Geocities had a fantastic DIY sensibility that encouraged absolutely anybody to put up a website. And people used it to upload articles from their old fanzines, and create sites on incredibly niche topics, like all the different versions of the Fourth Doctor's scarf we saw on Doctor Who, or the history of obscure TV shows. Nowadays, people would probably start blogs instead — but it's hard to keep a blog about Tom Baker's scarf going for terribly long.

Is there another fansite for science-fiction disco wizard Meco on the internet? We couldn't find one.

Anyway, we searched through Geocities in its last remaining moments, and pulled up some of our favorite sites that cover obscure or odd topics, plus a few of the silliest. What are your favorites that you'll miss when it's gone?

Jellied Jar-Jar Binks! Ummmm... yeah. Okay. http://www.geocities.com/rhelynn/SFC/
A really fun unified timeline for all science fiction stories (well, a lot of them, anyway...)




http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/3746/Scarf.html
Nobody will ever be this earnest about The Matrix again. Sadly. http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/theater/9175/neo/matrix101.html

Did you know there was a Space Family Robinson series for years before Lost In Space? I didn't.
Admit it, you want an easy to find repository of the original screenplay for Star Trek V. I love the part where they explain that the universe is real, and this movie will adhere to REAL science. http://www.geocities.com/ussmunchkin7/Star_Trek_V.htm

http://www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/ads.html
http://www.geocities.com/ktesh_kag/SMrecipes2.htm
This seems to be some kind of Star Wars parody site, but I couldn't quite figure it out. It's cute, though.
http://www.geocities.com/asnapier/nano/n-sf/
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/trout.html
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/6600/bwld.html
http://us.geocities.com/naran500/index.html







http://www.geocities.com/terabithia.geo/string.html
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/5555/

This appears to be the official site for Jupiter Moon, a somewhat obscure and short-lived science fiction series from England, containing reams of information. Hard to imagine that info will be available anywhere else...

Standing here, in the middle of San Diego Comic Con, it's easy to feel as though the movie industry is a huge maw — sucking up every stray thought or tingle of creativity that anyone has ever had, and mashing them all into new reasons for Brad Pitt to grimace. Hollywood feels all-consuming, when you're surrounded by hype for upcoming comic-book and disaster movies.

I was actually going to do a list of "gloriously unfilmable books," but then I Googled to make sure io9 hadn't already done that post. We hadn't, but SciFiWire, Screenhead and hard-SF writer Mike Brotherton all have. And after I'd already started writing this post, Wired Magazine did one too. (And io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer and the CrazyMonk blog have great comments on the Screenhead post.) The unfilmable novels include some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, some masterpieces of thought-provoking science fiction, including Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Connie Willis, and some giant epics, like Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. I would add at least some of Iain Banks' Culture novels, some Joanna Russ, and a lot of Rudy Rucker's work.

(Incidentally, the movie of William Gibson's Neuromancer? Still definitely happening, according to inside sources I've talked to recently.)

So instead of doing a list of unfilmable novels, let's discuss the whole idea of a book being "unfilmable." First of all, is it true that there are "unfilmable" books (as opposed to books that shouldn't be filmed?). And what makes a book unfilmable? And finally, what do these supposedly unfilmable books tell us about the process of translating a book to film?

Jeff VanderMeer makes a really fascinating point in his response to the Screenhead post. He writes:

I also think this brings up a serious point: more novels should be unfilmable. Because this speaks to what about the form cannot be replicated in other art forms. When I was writing Shriek, one thing I had foremost in my head was to create something that couldn't be filmed (well, except for little excerpts of it...).

Yes, there are unfilmable books.

So is there such a thing as an unfilmable book? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "Yes." Sure, people used to say Lord Of The Rings and Watchmen were unfilmable, and they were proved wrong. But those two examples don't disprove the existence of the unfilmable book, as a species. Some books are too abstract, too complex, too idea-driven, or too non-mainstream to become a Hollywood movie, or any kind of movie for that matter.

