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

1984 by George Orwell:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham:

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham:

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

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Neuromancer by William Gibson:

We by Yevgeny Zamyain:

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

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess:

War of the Worlds by HG Wells:

Set in the near future, Year of the Flood is a retelling of Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic classic Oryx and Crake from the perspective of characters who were only marginally involved in the massive act of bioterror unleashed by the previous novel's sociopathic Utopian scientist Glenn (AKA Crake). While Glenn and his damaged, upper-class buddies were cooking up a virus to end the world, the peaceful Green separatist Gardeners lived in squats, tending vast urban rooftop gardens. The Gardeners' leader, who goes by the name Adam One, preaches a kind of new agey Catholic environmentalism, complete with days devoted to saints (like Saint Rachel Carson) and hymns.

We follow two women, the young, credulous Ren and the toughminded Toby, after they join the Gardeners. Slowly they learn the skills necessary to survive the social collapse – the "flood" - that Adam One predicts will come about as the result of rampant genetic engineering and pollution. Circumstances sweep the two women back out into the "exfernal world," and they begin lives as service workers – Ren works at a sex club called Scales and Tails, while Toby takes a job managing a spa called AnooYoo that does biotech beauty treatments on wealthy women.

While Ren is relatively happy dressing like a bird and doing trapeze stripping for her clients, Toy stays in contact with the Gardeners via a secret chat room. She knows vaguely that her former brethren have splintered into two groups: Those who prefer Adam One's peaceful ways, and those who work with Glenn on acts of bioterror. Still, Toby is unprepared for what happens next: Trying to purge the Earth of its greatest threat, Glenn creates a human-targeted supervirus that spreads like wildfire across the globe, literally melting people in their tracks.

Ren and Toby manage to survive, but now they have to deal with fighting off genetically-engineered animals gone wild. The pigs with human brain cells and the half-lion, half-lamb creatures developed by Bible literalists who want lions to lay down with lambs are particularly pernicious. The two women inch towards their inevitable reunion across a landscape heaped with the refuse of scientific innovation gone horribly wrong, though we are never certain that they or any humans will ultimately survive.

Unlike Oryx and Crake, whose main characters come across as irredeemable, Year of the Flood is an oddly hopeful book. The Gardeners' odd survivalist wisdom is exactly the kind of belief system you'd need to survive a global pandemic. Members of the group know how to forage in an urban wasteland, and what to eat in the forest. Equally important, they possess a reverence for the ecosystem that's completely missing from traditional Western religion.

It's clear that Atwood has thought a lot about the kinds of helpful myths she'd implant in human history if she could restart the world: That's why every few chapters we hear a sermon from Adam One, along with a hymn. It's an interesting exercise in speculative worldbuilding. If the Gardeners can survive – and seems as if they might – their beliefs could become the moral lifeblood of a civilization founded on renewable resources rather than environmental exploitation.

For this reason alone, Year of the Flood is an interesting companion piece to Oryx and Crake. In the latter, Atwood investigated what it would take to genetically engineer the perfect posthumans. Glenn and his colleagues secretly build these perfect beings by synthesizing hardy, disease-resistant humanoids who eat nothing but leaves, communicate through healing purrs and birdsong, and experience no sexual shame. Now, with Year of the Flood, she imagines what's required to culturally engineer a new human society out of novel mythologies and social structures created by the Gardeners.

We never know for sure whether the genetic or social experiment will save what's left of humanity, and that's a good thing. Atwood pulls us into the lives of her characters so that we're forced to contemplate the true and deadly precariousness of our future as a species. You may not agree with the way she's framed the problem – the science in this novel is fanciful at best – but it's hard to deny that she's asking the right questions.

Year of the Flood via Borders

The sequel to Orxy and Crake, called The Year of the Flood, came out this month. (I'll post my review of it soon!) Like Orxy, Atwood's new novel is packed with weird hybrid animals and horrific biotech companies who will mutate any genome for a profit.

