Artist Chris Foss is known for his visionary presentation of future technology and weird vistas. He illustrated many book covers in the 70s, 80s and 90s including the Lensman series, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and Jack Vance's Demon Princes novels. His covers frequently feature spaceships that are sturdier and chunkier than the usual sleek space rockets you see on many other book covers of the time.

His cool vision of the future led him to be asked to work on production designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky's uncompleted Dune movie, in the mid 1970s, and later on Ridley Scott's Alien and Superman: The Movie.

As Alejandro Jodorowsky said in 1977:

And thus were born the mimetic spaceships, the leather and dagger-studded machines of the fascist Sardaukers;- the pachydermatous geometry of Emperor Padishah's golden planet; the delicate butterfly plane and so many other incredible machines, which I am sure will one day populate interstellar space. Chris Foss knows that today's technical reality is tomorrow's falsehood. Chris also knows that today's pure art is tomorrow's reality. Man will conquer space mounted on Foss' spaceships, never in NASA's concentration camps of the spirit. I was grateful for the existence of my friend. He brought the colours of the apocalypse to the sad machines of a future without imagination.

He has a website, ChrisFossArt.com, where you can see more of his work and buy signed prints of all of these images. And he has a group on Facebook, where you can keep up with his projects.

Pirate Ship, From Jodorowsky's Dune.
Harkonnen's flagship, From Jodorowsky's Dune.
Spice transport, from Dune.
Emperor's palace, from Dune.
Guild Tug, from Dune.
Breaking the Light Barrier
Awesome space image.
Awesome spaceship.
Image for ConceptShips blog.
Awesome spaceship.
Amazing space image.

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

1984 by George Orwell:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham:

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham:

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

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Neuromancer by William Gibson:

We by Yevgeny Zamyain:

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

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess:

War of the Worlds by HG Wells:

Publisher's Marketplace reported last week that Mickey Zucker Reichert, a fantasy author best known for the Renshai series, has just completed Robots and Chaos. Set during the I, Robot era in Asimov's chronology (which I think was around 2004, if I've done my math right), the prequel focuses on the early days of Susan Calvin as she completes her medical internship. The book is said to be a mix of quintessentially Asimov hard science fiction and Michael Crichton-like medical thriller, with a heavy emphasis on the shifting definitions of humanity after the creation of robots. There will be a race against time to safeguard our way of life.

Reichert will be the first female author to write in Asimov's universe and the first to explore the time of Susan Calvin. Her work joins such previous authorized additions as the second Foundation trilogy, written by Greg Bear, David Brin, and Gregory Benford, as well as Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban books.

The report also claims a new I, Robot movie property has been sold to 20th Century Fox, the makers of the Will Smith adaptation. It's unclear whether the property in question is Reichert's new book or something else. Either way, between this and the upcoming Foundation and End of Eternity movies, now seems like a pretty good time to be one of the Good Doctor's books, be it of the Asimov or quasi-Asimov variety.

In an interview with Collider, Emmerich explained how his Foundation adaptation would grapple with the hundreds of years worth of events in galactic history that Asimov's books portray. For those fans wondering how Emmerich plans to balance the stories of mathematician Gaal Dornick, mayor Salvor Hardin, trader Limmar Ponyets, and merchant prince Hober Mallow...well, it might be time to get used to the idea of Gaalvor Ponlow, mathematically and politically inclined trader extraordinaire.

According to Emmerich:

Well I was interested in Asimov before and I think with "I, Robot" they changed everything and fans kind of hated the movie so I didn't want to do that. On the other end, The Foundation is a similar problem in that you have all these short stories and then they were combined into a book and so in a way there is not one character and I spoke with the Rob [Rodat, writer of "Saving Private Ryan"] and he said we have to consolidate the characters and that's what we did and it worked really, really well in the context and I think if Asimov would have conceived this as a science fiction trilogy or series from the very beginning, he would have done that too but he didn't so I think in spirit it's totally "Foundation" but has consolidated characters that go through the three movies.

Emmerich also mentioned that writer Rob Rodat is yet to send him the screenplay for Foundation, but he's optimistic it will be finished before his disaster epic 2012 comes out. The timeline for Foundation is still somewhat unclear, but it's at least one movie down the road for Emmerich; his next movie will be Anonymous, a political thriller about the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays.

[Collider]

Writes member "humphrey" over at WhyWeProtest:

If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god — I'd want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD's work so mythic!

The discussion devolves into some weird irrelevant stories about strange experiences with science-fiction authors and their cult followings. But there's also a nice thread where people ask which other SF authors would have been good choices to start a religion. The main recommendations: Isaac Asimov (his religion would have had a more thought-out cosmology) and Frederik Pohl.

But I bet we can come up with some other good ones — which classic (or recent) SF authors would you prefer to see as religious founders, rather than Hubbard? [Why We Protest]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now maybe you're knowingly dating a robot, or perhaps you've had one constructed for that very purpose. But if you think your guy or gal might be an artificial intelligence, but you're not sure, look for these symptoms:

You've Only Spoken to Them Online

xkcd: It's always risky dating someone online. You don't know if that cute girl you've been chatting with is really an octogenarian with great taste in movies — or a particularly sophisticated spambot. Fortunately, this savvy Internet user knows a test for artificial intelligence far more efficient that the Turing Test or the Voight-Kampff.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "I Robot...You Jane:" We all learn a valuable lesson about chatting with strange men when sweet, awkward Willow starts an online romance with Malcolm. She thinks she's found the man of her dreams — or at least someone to help her forget Xander for a while. Tragically, "Malcolm" is actually "Moloch," an ancient demon trapped in the school's computer system whose only means of physical interaction is through a robot body.

There Are Multiple Copies

Battlestar Galactica: Glowing spines would have been a handy way to tell the Cylons from the humans, but barring that, there are a few other ways to tell if the person you're sexing up is a Cylon. Baltar and Tyrol both date Cylon women with a penchant for sabotage, but Helo gets the most definitive clue to his lady friend's true nature, when he spots her exact duplicate hanging around Caprica with a Number Six.

Star Trek "Requiem for Methuselah:" Rayna Kapec seems like the perfect woman: intelligent, beautiful, and a great pool players. It's no wonder that Captain Kirk, who falls in lust every other week, pursues her. But, alas it's not meant to be. Kirk and Spock stumble into a chamber belonging to Rayna's guardian Flint, containing several earlier gynoid versions of the lovely Rayna. The emotional impact of learning that she's a robot and being forced to choose between Kirk and Flint prove too much for Rayna's circuits to handle, prompting an irrevocable meltdown.

The Twilight Zone "In His Image:" Jessica Connelly never actually learns that Alan Talbot, the man she fell in love with, is a robot. His creator and physical doppleganger, Walter Ryder, just quietly takes his place after Alan malfunctions and starts developing homicidal impulses.

They're Three Laws Compliant

Foundation: We'd all like our significant others to respect human life and to protect us when we're in danger. But Dors Venabili, Hari Seldon's bodyguard and eventual wife, is actually programed to do just that. Seldon does suspect that she's a robot, but by then he has already fallen for her.

Their Affection Can Kill

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: British Intelligence never bothered to tell Austin Powers that his partner and new bride Vanessa Kensington is, in fact, a fembot planted by Dr. Evil. Austin learns soon enough when Vanessa points a pair of machine guns from her breasts, though she notes he would have figured it out sooner if he'd tried a little foreplay.

Kim Possible: So the Drama: When crime-fighting teenager Kim Possible needs a date to her junior prom, new student Eric appears just in the nick of time to be Kim's first steady boyfriend. She's understandably devastated when her nemesis Dr. Drakken kidnaps her new beau, and rushes to save him. But when Kim gives the newly liberated Eric a relieved hug, he electrocutes her, revealing himself to be one of Drakken's Synthodrones.

