Be glad that when you were a teenager, you didn't have an aunt like the person who wrote to the Journal's "Book Lover" column to ask this question:

My 13-year-old nephew is a voracious reader, but he tends to limit his reading to science fiction. He recently read "Brave New World," because he thought it was sci-fi. Any suggestions on how to expand his horizons to include other genres?

Anyone with half a lick of sense will know that a 13-year-old who's voluntarily reading Huxley is doing just fine and does not require an intervention. But the WSJ's book columnist, Cynthia Crossen, is a nicer person than I am, since she refrains from telling the aunt what an idiot she was being.

Instead, Crossen gives auntie a smart (if slightly muddled) lecture on the wrongness of misplaced snobbery, and admits that not all SF is equally great. Then she recommends that instead of stopping the allegedly trash-loving nephew from reading SF, the aunt should steer him towards the good stuff:

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.

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.

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff (DAW)

In this urban fantasy, Allie Gale's grandma disappears, leaving behind a strange shop that sells magical supplies to the local witch population. When Allie takes it over, she's suddenly involved in a mysterious struggle within the Canadian magic community. If you ever wanted to speculate about the witch population of modern Toronto, this is your book.

Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central Publishing)

From the io9 review:

This is a novel of pure adventure, with a kick ass heroine who gets to fight, do magic, and get laid just like the swashbuckling heroes of old. It's a perfect beach read. And the best part is the Jacqueline Carey is extremely clever – don't let her fool you with all that romantic frippery. She manages to slip a lot of interesting, subversive messages into this swords-and-sorcery tale.

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

The women of a Victorian brothel are hired to cater to the needs of a party of businessmen holding an auction for a mysterious piece. They find themselves quickly involved in intrigue and espionage, in a story with flecks of steampunk and classic mystery. We reviewed it (along with a couple of other Baker books) here.

Wild Thyme, Green Magic, Jack Vance (Subterranean)

This career-spanning collection of stories from Jack Vance includes a wide variety of genres, including a few science fiction stories about other worlds. Vance's ability to build worlds has been praised by Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg.

Fragment, Warren Fahy (Delacorte)

A reality show crew on a ship stumble on an island ecosystem inhabited by parallel-evolved monsters. From the io9 review:

If you like monsters and mad science - and who doesn't? - this is the perfect book to take on your vacation or on that long plane ride to a remote island. However, if you're looking for characters who move outside of two dimensions, you might want to give this one a pass.

The Year's Best Science Fiction 26, edited by Gardner Dozois (Griffin)

I'm a sucker for well-complied science fiction anthologies, and this one appears to be no exception. Including 30 stories from masters and new writers alike, this collection also has an extended list of honorable mentions. It looks like a pretty hefty resource for the short story geek.

Green, Jay Lake (Tor)

A fantasy / steampunky tale of international espionage and mythology. From the io9 review:

At times unsettling but always compelling, Green abounds with intrigue and adventure. A feminist fable lovingly written with a father's hope and concern for his daughter's future, Green is the story of a strong-willed young woman trying to find her place in a world that would rather ignore her. Green will not be ignored.

A Monster's Notes, Laurie Sheck (Knopf)

This novel turns inside out one of the oldest science fiction stories. The story imagines Frankenstein's monster not as Mary Shelley's creation, but as her companion, consoling her in a time of sorrow. He discusses with her all of the facets of humanity, trying to understand human connection in a world where he doesn't belong. It's a tale of speculative alternate history, couched in a story of compassion and companionship.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles WIlson (Tor)

A speculative future of post-oil America. From the io9 review:

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

Haze, L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Tor)

An agent of the now-Chinese-run Earth investigates a planet surrounded by a haze of nano-satellites. He finds an eerily familiar world of superior technology.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Ace)

This book came out a little while back in the rest of the world, but this month marks its publication in the United States. It's a space opera of post-humanity and colonization, with the added twist of relativistic travel. As a result, this novel chronicles a mystery distorted by time. It's certainly nice to see a space epic that explores some of the complexity of actual interstellar travel. We reviewed it here.

The Strain, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (William Morrow)

Master of Horror Guillermo del Toro brings vampires back from their whiney post-Buffy image. From the io9 review:

The Strain is a breakneck thrill ride chronicling only the first four days of the vampire plague that may destroy civilization. The cinematic quality really comes though, making the book feel more like a action blockbuster than a thought-provoking horror novel.

Johann Dippel: An actual inhabitant of Castle Frankenstein, Dippel is believed by many to be an inspiration for Shelley’s story. His life’s work was to discover the Elixir of Life, which would make anyone immortal, and created "Dippel’s Oil," an elixir made from bones, blood, and other bodily fluids and widely used as a neurostimulant. He was also rumored to have been an ardent vivisectionalist, frequently stealing corpses from the local graveyard.

Andrew Ure: Ure was also looking for the secrets of life in human corpses. He obtained and experimented on the body of John Clydesdale, a criminal who had been executed by hanging. Ure caused a stir among the scientific community when he revealed the nature of his experiements. He claimed that men who had died of suffocation, drowning, or hanging could be restored to life through the stimulation of the phrenic nerve.