In these images, artist Jason Courtney shows us a few of Atwood's imaginary GMO animals, who are horrifying because they seem to have been created for no good reason. Who wants a half-ape, half-pig? What's the use of a half-snake, half-rat? These hybrids represent science gone decadent. And the tech culture in her novel has gone decadent too, with teenagers dabbling in child porn and playing videogames about destroying the world (which indeed one brainy techie finally does, as you can see in the post-apocalyptic painting of our main character reduced to a state of savagery, looking at the ruins of his virus-ravaged civilization).

Unlike a typical science fiction author, who would try to depict realistic possibilities for bioengineering, Atwood turns genetic engineering into a fantastical metaphor. Her pigoons and snats aren't likely ever to exist. So she may not have predicted the future, but she has created fantastical figures who neatly capture the worthlessness of innovation for innovation's sake. And Courtney's paintings bring that feeling to life.

You can see more of Jason Courtney's work in his online gallery.

Thanks, Janna!

In her essay collection Moving Targets Atwood explains that she doesn't consider the books she writes, including The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a future America taken over by a fascist government, and Oryx and Crake, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with genetically engineered creatures, science fiction, a genre she defines as "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today." Ursula K. Le Guin, whose novels like The Left Hand of Darkness have gained critical acclaim under the science fiction and fantasy labels, suggests that Atwood is not making a viable literary distinction, but rather protecting her works from "literary bigots" who relegate genre fiction to a "literary ghetto."

Le Guin doesn't begrudge Atwood her genre hair-splitting ("Who can blame her?" she says), but she actually believes that Atwood's latest book, The Year of the Flood, itself a continuation of the post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake is less successful as "realistic" fiction than as genre fiction. In other words, reviewing it as a strictly realist literary novel instead of a speculative work forces Le Guin to write a more negative review:

I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.

With its vague references to a plague that wipes out humanity and characters better suited to morality play than emotional depth, she suggests that Atwood's novel nicely elucidates science fiction's power to "extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire," but that it is somewhat less successful as non-genre literary work. Le Guin seems ultimately less concerned with what Atwood's self-segregation means to the genre than that Atwood's refusal to label her book as science fiction makes the novel's bleak future at once upsetting and absurd:

It is no comfort to find that some of the genetic experiments are humanoids designed to replace humanity. Who wants to be replaced by people who turn blue when they want sex, so that the men's enormous genitals are blue all the time? Who wants to believe that a story in which that happens isn't science fiction?

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood [The Guardian]

The Year Of The Flood is not quite a sequel to Atwood's acclaimed novel Oryx and Crake, as I mistakenly wrote before. Rather, it's a thematic continuation of Oryx, with a lot of the same elements. Here's the book's official description, from the new website:

Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners – a religion devoted to the melding of science, religion, and nature – has long predicted a disaster. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women remain: Ren, a young dancer locked away in a high-end sex club, and Toby, a former God's Gardener, who barricades herself inside a luxurious spa. Have others survived? Ren's bio-artist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy policing force of the ruling powers… As Adam One and his beleaguered followers regroup, Ren and Toby emerge into an altered world, where nothing – including the animal life – is predictable.

The new website includes T-shirt designs promoting her made-up brands like Chickie-Nobs, Anoo Yoo Spa (which promises "Total reskinning"), God's Gardeners, and ScalesAndTails. And there's an excerpt, which shows us the novel starts with a fairly pastoral view of the world (mostly) without people:

In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, so if she slips and topples there won't be anyone to pick her up.

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it's been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef – bleached and colourless, devoid of life.

There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there's no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier? Toby has no idea. Unlike some of the other Gardeners – the more wild-eyed or possibly overdosed ones – she has never been under the illusion that she can converse with birds.

To promote this new novel, Atwood is planning something bigger than just your usual book tour. Rather, she wants to do a giant theatrical piece, featuring three actors and a choir:

Margaret Atwood has written a one-hour theatrical performance based on the book.

