As someone, possibly Jake from Animorphs, once observed, Earth is a tough neighborhood. A feature at Smithsonian magazine illustrates this memorably, noting the regions and circumstances where it doesn't make sense for life to exist, yet where it somehow turns up.

There are a few great counterintuitive examples, like the pupfish colonies soldiering on in Death Valley's aquifers and springs, or the Desulforudis audaxviator bacteria that lives in complete biological isolation at the bottom of a gold mine in South Africa. (D. audaxviator is named after a passage in — what else? — Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, from the Latin for "bold traveler.")

Other places where life springs eternal: on the surface of pools of acidic mining runoff; drifting in the stratosphere at altitudes of more than eleven miles; and in facilities at the Carnegie Institution, where scientists accidentally exposed strains of E. coli to pressures of 16,000 atmospheres, theoretically more than life can withstand, only to find that a number of the samples had survived.

Then there are the Jurassic bacteria, preserved in spore form in Antarctic ice for millions of years and resuscitated in modern labs — not unlike Philip J. Fry, except less likely to leave a hat full of milk in a storage locker.

If nothing else, this extremophiles' hall of fame lends some hope to those awaiting reports of extraplanetary biota. There's water on the moon, possible Martian microbe fossils in a crashed meteorite, and the potential for oceans of Jovian fish on oxygen-lousy Europa. If a previously unknown phylum of bacteria can be discovered in Yellowstone's near-boiling hot springs, why couldn't there be something waiting out there in the star-system suburbs?

Top ten places where life shouldn't exist… but does [Smithsonian]

This is just one of Kate Beaton's many historical comics, which chronicle the events in the lives of historical figures (albeit with great artistic liberties). This is her second Jules Verne comic; the first co-stars Edgar Allan Poe. And she's also taken on the unhappy life of Mary Shelley.

[Hark, a Vagrant]

The Masks by Ray Bradbury

Masks, myths and metaphors" play an important part in much of Bradbury's work, claim Jonathan Eller and William F. Touponce in their Bradbury study, The Life Of Fiction, and they believe Bradbury gets to the bottom of this obsession in his never-finished novel called The Masks. Filled with images of carnivals, this 1940s novel would have been the purest distillation of Bradbury's obsession with magicians and magic.

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

When Dick died in 1982, he was busy with The Owl in Daylight, which is reputed to be concerned with deaf aliens abducting a B-movie composer, artistic genius, new forms of sensory input, an amusement park, or a sci-fi reboot of The Divine Comedy, depending whom you ask. Dick never outlined the plot, so it's hard to say. His wife Tessa published her interpretation of his concept in 2009, but her version is largely her own work, and draws inspiration from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Irontown Blues by John Varley

We interviewed Varley back in March 2008, and he told us:

One of these days I hope to write a third novel in the Steel Beach, Golden Globe trilogy, entitled Irontown Blues. The reason I haven't written it is that I don't yet know what's going to happen.

People have been waiting for this novel forever, and little is known about Varley's ideas so far. Back in February, he said it's "third in line," after two other novels he's working on. "If I write it, it would be about a cop," he told Xero magazine.

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

A sequel to Camp Concentration, about the pursuits of a society of humans become immortal through genetic alterations caused by a plague that swept through the world. A few regular mortals also survive, hiding out in enclaves. Disch explained:

For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on "Pressure", and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realise I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standards sf advance". The personal reasons included an intense affair with the poet Lee Harwood that lasted about six weeks. After Harwood left him, Disch suffered several months of unrequited love. Disch confessed that much of The Pressure of Time was "inspired by the pangs of despised loved". Disch travelled around, visiting Ireland and Turkey, but suffered writers block. Unable to continue with his own work, he wrote novelisations of The Prisoner and Alfred the Great.

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

Butler died after Fledgling came out, but the book's ending left most people believing she intended to write at least one sequel, if not many. I've heard rumors she'd made notes on a sequel, but can't find any confirmation of that online. Butler also had started a third novel in her Parable series, called Parable Of The Trickster, but was unable to finish it due to a seven-year bout of writers' block. (Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? "Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.")

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

Verne wrote 50 pages, and never finished the rest. The book was rewritten by his son Michel as L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, along with several other works inspired to greater or lesser degree by his father's manuscripts. Esperanto enthusiasts are particularly saddened that in so doing, Michel expunged all references to support for the nascent language, of which Jules was a proponent.