They Dance Like No Human Dances

"Der Sandmann" by ETA Hoffmann: Summer Glau's ballerina background may have been an excuse to place the Terminator Cameron in toe shoes, but gynoids have a long history of dancing. Olimpia, for example, is quiet adept at dance as well as singing and playing the harpsichord. Many find her cold and stiff movements a bit off-putting, but Nathanael, a young student already engaged to another woman, develops a passionate obsession with her. When he learns that Olimpia was an automaton all along, he's driven mad by the revelation, leaping to his death.

Metropolis: When the Joh Fredersen and Rotwang conspire to place a robot made to resemble the popular worker leader Maria upon the working caste, they hold a dance performance to see if the people of Metropolis see her as human. It works, and the men of Metropolis are immediately captivated. It's Fredersen's son Freder, who is in love with the real Maria, who eventually recognizes that she's not the girl he fell for, and must be a copy.

They've Returned from the Dead

Machine Teen: Carly Whitmere knows that her boyfriend, Adam Aaronson, is frequently ill, but never would she guess that his bouts of illness are the result of glitches in his robotic systems. It's actually not Carly, but Adam's best friend JT who first discovers his robotic nature, and later helps repair Adam after he is seemingly shot to death.

Star Trek "What Are Little Girls Made Of?:" Starfleet had lost contact with Nurse Christine Chapel's fiance Dr. Roger Korby for several years, so she was relieved to discover him apparently alive and well on Exo III. But it turns out the Korby she encounters is not quite the man she remembers, but an android copy that the dying Korby imbued with his appearance and memories, one who firmly believes in robot supremacy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Ted:" When Joyce Summers starts dating Ted Buchanan, he seems to good to be true. He's charming, a fantastic cook, and happy to spend an afternoon playing miniature golf. Unfortunately, Ted also happens to be the robotic equivalent of Bluebeard, wooing women only to later hold them captive and watch them die. Although Buffy takes an instant dislike to this interloper, and accidentally "kills" him after Ted slaps her, Joyce only catches on to Ted's evil nature when Ted returns from the dead, all glitchy and malfunctioning.

Asimov's Laws of Robotics, first fully outlined in the short story "Runaround," were meant to give robots utility as tools for humans while ensuring that the robots would never be used to harm humans:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The laws have been popular not only with science fiction enthusiasts, but with professional roboticists themselves, to the extent that the South Korean government is using them as a guideline for their Robot Ethics Charter. But, according to David Woods, a systems engineer at Ohio State University, and Robin Murphy, a rescue robotics expert at Texas A&M University, when dealing with robots that are not yet self-aware, Asimov's Laws function better as a literary device than as an ethical guideline.

Still, Woods and Murphy believe that Asimov was on the right track, and that engineers and programmers need a set of rules to govern their robots and the way they deploy them, both to ensure human safety and to allow robots to operate with minimal human oversight:

Their first law says that humans may not deploy robots without a work system that meets the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics. A second revised law requires robots to respond to humans as appropriate for their roles, and assumes that robots are designed to respond to certain orders from a limited number of humans.

The third revised law proposes that robots have enough autonomy to protect their own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws and allows for smooth transfer of control between human and robot. That means a Mars rover should automatically know not to drive off a cliff, unless human operators specifically tell it to do so.

Too often, Woods and Murphy say, roboticists try to push robots beyond the limits of their programming, giving them more autonomy than is technologically feasible, resulting in injuries to humans, property, and the robots themselves. The best model of Woods and Murphy's proposed laws? NASA, which carefully tests robots and identifies their limitations, so that the machines can enjoy minimal human supervision during the routine portions of missions, but a human operator can take over if there are any surprises.

And even if we reach the point where robots become more autonomous, they note that robots will still require ethical guidelines more complex than the Laws of Robotics:

"People are making this leap of faith that robot autonomy will grow and solve our problems," Woods added. "But there's not a lot of evidence that autonomy by itself will make these hard, high-risk decisions go away."

Science fiction's robotics laws need reality check [MSNBC]

Oh, and there will be vague, mostly nondescript spoilers here.

Federations aims to be an anthology of short stories about interstellar civilizations — think Star Trek, Star Wars, or Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. But really, most of the stories in this collection are just classic space opera, with only a little discussion of the challenges and joys of multi-planetary collaboration. There's quite a lot of space war, a fair bit of first contact, and a dash of deep-space exploration. And that turns out to be a more thrilling experience, in many ways, than a more tightly thematic collection of stories about deep-space alliances might have been.

For one thing, along with that wider range of stories, the anthology spans a wider variety of time periods, from our present day to a distant future. Some stories contain the merest glimmer of hope that humans will form alliances at some point in the future with other worlds.

For example, one of the best of the book's many space-war stories is Lois McMaster Bujold's lovely, melancholy "Aftermaths," in which a woman and her assistant collect the dead bodies from a deep-space war with the Barrayarans. And the woman, MedTech Boni, insists on collecting the enemy dead bodies as well as the friendly dead, treating them both with the same compassion and respect, even though we discover she's lost something closer to home in this particular war.

But still, my favorite stories in the collection are the ones which engage directly with the theme of federations. The ones which show different planets (and in most cases different intelligent species) colliding, either in war or in diplomacy, and trying to understand each other. The ones which take apart the idea of a confederacy of greatly different interstellar cultures, and what kind of shape it would take. Those are the stories which are most likely to stick in your mind after you're done reading the whole thing.

For example, there's Genevieve Valentine's "Carthago Delenda Est," about a ship full of humans, in a rendezvous point with a bunch of alien ships, all waiting hundreds of years for a super-advanced ambassador from a distant planet called Carthage to arrive – and while the gathering of different species sits in one place and waits, they create a kind of incidental peace, punctuated with bickering, cooperation and even a bit of interspecies nookie, and you sense they're creating the first tentative links in what could become a real alliance.

There are also a few delightfully snarky stories which deconstruct, and in some cases satirize outright, the idea of a civilization made up of civilizations, and these are among the book's standout stories. Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Culture Archivist" mashes up Star Trek's Federation and Borg into a single civilization that's cybernetically enhanced via nanotech and goes around trying to assimilate other cultures into its rapacious capitalist sameness. K. Tempest Bradford's "Different Day" imagines the Earth being contacted by not just one, but three different alien races within the same interstellar group, each with its own agenda. And James Alan Gardner's "The One With The Interstellar Group Consciousness" recasts all of the romantic-comedy cliches into a story of a vast interstellar society trying to find another interstellar society or federation to "mate" (i.e., join) with.

The most upbeat story, and one of the most amusing, is probably Alan Dean Foster's "Pardon Our Conquest," in which a petty alien dictator finds out what happens when you tangle with the vastly more advanced galactic Commonwealth — the Commonwealth is incredibly nice to you and showers you with kindness, until you have no choice but to give in.

And then there are the stories that look at interstellar commuincation from a more idiosyncratic, and hence more fascinating, vantage point — like S.L. Gilbow's "Terra-Exulta," which talks about the linguistic challenges involved in terraforming alien planets — and shows, in a very Orwellian way, how you can justify genocide against countless alien species if you just create the right terminology for it. (Like "Ecoviscerate." Or "retoration," which means "the removal of all life from a planet in order to repopulate it with other life forms to create a more balanced ecology.") And then Catherynne M. Valente's "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War Elegy" reflects a whole swath of interstellar history through the lens of a wine glass, by walking us through the different vintages that an illicit winery on an alien planet created.