The piece will include three actors and a choir, with Atwood serving as narrator.

The author is scheduled to present the show in six Canadian cities, as well as in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Sweden.

"There have been many challenges, but it's a chance to break free from the traditional structure of a book tour," Atwood said in a statement.

"I felt this particular novel deserved a more complex presentation. It's also a great chance to work with other creative minds and see their interpretation of the story come to light."

Local actors and choirs will be used for each performance, a move the author's publisher says is designed to reduce "the carbon footprint of a travelling cast."

But that's not all — on her Twitter stream, Atwood mulls over the idea of selling stuffed animals of the weird creatures in her book:

Thinking about Boston Biblio's sugggestion — plushies of the genespliced animals in YOTF -tx! Good thought!

Last year, we gave you our favorite opening sentences from science fiction novels — but when we decided to do the same thing for endings, it turned out to be harder to find as many great ones, until we did a bit more digging. Why are great endings rarer than great beginnings?

In some ways, a great opening line is easier than a great last line. Everybody understands the need to draw the reader in, to craft a beginning that both seduces and informs the uncommitted. A first line gives you hints of what the story will be about, but also establishes a tone. But a last line has to wrap up the last bits of story, leave you with as much closure as the writer wants you to have, and give a feeling of a final grace note. And a lot of science fiction novels seem to end with a bang, or a last order of business, or a final thought — but a line that wraps things up, storywise, and leaves you with a sense that the story continues, past the horizon? That's a tad rarer.

So we spent hours sitting in various bookstores and our own book collections, rifling through the science fiction books to find the last lines that stay with you after you've put the book down. (I sat on the floor of a Border's for a couple hours. Shudder.) And here's what we came across, including a few fantasy ones as well. (Special thanks to Alexis Brown, who devoted tons of time to the search for the perfect final note.)

It goes without saying, there may be spoilers here. (Although perhaps not surprisingly, many of the best last lines are the ones which give the least away, because they do the least plot wrangling.) Also, we're cheating slightly, in some cases, and giving you the last paragraphs of novels, rather than just the last sentence. So here are our favorites:

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly:

"Stooping Down, Bruce picked one of the stubbled blue plants, then placed it in his right shoe, sliping it down out of sight. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving." It's a lovely surreal ending to a weird, unsettling book, and the blue plant that Bruce puts in his shoe is one of the seedlings of the mysterious drug Substance D. What's he going to do with it? I love the fact that in a novel about surveillance and fractured personas we have to be told, at the last, that nobody can see inside Bruce's mind.

Matthew De Abaitua, Red Men:

"She moved on to the question of what she would dream about, if she could decide on a good dream before going to sleep, and if the dream would obey her wishes and stay good all through the night." Another novel about fractured psyches and surveillance and people confronting their dark side, and it ends with a child's wish to control her own dreams — and we linger on how simple, and yet how difficult, that actually is.

Iain M. Banks, Against A Dark Background:

"A little later the monowheel vehicle spun backward out of the sewer outfall, pirrouetted vertically like a saluting mount, swung down across the greasy slope of stones at the base of the House's walls, dodged uncoordinated gunfire from a nearby tower, and accelerated quickly across the tide-flooding sands." Jesus. Read that aloud. It's a poem. And the imagery is so vivid, you can see the monowheel's dance, in your head. It's epic.

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere:

"And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway." It's interesting how many of these last lines are a literal departure, into darkness or into the void. Anyway, it's a really haunting last sentence.

William Barton, When Heaven Fell:

"Then the pipers piped and the drummers drummed and we all marched away into the sky." The main character is fighting in the alien army that conquered the human race, and they finally may have found an even more powerful enemy to go fight. I just love the ring of "marched away into the sky." Why isn't William Barton worshiped as a god, again?