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ia! Ia! Lovecraft started this novel in June 1922, but only wrote a small fragment, which was published afterh is death in the journal Leaves. According to Wikipedia, he described it as "a weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel." (Vathek being an 18th century novel about Arabia.) You can read the fragment that he actually wrote here. It starts quite stirringly, bemoaning our gray, citified, un-magical existence.

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

Yes, that Henry James. The "Turn Of The Screw" guy. He started writing this romance, about a young man who discovers he can walk through portals into the past, in 1900, but all the time-travel mechanics got too convoluted and gave him a headache. He abandoned it, only to return to work on it in 1914, writing another huge section. In the novel, Ralph Pendrel travels back and takes the place of his own ancestor, but then the woman he loves realizes he's a time-traveler and makes a great sacrifice to help him return to the present.

The Plant by Stephen King

This was King's famous experiment, where he serialized a novel online, and you were supposed to pay him $1 every time you downloaded a chapter. If the percentage of downloaders who paid $1 dropped below 75 percent, King threatened to stop posting the chapters. And eventually, that's what happened. The already-posted chapters have been removed from King's site. The novel is about a paperback editor who receives weird letters (and odd photographs) from a magical weirdo. The editor sics the cops on the magician, who sends him a strange plant in revenge.

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

A story of interdimensional travel including the titular tower (which turns out to be a far-future replica of the the bog-ugly Cambridge University Library), this was supposed to be the original sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. It ends abruptly and some people have accused it of being a forgery.

The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities by Samuel R. Delany

This sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand may never actually see the light of day. We asked Delany about it a while back and he explained:

I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in.

And after that, Delany's view of the gay community changed somewhat drastically.

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Adams was working on this book, a Dirk Gently novel, when he died, but he'd decided his ideas for it didn't work for Gently. So he tried first turning it into a standalone novel, and then reworking it into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy installment. The version which appears in the book of the same name does star Gently, and involves a client who wants to hire him to find the back half of her cat. According to Don't Panic, the book about Adams by Neil Gaiman (with revisions and updates by Guy Adams), the fragment which appears in the book is actually from several different versions of Salmon which were on Adams' various hard drives. What we have is pieced together from three files — Chapters 2, 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, Chapter 1 is from an earlier draft, and Chapter 9 is Adams' last known piece of writing. It's basically a mish-mash, and an assembly of working notes and fragmentary stuff.

Like the novels we're discussing, this list is decidedly unfinished — what are the books that were never completed, for whatever reason, which you would dearly love to read?

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder, Mary Ratliff and Cyriaque Lamar.

John Derbyshire wrote in the New Atlantis a while back:

You could make a case, in fact, that Verne was not really interested in science at all, so much as in technology. Certainly he was a magpie for curious technological and biological factoids, and had a fairly good head for numbers. The imaginative side of science, though - the side that actually propels science forward - was a thing he had no acquaintance with. I am sure he would have been baffled by Vladimir Nabokov's remark about "the precision of the artist, the passion of the scientist." The great pure-science advances of his time made no impression on him. I do not know of anything in Verne's works that would be different if Maxwell's equations had not appeared in 1865. About Darwin's theory he seems to have been utterly confused, employing a sort of crude pop-Darwinism in books like The Aerial Village (1901), yet declaring himself "entirely opposed to the theories of Darwin" in an interview he gave at about the same time. This was not likely an opposition based on religious belief. Though he always, when asked, described himself as a "believer," this was part of the bourgeois façade that Verne chose to live behind after some youthful dabbling in la vie Bohème. He actually gave up attending Mass in the 1880s, and probably died an agnostic.

Though a gifted storyteller, in fact, at any rate in his early years, Verne had not sufficient powers of imagination, or scientific understanding, to rise to true science fiction.

Drabble, author of many amazing literary novels including The Millstone, has no particular opinion over whether Verne was writing science fiction, but she confesses to being a huge fan of his work — something she kept secret until she realized he was actually avant garde. Writes Drabble:

I used to be somewhat ashamed of my love of Verne, but have recently discovered that he is the darling of the French avant-garde, who take him far more seriously than we Anglo-Saxons do. So I'm in good company.

What do you think? Science-fiction pioneer? Gee-whiz technologist? Avant-garde darling? Or all of the above?

[John Derbyshire via Isegoria, and L.A. Times]

The problem? It wasn't remotely true. Poe, a great lover of hoaxes, cooked up the entire thing. Poe's hoax proved to be one of the earliest works of science fiction, extrapolating existing technology to create a plausible account. And he may well have inspired other science fiction writers with his joke. Scholars of Jules Verne note that Verne was a great lover of Poe's writing (and, in fact, wrote a study of Poe's works), and have suggested that Poe's imaginary balloon voyage may have inspired Verne's Five Weeks in a Balloon and Around the World in Eighty Days.