Take Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and its sequel, Hylozoic. They're fresh in my mind because I just read Hylozoic recently, and there's so much in those novels that you could never possibly convert into a series of sounds and visual images. You have the nano-machines, the "nants," devouring the entire world and porting everybody to a virtual Earth simulation called "Vearth." And after the nants are turned back, you have a kind of global awakening via a network of Orphids, machines which turn every object fully interactive. And soon, everybody on Earth is quasi-telepathic and able to spy on each other via the OrphidNet. And people can expand their consciousness by connecting to a kind of group mind called the Big Pig. Oh, and they create plastic self-aware robots called Shoons, and contact giants from another plane of existence (the Hibrane) who show them how to "unroll the Lazy Eight" dimension. I feel like I'm barely scraping the surface here, and any Hollywood scriptwriter would need a week in a sensory deprivation tank after trying to turn this into a screenplay.

We went to a reading and booksigning for Jacqueline Carey a while back, and she mentioned, with obvious glee, that her magnificent "Kushiel" books couldn't be made into movies. Partly, that's because of their huge scope and complexity — but mostly, it's because of the subject matter. Especially in the first three books, the main character is a sacred prostitute who can turn pain into pleasure (I'm oversimplifying a bit), and sex work and S/M are woven into the story so deeply, you can't remove them without the whole thing falling apart. Not to mention, the fact that her story takes place in alternate France that worships the bastard son of Jesus Christ, who teaches that you should "love as thou wilt," including S/M as well as homosexuality. There are many ways to make a terrible movie of Kushiel's Dart, but no way to make a good one — at least within Hollywood.

Some books just aren't visual enough to make good movies — take Le Guin's The Dispossessed. You could, I suppose, make a somewhat lifeless film about a physicist from an anarchist planet who travels to a capitalist one. But it would be missing everything that makes The Dispossessed brilliant, from its exploration of the limits and virtues of Annares' utopia, to its dead-on depiction of academic politics, to the investigation of physics and philosophy that lie at the core of the development of "simultenaeity physics." How do you make a compelling movie about someone coming up with a new way to think about space/time?

Watchmen and Lord Of The Rings, by contrast, are both action/adventure stories. They were already woven into the fabric of tons of other superhero and fantasy movies long before they came to the silver screen. Turning them into movies required a deft touch, to be sure, but there was nothing in either work that was antithetical to the needs of the movie form. (Except, possibly, Watchmen's giant alien squid.)

And novels that are even more unfilmable than the ones mentioned above also exist. Some of them aren't particularly great as books either — there are novels that are so dreadful, so dull, or so pointlessly offensive that you'd go mad trying to adapt them. I've read many of these books, so I know.

I should add a caveat: even if a book really is unfilmable, you can always make a movie with the same title and one or two character names, with nothing else in common with the original. If you include works loosely inspired by a book, then yes, anything is "filmable."

Are there books that can be filmed, but shouldn't?

As to whether a science fiction novel shouldn't be turned into a film, that's slightly more of a value judgment than the question of whether it can. Many people — myself included — argued that Watchmen shouldn't be a movie. In my case, I was groping towards the theory that a movie that was faithful to the graphic novel would be both too dark and too dull. I wrote:

I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?... The Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Looking back at what I wrote, I'm not sure I made the case conclusively — I focused too much, in that essay, on discussing the things that Watchmen does that are unique to the graphic novel form, and discounted the possibility that the movie could do similar things in a different way. I didn't talk enough about the story itself, and the things about it that could, or could not, make for a good movie.

And then, a year ago today, I saw a bunch of footage and talked to Zack Snyder, and came around to the idea that his movie could work — it could be about the history of superhero movies, in the same way the graphic novel was about the history of comics. On the other hand, the actual movie that resulted really was a bit lifeless, as I'd originally feared — especially in the final act.

You'll find no shortage of novelists who feel their books shouldn't be movies, that too much would have to be sacrificed to the crudeness of the movie form.

But actually, thinking about it some more, I think it's a lot harder to argue that something shouldn't be filmed than that it can't be. If you're going to argue that it's possible to make a movie of your favorite book, but too much would be lost in the adaptation, you're shouldering the burden of proof. You have to identify just what elements would be lost — and make a stab at understanding how a work gets ported from "book" to "movie."

What does the process of adapting a novel to films tell us about movies and books?