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow:

"Unaware of his own movement, schooled by old habit, Vincenzo Giuliani rose and went to the windows, and stood looking, for how long he had no idea, across a grassy open courtyard to a complex panorama of medieval masonry and jumbled rock, formal garden and gnarled trees: a scene of great and beautiful antiquity." It's a wonderfully melancholy last sentence for a novel that ends with dreadful sadness and contemplation of almost unimaginable brutality. The universe is even older, and even harsher, than anything we have on Earth, and yet there's beauty as well.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition:

"She kisses his sleeping back and falls asleep." Supposedly it's a major taboo to begin a novel with a character waking up, but in this case, ending a novel with falling asleep, especially after a kiss, just feels right.

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother:

"She kissed me then, and I kissed her back, and it was some time before we went out for that burrito." It's like the end of a Roger Moore James Bond movie, where he's finally in bed with the main girl, and we pan back slowly, giving them some privacy for their much-deserved nookie. Except Doctorow's version is funnier, and the burrito thing is a nice callback to the crucial burrito scene earlier in the book.

The Killing of Worlds (Succession, Book 2) by Scott Westerfeld:

"A kiss could change the world." Another kiss, and this one full of hope that the personal can have a transforming effect on the universe.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451:

"When we reach the city." Super short, but one of the most discussed last lines in literature, for its possible religious symbolism among other things. It's inspired a whole blog.

Charles Stross, Saturn's Children:

"And none of them need fear being eaten by memories of Rhea." I just love the "eaten by memories" thing.

Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation:

"The Vibe doesn't say a word, for it's been done with him for years; but in his daughter's breathing, the calls of birds from the vines draped over branches, the thickening sky talking about the rain, the insects landing with rustles and whispers on their faces and hands, the ruts in the road that connect La Paz with his wife sleeping on the warping porch at the edge of the ravine, he thinks he hears the answer." One last rolling boulder of a sentence from this thundering novel, that leaves you wondering just what that answer might be.

Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner, Juggler of Worlds:

"In the skies over Atlantis, two suns were gone." And if that doesn't leave an image in your mind after you close the book, there's no helping you.

Frank Herbert, Dune:

"Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine-never to know the moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chai, we who carry the name of the concubine-history will call us wives." Both Alexis and I picked this one out separately — it's just such a great chunk of intrigue. Although I was torn between this one and Children of Dune, which ends with another great quote: "One of us had to accept the agony, and he was always the strongest."

The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds:

"'Dreams,' Demikhov said. 'Beautiful human dreams.'" It's actually really hard to end a novel on a line of dialogue without feeling hokey or as though the interplay of dialogue and narration is just stopping, but Reynolds does it amazingly well.

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time:

"But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone." It's just so fairytale-like, with the nice use of "for" and the gust of wind. And the mystery lingering after you close the back cover.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games:

"I take his hand, holding tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go." One of our favorite books of the past year, and it ends with the greatest test yet to begin. And "let go" has so many different meanings here, it's amazing.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx And Crake:

"Zero Hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go." You can see why this book is getting a sequel, since that's another ending that feels like a beginning.

Arthur C Clarke, Childhood's End:

"No one dared disturb him or interrupt his thoughts; and presently he turned his back upon the dwindling sun." Another one that both Alexis and I picked out separately, for its image of the sun dying away.

Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon:

"We moved on through the cavern to the stairs where the dead men lay and went round and round above him in the dark." Another one which ends with a sense of motion and departure, with the narrator leaving into the dark.

Otherland Volume Three: Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams:

"She learned on the balcony railing, waiting for the end of the world." There are some last lines that would also make great first lines, and this is definitely one of them.

H.G. Wells, War Of The Worlds:

"And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead." It makes me want to go back and re-read that book right now.

George Orwell, 1984:

"He loved Big Brother." You can't get much sharper, darker, or bleaker than that final statement.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein:

"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance." Another last line that's a departure, and that features someone disappearing into the darkness, in a poetic, haunting way.

Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End:

"Then he was down the elevator and back on the sunny plaza. And hovering immanent all around him were the worlds of art and science that humankind was busy building. What if I can have it all?" Of all the endings we looked through, this is the one that felt the most cinematic, for some reason. You can just feel the camera panning back to show the future being built and the big question hovering in the air.

Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible:

"When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a super-charged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world." More books should suddenly veer into second person, as if this is all of us going on this journey of vengeance together — it just amps up the awful power of that last evil oath.

Ken MacLeod, The Sky Road:

"Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written." The image of conquest, culminating with the blank, black flag, is just so rich and hangs around long after you put the book down.

Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue:

"One of the things he planned to do, before he left this fancy hell, was figure out how to get into the Interface and go for a swim with those whales in that beautiful blue water. Round and round and round, in a lovely endless loop." Another really sticky image, this one a bit surreal and full of color.

Top image is cover of The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod, art by Mark Salwowski. Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

In an interview yesterday with the New York Times, Atwood laid out the philosophical underpinnings that will play out in her latest novel, which examines the effects of a cataclysmic environmental disaster on an already crumbling society. That last part has quite a bit to do with Atwood's thoughts on the global economic crisis, which she spelled out in great detail in last October's book-length essay Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

In short, humanity's current troubles are in part the result of colossally mishandling the apportionment of debt. According to Atwood, what had historically been a highly tangible concept of debt - she points to ancient Sumerian tablets that helped pioneer writing systems simply to more concretely record who owed what - has in recent years become hopelessly abstract, with mortgages chopped into tiny bits and sold on to others, making it impossible for people to understand whom precisely they owe money to, or indeed how the system works at all.

This interferes with the human desire to construct debt as a narrative of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness. This lack of narrative ultimately undermines the massive institutions that rely on precisely that assumption of basic fairness in their dealings - banks, for one particularly obvious example - when suddenly people can't pay back their debts. Thus the collapse of a fair system of debt is the collapse of a far larger conception of how society should work, and therein lies the danger of chaos. Keep in mind Payback came out only a month after the financial crisis began. No wonder her book has been called prophetic.

In the interview, Atwood tied together these ideas with her thoughts on the environment:

Humankind will doom itself by taking more than it gives back. 'Our technology has become so clever that it can chew things up much faster than we can replace them,' she said.

This sentiment connects her latest works with themes she's dealt with her entire literary career, including the loss of human agency, excessive commercialization, and uncontrollable technology.

That might be what The Year of the Flood is about thematically, but what's its story? From Amazon's description:

The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners-a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life-has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.

Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...

Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...

The novel will also showcase another of Atwood's myriad talents, as the book will come with a CD of fourteen hymns she has composed and had set to music. These hymns honor some of God's Gardeners' most venerated figures, including Saint Francis Assissi, Saint Al Gore, and Saint Rachel Carson.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is out now in paperback. The Year of the Flood comes out September 22.

[The New York Times]

Actually, it sounds as though Robert Edwards is mostly offended by the anti-Christian themes in Atwood's seminal story of a future theocratic society which uses women as breeders.

But he's latched on to the book's violence, foul language, sexual degradation, "brutal situations," and "prostitution" as reasons to remove it from the classroom. After all, some of the language in the book is stuff students would be expelled for saying in the hallways, so why is it okay to read a book containing it?

"I'm not looking to ban books," says Edwards, who's launched a formal procedure to get the book removed from the school. He considers himself religious, and says that if the school board is going to include books criticizing one faith, then all faiths ought to be opened up for criticism. (Including Zoroastrianism?) A "review committee" is considering the book and will make a recommendation to the "director of education."

