the last of the Time Lords, and gets called a god a lot. Neo turns into the blind buddha Jesus monster, or something.

The upcoming BBC radio adaptation of Long Dark Tea-Time will act, in part, as a bridge between the two series:

“There is definitely Hitchhiker’s/crossover,” explains Dirk Gently adapter-in-chief and director Dirk Maggs. “In this second series there is one particular idea from Douglas’s notes for the third [unfinished] Dirk Gently book which at one point he thought might be a Hitchhiker’s book. It’s a very simple idea that puts one of the Hitchhiker’s characters in the same universe as Dirk Gently in a way that I thought had enormous potential. In this series we find that the characters in both universes are inhabiting the same world, and I think where we’re going with this is something that actually resolves later on in Hitchhiker’s. It’s turning into a bit of a prequel!”

The radio adaptation of the novel is due to be broadcast on UK BBC Radio 4 before the end of this year.

EXCLUSIVE Dirk Gently 2 to feature Hitchhiker's crossover [SFX]