The first great balloon hoax [Guardian]

Dr.Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators


You may have read about Dr.Grordbort's amazing artillery here before, or perhaps you even had the pleasure of seeing them at Comic-Con. These ray-guns are the careful craftsmanship of WETA designer Greg Broadmore, who has created an entire world for his work to reside in, publishing Dr. Grordborts Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory. Broadmore is also responsible for all of the cool alien contraband tech in District 9. Take a gander at this WETA Informercial for his Infallible Aether Oscillators:

Steampunk TARDIS Console

Livejournal user Douglas442 is working on a project we wish we'd thought of first; a Steampunk TARDIS console. We assume he's building it using a only a sonic screwdriver. Douglas has posted a 3D rendering of the eventual finished project, pictured here. Wouldn't Matt Smith look dandy in his bow tie and tweed at this gleaming console? Assuming, of course, that his Doctor is a bit more competent at flying through time and space than some of his predecessors....

Steampunk Dalek
Because we can't get really mention the Doctor without making some mention of the deadly dustbins, here is an amazing little project from Who fan Alex Holden, the base of which is apparently a Dalek Bubble Bath bottle. (And yes, Cyberman Bubble Bath is also available.)

Chronotheric Fluxing Capacitron

It's what makes time travel possible. The inventor (the elusive Absinthetic) explains his revolutionary time-traveling device:

I set forth in a series of experiments, attempting to capture that energy and use it towards my research on creating tears in the fabric of time. Though I cannot divulge the exact method, I will grant you the final product: lightning in a bottle! With this incredible success, after much trial and error of course (and three dead cats), I had the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to power the Chronotheric Fluxing Capacitron and send myself back (and forward!) through the time-aether. A rotating "time dial" allows me to set the exact date and time I wish to arrive in (to the nearest hour)

A photo gallery of the CFC can be found here. His Wonderland Expedition Kit is also well worth a look, and was a runner-up for this list.

The Electriclerk
Bringing the dystopian deskware of Brazil to life, our next entry is the incredible Electriclerk . According to the Make: blog, The ElectriClerk is a functional 1988 MacSE with a 1923 Underwood typewriter base, which craftsman and creator Andrew Leman says was "built for a game of Cthulhu Lives! that has yet to be played." Leman is a multi-talent prop maker and designer, and we shudder to think what awesomeness could ensue if he and WETA's Broadmore ever collaborated.


Steampunk Telectroscope
Based on the infamous Victorian hoax, the Telectroscope is ostensibly a transatlantic tunnel, allowing viewers in London to peer through a giant 'telescope' and see viewers in New York, and vice versa. The web-cam installation appeared in both cities last year courtesy of artist Paul St. George and the Artichoke Trust, whose mechanical innovations and gigantic inventions are the next two entries on our list.


The Sultan's Elephant
The brainchild of the Artichoke Trust and theater company Royal de Luxe,The Sultan's Elephant is both dazzling performance art and a masterpiece of steampunk conceptual design. The first performance took place in Nantes, France for the Jules Verne Centennial, and involved a massive mechanical elephant, a time-traveling little girl and her rocketship. The show was performed in London in 2006 to much fanfare. If you haven't already seen it, check out this video of the Elephant in London:

Machines of the Isle of Nantes
Artichoke and Royal de Luxe set up shop in a vast shipyard and warehouse in Verne's hometown of Nantes to construct the Sultan's Elephant and other fantastical mechanical contraptions for our enjoyment. Along the way the Machines de l'île factory became a tourist attraction in itself, and in 2007 became a permanent exhibit hall and museum for the Royal de Luxe crew. The museum is home to, among other oddities, a full-scale replica of the Sultan's Elephant and a replica of the giant mechanical spider known as La Princesse. The crew is currently working on a giant merry-go-round of undersea creatures (including a giant squid!) which will debut in Spring 2010 - book tickets now!


The Swimming Cities
The Swimming Cities are something out of Terry Gilliam's daydreams, part Mad Max fantasy and partWaterworld reality. The first iteration, Swimming Cities of The Switchback Sea, is a collaborative project by notable artists and eccentrics such as Swoon, Chicken John, and Kinetic Steam Works crew. A flotilla of seven sister raft-cities, hand-crafted and cobbled together with everything including the kitchen sink, they voyaged down the Hudson River river last year and put on various multi-media performances from there decks. This year, the gang reunited and built three vessels christened The Swimming Cities of Serenissima, and sailed the rafts across the Adriatic sea to crash the Venice Biennale. We eagerly await the next installation by these merry mischief makers.



