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Annalee's Thursday edition of irregular sex column Fully Functional (That's a column about sex that runs on an irregular schedule, not a column about irregul - Oh, you understand. Never mind.) certainly seemed to raise the ire of the vampire haters in our audience:

QimatPower: "I just wanted to make this clear: vampires are not interesting. (I felt this way before Twilight, 30 Days of Night, True Blood, Let the Right One In, and everything else.)"

Indigen: "Nice article but I'm left a little mystified, because I never found vampires sexy. I understand the perversity of the whole schtick, and I know there are people out there into bloodletting and domination etcetera, but are there really that many of those people to write a whole article addressing every reader as if they agree? Nobody I know would."

Convair 990A: "Hmm. I have a hard time conceiving of them as anything other than highly-optimized killing machines along the lines of a xenomorph from LV426 or something from Skynet... Modern anti-Victorians can read all they want into Bram Stoker, but I think the common thread remains: These things are not your friends and they're not acting in your interests. You're an ultimately expendable and ambulatory supply of resources for them that just happens to share some aspects of external appearance with them."

Kaiser-Machead: "Sure, they're sexy in pictures, but just imagine the smell of carnage on their breath..unless you're into that sort of thing, then vamp away."

Okay, maybe not that last one. But still; dissent was clearly in the air - Even those who agreed that blood sucking = teh hawtness had nits to pick:

Belabras: "Really, Braum Stoker's Dracula is more about power than seduction - Dracula himself is regarded as repugnant by everyone who encounters him, but he is able to dominate others through his supernatural power. He's not a player, he's a rapist."

theizz: "You have to read Dracula in the context of repressive Victorian society. Dracula was popular b/c he allowed readers of both sexes to think about forbidden sex without feeling ashamed. It's not that the human characters (and readers) are depraved for finding Dracula sexy, it's that hypnotic sex appeal is one of Dracula's powers and the humans are too weak to fight it. The humans are absolved of guilt. The women get fantasize about a sexy lover and the men get to fantasize about "respectable" women clamoring for and enjoying sex."

bonniegrrl: "That's one of the few things the Victorians got right in my book — erotica masked as vampire tales of terror."

Thankfully, some commenters were trying to be constructive and helpful to those tracking the sexy vampire trail:

Spiral: "I wonder if we could pinpoint the exact time vampire myth changed. Earlier myths had vampires as repulsive, ugly, more zombie-like beings that just happened to be alive after their time and needed blood- you see that myth picked up more in things like Nosferatu. At some point they became young, beautiful and sexual. Was it the Victorian era, or is their a source before it where the myth changed?"

geekgrrl: "my rudimentary guess would be, it seems more like a change in locale.. you found the repulsive, board-up-your-windows vampires in Eastern Europe, but they took on a sexier stance in the West. like you said, i'm sure there was a turning point, but travel made it more pronounced."

MinervaAlpaca: "That's Polidori's doing. He based his vampyre, "Lord Ruthven," on his associate Lord Byron—and thus popularizd the idea of the vampire as a dashing Byronic seducer."

AngryEddy: "At what point did they all start shopping at Hot Topic?"

taxbaby: "I think I remember that from Stoker. Didn't Jonathan Harker describe the 'three sisters' as wearing chokers and Invader Zim T-shirts?"

But, in reality, only Killa_Charlie truly got to the heart of the matter:

Why are they so sexy? Cause we're all 14 year old girls in reality.

Factually incorrect, perhaps - in reality, I'm actually male and twenty years older than that, sadly - but on some cosmic allegorical level, so, so true.

#1: Caption this Photo to Win A Cyborg-Sized Load Of Terminator Gear
Not that we think that you're greedy or anything, but the two most commented upon posts this year were both contests. This one, from March, got 500 comments in response to what amounted to our bribing you to do so with all manner of goodies from Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Damn you, greed!

#2: Win a Copy of Appleseed: Ex Machina on DVD
Who wants a copy of Appleseed: Ex Machina? Apparently, 353 of you did back in April, and left comments to that effect.

#3: Imagine an America Where Socialism is No Longer a Dirty Word
Better yet, imagine a world where a politically-charged post written the day before a Presidential Election gets 344 comments, many of which are somewhat upset that we'd put up a politically-charged post the day before a Presidential Election. If your imagination is somewhat lacking, you could simply check out this post and see the carnage for yourself.

#4: What Chicks Don't Like About Science Fiction
Apparently, what chicks don't like about science fiction is continually being told that they don't like science fiction, according to Annalee. 274 of you let her know that she was damn right, back in May.

