It seemed that mouse house was interested in turning Dick's story into a Lord of the Rings type tale and even added it to their upcoming projects slate on the Disney web page later this year, complete with fancy old timey font...

Slashfilm recently pointed out that Disney webpage which slated the film for Christmas 2012 as a CG 3D production, is gone. The page is still there, but you can no longer navigate to it from the Disney home page. Plus, there's an ongoing discussion at the animation site Tag Blog claiming that the project has been canned.

It's not looking good for this Dick project. Which is sad, because we would have loved to see Disney work more with this kind of material. We miss the stories like The Sword In the Stone and its copy-cat films like The Black Cauldron in the fantasy-rich 80s. No doubt Peter Jackson's The Hobbit will help spark another fantasy movie uprising, but we'd love to see the younger generations exposed to this type of rich storytelling. Culminating with a Supernatural film.

Here's the official synopsis from PKD's story:

An ordinary man living in the Mississippi Delta, whose reluctant actions to help a desperate band of elves leads them to name him their new king. Joining the innocent and endangered elves as they attempt to escape from an evil and menacing troll, their unlikely new leader finds himself caught on a journey filled with unimaginable dangers, and a chance to bring real meaning back to his life.

[picture via maskworld]

Granted, not all of these foods will actually devour you; some will simply kill you or turn you into their zombie slave. But all are best approached with caution, and should only be handled by chefs with combat training.

Killer Tomatoes (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes): After years of being made into ketchup and mistaken for vegetables, the tomatoes get their revenge, and a killer theme song.

The Stuff (The Stuff): It's not clear what would possess a man to taste a slimy substance he found out in the woods, but it turns out the Stuff is delicious, addictive, and contains no calories. It also turns out that the Stuff is alive, and it chews on your brain until you've transformed into a nice, pliable zombie.

Bubble Shock! (The Sarah Jane Adventures "Invasion of the Bane"): Another zombifying substance is Bubble Shock!, a fizzy organic beverage. But it's actually an alien life form, one that turns drinkers into slaves of Mother Bane. While it doesn't have quite the brain-mushing powers of the Stuff, Bubble Shock! has a viral quality, with Bane zombies offering the beverage to anyone who hasn't tried it.

Popplers (Futurama "The Problem with Popplers"): Another mysterious foodstuff found lying on the ground, popplers are incredibly delicious nuggets of meaty goodness. There are just two problems: first, popplers are intelligent; second, they're the juvenile form of the ornery Omicronians, and Lrrr, the Omicronian ruler, thinks it's only fair that he should get to eat a human to set things right.

The Blue Plate Special (Spaceballs): Poor John Hurt. When he tried to enjoy a meal in Alien, he had a chestburster pop right out of him. Then he sits down for the blue plate special at a diner in Spaceballs and meets with the same fate.

Curry Monster (Red Dwarf "DNA"): In a typically boneheaded move, the crew of the Red Dwarf test a DNA modifier on a container of vindaloo, creating a monster that's half man, half Indian takeaway.

Killer Pizzas (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles "Case of the Killer Pizzas"): The pizza-loving foursome find that sometimes their favorite food can get a case of the munchies. An alien species from Dimension X lays eggs that happen to look like meatballs, and they manage to land on a handful of pizzas. Pop your pizza in the microwave, and those little critters hatch mean and hungry.

TMNT - Case of the killer pizzas

Wolfbullet | MySpace Video

Pizza the Hut (Spaceballs): He's delicious enough that he ate himself to death, but woe unto those who cross this cheesy gangster. They'll learn what it's like to have Pizza send out for you.

Bezoar Eggs (Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Bad Eggs"): When Buffy and the crew are given eggs to babysit as a class assignment, it seems like a minor nuisance. But it turns out those aren't chicken eggs they're faux parenting; they actually hatch bezoars, little parasites that attach to your brain stem (and, like all good parasites, render you their zombie slave). And Xander gets a nasty surprise when he hardboils his egg son and decides to enjoy a mid-afternoon snack.

Evil Gingerbread Men (The Tick, The Gingerdead Man): Be they the product of an eager baker or possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, these confections can be downright deadly. You'd imagine, though, that milk would be a major weakness.