We couldn't complete this list without mentioning the Treehouse, could we? Brought to you by the fine purveyors of steam-powered wonder, Kinetic Steam Works, the Treehouse emerged as a installation for Burning Man 2007 and has since become something of a Steampunk celebrity. The 30' tall Treehouse has been traveling, and most recently showed up at Coachella. Members of KSW are currently in Nevada, assembling the Raygun Gothic Rocket in Black Rock City.

The airship paintings are part of Amend's "Airships and Tentacles" series, in which he combines Jules Verne-inspired technology with Lovecraftian monsters. They're all available as prints at Amend's store, which also features Amend's other steampunk-inspired paintings and engravings, such as "Nautilus 20,000 Leagues," also below.

[Myke Amend via Dark Roasted Blend]

Behold the Machine
Antarctic Experiment
Sabicu
Engraving from "Sabicu"
The Rescue
Nautilus 20,000 Leagues

Replicators! I'm not actualy sure how they got rid of capitalism back in original Star Trek days, but by the time the Next Gen rolls around, they're making anything they want using replicators, which are basically magic make-everything machines. In the season one finale "The Neutral Zone," Captain Picard meets a 20th century troglodyte who's been frozen for centuries and still wants to use old-school money. Picard explains: "This is the twenty-fourth century. Those material needs no longer exist." Interestingly, at least one of the novels has Spock inventing the replicator, when he realizes you don't actually need to demateralize something in the transporter, before "rematerializing" it. Mmmm... that Martini tastes molecule-tastic!

Hand over the economy to computers. In the last chapter of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, the Earth gets divided into four regions, and supercomputers are running the Earth's economy. The machines are perfect and have access to perfect information, so they make immaculate decisions, keeping the Earth's economy zipping along efficiently. Writes Asimov:

The Earth's Economy is stable, and will remain stable, because it is based upon the decisions of calculating machines...The population of Earth knows that there will be no unemployment, no overproduction or shortages.

Open up multiple realities. In David Louis Edelman's Jump 225 trilogy, the economy has already been revolutionized by the development of Bio/Logics, programs that allow you to hack your own body in various ways. But when the famous Surina clan comes out with its latest product, MultiReal, an even bigger revolution is on the way — MultiReal will let you access multiple realities, and play out the same scenario in an infinite number of ways, picking the best version for yourself. It could lead to economic chaos — or it could lead to a whole new boom, as hordes of entrepreneurs hack reality to make sure their own ventures succeed. (Still waiting for the third book to see how it all plays out.)

Pluck some gold from space! Jules Verne's lesser-known works are full of people finding gold from the heavens. In particular, The Hunt For The Meteor features a scientist shooting a laser-like beam to try and divert a giant meteor made out of pure gold. (Not sure if that would create economic prosperity, or just devalue gold.) Alas, the meteor crashes in the ocean. In another Verne classic, Hector Servadac, a meteor made of gold telluride crashes into Earth and carries off a piece of our crust with people on it. We're rich! But adrift in space!

Discover anti-gravity AND anti-aging technology. The United States of the year 2018 has become a dystopian mess, run by an increasingly totalitarian government, in They Shall Have Stars by James Blish. So Senator Bliss Wagoner decides to shake things up, by developing gravity control systems that allow faster-than-light travel, and inventing a surefire anti-aging drug called asomycin. The resulting one-two punch of progress revolutionizes the economy and allows people to start exploring interstellar space.

Let robots take over the icky manual labor. That's what the human race does in Battlestar Galactica, after the Cylons are created to take up our burdens. And it works out great... for the most part.

Sell something we have in abundance. In the Damon Knight story "The Big Pat Boom," aliens come down to Earth and start buying up cowpats, causing a huge cowpat boom.

Discover a lost civilization. In old-school adventure novels, the protagonist often discovers a lost civilization, and with it a huge new source of wealth. In Ludwig Holberg's eighteenth century classic Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum, Nicolai ventures to the center of the Earth and meets a ton of weird races, including hyper-intelligent trees and dog people. He creates a whole new economic boom by generating a huge demand for periwigs among the dog people. (That's entrepreneurial genius for ya. I would never meet dog people and think, "I know, I'll get them hooked on periwigs.") BTW, a periwig is a big 18th-century style wig.