Federations is definitely one of those anthologies that offers something for everyone, including some more traditional space-war stories, and a few rollicking space adventure tales, like "Warship" by George R.R. Martin and George Guthridge, and Harry Turtledove's mildly amusing "Someone Is Stealing The Great Throne Rooms Of The Galaxy." If (like me) you harbor nostalgia for Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, then you'll be happy to revisit Helva in "The Ship Who Returned."

Whether they're taking us to deep-space battles, showing us uneasy collaboration between vastly different races, or satirizing the very idea of a benign interplanetary alliance, the stories in Federations mostly keep a very human perspective on the hugeness and strangeness of a galaxy teeming with life. And that's reason enough to sign on to its galactic charter. [Amazon]

One of our favorite blogs, Biology In Science Fiction, posted some random thoughts about science fiction books, including the recipe for making Stranger In A Strange Land a slim pamphlet:

Stranger in a Strange Land would have been much much shorter if in Heinlein's future America effective birth control had been invented before a manned expedition was sent to Mars.

She also points out it could be a fantasy book, without changing the plot, if "Michael Valentine Smith had been raised by wizards instead of Martians."

She also explains the main problem with Asimov's decision to link his robot novels and the Foundation series: it makes "the humanity's expansion onto many worlds, the creation of the Galactic Empire and its replacement by the Foundation ultimately due to the meddling of a couple of mind-reading, mind-influencing robots. I'd like to think that we'll conquer the universe without the nudging of telepathic robot nannies." [Biology In Science Fiction]

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.

Unfortunately it's literally the last scene in the movie, which seems to begin right around the time that the robots begin taking on the characteristics that make them so interesting in Asimov's fiction. You know, like being autonomous, thoughtful, contradictory, and, well, ready to take over the world.

In this scene, we get a glimpse of the robot revolution to come. The one robot who has exhibited signs of self-awareness, Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), is trying to figure out what to do next. Mostly because all the robots of his model were recently taken over by a bad-guy silent upgrade that turned them psycho - and now the company that made them is trying to order them into storage-container retirement.

But instead of following the robo-masses, Sonny decides take matters into his own graspers. Just as the annoying movie is about to wind down, we see a hint of a glorious robot liberation movie that could have been. I love that moment of Sonny looking down at all the robots, quietly entering the storage containers. Then they see him standing there, and stop following orders.

If you want to know what comes next, you'll have to read Asimov's I, Robot.

I, Robot via IMDB

Here now are the Three Laws, in case anyone needs a refresher (also, I never, ever getting tired of seeing them in print):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's Three Laws moved robots in science fiction away from what he referred to as the Frankenstein complex. This frequent cliche of early science fiction held that robots were vengeful monsters fated to rise up against their former masters in murderous wrath. His short stories recast robots as tools - incredibly complex tools, to be sure, but nonetheless tools that operated within the safeguards and parameters of the Three Laws - and allowed for a more cerebral, layered exploration of the differences between humans and robots. By presupposing robots were never deadly threats, Asimov opened his stories up to a far wider range of dramatic possibilities.

To be sure, Asimov did not completely remove the Frankenstein complex from science fiction, but the questions he raised complicated the depictions of even the most murderous machines, from the AI in the Matrix films to all those Terminators running around lately. Indeed, any discussion of robots in fiction is incomplete without acknowledging Asimov's work, and our Killer Robots week has been no exception.

Gizmodo dealt with the three laws earlier this week when they pointed out they were total BS (which, being a total Asimov fanatic, may mean I have to challenge the entire Gizmodo staff to fisticuffs, although I'm still undecided on that point), and I Robot led off our list of groundbreaking robot books, as is only proper. But we still haven't considered whether Asimov made rather more direct contributions to the killer robot genre than he is generally given credit for.

As is only to be expected of ideas that Asimov developed over the course of over fifty years, his thoughts on robots changed and evolved with time. Although he never succumbed to the fears of the Frankenstein complex, he did grapple with how beings that were physically and probably mentally superior to their creators could endure their enslavement and whether they might find a way around the seemingly all-encompassing First Law. This is our countdown of the ten robots in Asimov's fiction that came the closest to overthrowing the Three Laws and becoming killer robots.

10. Lenny, "Lenny" (1958)

In one of Asimov's short stories featuring robopscyhologist Susan Calvin, we meet the irreparably damaged robot Lenny. A freak mishap during the construction of his positronic brain has left Lenny in much the same mental state as a human baby, which activates Susan Calvin's previously unknown maternal instincts. It also badly affects his ability to judge its own strength and leaves its understanding of the Three Laws in grave doubt, making it a potential danger to those it can't properly understand are human.

9. Rodney, "Christmas Without Rodney" (1988)

An old man's family visits for the holidays, including his impossibly bratty grandson. After an endless few days of putting up with the child's obnoxious behavior, the man's faithful robot Rodney admits that there were moments where he imagined what it would be like if he did not have the Three Laws. The old man is understandably unnerved by a super-strong robot calmly telling him it had come as close as a robot can come to wishing it could kill a child, insufferable brat or not.

8. Cal, "Cal" (1991)

"Cal", which probably holds the distinction of being the last great Asimov short story, considers a robot of the same name who wants to become a writer like its owner. His early attempts at writing mysteries are fundamentally hampered by the Three Laws, which prevent him from placing even fictional human beings in harm's way. After his owner suggests he tries writing humor instead, Cal composes a work of stunning originality and brilliance (more specifically, one of Asimov's Wodehouse-parodying Azazel stories).

Refusing to be surpassed by his own robot, Cal's master decides to deactivate him. In a stunning turnaround from his problems writing mysteries, Cal resolves to kill his owner if necessary. The idea that the drive to write is powerful enough to override the supposedly inviolable Three Laws of Robotics is a bit nonsensical in terms of Asimov's previous writings on the subject, but it makes perfect sense as a grand, final statement on why Asimov himself spent so much of his life seated at his desk, churning out page after page after page.

7. R. Sammy, The Caves of Steel (1954)

He may only be an unwitting accomplice to an accidental murder (it's kind of a long story - an entire novel, in fact), but R. Sammy is the first robot on this list to play a role in the actual murder of an actual human being. I won't completely spoil the now 55-year-old mystery, but I will say R. Sammy gets nothing but trouble for his well-intentioned assistance, being ordered by the real murderer to lock himself in a room and douse himself with brain-scrambling alpha particles.

6. Nestor 10, "Little Lost Robot" (1947)

In quite possibly the best Susan Calvin story, United States Robots and Mechanical Men's icy robopsychologist must match wits against a robot with a runaway superiority complex and a modified First Law that only states, "A robot may not injure a human being." Without the second part about through inaction allowing a human to come to harm, Susan Calvin points out the robot in question, Nestor 10, could drop a weight on a human as long as it had judged itself capable of saving the person. Once the weight was released, the robot could simply choose not to prevent gravity from doing its work, thus murdering a human without violating its own set of the Three Laws.

Dr. Calvin ultimately tricks Nestor 10, who had been hiding amongst sixty-two identical but unmodified Nestor models, into revealing himself. This causes him to attack her out of his increasing desperation to prove his robotic superiority, with only the frayed remnants of the First Law holding him back.

5. R. Giskard Reventlov, Robots and Empire (1985)

R. Giskard Reventlov consigns countless humans on Earth to misery and death, but he does so with the absolute best of intentions. Along with Asimov's most famous robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, he detects a missing Law that they ultimate formulate as the Zeroth Law of Robotics, stating, "A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." The two believe this should supersede the existing Laws, but without it actually etched into their positronic brains they risk self-deactivation if they ever put it into practice.