Giovanni Aldini: Luigi Aldini discovered that a frog’s legs would kick as electricity traveled through the muscles. His nephew Giovanni took the discovery a step further. He studied the effects of galvanizing human and animal bodies. He publicly electrified a recently severed dog’s head, giving it the appearance of life. He also performed experiments on recently deceased criminals, churning electricity through them to achieve momentary reanimation. His corpses convulsed, grimaced, and even raised their limbs, much to the shock of onlookers. Aldini was also the first to use electric shocks to the brain in the treatment of neurological disorders, a practice still in use today.

Gabriel Beaurieux: France’s use of the guillotine led to Beaurieux’s fascination with severed heads. He examined heads immediately after decapitation and noted that the heads would open their eyes, fix their pupils on the objects before them, and even respond to their own names for several seconds before appearing to completely lose consciousness.

Robert Cornish: Building on the work of George Washington Crile, who pioneered the blood transfusion, Cornish worked in resuscitating dead animals. After asphyxiating dogs in a lab, Cornish would place the bodies on a teeterboard while infusing them with saline, oxygen, and adrenalin. The fourth and fifth dogs in the experiment (named Lazarus, as were their less fortunate predecessors) were successfully revived, although they never fully recovered. Cornish went on to play himself in Life Returns a film about a doctor who works to revive the dead.

Sergei Bryukhonenko: We have mentioned Soviet scientist Sergei Bryukhonenko before. Another fan of canine experimentation, Bryukhonenko invented the autojektor, a heart and lung machine, and proved its efficacy by attaching it to a severed dog’s head, which stayed alive, eating and drinking.

Vladimir Demikhov: We can credit Demikhov with many modern advances in organ transplants, but he is perhaps best remembered for his work in two-headed dogs. Demikhov transplanted the head and front legs of one dog onto a second dog’s body. Both dogs were awake, aware, and hungry. He made 20 of these two-headed creatures, but, tragically, due to tissue rejection, none of them lived longer than a month.

Robert White: Following the revelation of the Soviet Union’s two-headed dog program, the United States began working on some mad transplant programs of its own. During the 1970s, surgeon Robert White successfully transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another. Because he was unable to repair the resulting nerve damage, the monkeys were paralyzed from the neck down, but the heads themselves could see, taste, think, and feel. It was believed the monkeys could survived this way indefinitely, although they were ultimately euthanized.

Commenter OMG-Ponies proclaimed the other day that the only true zombies come from "voodoo or Jesus," not science. But as champions of a rational, scientific view, we disagree, of course. And here's the list to prove it:

Reanimator. A mad scientist, Herbert, invents a "re-agent" serum that brings the dead back to life in this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. It starts with cats and devolves into zombie heads and rampaging corpses. Here's a gross and possibly disturbing zombie head scene:

World War Z by Max Brooks. A plague causes a zombie outbreak, which starts in China and spreads around the world. At first people think it's a type of rabies, but they soon realize it's an unstoppable pandemic that resurrects the newly dead.

Fido. This 2007 movie never really explains how the zombie plague happened, but it's definitely science fiction. The last survivors of humanity live in fenced-in bubbles of normality and turn zombies into their slaves using electrical collars. The collars neutralize the zombies' aggression and turn them docile and obedient. It's this weird paternalistic 1950s pastiche where your newly dead loved-ones become your mindless servants. There may be some social commentary buried in there.

28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Two movies with slightly different takes on the same premise: well-meaning scientists create a plague that turns people into monsters. They're not technically undead, but they growl, eat human flesh and rampage just like zombies. In 28 Days Later, their bite turns you into one of them, which is much more zombie-like. In both cases, it starts in the laboratory and ends with pale mutants biting you.

Night of the Living Dead. This one's a bit iffy. At one point, a scientist suggests that radiation from a returning Venus probe may be responsible for the zombie outbreaks. But director George Romero later disavowed this explanation.

Planet Terror. The better half of Grindhouse (sorry, Quentin) features a toxic gas called DC-2, aka Project Terror. A bioweapon deal gone wrong releases some of the fumes onto a sleepy town in Texas, and soon everybody is turning into horrendous zombies. A few people are immune, and you can delay the effects of the process by exposing yourself to the gas again.

Zombie Prom. A lovestruck teenager throws himself into a nuclear cooling tower, only to return as the Atomic Zombie. Reunited with his sweetheart, he wants to attend the high school prom, but principal Delilah Strict (RuPaul!) harbors anti-zombie prejudices. This musical short film is yet another 1950s pastiche, possibly harboring more social commentary. Here's the trailer:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The monster is a collection of dead body parts, and Victor Frankenstein zaps him to unlife using a modern science, including electricity and chemistry, mixed with old-school alchemy. Okay, so the monster doesn't go around turning others into zombies, and he's conscious and intelligent in the book. But he acts quite zombie-like in most of the movies, except Kenneth Branagh's. Call him a zombie outlier.

Resident Evil. In the movies, at least, the evil Umbrella Corp. creates viruses to use as biological weapons. The deadly T-virus is later turned into a cosmetic cream to restore your dead skin cells, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning tons of people into contagious zombies. And cosmetics company Olay recently started marketing a rejuvenating product that looks just like it.