In the meantime, Edwards' 17-year-old son, who had been studying the book with the rest of his classmates, will instead study Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a book with no disturbing sexual situations at all. And he'll get to step out of class during discussions on Attwood's book. (In other words? Free period!) [Edmonton Sun]

Note: I'm not suggesting that any of these things are actually planks on John McCain's campaign platform, any more than the "liberal dystopias" I posted a while back were Obama's positions. Neither candidate is running for president on a "dystopia now" slogan, as far as I know. As with the liberal dystopias, this is a collection of broad-brush conservative ideas taken to their furthest extreme. Okay? Then here we go:

Corporations will own your ass.

I couldn't really put this vision of the future better than The Onion:

Having read the futuristic accounts of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, the path our future shall take will be bleak, indeed — but in a much different way.

When the ongoing trend of corporate mergers reaches critical mass in 2030, the scant handful of corporations that remain will be too powerful to resist and will ultimately supplant all government. National borders will crumble, replaced by warring corporate armies who deploy vat-grown Yakuza assassins to take down enemy CEOs in the name of commerce.

I literally could not possibly list all of the corporate-dominated dystopias in science fiction. Think Blade Runner, Neuromancer, or Metropolis. This site argues passionately that a weakened state and the rise of super-powerful corporations which are practically states in themselves is a crucial component of cyberpunk. Walter Jon Williams' books Hardwired and Voice Of The Whirlwind are both about soldiers of fortune and fighters who live in worlds ruled by corporations.

Wikipedia's list of corporate-dominated dystopias in film includes the Alien films, Charlie Jade (TV), The Final Cut, Fortress, Hardware, The Island, Johnny Mnemonic, Max Headroom, One Point O, Parts: The Clonus Horror, Resident Evil, RoboCop, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Super Mario Bros., Tank Girl, Total Recall and The Truman Show.

Probably my favorite corporate-dominate dystopia is in Max Barry's Jennifer Government, where your job is the most important thing about you and your last name is the name of the company you work for. (This is also Superman's favorite book.) There's still a government, but it's weakened and has very little enforcement power over the big corporations, which have grown ever more immoral. To the point where they'll pay someone to organize a "gang-related" shooting at a Nike product launch to give the newest Nikes more cache. Anyway, Jennifer Government writer Max Barry has created an online game called NationStates, and one of the fictional nations includes The Corporate Dystopia Of Wu Corporation:

The Corporate Dystopia of Wu Corporation is a massive, economically powerful nation, renowned for its complete absence of social welfare. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical population of 6.219 billion are ruled with an iron fist by the corrupt, dictatorship government, which oppresses anyone who isn't on the board of a Fortune 500 company. Large corporations tend to be above the law, and use their financial clout to gain ever-increasing government benefits at the expense of the poor and unemployed.

Another favorite dystopia: The Company, in the Doctor Who story "The Sunmakers." Everybody works for The Company, which houses everyone on Pluto and supplies artificial suns and a habitable biosphere, and in return you have to work all the time. The Company levies extra taxes for everything including your death. (Yes, it's a satire of excessive taxation, but it's also a corporate-dominated world.) There's also the awesome dark alternate universe in Charlie Jade, where corporations control everything, chip implants are mandatory, and people are divided into castes. Really, I could be here all year listing corporate dystopias.

It's God's country, and you just live here (unless you blaspheme.)

Church and state are no longer separated, and the state becomes a golden throne for the church to look down on the huddled masses from. One of the classic theocratic dystopias is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, where a quasi-Christian theocracy overthrows the U.S. government and imposes sumptuary laws governing how woman can dress. Pre-marital sex is illegal, and sexual deviance is punishable with corporal — or capital — punishment.

There's also the newly published young adult novel Bad Faith by Gillian Philip, which her husband (I think) describes as "an eerily good picture of what I imagine the USA would be like if Sarah Palin was in charge." In the gloomy future, the One Church runs everything, and gangs of extremists run around beating up anyone who defies the One Church's authority. In the Robert Heinlein story "Revolt In 2100," a small band of Americans rises up against an evil future theocracy. Suzette Haden Elgin's Judas Rose series also includes an evil Christian theocracy that oppresses women.