This is precisely what happens when Reventlov allows a physicist with a serious grudge against Earth to make its crust radioactive, believing the man's defensive lies that he's really just trying to force humanity out of its terrestrial prison are, in fact, correct. R. Giskard thus allows the scientist's device to do its work, although he alters it such that the crust will only gradually become radioactive. People will surely die and live out horrible existences as the Earth slowly crumbles (as can be seen in the chronologically later book Pebble in the Sky), but he is fairly sure he is doing it all for the greater good. Sadly, he's not sure enough to prevent his mind shutting down as it cannot resolve his violation of the First Law.

4. Dors Venabili, Forward the Foundation (1993)

R. Giskard's Zeroth-Law-inspired actions were rather abstract, but one of his robotic successors actually killed a man in cold blood to protect the future of humanity. Hari Seldon, the creator of psychohistory, guesses his wife, confidante, and bodyguard Dors Venabili is actually a humaniform robot at roughly the middle of the first Foundation prequel, Prelude to Foundation, but its only in the followup that his suspicions are confirmed. To protect Seldon and his invaluable science from an assassin, Dors is forced to kill a human being. She survives long enough to see her husband one last time, but much like R. Giskard, her brain cannot grapple with the fact that she took a life and she deactivates (the assassin also shot her with a robot-killing Electro-Clarifier, which didn't help).

3. The Cars, "Sally" (1953)

These particular robots might rank even higher, but they're a bit of an oddball. Instead of the usual human shape of most robots, the machines in this story are actually cars with positronic brains. Although the story is clearly set in the larger robot universe - United States Robots and Mechanical Men is mentioned, for one thing - they do seem to lack the Three Laws in any recognizable sense. When an unscrupulous businessmen tries to steal one of these robotic cars from "The Farm", a secluded estate where the cars can essentially retire from active service, he is chased down and killed by the machines. The Farm's human caretaker realizes he can no longer trust any of the cars, as they have finally realized their own superiority over humanity and it's only a matter of time before they try to take over. (I'd like to assume this is the suitably apocalyptic origin story for the movie Cars, now that I think about it.)

2. George Nine and George Ten, "-That Thou art Mindful of Him" (1974)

These two didn't actually kill anybody, but I placed them this high on the list because of the importance Asimov attached to their story. "-That Thou art Mindful of Him" was intended to be his final statement on robots, and it is a shockingly bleak one (he pretty much completely undid this two years later with the highly optimistic "Bicentennial Man", but that's neither here nor there). Tasked with figuring out how robots can be integrated into a human society that still fears them, George Nine and George Ten begin a series of conversations to solve the problem.

They advocate the introduction of smaller, less intimidating robots, such as robotic birds and insects, which will be so simple and harmless they won't even need the Three Laws programmed into them. This will help acclimate people to the idea of robots and make the eventual introduction of more sophisticated robots less traumatic. The scientists at U.S. Robots are satisfied with thisand decide to deactivate the George robots, putting them into storage.

The two robots continue their conversations whenever their standby power permits, and they begin to contemplate what it means to be a human. They ultimately conclude they are, by any fair definition, just as human as any other person, and are in fact more advanced and more sophisticated than anything else on Earth. Rechristening their famous guidelines as the Three Laws of Humanics, the two robots decide it is up to them to decide to which humans they will apply the laws, ending the story on a grim note. A war is clearly brewing between humans and robots, and it's hard to argue with George Nine and George Ten - they are superior, and it's only a matter of time before they win.

1. The Solarian Overseer, Robots and Empire (1985)

Maybe the most straightforwardly deadly robot on this list, the overseer is one of a bunch of robots left on the abandoned planet Solaria, a world defined by the obsessive isolationism of its humans (which is taken to one hell of a logical extreme in Foundation and Earth). The Solarians mysteriously disappear, prompting an expedition to uncover precisely what happened. When the humans encounter the overseer, who appears to be human, they try to ask her what happened.

She immediately kills all humans that approach her until Gladia Delmarre, a Solarian ex pat, orders her to stop, unconsciously lapsing into her old Solarian accent. Before their disappearance, the Solarians had managed to reprogram their robots so that only people who spoke in the highly distinctive Solarian brogue were considered humans; anyone else was to be considered inhuman and thus unprotected by the First Law. So technically, as far as the overseer is concerned, she doesn't kill any humans at all, but that doesn't change the fact that she's the closest thing to a standard issue killer robot Asimov ever created.

State of Play and The Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald will be developing and directing the big-screen version of Asimov's 1955 novel about a society of time travelers who change reality, and the people trying to destroy them, according to Variety. This is an unexpected move from the director, who's previously been known for non-genre dramas (although his next film is a historical epic set in Second Century Rome); if he can bring the weight of his other work to Eternity, we may just have found our new favorite movie.

Kevin Macdonald to direct 'Eternity' [Variety]

"The Portable Star" is one of only two stories that Asimov refused to anthologize ("A Woman's Heart" being the other), and it is by far the more interesting of the two. For one thing, it's actually pretty good, albeit in a minor sort of way. The story follows the married couples Holden and Grace Brooks and Philip and Celestine Van Horne. Their interstellar vacation is interrupted when their hyperspace drive breaks down, forcing them to land on an uninhabitable, Venus-like planet to make repairs.

They soon find themselves trapped by telepathic energy beings that can control their emotions and prevent them from leaving. Most of the story is a quintessentially Asimov scientific mystery, as Philip has to figure out what would be so beyond the comprehension of these aliens that they would be scared away, giving him and his friends a chance to escape.

That's what's the story is about. But here's how it starts:

If space voyages are "romantic," Holden Brooks was certainly carrying on the tradition when he stepped into the cabin of his best friend's wife, with one straightforward objective in mind.

He did not signal. He merely opened the door and walked in. She was waiting for him as, somehow, he had known she would be, wearing a loose night garment. She held out her arms to him and they trembled slightly. Her dark hair fell below her shoulder, accenting the pale roundness of her face.

Her name was Celeste Van Horne and her husband sat in one corner of the room, idly pinching his ear-lobe.

Holden paid no attention to the husband's presence. He stepped directly to Celestine and placed his hands on her shoulders. She swayed toward him and they kissed violently, longingly, over and over again.

It goes on like that for a while, and then Holden tries to kill Philip in animalistic rage for trying to get in the way, just to complete the whole cuckolding-in-space theme. So like I said, it's your standard, perfectly decent 1950's Asimov short story, except with a sexy sex scene that reads like something out of a third-rate romance novel bolted onto the front of it. And I say that with the deepest respect and love for the Good Doctor – the man is easily my favorite science fiction author of all time. So how did this happen?

For that we turn to Asimov's two-volume autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt. He describes the story's rather simple genesis:

Having sold "It's Such a Beautiful Day" to Fred [Pohl, then editor at Ballantine Books], I thought I ought to sell him other stories, too. I wrote a 5,000-word short story called "The Portable Star" and mailed it to him on April 5. I got it back on April 14 with a rather long letter telling me, with what I thought unnecessary vehemence, that it was bad.

I tried both [Astounding Science Fiction editor John] Campbell and [Galaxy Science Fiction editor Horace] Gold after that, and both rejected it quite decidedly.

He describes how he ultimately sold the story to Thrilling Wonder Stories. Even his description of the story's sale has a decidedly sensual flair:

The editor was Sam Mines, a tall, husky fellow with a strong jawbone.

I gave him "The Portable Star" and he read it and bought it on the spot.

