He Was Abducted by Aliens

Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: Arthur Dent, one of the token Earthlings traveling through the stars, discovers a Tennessean singer with the initials “EP” at an alien bar called “The Domain of the King.” Dent and Ford Prefect buy a pink spaceship from the fellow and tip him an obscene amount for singing “Love Me Tender.”

Animaniacs “Space Probed”: One fateful night, the Warner siblings find themselves aboard an alien spacecraft. A quick inspection of the ship proves that they’re not the ship’s first Earthling guests. Elvis has beaten them to the punch, along with Amelia Earhart, Bigfoot, and Jimmy Hoffa.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, insists he never laid a hand on Mr. Presley, no matter what some pub quiz game says. Chances are that Elvis either is flipping patties at a Burger Lord in Des Moines, or was abducted by aliens who thought him too good for our world.

He Is an Alien

Men in Black: If MIB taught us anything, it’s that anyone you’ve ever suspected of being from another world actually is, from Dennis Rodman to your kooky third grade English teacher. As for the King, he didn’t die, Agent K coolly informs us; he just went home.

“The Bride of Elvis” Kathleen Ann Goonan: Elvis wasn’t just the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll; he was a King, a royal member of an alien race. Fearing his party-hearty ways on Earth would lead to his premature demise, his caretakers, known as “Brides,” place him in a death-like coma until their ship returns to take him away.

He Faked His Death

Bubba Ho-tep: Weary of his fame, Elvis decides to take a breather and find someone else to endure his endless public adoration. He exchanges lives with the world’s most convincing Elvis impersonator, but when the facsimile dies on the can, no one believes that Elvis is the genuine King. He lives out his remaining days in relative peace, at least until the mummies and vampires start showing up.

Death Becomes Her: All individual who partake of Lisle von Rhoman’s immortality elixir must eventually disappear from the public eye. But Elvis can’t resist the occasional tabloid photo op.

Preacher by Garth Ennis: Jesse Custer picks up a number of hitchhikers as he heads towards the Alamo, but perhaps the most memorable is the shadowy Southerner who rhapsodizes on his long-surrendered fame. He never says his name, but reveals his identity as soon as he slides into Custer’s car with a “Thangyu Verrmuch.”

The Chronicle “The King is Undead”: In an episode written by The Middleman’s Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the journalists of tabloid newspaper The Chronicle discover that all Elvis impersonators are, in fact, vampires. And it seems that when the King learned this horrifying truth, he faked his death, adopted the name of his stillborn twin, and became the world’s foremost hunter of the Elvis-themed undead.

The X-Files: In “Shadow,” conspiracy-obsessed Fox Mulder jokes that Elvis Presley was the only man to successfully fake his own death (Andy Kaufman apparently bit it for real). But when the Lone Gunmen investigate an Elvis impersonator only to discover that he isn’t actually Elvis, the trio begins to worry that the King may truly be dead.

He’s Alive and Well, in an Alternate Universe

Armageddon: The Musical by Robert Rankin: A group of aliens become frightfully distressed when their favorite soap opera – the planet Earth – is about to be canceled due to Armageddon. To extend Earth’s airtime, they decide to create an alternate plotline in which Earth’s destruction is delayed. So they send Barry the Time Sprout back in time to persuade Elvis Presley to resist the draft, thus averting US involvement in Vietnam. The time-traveling Elvis ends up creating some alternate histories of his own, including one in which he’s worshipped as God.

He’s Been Copied

Thriller by Robert Loren Fleming: The short DC series features Kane Creole, an Elvis clone turned bank robber. Creole’s none too pleased with the way his creators desecrated the original Elvis’ remains and angrily kills them off.

What If? “What If Thanos Changed Galactus Into a Human Being?”: In this hypothetical tale, Thanos responds to Galactus’ attack on him by transforming the planet eater into a human being. But the remade Galactus isn’t just any human; he’s a perfect copy of Elvis Presley – before the weight gain and the undignified toilet death. Galactus can even sing and dance like the King, and when Galactus is offered the chance to return to space godhood, opts instead to remain on Earth and keep Elvis’ legacy alive.

He’s Really Dead. Honest.

Elvissey by Jack Womack: Elvis may be dead, but that doesn’t stop a cult from emerging in the year 2033 claiming him as semi-divine. In an attempt to maintain their monopoly on the human consciousness, a multinational corporation sends two of its agents to retrieve a young Elvis Presley from an alternate history’s past. But the Elvis they bring back is less “King of Rock” than “sexual predator.”

Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries by Charlaine Harris: Elvis hasn’t made it into True Blood yet, but in the source material, the King was discovered very slightly alive by a vampiric morgue attendant. The misguided vamp decides to make the overdosed Elvis undead, but the resulting creature, answering only to “Bubba,” is somehow brain damaged by the process. The other vampires treat him as a dimwitted errand boy, and try to keep him clear of any household pets.