Allen Steele's novel Coyote also starts out in an authoritarian right-wing theocratic version of the United States, known as the United Republic. (It later collapses in on itself.) Besides religious fanaticism, the other factor driving the rise of the Republic is the paranoid fear of terrorism. And then in Cave Of Stars by George Zebrowski, the Pope takes over the world! And it's bad.

And then there's the fantastic government of the Reverend Jimmy Joe II, who oppresses you in the name of the Lord. Lordy! His regime involves throwing people in prison, where they get beat up by dominatrixes, in the fantastic movie Storm Rebel. You can watch a couple of amazing clips from it here.

You support the troops (by letting them stomp all over you.)

In novels like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a militaristic future Earth is at war with alien bugs, and the military wields great power. (In Troopers, you can't exercise full citizenship, and vote, unless you've served in the military.) There's also the all-male militaristic society of A World Without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pyun.

And then there's Star Wars, especially episodes II and III. George Lucas wasn't exactly subtle in his depiction of a society that gets dragged into an endless war, and the state needs more and more power to pursue its enemies. Freedom dies, not in silence, but to thunderous applause, yadda yadda. And there's the anime movie Ellcia, where unscrupulous people dig up the remains of a super-advanced society and use its advanced technology to found a new militaristic dystopia called Megaronia. No, really — Megaronia.

In Marge Piercy's feminist science fiction classic Woman On The Edge Of Time, our heroine travels to a happy shiny feminist utopia, where men breastfeed and everybody wears hemp underwear. But she also visits an alternate future, a horrendous dystopia where the military control everything.

There's also the whole swathe of narratives where the security state gets out of control, and everyone trades their freedom for security. People are under constant surveillance by a thuggish leadership, as exemplified by Alan Moore's graphic novel V For Vendetta.

We're all forced to go back to some horrendous idealized version of the 1950s.

Just think Pleasantville — a monstrous idealized version of the repressive, horrendous past, when people still thought Doo-wop was music. In this movie, Spider-Man gets a special remote control from a weird old guy, and it zaps him and his sister inside his favorite sitcom, which is an obvious Leave It To Beaver riff. At first, Spidey is overjoyed, but he eventually sees how repressive that B&W conformity really is, and he finally joins his sister in rebelling against the crushing sameness. Luckily, you can make a tree burst into flames just by masturbating.

We didn't sign the Kyoto Accord, and now the planet is trashed.

You could argue that the huge genre of eco-disaster SF represents a dystopia where conservatives have triumphed over nature, our greatest enemy of all. There are almost too many eco-disaster SF stories to list, from Wall-E to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. I went to a reading by Kim Stanley Robinson a while back, where the theme was ecological destruction, and he said he'd written too many works on that topic to choose just one. So he read selections from seven different eco-catastrophes he'd written. There's no shortage of thrilltastic science fiction ecology disaster movies, including The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The main character of this well-known novel can't get enough of Substance D, a psychoactive drug that's also known as Slow Death. It turns out that even his dealer works for the government and has been part of a police operation all along — and even more surprisingly, he finds Substance D grow fields at his rehab clinic. Dick never reveals the true source of the dangerous drug, but his hints on the subject are the staples of conspiracy theory fiction: evil Communists, evil aliens, evil government, or evil corporations.

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

Drug use and conspiracy theory stories go hand-in-hand, it seems. Morrison wrote The Invisibles after an incredible hallucinogenic experience in Kathmandu — one he originally attributed to alien abduction. He later learned to just blame the drugs, and so The Invisibles became the most psychadelic comic ever, filled with swearing, bright colors, and wild characters. The protagonist of the first volume, Dane McGowan, is plucked from his life as a petty thief and sent to a corrupt juvenile detention center. After his rescue, the vast conspiracies surrounding everything in his life begin to reveal themselves, and he teams up with the eclectic Invisibles to discover more and more about the vast suffering of humanity.