Much of what Alan Moore said, in arguing that Watchmen shouldn't become a movie, is true of all printed works. You read a book at your own pace, with the ability to flip back and forth as you notice connections between things that happened in the previous chapter and things that are happening now. You do much more of the work of imagining the world in your head — even if there are illustrations. The book is frozen; the reader moves. It's the opposite of a film, in a sense.

I think people who believe that any novel that's brave, or complicated, or emotionally rich, will automatically make for an unfulfilling movie are slightly selling the medium of film short. You can do a lot in visual shorthand in movies, and there's a lot more scope to convey information in a way that will go over the heads of some viewers but resonate with others. Any film worth its photons works on multiple levels, for different audiences. A decent actor can convey a whole chapter's worth of backstory with a meaningful look.

Maybe, when adapting a book to a movie, there's something like T.S. Elliott's "objective correlative": you can put in visual cues, props and hints that stand in for complicated ideas and emotions inside a book.

My favorite book-to-film projects include Adaptation, which takes Susan Orlean's introspective work of journalism The Orchid Thief and turns it into a bizarre pomo story of two screenwriter brothers struggling with an inscrutable story. And then there's American Splendor, the film which adapts Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics the only way you could: with a mixture of documentary and reenactment, with the two crossing over in a surreal fashion.

Of course, both of those movies experiment with the movie format to try and do justice to a quirky, unusual book. It's hard to imagine a science fiction movie doing something similar, unless it was a low-budget indie like Primer or Moon. Certainly, the kind of big-budget movie that a book like, say, Neuromancer demands is not going to support much in the way of stylistic experimentation. But maybe there are other ways of doing what those films do — bringing in some of the metatextual quirks of the books by adding a narrative voice-over, say, or a Verhoeven-esque set of fake commercials.

But really, that brings us to the biggest problem with adapting movies to books — big-budget Hollywood film genres are much more restrictive than book genres, at least right now. You have superhero films, disaster films, space-horror films and the occasional space opera. But that can always change — it was only a decade ago that you could count the number of satisfying superhero films on one hand, and now it's the "it" genre.

So maybe instead of hoping that your favorite book never becomes a movie, you should hope it does — and in the process of being filmed, it expands, just a bit, the circumference of Hollywood's narrow sphere of possibility. After all, it never hurts to be optimistic.

One of the things that keeps popping up when writer Captain America writer Ed Brubaker and editor Tom Brevoort talk about Reborn is that bringing Steve Rogers back has always been part of the plan. As Brubaker told MTV,

There was never any thought on my side that we wouldn't bring him back, so it's not like there was ever a fight about it...I only killed him with the intention of bringing him back.

Brevoort has echoed this, and said something that caught our attention:

We've been planning the story of Cap's return virtually from the moment that he died... you'll be able to look back into [Captain America #25] and the issues that followed and see the assorted seeds we planted once we reveal what's been going on in Reborn.

Assorted seeds? Sounded like a reason to re-read the issues to us. But when we did, we realized that not only was that statement true, but that we were all idiots for not realizing what was going on first time around.

Let's start at the end, shall we? Steve Rogers' end, that is. We've known since the issue after he was shot that all was not as it seemed when it came to Cap's "death." After all, what kind of gunshot wound results not only in death, but in this?
In the same issue, main series villain the Red Skull meets with one of his minions, onetime Nazi scientist turned robot Arnim Zola, to discuss a recent acquisition from fellow evil mastermind Doctor Victor Von Doom:
See where we're going already? Don't worry. It'll become more obvious.

As the storyline's main thrust - which sees the Skull attempt to bring about America's downfall through capitalism and democracy while former sidekick and former brainwashed-assassin Bucky Barnes take over the role of Captain America to stop him - continues, the villains fall out, as tends to happen in these cases. One of the reasons for their rift? The treatment of their prisoner, and Steve Rogers' ex-girlfriend, Sharon Carter... who has a mysterious purpose that we only get hints about more than a year after Rogers' death:
What's that about a "platform"...? Well, here's where we take a slight leap of faith, but not an incredibly unlikely one. We know, after all, that Zola has been working on technology involving time travel from Doctor Doom, so we're guessing that he's talking about Doctor Doom's Time Platform, a Marvel Comics mainstay since 1963's Fantastic Four #5. But what's does this have to do with Sharon (or Steve Rogers, for that matter)? Later in the same issue - #41, for those of you out there who really want to know - the other side of the villainous rift, evil psychiatrist Dr. Faustus, talks to Sharon and spills the beans:
"The Constant"? To a generation of Lost fans, that phrase means only one thing: Desmond and Penny. So, if Sharon is Penny, then surely that means that Steve Rogers is, somehow, lost in time. Let's take another sideways trip off Memory Lane and look at Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for a second, which has been cited as an influence on Lost's episode "The Constant". Mr. Vonnegut, would you please explain to the class what Billy Pilgrim learned about death in the classic novel?