Go back in time to the boomtime. In the awesome Japanese movie Bubble Fiction: Boom Or Bust, a woman who works for Hitachi accidentally re-engineers a washing machine to work as a time machine as well... but it only seems to work for her. The Japanese government begs her to go back in time to 1990, before the Japanese economy collapsed, and prevent the economic bubble from bursting. That works every time!

Start a regular old real-estate bubble. Bowling-ball-shaped aliens decide to take over the Earth in Clifford Simak's They Walked Like Men. But instead of coming down, ray guns blazing, and mounting a takeover, they buy up huge chunks of it — creating a massive bubble. Which they then burst, on a prearranged date, so as to make the world ripe for their takeover.

Good old fashioned public works projects. We may have to go to Mars before we see the New Deal tried again, but at least it happens in the Philip K. Dick novel Martian Time-Slip. The Plumbers Union starts a new Martian colony that becomes among the most prosperous on the planet, thanks to a robust program of public works. And yet somehow, despite all this fiscal largesse, the colony also manages to accrue a large cash reserve as well. It's not the most prosperous colony though — the richest is actually the Zionist colony, which manages to reclaim large stretches of desert into farmland that actually exports back to Earth. Only on Mars.

Money grows on trees! The easiest way to have an economic miracle is just to find a new, fresh, unspoiled planet and start anew, exploiting its resources like there's no tomorrow. Or, if you're kind of a moron, you can do what the people colonizing prehistoric Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy do: declare that the leaves on the trees are the currency in your new society. Of course, they wind up with runaway inflation. (That Hitchhiker's scenario makes me hope Joss Whedon is right about who would win in a fight between spacemen and cavemen.)

Teleporting pirate planets. In another Douglas Adams joint, the Doctor Who story "The Pirate Planet," times have been hard on the planet Xanax. Maybe because people with panic disorder keep trying to swallow it. (Okay, fine, maybe the planet's called Zanak instead.) In any case, the planet achieves a sudden rush of peace and prosperity under its new ruler, the Captain, because it gets hollowed out and starts materializing around other planets, to harvest their mineral wealth. Soon the streets are strewn with jewels and precious stones. (It's not explained why these items remain valuable once they're common.) As the Doctor explains, "It's an economic miracle. Of course it's wrong!"

Verne's early life was a lot less glamorous than the steampunk fantasies of the 2000 SciFi Channel series The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. Verne had to deal with intense rejection, his failures becoming so frustrating that he once threw his manuscripts on an open flame before they were rescued by his wife. No negative feedback was more devastating than the one administered to his first completed full length novel, the gloomy Paris in the Twentieth Century. William Butcher's 1994 biography recalls Hetzel's letter:

...Hetzel categorically refused the novel, writing that he found nothing good in it: "frankly nothing...a disaster...almost as if by a child...a failure...painful thing, so dead...inferior on nearly every line...mediocre...no real originality...no wit."

The letter went on to say:

"I was not expecting perfection — to repeat, I knew that you were attempting the impossible — but I was hoping for something better. ... In this piece, there is not a single issue concerning the real future that is properly resolved, no critique that hasn’t already been made and remade before. I am surprised at you ... [it is] lacklustre and lifeless."

Five hundred words later, Hetzel had rejected what would become the most successful French novel ever in the United States. Hetzel kept a tight rein over Verne, encouraging him to avoid any novels with sex, any novels with technology, and any novels even set in France!

Originally begun in 1860, the novel certainly isn't Verne's finest work, but it is a far more interesting read now than it may have been at the time. Sure, some of Verne's predictions for the 1960s did end up up off the mark, but he did foresee street taxis, a metro system, information flowing through fax machines, and the electric chair.

Presumed lost, the novel was discovered by Verne's great-grandson in the early 1990s and was translated by preeminent scholar Richard Howard. As an anti-capitalist vision of the future, it might have some resonance today, and you can buy it here.

Although Isaac Asimov let his body be cremated after he passed in 1992 from complications from HIV, other giants of the past have wanted themselves memorialized in some way. Here are a few of our favorites.

Who: Philip K. Dick
Where, When, Why: After his long struggles with mental illness, Dick had a stroke and doctors pulled the plug on March 2, 1982 in Santa Ana, CA. He was buried next to twin sister Jane who had died shortly after their birth.
Best Book: VALIS is as good a choice as any, but there's much to say in favor of 1969's Ubik as well. With tons of Dick projects in the offing, we'll likely have a spirited debate on this at some point.
Fitting Tribute?: It's sufficiently modest, considering Dick's reputation has spiked considerably after his death. His children maintain a comprehensive web presence.