#5: Now X-Women Can Be Bimbos Too
Marvel Comics tried to prove that sex sells back in July, and I turned into the Boob Grinch by complaining about it. Luckily, 266 of you were ready to point out that, really, there's nothing that wrong with Rogue's ass - although Storm playing with her hair was a bimbo too far for many of you.

#6: The Coming War Between Religion And Super-Science
Charlie Jane warned us all in April about the possibility of a showdown between science and nature in the 21st Century, and then went ahead to wonder about what stories could come out of such a battle. 259 comments later, we'd discovered that God might've been an astronaut after all.

#7: Battlestar Galactica Goes Planet of the Apes
If you needed any proof that the last episode of the first half of the final season of Battlestar Galactica was controversial, take a look at the 254 comments left after Annalee recapped it, and called it "truly worthy of the promise BSG offered when I first watched the miniseries and thought, 'Holy shit this show is too awesome for TV.'"

#8: No We Can't
What kind of world are we living in when an installment of io9 Ourobouros can get 251 comments itself? Oh, that's right; a world where asking wondering whether or not politics had any place in science fiction is the kind of thing that makes people a little bit agitated. On the plus side, I doubt we're going to write about the inauguration that much.

#9: The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life
Way back in February, Annalee listed the twenty SF books that would "could change the way you see the world, and maybe even change your life." 247 of you wanted to let her know that you appreciated the choices, but wondered where the novelization of The Cat From Outer Space was.

#10: Avatar Casting Makes Fans See... White
Aaaaaand finally - and fittingly from this very month - 241 people were suitably appalled at the casting decisions made by Paramount Pictures for M. Night Shyamalan's big-screen version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Or, at least, appalled enough to leave comments about it.

This week New Scientist comes out with its science fiction issue, and Chown, who consults for the magazine, launches the discussion on where science fiction is headed. His question, whether science fiction is a dying genre, comes from individuals who suspect that science will leave science fiction with nothing to explore, a belief Chown does not share:

Such claims seem reminiscent of the perennial claims that science is dead or dying, most famously expounded by the prominent physicist Lord Kelvin in 1900, when he declared: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." This, of course, was just before the atom came apart, the quantum genie burst free and all scientific hell broke loose. In the case of science fiction, the premise of the doomsayers' claims is that the genre is about predicting the future. In fact, very little of it is.

Chown ultimately concludes that science fiction as we know it may change, but it will be an evolution rather than a distinction. And cyberpunk author William Gibson seems inclined to agree, noting that science fiction’s value has less to do with accuracy than on speculation, which casts a reflection on our society even as it imagines another time:

If I could magically access one body of knowledge from the real future, I think I'd choose either their history of the ancient past or whatever they might have that most resembles science fiction. The products of two different speculative activities. They'll know a lot more about our past than we do, and trying to reverse-engineer history out of dreams, as I recall, was quite a uniquely exciting activity.

Ursula K. Le Guin also emphasizes speculation over prediction, suggesting that recent science fiction has more successful when it puts less emphasis on the “science”:

Science fiction that pretended to show us the future couldn't keep up with the present. It failed to foresee the electronic revolution, for example. Now that science and technology move ever faster, much science fiction is really fantasy in a space suit: wishful thinking about galactic empires and cybersex - often a bit reactionary. Things are livelier over on the social and political side, where human nature, which doesn't revise itself every few years, can be relied on to provide good solid novel stuff. Writers like Geoff Ryman and China Miéville are showing the way, or Michael Chabon, who foregoes the future to give us a marvellous alternate present in The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

Kim Stanley Robinson suggests a wholly different approach, however. He suggests science fiction writers return to form by setting their stories in a more distant future:

One solution is to jump past the next century to the familiar comforts of space fiction. If we survive we'll get out there, and it's a great story zone. Without the next century included, though, the imagined historical connection between now and then will be broken, and space fiction will become a kind of fantasy. We need to imagine the whole thing.

So we have to do the impossible and imagine the next century. The default probability is bad - not just dystopia but catastrophe, a mass extinction event that we will have caused and then suffered ourselves. That's a story we should tell, repeatedly, but it's only half the probability zone. It is also within our powers to create a sustainable permaculture in a healthy biosphere.

The issue also features meta-science fictional predictions from Margaret Atwood, Stephen Baxter, and Nick Sagan.

The Science Fiction Issue [via New Scientist]