We've already written a lot about Robert J. Sawyer's novel Flash Forward becoming a new ABC show, from producers David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga. Sawyer's novel tells of an incident where everyone on Earth has a blackout and sees 21 years into the future, as a result of an experiment by physicists. It already sounds like Goyer and Braga are taking major liberties with the concept to make it television-friendly, like making the flash forward only show people five months into the future, not 21 years. And each season will end with another flash-forward, further into the future, carrying the story forward.

Meanwhile, the late and lamented (as of today) John Updike lived just long enough to see his novel The Witches Of Eastwick picked up for a television series, also on ABC. (To be fair, the TV show may also be based more on the movie version, starring Jack Nicholson.) According to Variety, the new TV show (the second attempt, after a failed 2002 pilot) will retell Updike's book, focusing on three women in a small town who discover they have magical powers when a mysterious man arrives in town.

And now, e-book pioneer and erotica mastermind M.J. Rose is the latest author to turn a book into a TV series, according to Publisher's Marketplace. The Reincarnationist tells the story of a investigator who solves people's problems by untangling their issues from their past lives. (And the main character, Josh, also discovers he was a priest who slept with a vestal virgin in a past life, and some bad people are looking for special stones that help you reach your next life.) Warner Bros. is producing a pilot, with Rose as executive producer, for Fox.

What we found: As you might imagine, the real surge in literary novels with science fiction themes came in the past five or six years, after literary journal Conjunctions published its "New Wave Fabulist" issue and magical realism was on the wane. There were literary novels with SF themes, like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which didn't really fit into the general subject areas of "alternate history," "time warp," or "post-apocalyptic." We were most interested in seeing which years featured the most literary novels featuring those themes.

Of those three subcategories, alternate history was the most consistent, with literary authors using it to explore how wars could have gone differently, but also other topics. Not surprisingly, you saw more alternate history novels at the start of this period, when the U.S. was active in Somalia and still bombing Iraq, and then at the end, when we had invaded Iraq. Alternate history is traditionally a fairly conservative genre, with authors like Newt Gingrich dabbling in it and exploring how things could have turned out worse if we hadn't stiffened our spines. But a recent spate of alt-history novels is more liberal, exploring a world where the Aztecs never fell (Atomik Aztex) and a world where the Jews got a homeland in Alaska and we avoided the Middle East conflict (Yiddish Policemen's Union).

There was a boomlet in time-travel fiction, and stories about time acting strange, in 2003-2004, with Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife proving a huge mainstream hit. This was the peak of the Bush-era resurgence in conservativism, with a lot of mainstream nostalgia about World War II and the Greatest Generation.

And then was a boom in post-apocalyptic fiction in more recent years, with three huge classics of the genre hitting in 2006. In particular, Cormac McCarthy's The Road has become the poster-child for the literary-authors-going-speculative trend. These books coincided with the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and a worsening Iraq conflict. But there's been a lull in the post-apocalyptic genre since then as well.