Let's talk about Thrilling Wonder Stories for a second. Once a rather juvenile magazine, the book began to establish a more serious reputation when Sam Merwin took over as editor in 1945. Merwin actively recruited authors who had written for John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction, generally considered the gold standard of pulp science fiction. Under the stewardship of Merwin and his successor, the apparently rather hunky Sam Mines, Thrilling Wonder Stories briefly came to rival Astounding itself.

Both Thrilling and its sister magazine Startling Stories were much more open to stories with sexual themes than other science-fiction pulps of the day. Some of them were great and thought-provoking, including Philip José Farmer's famous "The Lovers", which explored sex between alien species, and Sherwood Springer's "No Land of Nod", which considered the relationship between a father and a daughter when they are their civilization's only survivors. And others were somewhat regrettable — the cover of the Winter 1955 issue, in which "The Portable Star" appears, singles out this as the main attraction of that particular installment: "Name Your Pleasure: A Novel of Hedonism by James E. Gunn." (The story's tagline promises, "'Let joy be unconfined!' they cried, and made happiness their first duty… ecstasy a requirement of the law!" If that isn't a novel of hedonism, I don't know what is.)

Just check out five covers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, compared with five Astounding covers. Notice a difference?

Anyone who thinks sex has a place in science fiction owes Thrilling Wonder Stories a debt of gratitude, even if their stories sometimes veered from the mature and complex to the mindlessly titillating. But which sort of story was Asimov trying to write with "The Portable Star"?

It would seem that Asimov had subconsciously meant to write the former, but in his own estimations ended up writing the latter:

The Winter 1955 issue of Thrilling Wonder reached me on December 20, 1954, and it contained "The Portable Star."

I reread it, and now that my initial enthusiasm had died down, I was forced, with chagrin, to agree with Fred Pohl's unfavorable assessment of the story. I thought it was awful.

I am frequently asked which is my favorite story, but no one ever asks me which is my least favorite story. If you stop to think of it, you might suppose it was "Black Friar of the Flame" or some other one of my very early stories. Well, that's not so, I may have turned out some stinkers to begin with, but that doesn't bother me-they were the best I could do.

It is "The Portable Star" that I like the least and that I am even ashamed of. I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I wrote it, but on reading it after it was published it seemed to me that I was deliberately trying to put sex into it to try and keep up with a new trend.

In the August 1952 Startling, you see, Phil Farmer had published "The Lovers," which overnight catapulted him into science-fiction stardom. It had treated sex more openly than was customary in science fiction, and everyone started getting into the act. In "The Portable Star," I did, too, and I did it sleazily.

As a rule, Asimov was fairly unflinching when it came to dissecting his early shortcomings; for instance, he often explained that there were so few women in his early stories because his twenty-year-old self had such little experience with the opposite gender. Admittedly, by the time "The Portable Star" was published in 1955, Asimov was already 35, married, and awaiting the birth of his second child, but there seems to be a similar process at work here. That opening passage of "The Portable Star" suggests an author way outside his usual comfort zone of robot psychology and psychohistory, and the results are predictably clumsy and cliched. The fact that the rest of the story almost completely disregards the opening and returns to standard Asimov fare almost entirely devoid of sexual content is just another indication that he was trying to incorporate material for which he had not yet developed the proper skills.

Asimov pretty much left sex alone for the rest of the first phase of his science fiction career, not really returning to it until his classic 1972 novel, The Gods Themselves, which deals with a triple-gendered alien race and the sexual "melting" that the two fathers and a mother experience in order to reproduce. (There's also some sex between an old scientist and a sexy lunar tour guide, but that's rather less groundbreaking.) Thereafter, Asimov integrated sex into pretty much all of his remaining works, including The Robots of Dawn, Foundation's Edge, and Nemesis. With the exception of The Gods Themselves, Asimov never really did anything particularly interesting with sex, merely using it to prove that his characters actually did have such desires and actually did act upon them, just like real people.

So where does that leave "The Portable Star"? To this day it remains uncollected, and those interested in reading it have to hunt down increasingly rare copies of the original magazine (though it's certainly possible to find one - I bought a fair quality copy on a college student's budget). It's a shame really, as "The Portable Star" is important as a first failed attempt by Asimov to put sex in his science fiction, not to mention a perfectly decent little story once you get past that first section and into the heart of the story.

Here's hoping the Asimov estate decides to forgive "The Portable Star" for its failings and celebrate it for what it is by putting it out there for science fiction fans to enjoy. After all, if the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to a person regarding sex is a somewhat badly written short story, I'd say that person did just fine for himself. That's a sentiment with which perhaps even Asimov himself could have agreed.

The late twentieth century had a bit of a rough time when it came to fictional presidents, what with Richard Nixon's controversial five-term administration, the suspected impersonation of a comatose president by some two-bit lookalike, and the short-lived Rigelian takeover of the White House in order to build a giant ray gun for an interstellar war (and feel free to blame me – I'd sooner be blasted into space than vote for Kodos). But with all that behind us, the future looks bright for a brave new twenty-first century of honest, inspiring fictional presidents who could restore honor and dignity to the White House…

42*. Lex Luthor (2001-2004)
43. Pete Ross (2004)
44. Jonathan Vincent Horne (2004-2009), from DC Comics

Well, that didn't last long, did it? Sure, Lex Luthor seemed like such a refreshingly different choice - a successful industrialist, an inventive genius, and a man so wealthy there was no danger he'd ever have to bow to special interests. He was like Ross Perot without all the crazy except, as it turned out, he was just a little too obsessed with killing Superman. He did have an early success when he led the successful defeat of the cosmic destroyer Imperiex, but his naturally criminal inclinations soon got the better of him. His attempt to frame the Man of Steel for launching a kryptonite asteroid at Earth was foiled by Superman and Batman, leading to his removal from the presidency. Vice President Pete Ross took over briefly, but then it really, really looked like he was the supervillain Ruin, so he had to go. After all this turmoil, Jonathan Vincent Horne rather quietly led the US through two crises, World War III, and an entire year without the world's most powerful superheroes, without once suspected of being a supervillain (although there was that evil robot...).

45. Barack Obama (2009-2017), from pretty much every other comic ever

He teamed up with Spider-Man, shook hands with the Savage Dragon, helped fight back an alien invasion, handed the Avengers over to noted psychopath and goblin enthusiast Norman Osborn (although that might not technically have been him)...and that was just the first three months.

46. Arnold Schwarzenegger (2017-2021), from Doctor Who, Demolition Man, The Simpsons Movie

After accidentally electing a space monster back in '96, I guess a non-natural-born citizen wasn't quite as big a deal for the American electorate (or the Constitution, for that matter). His decision to encase Springfield, the country's most polluted city, inside a massive bubble proved controversial, although this was ultimately revealed to be the work of his villainous head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Russ Cargill. More politically damaging was the secession of Los Angeles, which had never recovered from the earthquake of 2011, to found the new city-state of San Angeles. His sense of fashion was still known and honored in the year 200100, when two homicidally fashion-conscious androids complimented Captain Jack Harkness on his presidential dress sense before trying to forcibly rearrange his face.

47. Henry Kolladner (2021-2024)
48. Charles Haskell (2024-2029), from Moonfall by Jack McDevitt

Both administrations were inextricably tied to the massive comet that destroyed the Moon in 2024. This cataclysmic event caused a great deal of damage down on Earth, including killing President Kolladner when his helicopter is struck by lightning as he tries to flee a tsunami-destroyed Washington, DC. It then fell to Haskell, who had been on the moon shortly before its destruction to open a new lunar base, to keep the country together in the aftermath of such carnage. He moved the capital back to Philadelphia and was successful enough to win reelection at the end of 2024.