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die... All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist... It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

What if the reason Steve Rogers' body shriveled up wasn't because he was dead, but because his soul had been ripped out of it, and sent bouncing around time without any control? After all, the recent Captain America #600 revealed that he hadn't been shot by a regular gun...

But without a body to come back to - and that body is gone, let's face it - what could Steve Rogers come back to? Well, let's look and see what happened when the Red Skull and Zola tried to use the still-unexplained device:
Oh, Sharon, if only you hadn't destroyed the machine at the point where the whole thing was going to be explained to us...

To add some fuel to our fire, you have Captain America: Reborn editor Tom Brevoort revealing more than he probably meant to in a Marvel.com interview:

All during these months, while the world thought him dead, Steve's been on a metaphysical journey of his own, and the experiences he's lived through during that time are going to have a profound effect on his state of mind.

A metaphysical journey like being trapped in time and forced to relive his life, perhaps? Such a journey would give Steve Rogers - when he returns - a new view on life as Captain America, new readers a chance to get acquainted with the character's possibly daunting backstory, and the preview pages we've seen from the first issue to be less straight-up flashback and more involved in the actual story than initially thought.

If our guess about exactly what's been going on is correct, of course. For all we really know, Steve Rogers has just had amnesia after waking up on the mortuary slab and swapping his body with a handy melting clone all those months ago...

Captain America: Reborn #1 is released on July 1st. Feel free to come back and tell me when I'm shown to be horribly wrong.

I read the Riverworld series as a teen and it still sticks with me - I was thinking about it the other day. It represents 1970s science fiction at its trippiest and most random. Everyone who has ever lived on Earth wakes up together on a huge planet with an endless, winding river. They're all naked and bald, and they discover at length that they cannot die - at least not at first. His second series, World Of Tiers, follows a group of humans traveling through a series of stacked artificial parallel universes.

Farmer is also known for his first published short story, 1952's "The Lovers," which broke the taboo on explicit sexuality in science fiction and won a Hugo for Most Promising New Writer. According to Christopher Paul Carey:

[T]ravel back in time to the early 1950s. A young new writer, struggling to support his family by working overtime in a steel mill, submits his first piece of science fiction to Astounding. John W. Campbell doesn't want it. The writer sends the story to H.L. Gold at Galaxy, but the manuscript is again returned. The story is just too mature for a genre marketed toward adolescent males: 'there is no sex in science fiction'. Disgruntled, the writer resigns to try one last time and submits the story to Sam Mines at Startling Stories. This time comes a different response. Mines, sensing he has a winner, albeit a controversial one; buys the story and publishes it in his August 1952 issue. The story is The Lovers and the unknown author bears the strangely exotic sounding name of Philip José Farmer. The response from readers is electric. "Letters poured into Startling Stories praising the story," says Michael Croteau, web-master of The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page, who has extensively researched the history of Farmer's groundbreaking novella. "Several commented on how good the story was for a first time author," Croteau continues, "while others speculated that the story must have been written by an established pro who used a pseudonym because of the story's subject matter."

The Lovers tells the tale of Hal Yarrow, an Earthman sent on assignment to the planet Ozagen, who finds himself daring to rebel against his own planet's religious fundamentalism by engaging in intimate contact with an alien female. The story is tame by today's standards, but the mix of Farmer's raw talent, his ingenious description of photo-kinetic reproduction, and subject matter that was risqué for its day led to an ecstatic reaction among science fiction readers, who suddenly found their misbegotten genre gaining some maturity. "So many letters came in [to Startling Stories] over the next several months," says Croteau, "that six months or so after the story appeared, people started writing letters about the letters." In fact, letters about Farmer's story continued to be printed consistently in the magazine for the next two years. Many came from readers who had missed the August issue in which the novella appeared and desperately wanted to get their hands on a copy so they could join in the excitement. It was not surprising that in the year following the publication of The Lovers, Farmer won the Hugo award for 'most promising new talent'. "Science fiction never had any sexual relationships in it," says the now 88-year-old Farmer. "I felt that that was a part of life and so should be a part of SF." History has proved Farmer unquestionably right.