“You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” by Stephen King: Presley is the mayor of the ironically named town of Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven, a spot in the afterlife where all the great, tragically deceased rock stars of the world gather and subject “normal” residents to interminable concerts for all eternity.

Odd Thomas Series by Dean Koontz: Elvis numbers among the ghosts who befriend the specter-spotting Odd Thomas. Elvis is reluctant to leave the world of the living because he’s not prepared to face his mother’s spirit.

Six-String Samurai: After a Russian nuclear attack destroys an alternate America, Elvis becomes the literal king of a chunk of the American Southwest. After four decades of rule, he dies, and America’s remaining musicians vie to fill his rhinestone-covered shoes.

RoboCop 2: Lest we had any doubt about the King’s demise, RoboCop 2 settles it. The megalomaniacal drug dealer Cain has Elvis’ skeleton, which is sealed inside a glass coffin.

The Twilight Zone “The Once and Future King”: Not only is Elvis unequivocally dead in this Twilight Zone episode, he actually died long before 1977. Gary, an Elvis impersonator, gets sent back to 1954 and meets his idol. But when he tries to prematurely introduce Elvis to rock music and his famous shaking hips, a baffled Elvis becomes enraged and Gary is forced to kill him in self-defense. Gary then takes on Elvis’ identity and spends the next two decades living out every Elvis impersonator’s dream.

The award went, instead, to Connie Willis for her book The Winds Of Marble Arch And Other Stories. Doctorow's Overclocked: Stories Of The Future Present came in third, despite having the most votes and the most first-place votes. The last-minute rule-changing didn't stop Locus from bragging that its awards got more votes than the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy nominations combined. (To be clear, Willis and Doctorow are both fantastic writers, and they both deserved to win. But changing the rules after everyone's voted? Not super great.)

In other, happier awards news, the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas announced the winners of its annual awards. The John W. Campbell Award for best novel (not to be confused with the Campbell Award for best new writer) went to In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan. For the first time ever, the Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short story was divided between two works: "Finisterra" by David Moles and "Tidelines" by Elizabeth Bear. [Workbench and Infozine]

What initially inspired your interest in writing about nanotech futures?

That's pretty easy, on the face of it, but it gets complicated.

In 1990, I read [Eric] Drexler's The Engines of Creation, arguably one of the most radical views of what a true and fully functioning nanotech might do. I suppose you could call it the strong view of nanotech.

At the same time, I was working on a novella that had large flowers on top of buildings, which came from something that came into my mind while I was meditating or running—similar states.

These two visions meshed.

There were a lot of other vectors that went into the writing of Queen City Jazz, of course. The study of honeybees—their vision, their means of communication (dance, and pheromones); the sisterhood of bees and the utopian attempt of Mother Ann's Shaker vision to create a society in which sex and sexual differences did not overwhelm the social structure; the history of Cincinnati; Scott Joplin's music and other American arts such as comics and jazz. However, the empowering element in it was nanotechnology, as well as something I called bionan.

Queen City Jazz was the first nanotech novel to be published, but it was not terrifically publisher-backed, as was Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which came out a few months later, so this is not generally known.

I think that, for me, nanotech has been a metaphor for the power of thought, and for the power of language. This may sound odd, but it seems that the more we understand matter and the more we are able to manipulate it and to make decisions about how and why to do so, the better we understand ourselves. In the category of "ourselves," I include everything that lives, according to our possibly limited definition.

Why do you think there was an explosion of so-called nanopunk writing in the 1990s, but not so much in the 2000s? It seems odd to me that an era when nanotech is actually making headway as a science (ie, the last five years) hasn't been accompanied by a rich SF tradition.

Maybe it's because what is called nanotech seems to be put to mundane uses. There are a lot of fabulous things coming down the pike in the realm of molecular engineering, but right now, what the public knows about nanotech is that it is used as an advertising buzzword—what I call "weak" nanotech. In science fiction, it is routinely used as "the sufficiently advanced technology that seems like magic." It is not really seen as a powerful possible agent of the very foundations of what makes us human. When it is too difficult to explain how something works, it is just "nanotech."

Do you want your Nanotech Quartet to be read by nanotech developers as a warning?

Absolutely not! As a warning, perhaps, that we should not create Flower-Cities—as if anyone would? I am an inventor, an artist, a writer telling stories. As a writer, I work very hard to make my novels and stories real. I want the reader to be completely immersed. If scientists read my books and find them plausible—and they have—so much the better, in terms of the science in the science fictional work. But science fiction is not predictive. In an odd way, I am always writing about the present. It could hardly be otherwise, because the present is where I live. I use the language of the present, with all its freight of the present. Judging from history, the beam our headlights cast does not illuminate anything very far into the future.

And finally, a slightly orthogonal question: who would be your pick for the most futuristic jazz composer of the last 30 years?

Because I was immersed in WWII for so many years as I wrote In War Times, I must say that I'm rather partial, musically, to that period. Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and John Coltrane all spring to mind as those who set out in new directions and who remain timeless in their explorations, even though they don't really fall into the thirty-year limit.