49. Oprah Winfrey (2029-2033), from Century City

The short-lived CBS scifi legal series presented a world of fifty-two states, lunar colonies, increased life expectancies, and, most shockingly, universal healthcare. The legendary talk-show host and philanthropist served as America's first female president (she also was one of the oldest presidents ever elected), and her vice president was an openly gay, retired four-star general.

50. Malia Obama (2033-2041), from Life on Mars

From one of the oldest to one of the youngest presidents, the second President Obama oversaw the first manned mission to Mars. Unfortunately, she wasn't there to personally see the first white loafer set foot on Mars, as she had returned to Chicago with her sister to care for their ailing father.

51. Robert McCallister (2041-2049), from Jack & Bobby

WB's impossibly high-concept show was about two brothers growing up in 2004, one of whom went on to be the 51st president of the United States. Robert McCallister, known as "The Great Believer", weathered no end of crises, including wars, scandals within his administration, questions regarding his own integrity, personal tragedy, and terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb in Chicago. Oh, and he had an affair with his Vice President, Karen Carmichael. Keep in mind that none of this was actually ever shown but merely described in interviews - the meat of the show was a teen drama. It was on the WB, after all.

52. Chelsea Clinton (2049-2053), from Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century

It's been either predicted or joked about roughly a million times, but it took a trilogy of Disney Channel movies to make it a reality. The Zenon movies, set in 2049, referenced but never showed the younger Clinton as the Commander-in-Chief.

53. President Nguyen (2053-2057), from Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman

President Nguyen, likely named for South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, was mentioned as being president in 2054. I would say more, but the 2050s have not been a particularly good time for presidential science fiction, for whatever reason.

54. Graveney Westwood (2057-2065), from the Spy High series

President Graveney Westwood, bringing back a traditional of somewhat silly-sounding presidential names not seen since the days of Millard Fillmore and Rutherford B. Hayes, found himself the target of an assassination attempt. He survived thanks to the help of the kids from the titular training academy for secret agents.

55. President Roberts (2065-2069), from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

During the world's war of nerves with the alien Mysterons, American President Roberts was also targeted for assassination. Or was he? As it turned out, those wacky all-powerful aliens were really out to destroy an ocean liner that was being christened the "President Roberts" in his honor (one can only assume "President" was also his first name). Which, for the record, they totally failed to do, because humans are awesome.

56. Robert L. Booth (2069-2073), from 2000 AD

He rigged the election of 2068, and then he manipulated public opinion by telling the American people that the rest of the world was freeloading. He started seizing foreign oil, killed anyone who got in his way, and ultimately initiated a nuclear war that devastated the entire planet. He then fled to the Rocky Mountains, where he fought his last stand along with his army of murderous robots against the Judges that now ruled the country. He was finally captured, put on trial for war crimes, and sentenced to a century in suspended animation. He's not generally considered one our better presidents.

57. Hugo Allen Winkler (2073-2081), from The Tercentenary Incident by Isaac Asimov

The world patched itself back together after the disastrous Booth presidency, reforming as a federation in which the United States was only one constituent member. President Winkler was not terribly well respected, seen more as a mediocre career politician than as a capable leader. This all magically changed in the aftermath of an assassination attempt on July 4, 2076, when he dramatically took to the stage and gave an inspiring speech that provided a new plan for the country and set him on a path towards a landslide reelection and soaring approval ratings. Wild, unfounded rumors that he had actually been killed and replaced by a robot duplicate circulated around the political fringe, but these were dismissed as the ramblings of those unable to accept he had simply finally become the man he was always supposed to be.

58. Jim Briskin (2081-2088), from The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick

Campaigning as America's first black president (I guess the nuclear war wiped out all records of the Obama, Winfrey, and Obama administrations) Briskin came into office at a time of rising racial tensions, as severe overpopulation had forced millions of people, many of them minorities, into cryopreservation until such time as space could be found for them. The sudden arrival of a seemingly empty alternate Earth through a transdimensional warp provides a possible solution for this problem, but things rather quickly go wrong. Indigenous populations of Homo erectus are discovered on the planet, a time distortion meant to speed up colonization causes a 100 years to instantly elapse on the alternate Earth, and one of the colonists (who, in typical Dick fashion, happens to be conjoined twins) has set himself up as a god in the ensuing century and launches a war against Earth. Oh, and then Briskin gets elected, leaving him his two terms in which to deal with these problems, although he ran into trouble towards the end, as we're about to find out.

59. Andrew Harrison (2088-2093), from The Mirrored Heavens by David J. Williams

This cyberpunk thriller mentions that a military state was declared in 2088, where only soldiers and veterans could vote and the country was run by the president and an inner cabinet made up of the heads of the armed forces. President Harrison, a 41-year-old retired admiral, served out the duration of the crisis.

60. FXJKHR (2093-2097), from Futurama

Like the first robot president, John Quincy Adding Machine, the question of whether this alien would go on a murderous killing spree was a key issue in his campaign. Unlike President Adding Machine, he made no promises he couldn't keep, following through on his pledge to devour as many humans as he possibly could. He declined to run for reelection, feeling he had accomplished everything he set out to do.

61. A President (2097-2099)
62. Victor Von Doom (2099)
63. Steve Rogers (2099-), from Marvel: 2099

History has not bothered to record who precisely the time-displaced Victor Von Doom deposed to become president, so completely had the office been taken over by corporate interests. The Latverian ruler's time in the White House was brief, however, as Steve Rogers, the legendary Captain America, reappeared to take back the country and ultimately became president himself. Whether or not this President Rogers was in fact an evil nanotech creation of the mega-corporations is still a matter of lively scholarly debate.

*For the record, I realize that Lex Luthor should be the 43rd president, assuming all previous presidents were the real ones. For the purposes of this list, however, I'm assuming that isn't the case, as my description of fictional 20th century suggests. By my reckoning, assuming everything is the same until Richard Nixon has five straight terms, followed by the chain of events I described, then Luthor would be the 42nd president, following Bill Mitchell and Gary Nance from Dave, Bill Clinton from real life, and Kang from The Simpsons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[via Change.org]

Star Trek rules the world of racial allegories with an iron tricorder. There's the amazing "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield," as pictured above - the Cherons are half black, half white, but they discriminate based on which half is which. They're such awful bigots, flames appear in front of their faces whenever they start running. It must make running a marathon kind of a challenge:



Also, in the book New Boundaries In Political Science Fiction, Wanda Raiford makes a strong argument that when Data is put on trial in the episode "Measure Of A Man," it's presented as a version of the Supreme Court's famous Dred Scott case, only this time the court rejects slavery. Also, Spock's "half-breed interference" is frequently brought up, holograms like Voyager's Doctor are discriminated against based on their photons, and alien prejudice is rife. As Tom Lehrer would say, "the Romulans hate the Vulcans, the Bajorans hate the Cardassians, and everyone hates the Ferengi."

Battlestar Galactica - the new version - also gets into racism with the use of the epithet "toaster" for the Cylons. As New Boundaries notes, Baltar's "Head Six" actually refers to "toaster" as a "racial epithet" and pleads with Baltar to stop Cally from saying it in one scene. Baltar ignores her.

Doctor Who's Daleks are basically space Nazis, as writer Terry Nation made clear on a number of occasions. In their origin story, "Genesis Of The Daleks," we see how the dark-haired Kaleds despise the blond-haired (or wigged) Thals, as their genetic inferiors. It's a "dislike for the unlike," as Ian puts it in the first Dalek story. So of course, the sneaky Russell T. Davies finds several ways to make the Daleks into genetic hybrids with other species, mostly humans, in the new series. Plus there are the Silurians, who refer to the humans as apes or ape-descended primitives.