And then there's Farmer's bizarre pseudonymous novel, Venus On The Half Shell, written under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout - who's the itinerant struggling science fiction author in Kurt Vonnegut's writing. VonnegutWeb quotes Edgar L. Chapman, explaining how this came to happen:

A strong admirer of Vonnegut, Farmer has also confessed to a deep identification with Trout (who was actually suggested by Theodore Sturgeon). The identification was strengthened by many things: Farmer's own years as a struggling science fiction author in the early and middle stages of his career; Farmer's experience as a misunderstood social critic; and Farmer's identification with pornography as an Essex House author, a fate that plagued Trout. Finally, not long after Farmer had returned to Peoria, he was accused in 1970 of having written a letter signed ''Trout'' in the Peoria Journal Star criticizing President Nixon's Vietnam policy-another ironic identification of Farmer and Trout. (The letter is believed to have actually been penned by a college student.)

At any rate, Farmer, when afflicted with a temporary writer's block, conceived the idea of writing one of Trout's nonexistent novels and publishing it under Trout's name. He obtained Vonnegut's permission and went to work. When Venus on the Half-Shell was published by Dell, with Farmer wearing a false beard and a Confederate hat as a disguise on the back cover, the book was a ninety-day wonder, until Farmer's authorship, which Farmer made little effort to conceal, became known. Although the novel brought Farmer some unaccustomed notoriety (and made Vonnegut regret giving his permission to the project), the revelation of Farmer's authorship created a tendency to dismiss the work as simply an amusing parody and literary hoax. An additional irony in this episode has been Vonnegut's claim in a recent interview with Charles Platt (recorded in a book published in 1980) that Farmer failed to avow his authorship of Venus for a long period, presumably in the hope that sales would be increased by association with Vonnegut's reputation. This allegation, however, is not borne out by fact: Farmer told numerous friends, colleagues, and fans of his authorship; in fact, he informed the present writer of it when Venus was appearing as a serial in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut's reaction is perhaps not surprising, since Trout is his invention. But when Vonnegut professes to feel anxiety that Farmer's book may somehow have harmed his literary reputation, it is hard to take him seriously. Such concern might have been better devoted to the effect of Vonnegut's self-indulgent seventies novels, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick.

According to Slice of Scifi:

The director will add his own twist to the well-known “Frankenstein” franchise, a story he has been waiting to tell all his professional life.

“To me, Frankenstein represents the essential human question: ‘Why did my creator throw me here, unprotected, unguided, unaided and lost?’ ” del Toro said. “With that one, they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands to prevent me from directing it.”

However, for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” del Toro plans on sticking closely to the original Robert Louis Stevenson tale.

Probably the last great version of Frankenstein to hit the screen was Kenneth Branagh's version with a scarred, whiny Robert De Niro emerging from a gooey, womb-like machine to become the monster.

As for Jekyll and Hyde, I'd like to see del Toro have the guts to really stick to the original story, which does not contain any annoying girlfriends or maids who are menaced by Hyde. Every single filmed version has had one or two ladies in it, which completely blows the premise of the original tale about a man who is so alone that he's driven to explore himself and divide in half.

And del Toro will also be adapting Vonnegut's beloved novel Slaughterhouse-Five:

In his upcoming version of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” del Toro will migrate away from the first film adaptation of Vonnegut’s inspiring novel and provide a more literal rendition, one that stays truer to the novel.

“There are ways that Vonnegut plays with and juxtaposes time that was perhaps too edgy to be tackled on film at that time,” del Toro said.