Who: Edgar Allen Poe
Where, When, Why: He died in Baltimore in 1849, as a plaque commemorating his birth in Boston tells us. There's considerable debate over how exactly he died, but some blame the bizarre practice of cooping.
Best Story?: "The Tell-tale Heart" and "The Masque of the Red Death" loom among short stories in the American canon, but the score-settling "The Cask of Amontillado" might be his very best.
Fitting Tribute?: He was reburied in 1875 in one of the more famous exhumations. Astonishingly, he was dug up by the man who buried him. His doctor quipped that his "skull was in excellent condition - the shape of the forehead, one of Poe's striking features, was easily discerned. The teeth were perfect and white as pear." He's now buried here.

Who: Stanislaw Lem
Where, When, Why: Born Jewish, a converted Catholic, this finally atheist writer wrote in Polish. He died of heart disease in 2006 in Kraków.
Best Book?: His most exciting ideas were present in the mystery of Solaris, which A Perfect Vacuum collects reviews of non-existent books, a concept bizarre enough to be compelling. Some of his work remains untranslated, including material written under the watchful eye of Stalinism. Outside of Philip K. Dick, Lem didn't care for American science fiction.
Fitting Tribute?: Before his death, Lem appeared somewhat depressed by how far science had come in his lifetime. The latin inscription can be read as, "I did what I could, let those who can do better." Awesome.

Who: Arthur C. Clarke
Where, When, Why: He died in March of 2008, having suffered through polio for most of his life. He was buried in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he lived because of his lifelong love of scuba-diving.
Best Book?: Arguments can be made for many, but 1979's Fountains of Paradise has Clarke at his goofiest and his best. It nabbed both the Hugo and the Nebula that year.
Fitting Tribute?: After a full Sri Lankan funeral he was buried with the inscription: "Here lies Arthur C Clarke. He never grew up and did not stop growing." With ample time to think about what he wanted to say, he decided on something simple and personal.

Who: C.S. Lewis
Where, When, Why: The grandfather of Christian SF and fantasy, Lewis spent most of his life at Oxford. After prolonged illnesses related to his failing kidneys, Lewis died on the same day as John F. Kennedy, completely obscuring his own passing.
Best Book?: In the non-scifi fantasy world, Mere Christianity is a religious classic. Excluding his Narnia series, his Space Trilogy, led by Out of the Silent Planet, might deserve revisiting.
Fitting Tribute?: His brother Warnie curated the inscription, "Men must endure their going hence." It's from King Lear. As Warnie Lewis put it, "There was a Shakespearean calendar hanging on the wall of the room where she [our mother] died, and my father preserved for the rest of his life the leaf for that day, with its quotation: "Men must endure their going hence." He is buried at the Holy Trinity Church at Oxford.

Who: Jules Verne
Where, When, Why: He survived his 25-year-old nephew shooting him in the leg, and although he lived 19 years after that, he couldn't beat diabetes.
Best Book?: We're partial to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but there's much to admire about this prolific master.
Fitting Tribute?: Considering his son made extensive changes to his final works, the inspired vision of him crawling out of the ground is probably the best thing that came out of his family's tribute to him.

A Boy's Life, Guided By The Works of Cosmic Wonder [The New York Times]