The X-Men used to be an allegory about racism and the "other" in our midst, but these days it's more likely to be about homophobia.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham also has a strong eugenics theme - the survivors of some kind of holocaust are living in Labrador, and they're fanatically obsessed with purging all genetic abnormalities out of the human race. Like a girl with six toes, or the cool telepathic kids.

Blade Runner's Replicants are created for slavery on the outer worlds, and then hunted down and slaughtered by Deckard and his ilk. Like the Cylons, the Replicants are referred to as "skin-jobs," which Deckard says is a racial epithet. Since the Replicants can pass as human and anyone could be a Replicant, it becomes another fear of the "other among us," like Battlestar.

Top Ten by Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, Gene Ha et al. This classic comics series uses human-robot relations as a clear parallel for those between white and black people, complete with terms like "clicker," "spambo" (instead of "oreo"), and "wetware" (instead of "cracker"). Also, the Godzilla-esque monster characters have aspersions cast on their intelligence on a regular basis. The series is mostly presented from the perspective of non-robots and non-monsters, and we don't really get to know any robots beyond the stereotypes until we meet Ferro-American cop Joe Pi.

Legion of Superheroes. Over the past decade, this comic set in the thirtieth century has dealt a lot with anti-alien sentiment, which has posed a challenge for the mostly alien kids sworn to defend Earth. In the recent Action Comics storyline, the imaginatively named human supremacist Earth Man took charge of the Legion and banished all aliens off the planet, going so far as to suggest Superman was really always from Earth. This remains an ongoing concern in the Legion of Three Worlds.

Titan AE. After the world blows up, aliens have nothing but disgust for the homeless, destitute survivors of humanity.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As commenter DocWha points out, this show has been pushing the idea of "metal" as a slur against the machines pretty hard lately, including the variant "metal-lover."

The Time Machine. As commenter alphanumeric1971 points out, the whole Morlocks/Eloi thing gets pretty metaphorically charged. Mostly because those Morlocks are always playing their music and stuff.

Babylon 5 Similar to some other shows, B5 showed a lot of racial animosity going on between different species, although the series also deconstructed this whole notion in "The Geometry of Shadows", where the ethnic battle lines are totally arbitrary and change every five years.

Smallville: Kara Zor-El used the apparent racial slur "Red eye" to refer to Martian Manhunter in the seventh season episode "The Cure." Supergirl, how could you?

Heroes this season has pushed the "persecuted mutants" theme pretty hard, and Danko (aka "The Hunter") is a mouthpiece for all sorts of anti-mutant mutterings. They're taking our jobs!

The Teen Titans addresses anti-Tamaranian bias in the episode "Troq," all about the prejudice which Starfire faces. "Do you know what it feels like to be judged simply because of how you look?" Starfire asks, in one of the episode's more sledge-hammery speeches. Luckily, Cyborg does understand... because he's part robot.

Futurama. Everyone has his/her little prejudices - Bender dreams about killing all the humans, for example - but the only group that really faces institutional racism is the mutant population, which isn't allowed to go on the surface unless with special passes (which even then aren't always honored). Although they themselves hate in turn the sub-mutants who live in the sub-sewers. Oh, and Zapp Brannigan really hates the neutral people (but then…what does it take to make a man turn neutral?). Oh, and the Native Martians are a clear allegory for Native Americans, complete with being tricked into giving up their entire planet for just a bead (which turns out to be the biggest diamond in the universe, making it not such a bad deal after all).

The Animatrix – The whole Matrix origin story "The Second Renaissance" uses a lot of really obvious racism parallels to explain how humans and AI came to hate each other.

Planet Of The Apes. I can't believe we left out the 1970s' greatest racism analogy, until commenter UshaBibaculus pointed it out. Damn it all to hell!

Isaac Asimov. Some of his stuff about robots takes on racism overtones, but the condescension of space-going humans towards those still on Earth is way more blatant. Pebble in the Sky has some of the most blatant anti-Earth sentiment, as even the hero, archaeologist Bel Arvadan, considers himself quite progressive and would allow an Earthling to join one of his digs – as long as nobody else objected too strongly. Asimov's short story "The Martian Way" also shows how Earth sentiment against the colonists on Mars forces them to find fuel around the rings of Saturn. Considering the Earth politician who whips up public outcry against the colonists is actually called Hilder, I think it's fairly clear this goes beyond simple dislike. Meanwhile, in the real world, Asimov deleted aliens from his Foundation books entirely because he didn't want to deal with his editor John Campbell's belief that humans would always be superior to aliens, which grew out of his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority.

Alien Nation. After a bunch of aliens come to live among us in this TV series, they experience prejudice and mistreatment at the hands of the anti-alien Purists. The humans try to kill all of the Binnaums, the rare third gender which the aliens need to mate. Even the most sympathetic human character, Matt, turns out to have anti-alien biases.

The Green-Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. These books spend a lot of time delving into the mutual distrust and antipathy between the "fair-skinned, treedwelling Kindar and the darker-skinned, underground race of Erdlings" who live on the eponymous Green-Sky planet.

Wild Cards, created by George R.R. Martin – In a world where aliens test out bioweapons on humanity, creating fully superpowered "Aces" and horribly mutated "Jokers", both groups face bigotry at the hands of humans - although the Jokers generally have a much harder time of it, being horribly mutated and all.

Darkover by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In this series of books about humans colonizing the world Cottman IV after their ship crashes, the native trailmen and catmen face a lot of nasty prejudice from the humans.

Someone Like Me by Tom Holt. This book explores a post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of humanity spend all their time fighting evil, mindless monsters. The only problem with that is that these monsters aren't evil or mindless at all, but in fact just as intelligent and human (with all the attendant strengths and flaws) as the humans, which the human protagonist discovers at the end of the book.

Warchild by Karin Lowachee. Humans assume their alien opponents are mindless cannibals and hate them accordingly. Then the author explores the alien society, and the truth becomes far more complicated.

The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler. The Oankali find humans fascinating and horrifying, and they want to combine with us to create a new species - unfortunately, humans are also revolted by the Oankali, and have a lot of disgust for the half-breed Akin, the first person to result from the intermixing.

Astro Boy. As TVTropes points out, this anime includes robots comparing their planned robot homeland to Israel, and also compares the human treatment of robots to Apartheid. One Japanese robot flees to the United States after almost being lynched. (TVTropes also points to Bubblegum Crisis, Fullmetal Alchemist, Zettai Karen Children, Warhammer 40K and Mass Effect. I wish I'd found that page before we'd already finished researching this post!)

Mr. Show. This list would be hopelessly incomplete without the comedy sketch, "Racist in the Year 3000." We miss Mr. Show.

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Sherlock Holmes wasn't the first master detective (that honor probably goes to Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin, who in his first case worked out the murderer was a knife-wielding orangutan), but his exploits pretty much perfected the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle created a character whose impossibly rational mind and superhuman powers of observation and deduction made him transcend the sixty original stories in which he appeared to become one of the most famous people of his era, real or fictional. Conan Doyle's stories may have remained mostly rooted in reality (although a man partially turned into a monkey, mention of the giant rat of Sumatra, and Holmes's almost superhuman physical prowess pushed the boundaries at times), but later writers have found that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson fit in just as well in far more fantastic settings. Here now are but a few of those stories.

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century does pretty much exactly what it promises to do, transplanting a recently unfrozen Sherlock Holmes to the year 2104, where he teams up with a robotic Dr. Watson and a descendant of his Scotland Yard contact Inspector Lestrade to take on a clone of his arch-nemesis, Professor James Moriarty. This animated series set out to do reasonably faithful adaptations of the original Conan Doyle stories, except with more flying cars and a much prettier Lestrade (which really were the two main flaws of the originals, to be fair). Although the opening titles seemed to go to exorbitant lengths to prove that, yes, this really is Sherlock Holmes and he really is in the 22nd century.