We'll see. This is one of those movies, like Watchmen, that could have fans clutching their heads in agony because it's really meant to be a book not a film.

del Toro's 9 Year Calendar [via Slice of Scifi]

Marienbad, My Love is the story of a film-maker who believes he's God, or that Jesus is talking to him, and he decides to make a science fiction movie that pays tribute to one of the world's worst films, Last Year At Marienbad, in order to end the world. The novel is peppered with David Lynch references as well as sections from a faux novel in the style of later Kurt Vonnegut. And "thrill-crazed space-bugs," the Cicadians (pictured above) show up, probably to assist in the metafictional destruction of the universe. Plus there's a giant UFO hanging over Earth, Nazi/alien collaborators, mind control, alien abductions, and a mad scientist who's adding a substance called Fluoride9 to the water to create the world's first privately owned deity.

Here's a quote from Leach's press release:

“If you’re going to destroy the world, you really ought to do it big,” Leach said. “When I released the first edition of "Marienbad My Love" in March, the original length of 2.5 million words seemed plenty long for a 21st century Apocalypse. But the ideas kept coming, and the story kept growing. Now I feel like I'm just getting warmed up.”

Besides being crammed with weird ideas, Leach says Marienbad, My Love includes:

• the world's longest word. Also called "the holy Jah," the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from the world's faiths. It means "god within."
• the world's longest sentence (3 million words).
• the world's longest book title (6,700 words).

Why a calypso musical, you ask? Because much of Vonnegut's novel takes place in the fictional island of San Lorenzo, whose dictator brings about the end of the world using "ice nine," the substance that causes all water to freeze solid. And Vonnegut wrote several "calypsos," or Bokononist prayers, for the novel — which are being turned into songs. Here's how the Untitled Theater Co. #61 describes the adaptation:

A pageant that decries "the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind," this faithful, humorous adaptation of the cult classic is set in the Church of Bokononism, Vonnegut's fictional religion. Presenting a Bokononist passion play, the members of the church sing, play instruments (trumpet, flute, guitar, clarinet and xylophone are among the repertoire), and enact Vonnegut's politically resonant satire. A model set, projected on the back wall of the "church" via live video, forms the backdrop to the action.

The whole idea that our actions are determined ahead of time is more metaphysical than scientific, although some have claimed that quantum mechanics proves our decisions have already been made. But the idea of "fate," or "unshakeable prophecies," really belongs more in the realm of mythology and gods than in a story about a rational, observable universe. As soon as you start talking about someone being unable to escape his/her destiny, suddenly there's a guy with a white beard talking for like ten hours. Like this guy:(What I really want to know is, why hasn't anybody made an animated gif of the Architect doing a funny dance, with all his hand gestures?) So here's a list of the main types of SF stories about predestination, which I was always fated to write:

We're just following a program. That's what I think the Architect is saying at the end of Matrix: Reloaded. Neo is just the latest "One," acting out a program that leads to the Matrix and Zion being rebooted so that another version of the same cycle can happen again. Every choice Neo makes is just part of his program, except that this time around Neo actually saves Zion instead of rebooting it. I think.
Everything is ultimately predictable. If you have enough data about the present, you can make iron-clad predictions about the future. The only reason we don't know the future is because we don't have the raw data on every single factor that will lead to future events. In the first season finale of Blake's 7, the nearly omniscient computer Orac is able to make a dead-accurate prediction that a ship that looks like the Liberator (but isn't) will blow up. Orac never predicts the future again, for some reason. In another episode, "Weapon," a mascara-wearing psycho-strategist, Carnell, can predict everyone's future actions completely — but his predictions fail because he's lacking a crucial piece of info.

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck builds a machine that can absolutely predict the future. He uses it to witness his own fate (before his memory gets wiped), and gives himself a bunch of tiny items that allow him to kill all suspense get out of every jam he gets into. But then, in our totally nonsensical clip from earlier today, he suddenly decides that the machine's predictions really only come true because people find out about them and inadvertently make them come true. (It makes no sense to us either.)

The vision of the future. Our hero gets a glimpse of a future event, and has to accept it or change it. It's usually something worse than just "You'll have a colostomy bag in a few years." Sometimes, it's only a possible future and we can totally change it, but sometimes it's presented as an unshakeable reality. In the Robert J. Sawyer novel Flashforward, physicists accidentally send everybody's consciousness twenty years into the future, and one of the physicists learns he'll be murdered. Sawyer has written that Flashforward is about the unsettling notion that "the future is just as fixed as the past."