• In Verne's story, the cannon that fires the passengers into space is called the Columbiad. More than 100 years after this book was published, the ship that sent the astronauts to the moon in the Apollo 11 mission was the Columbia.
• There are other correlations to the Apollo mission: in both cases there were three travelers, both ships blasted off (literally, in Vernes' case) from Florida, and the dimensions of the "shell" are very close to those of the Apollo Command/Service module.
• The French adventurer Michel Ardan in the novel was inspired by the French photographer, cartoonist, writer, and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. He was the first person to take aerial photographs, and inspired the Verne novel Five Weeks In A Balloon.
• In 1875 the novel was adapted into an opera, "Le voyage dans la lune." Although this was done without Verne's permission, it featured an enormous budget with music by Jacques Offenbach, huge palaces built out of glass, a live camel, and 673 costumes. Verne approached the creators of the show and complained to them that it was similar to his novel, and they apparently settled the matter, because the same team later adapted Verne's short story anthology Doctor Ox into an opera as well.
• Verne did his own rough calculations on what it would take to shoot something into orbit for this novel, and they turned out to be fairly close to the real thing. If Verne had lived in the 1950s and 1960s, who knows what would have happened.
• In the novel, when constructing the cannon, they have to dig a hole 900 feet deep, and 60 feet wide, to house the barrel. That's pretty damn big.
• Although the projectile is actually fired in this novel, the fate of the astronauts aboard is unknown. Verne later wrote a sequel called Around The Moon which details their trip which involves orbiting the moon, and somewhat impractically falling back to the Earth and being rescued.
• This book inspired the first science fiction film ever made: Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, in 1902. Later adaptations included From The Earth To The Moon in 1958 from RKO Pictures, and a comedy with Burl Ives and Terry Thomas in 1967 called Jules Verne's A Rocket To The Moon.
• In 1961 ballistics engineer Gerald Bull began Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) which fired very large projectiles into the sky, with the hopes of them one day attaining orbit. This would be much cheaper than using rockets, although the project was ended before they could get anything beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
• Bull kept trying to work on his idea to launch a satellite into space via a gun through the 1970s and 1980s, and produced an enormous gun based on his work called the GC 45. It fired 155 millimeter shells over vast distances, and was purchased by both South Africa and Iraq. Bull continued to work with the Iraqis on the design of the supergun, but was assassinated in 1990, most likely by Mossad agents, as Israel would have been the target of that gun.
• During the U.S. military's Operation Plumbbob series of nuclear tests in Nevada in 1957, a 900 kilogram steel plate covering a safety shaft was sent shooting skyward at enough speed to attain escape velocity, and it was never found again. Some researchers think that it broke the Earth's gravity and is in space somewhere, but others believe it melted in the upper atmosphere.
• When Disneyland Paris was designed, the Imagineers drew heavily on the French love for their native Jules Verne, and as a result Space Mountain was built as an homage to this book. In fact, there's an enormous cannon mounted on the building, which is meant to "fire" tourists into space. Inside the ride you pass by the Columbiad which fires and recoils as you pass it. Logos for the Baltimore Gun Club and the Columbiad Cannon are visible throughout. Additionally, the ride lies right next to the attraction inspired by Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
• A verneshot is a geologic term where a hypothetical volcanic eruption caused by a buildup of gas deep underneath the Earth's crust could launch parts of the crust and mantle into orbit. It's named in tribute to both Verne, and From The Earth To The Moon.
• Warren Ellis' excellent Planetary comic book features many homages to classic literature, including the discovery of the shell fired by the Baltimore Gun Club (now the American Gun Club). However, in Ellis' story there was a miscalculation in the trajectory, and the shell orbited the Earth for years before crashing back to Earth, and the astronauts aboard died due to lack of food and water.
• In 2005 a video game called Voyage: Inspired By Jules Verne was released, based on this novel and its sequel, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells. It's set in the year 1851, and you play the part of French adventurer Michael Ardan who travels to the Moon aboard the shell. The story then deviates from Verne's work, having Ardan meet an entire civilization that lives under the surface.

The ESA's ATV is fully automated. When it gets close to the ISS, the entire docking procedure is handled by computers using GPS, optical sensors and an off-board laser range-finder. Once it is docked, astronauts can enter the cargo bay directly from the main ISS modules and retrieve supplies without ever putting on a space suit. It will remain docked for several months, during which time it will be emptied of supplies and then gradually filled with waste and garbage (liquid and solid).

When it's time for another cargo vehicle to dock with the ISS, the Jules Verne will undock and head into a steep re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, burning up when it hits the atmosphere. The ESA has plans for another six expendable cargo vehicles - it would be cool if they named them all after classic sci-fi authors. The Jules Verne carried two rare manuscripts by the groundbreaking writer, which will be kept on the ISS. Photo by: ESA.

Impressive dress-rehearsal for Jules Verne ATV. [ESA]

• Brendan hadn't read the original Journey book and went out to find a copy at his local Borders. He found the last copy in a Jules Verne anthology.
• He found out that during World War I, soldiers on all sides of the conflict it was being read by soldiers in the trenches in multiple translations.
• He compared the first version of the script he saw to a three-day old smorgasborg, "It would give you indigestion because so many people had already been going through it." So he pitched a new version to director Eric Brevig, and they made extensive changes to the script, returning it closer to Verne's original version.
• Fraser remembered being wowed by the computer-generated knight coming out of the stained glass window in Young Sherlock Holmes, and we now take amazing effects for granted.
• They were able to view "morninglies" and "nightlies" since they were shooting with digital cameras, instead of viewing them once at the end of the day, or the next day, which is traditionally how it happens.
• 60% of the film has digital enhancements and CGI elements of some kind.
• Brendan's favorite films from his own career are: Gods and Monsters, The Quiet American, The Mummy, and George of the Jungle.
• He went on to say "I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize for Monkeybone," and he called it an "$80 million dollar arthouse film."
• When a fan asked Brendan what advice he'd give to an up and coming actress, he said "I'll give you the same three words I was given when I was in training in Seattle, 'Have courage.'" When asked what the third word was, he said "I'm not very good at math."
• Brendan wants all of us to "take a leap of faith" with this "beta" version of where we're heading with 3D filmmaking, and he says the movie is as important as when sound first came to the movies in The Jazz Singer. Based on the trailer we've seen, we're not sure if we'll be leaping into that hole. However, the 3D footage they showed late sure looked tactile and tasy.