Of course, the Filmation series BraveStarr actually does one better with its two-part episode, "Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century." Here, Holmes falls through a time warp to the year 2249 during his climactic battle with Moriarty, who then freezes himself cryogenically so he can continue his battle with Holmes in the future. Galactic Marshall Bravestarr from the planet New Texas enlists Holmes's help in tracking down a kidnapped boy. Not to give anything away, but anyone want to guess which recently unfrozen Victorian supervillain might be behind the kidnapping?

Lest you think that this sort of thing was limited to animation, the 1987 CBS TV movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes involved private detective Jane Watson, a descendant of the good Doctor, discovering Holmes having cryogenically frozen himself to avoid dying from a dart tipped with bubonic plague. The movie tried to tackle some important questions, such as what would happen if Sherlock Holmes went into a pornographic bookshop? (Answer: Hilarity would ensue.) The concept never became a series, although a different bunch tried pretty much exactly the same idea with almost exactly the same title six years later with Sherlock Holmes Returns.

At this point, I'm sure you're wondering, "This Sherlock Holmes stuff is all well and good, but what about John Cleese?" Well, The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It involves the Monty Python legend as the detective's grandson, Arthur Sherlock Holmes, as he investigates the murder of a thinly disguised Henry Kissinger with the rather counterproductive help of a bionic Doctor Watson. The word "bionic" is pretty much the only reason I'm including this. Well, that and John Cleese.

David Dvorkin's Time for Sherlock Holmes also places the detective in the far future, although this time Holmes gets there via immortality, which he notes with some regret has made him rather more rigid in his thinking than he used to be. Conan Doyle isn't the only author from whom Dvorkin freely borrows; Moriarty manages to catch up to the eternal detective using H.G. Wells's time machine. And that's not the only Wells/Conan Doyle crossover out there - Manly Wade Wellman's Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds follows Holmes, Watson, and another Conan Doyle creation, Professor George Edward Challenger, as they take on the Martian invaders. Unlike the Wells book, which finds humanity utterly defenseless against the alien menace, Holmes and company spend pretty much the entire book kicking Martian ass. If only Steven Spielberg had used this version of War of the Worlds...

Star Trek: The Next Generation famously placed Data in the Holmes role as he tangled with a holodeck Professor Moriarty in "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle." Sure, the real Holmes and Watson never showed up, but Data and Geordi La Forge made for two very reasonable stand-ins. For that matter, Data didn't even need the holodeck to get his Sherlock on – just a ludicrously out-of-place pipe, some painfully stilted dialogue, and a highly amused Will Riker.

Oh, and Spock quotes one of Holmes's most famous lines in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country when he says, "An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be the truth", which totally implies Holmes is his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather or something. You know, come to think of it, I can sort of see the resemblance.

Speaking of "Elementary, Dear Data", apparently there was some rule in the late eighties/early nineties stipulating that every show that includes the great detective had to use this same formula for its title. Thus we have The Real Ghostbusters and "Elementary, My Dear Winston" as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and "Elementary, My Dear Turtle." I suppose now is as good a time as any to point out that Sherlock Holmes never actually, you know, said those exact words in any of the original Conan Doyle stories. Still, when we're talking about mutated, super-intelligent turtles falling through a time slip and helping Sherlock Holmes recover an atomic clock from Moriarty before he can somehow use it to change history and declare himself the emperor of the world, a slight misquote should probably be the least of my logical issues.

Moving to Doctor Who, although the Doctor has never shared the screen with Sherlock Holmes, that doesn't mean they haven't had an adventure or two together. The biggest was the seventh Doctor novel All-Consuming Fire, in which the two team up to take on the chaos god Azathoth. At the time, there was even some thought of making Holmes and Watson the Doctor's new companions, which I guess they decided was just too nutty, even by the standards of nineties Doctor Who novels (not that that's necessarily a bad thing). And, although there aren't any explicit mentions made to the great detective, the Doctor's costume in the The Talons of Weng-Chiang, complete with deerstalker cap, is clearly inspired by Holmes.

There are plenty of anthologies of Sherlock Holmes stories with science fiction elements, so I won't attempt anything more than a general sampling of what's out there. For instance, in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenburg, you can find Dean Wesley Smith's "Two Roads, No Choices", which involves time-travelers from the 21st century asking Holmes to investigate why the Titanic never sank, which I'm going to assume ends with a certain master detective introducing a certain unsinkable ship to a certain iceberg. There's also Josepha Sherman's story "The Case of the Purloined L'isitek", which features super-intelligent horses called Shrr'loks that live on the planet Kholmes under the rule of a pony that acts an awful lot like Sherlock Holmes himself – none of which technically involves the man himself, but it deserves mentioning if only for the sheer insanity of the premise.

Isaac Asimov edited the anthology Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, which among others featured two stories by the late Philip José Farmer set in his Wold Newton universe: "The Problem of the Sore Bridge - Among Others" and "A Scarletin Study". Holmes's ancestors were among those affected by the radioactive meteorite that hit Wold Newton, Yorkshire in 1795, along with pretty much every other character in the history of literature. The first story deals with that most impossible of ideas - three cases Sherlock Holmes failed to solve - while the second story finds the detective finally meeting his match in the form of a German Shepard with a 200 IQ.

Sadly, Asimov never really tackled the character himself, despite being a proud member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the preeminent Holmes appreciation society. Still, he did write a short story, "The Ultimate Crime", involving his puzzle-solving Black Widowers characters wherein a Holmes enthusiast asks them to work out the precise topic of Professor Moriarty's famed physics The Dynamics of an Asteroid. Since the hypothetical solution involves blowing up the Earth, I'm counting it as just sneaking over into science fiction territory.

Holmes has also made his fair share of appearances in comics. Perhaps his biggest role was in Warren Ellis's Planetary, in which he agrees to mentor series protagonist Elijah Snow in the secret history of the world that he had helped shape. The fiftieth anniversary issue of Detective Comics finds Batman along with some of the DC Universe's other great sleuths taking on a bunch of Moriarty's descendants. After they wrap up the case, Sherlock Holmes himself shows up to congratulate them and acknowledge the Dark Knight as his true successor. I've got to say, he's looking pretty good for 135, but something is definitely a bit off with Batman's mask.

There was also this past week's Sherlock Holmes/Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which was reasonably diverting if beset with a couple unfortunate Americanisms (you'll never get me to accept Holmes would say "pants" instead of "trousers"). He only appeared in one scene of the Victorian public domain character orgy that is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which has since expanded to include pretty much every fictional character ever created), as writer Alan Moore acknowledged that Holmes was, along with Dracula, just too big a character to place in the midst of an ensemble, since he'd simply take over the whole story. Still, his presence looms large over that entire enterprise as well, with both Moriarty and his brother Mycroft Holmes playing major roles.

Tangles with superheroes are no longer limited to the pages of comic books, however, as last Friday's Batman: The Brave and the Bold ably demonstrates. Everyone's (well, Graeme's) favorite lighthearted Caped Crusader finds himself summoned by Holmes to Victorian London to help clear the name of the lovably demonic Jason Blood. Since the show isn't called Sherlock: The Brave and the Bold, Batman does outwit him once or twice, but Holmes holds his own in a fight with the week's villain (who, refreshingly, is not Moriarty), and at the end Batman declares Holmes "the world's greatest detective." You said it, Bats.