But in Minority Report (the Dick book, and to some extent the movie), it's made clear that the precogs are only seeing one of a few possible timelines. Otherwise, even imprisoning the pre-criminals wouldn't be able to prevent them from committing the crimes they're destined to commit.

Time travel. Heroes actually takes a belt-and-braces approach to future predictions: Isaac paints his precog vision of New York getting toasted, but Hiro also travels forward and sees it first-hand. But Heroes also tries to have it both ways about whether Isaac's paintings are "fated" to come true: New York doesn't get toasted, but everyone still acts as though HRG can't possibly escape getting shot in the eye. Maybe predictions that include actual time travel are more mutable, because you're only visiting a possible future?

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time, visiting his own past and future. He finds he can't change either one. He knows when he'll die, and can't change it. But he can announce the fact at a speech right beforehand, which seems like changing the future somewhat to me.

In most time-travel stories, the maxim "any future is only one of many possible futures" tends to come up, because an immutable future is a recipe for boring stories. At some point, the writers on Doctor Who realized that any story taking place in Earth's history must have zero suspense, because we "know" that Earth is fine in the twentieth century. So Robert Holmes inserted a scene into "Pyramids of Mars" where the Doctor proves that Earth in 1980 will be a barren wasteland if he doesn't stop the monstrous Sutekh in 1911. Similarly, in "The Unquiet Dead," the Doctor tells Rose that there's nothing stopping him from filling Victorian England with walking corpses, even though her "present" doesn't include that piece of history.

So here's the part where we settle the question of fate vs. free will once and for all. Ready? Okay. The bottom line is, in order to predict everyone's future actions absolutely, you would need an infinite amount of data. You would need a model of the universe the size of the universe. And you can't have time travel without the ability to change the timeline, or else you couldn't interact with the past at all. You'd be unable to touch anything or move anything, even minor things, because it's all part of established history. You couldn't even disturb the air molecules or step on anything. And if you can change the past, you can change the future. Any questions?

Crash another planet into Earth. In an episode of the Transformers cartoon, the villain Megatron tried to bring his home planet, Cybertron, into Earth's atmosphere. The Cybermen also brought their home planet Mondas close to Earth in Doctor Who, and tried to suck the life-force out of our planet, which is sort of similar.

Freeze it to death. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, a substance called ice-nine freezes all water on Earth, causing the extinction of most creatures, including humans, within a few days.

Poison it. In the James Bond classic Moonraker, Hugo Drax distills the poison from a rare orchid and puts it inside globes, which he plans to launch from a space station to points all over Earth. The result: total obliteration.

Cause the sun to go nova. Evil Star, a Green Lantern villain, wanted to plant a device in the Earth's sun that would make it go nova, so he could feast on the stellar energy. The NOVA bomb in Halo: First Strike would do the same thing.

Materialize another planet around it. In the Doctor Who story "The Pirate Planet," a giant hollow planet materializes around smaller planets and crushes the life out of them, then strips them for all their mineral wealth.

Bombard it with garbage. In the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage," New York launches a giant ball of its trash into space in 2052 — only to have it crash back towards Earth, threatening destruction, years later.

Set up giant mirrors in space. This aspiring mad scientist has a plan to create a giant balloon in space, then cut it in half and coat each half with a reflective surface. If positioned the right way, they could reflect a ton of sunlight on a specific point on Earth.

Biological warfare. In the latest season of Heroes, the Company created a nasty virus that would kill almost the entire human race. And that white Samurai guy was so mad that Hiro kissed his GF that he decided to unleash it.

Killer robot army. In the classic video game Robotron 2084, a swarm of killer robots succeeds in wiping out the entire human race. Only one humanoid mutant remains to fight them off.

Knock it off its perch. Doctor Impossible plots to throw the Earth out of its orbit around the sun in Austin Grossman's novel Soon I Will Be Invincible. "As the Earth grows colder, my power becomes apparent, and the nations submit," he says. And the eponymous monsters in Zombies of the Stratosphere plot to send the Earth off course so Mars can take its place.