Dark City, written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer

In 1998, a revolutionary sci-fi film noir hit cinema screens. It began with a man waking up at a murder scene in a city that never sees daylight, a man who's unable to remember who he is or how he got there. As he's trying to find answers, he discovers that the world is not at all what it seems, and that a group of mysterious figures called the Strangers are controlling human reality. There's a conspiracy for ya. Luckily, this man possesses the ability to change reality, or "tune," as well, and so puts up a good fight so he can escape to a better world with his wife.

The Matrix, written by Andy and Larry Wachowski

A year after Dark City's release came The Matrix, which was far more successful — the stories are similar, but there's a lot more gunplay and leather in the Wachowski brothers' version. The Matrix certainly offered us a very good reason to be paranoid: It's possible that aliens have invaded, subjugating all of humanity by convincing us that our lives are progressing as normal. The chilling reality, that humans are harvested for energy and fed with the dead matter of their own species, is one of the scariest sequences in film. Plus, the simulated reality that most humans believe is nothing more than a computer program, and the stewards of that program are stony-faced agents who have all the power. That is, until a cute computer hacker shows up to save us all.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Often thought of as a sequel to her also fabulous dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a scathing criticism of current society. She portrays the 21st century as a world dominated by international corporations who subjugate their employees, a world where even children watch live executions on the internet, a world where humanities and the arts are vilified in favor of fields like biotechnology and engineering. The Crakers, human-like creatures who also inhabit this world, have a mysterious origin — and at the end of the book, Atwood reveals that they were created by a giant corporation's genetic engineering experiment. In the end, the creator of the Crakers also launches a genetically engineered virus that kills almost all of the humans; it's quite a formidable cautionary tale about the dangers of corporations with too much power.

Dreadful Sanctuary by Eric Frank Russell

1948 saw the release of perhaps the first major conspiracy novel in science fiction, Russell's Dreadful Sanctuary. In his story, a secret society keeps the rest of humankind from discovering or contacting alien life. After several failed missions to space, it seems that Earth is being quarantined by the universal community; in fact, however, the secret society is simply spreading that illusion to control the population. Dreadful Sanctuary was originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, but Russell rewrote it to publish it as a paperback novel in 1967 — just two years before humans successfully reached the moon. Thank goodness no one's stopping us from space exploration in real life ... or are they?

Whether it's Communists, Russians, our own government, or an extraterrestrial one, fears of hidden and powerful villains will probably never end. As ridiculous as conspiracy theory stories may sound sometimes, they're necessary for a society that wants to give its average, ordinary members some level of control. After all, nobody likes totalitarianism, except perhaps totalitarian leaders.

Here is today, 2007, with its diseased ideas of drugs, Darfur disputes and suicide bombers. The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario. Little wonder the tiger is almost extinct, the polar bear doomed. How do you think the algae feel, in the great wastes of warming ocean? Can you not hear the ecosystems crashing down? Ideal fodder for SF, one might think. However, one might not if one was brought up on Isaac Asimov and AE van Vogt. SF is not designed for realism but for imagination.

Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.

Our science fiction fate [Guardian Unlimited]
Everybody is happy now [Guardian Unlimited]

Famous names: Aidan Quinn, Robert Duvall, Natasha Richardson, Volder Schlondorff, Faye Dunaway

Crunchy goodness: 4

Sight you'll never unsee: The antisex sex scene between Robert Duvall, Natasha Richardson, and Faye Dunaway.

The shit: This is a genuinely smart, disturbing movie about how the United States is essentially one disaster away from turning into a militaristic, Christian Patriarchy.

Copycats: The link between apocalypse and infertility is a common one. Children of Men imagines a future world where infertility begets fascism, and underground hit Hell Comes to Frogtown depicts a post-nuclear war world where men with live sperm are held captive by roving bands of baby-hungry ladies.

Review by Christopher Null