Fraser's scientist character has been discredited because of his crazy theories, but then he discovers the passageway into the deep caverns underground. The film was shot using the 3-D camera system developed by James Cameron for 2009's Avatar.

• Brendan Fraser rules in art films like The Quiet American and Gods And Monsters, but he has a history of Monkeybone-ing his way through a horrendous spate of lighter films.
• The lack of buzz about a movie coming out in July is a little worrying.
• Let's just pray that an earlier Journey script, in which an explorer finds vampires at the Earth's center, left no trace on this one.
• It's another pointless 3-D movie, cashing in on Beowulf's success and Avatar anticipation.
• Fraser has a 13-year-old nephew tagging along, played by Josh Hutcherson (Zathura, Little Manhattan).
• Director Eric Brevig is another newbie who's only done special effects work before (just like Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem's Strause brothers.)

[Slashfilm]

So with the strike dragging on and...

Jeph: Strike? What strike? You mean, it might last longer? What?

Well, since you've completed a whole volume before the strike, will NBC be putting that out on DVD a bit sooner to give fans something in the interim?

Tim: Well, there are really no plans for that, and we're not talking to NBC right now. But, it seems like a very logical thing to do since we have a whole volume with a completed story.

Jeph: Great, I can see the headlines tomorrow. "NBC Releasing Heroes DVD Early!"

There's been a great effort in the show to tie powers to genetics, but at some point will you look to other methods for people getting their powers?

Tim: I shied away from that idea initially, but I also said I reserve the right to have it morph and change into other theories. There have been other theories posited, like that maybe someone made them and that this was all experimental. Since we know the company is a big nefarious operation, you could definitely come to that conclusion.

Jeph: I think it's God. I've always thought it was God!

Tim: And there has been some talk about the possibility of the spiritual aspect of the powers.

Suresh has been the human voice of the series and been used as a framing device. Will that continue when the series comes back?

Tim: Yeah, we didn't lean on it as heavily in Volume Two as we did in Volume One. There is an omniscience to that voice, as if he's talking from some distant knowing place in the future, and that idea is still good for us.

The Heroes graphic novel has been the first foray at taking the show into the comic book realm. Jeph, are you still writing comics?

Well, we didn't really do a graphic novel. Every week we put out a comic book online, so it's a webcomic. This was just a collected volumes of those issues, but it was all recolored by artists, and it looks a lot different on paper.

And, I'm proud to say that I have the number one comic book in the world right now, the new Ultimates that has just been relaunched, and next month I'm relaunching The Hulk.

Well, thank you both, we love the show.

Tim: Thank you very much!

Jeph: Yes, thanks a lot, and good luck with io9!

Malcolm McDowell, probably best known for his lead role in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange stopped to share his thoughts about science fiction with us:

Do you think science fiction films have lost their political edge over the years?

You know, science fiction has gone through many changes, hasn't it? I think the benchmark was Stanley Kubrick's 2001, which took science fiction into another sphere completely, from the sort of Flash Gordon type thing with cardboard sets to films about our philosophy and where and what we are. That's the beauty of science fiction and where it should be. Even films like Star Wars have taken where Stanley left off and run with it, and they're beautiful films. And of course, Blade Runner is a very good example. It's rather a dark film, but it does question us as a human race, and that's what's so interesting about it.

The problem is, a lot of these films are really hokey and bad. Although some of the bad ones can be fun to watch. But, Kubrick did us such a service when he set the bar so high.

It's funny you mention "bad" movies, because when Blade Runner came out, it was generally perceived as a flop. However, here we are celebrating it 25 years later as a classic. Will that happen to other films that weren't hits?

You know, I think that's down to the DVD and the internet. It's amazing how DVD has really rescued some great movies, classic cult movies and now it's not only about who can have the biggest opening weekend. I really love a slow burn, and Blade Runner is one of the best examples of that.

When you were young, were you inspired by any science fiction?

Of course I read The Martian Chronicles and I love Ray Bradbury. He really is the Jules Verne of our country, and he's also a great poet as well.