Werewolf (Angel "Unleashed"): Werewolf is considered a delicacy among certain sadistic members of the Los Angeles elite. Unfortunately, werewolves tend to revert to their human form once they're killed, so they have to be served alive while the meat is carved off. But if the werewolf isn't properly restrained, you could end up on the menu.

Wub ("Beyond Lies the Wub" by Philip K. Dick): Again, it's rarely a smart idea to eat a species you happen to find just hanging out on another planet, especially if it's capable of literary discussions. The pig-like wub will let you eat it, but there's a hefty price; the wub will completely take over your body, essentially booting out your soul through your stomach.

Martian Water (Doctor Who "The Waters of Mars"): Actually, you don't even need to drink water containing the Flood to contract its zombifying contagion — just touching it will do the trick. Still, drinking the water is ill-advised.

Kandy Man (Doctor Who "The Happiness Patrol"): The good news is that this licorice-based robot won't actually devour you. The bad news is that, if you aren't visibly happy at all times, it will kill you — likely by drowning you in super sugary fondant.

Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (Ghostbusters): Sure, Stay Puft nearly demolished the entire island of Manhattan in the service of Gozer. But that toasted marshmallow glop that dropped on the Ghostbusters at the end of the move looked mighty tasty.

Ebola Cola (Transmetropolitan): As the slogan goes, "You Drink It, It Eats You."

Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Aqua Teen Hunger Force): A mutated meatball, milkshake, and carton of french fries, the Aqua Teens get into all sorts of mayhem, which often gets various creatures (and occasionally Maser Shake) killed. I probably wouldn't put eating the remains past them either, given the right situation.

Triffids (Day of the Triffids): Triffids have a lot going for them. They're a great source of vegetable oil (making them valuable crops), and they can fight off any potential predators with their venomous whips. Plus, they love to feed on rotting meat, which is easy to obtain once most of humanity has been struck blind.

Tom Turkey (The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XIX"): Since it's Thanksgiving week, this musket-wielding bird will cap off our list. After rescuing the children of Springfield from the murderous Grand Pumpkin, Tom Turkey gets invited to Thanksgiving dinner. But once he learns what people eat on Thanksgiving, he starts gobble-gobbling up the children himself.

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:

The Masks by Ray Bradbury

Masks, myths and metaphors" play an important part in much of Bradbury's work, claim Jonathan Eller and William F. Touponce in their Bradbury study, The Life Of Fiction, and they believe Bradbury gets to the bottom of this obsession in his never-finished novel called The Masks. Filled with images of carnivals, this 1940s novel would have been the purest distillation of Bradbury's obsession with magicians and magic.

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

When Dick died in 1982, he was busy with The Owl in Daylight, which is reputed to be concerned with deaf aliens abducting a B-movie composer, artistic genius, new forms of sensory input, an amusement park, or a sci-fi reboot of The Divine Comedy, depending whom you ask. Dick never outlined the plot, so it's hard to say. His wife Tessa published her interpretation of his concept in 2009, but her version is largely her own work, and draws inspiration from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Irontown Blues by John Varley

We interviewed Varley back in March 2008, and he told us:

One of these days I hope to write a third novel in the Steel Beach, Golden Globe trilogy, entitled Irontown Blues. The reason I haven't written it is that I don't yet know what's going to happen.

People have been waiting for this novel forever, and little is known about Varley's ideas so far. Back in February, he said it's "third in line," after two other novels he's working on. "If I write it, it would be about a cop," he told Xero magazine.

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

A sequel to Camp Concentration, about the pursuits of a society of humans become immortal through genetic alterations caused by a plague that swept through the world. A few regular mortals also survive, hiding out in enclaves. Disch explained:

For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on "Pressure", and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realise I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standards sf advance". The personal reasons included an intense affair with the poet Lee Harwood that lasted about six weeks. After Harwood left him, Disch suffered several months of unrequited love. Disch confessed that much of The Pressure of Time was "inspired by the pangs of despised loved". Disch travelled around, visiting Ireland and Turkey, but suffered writers block. Unable to continue with his own work, he wrote novelisations of The Prisoner and Alfred the Great.

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

Butler died after Fledgling came out, but the book's ending left most people believing she intended to write at least one sequel, if not many. I've heard rumors she'd made notes on a sequel, but can't find any confirmation of that online. Butler also had started a third novel in her Parable series, called Parable Of The Trickster, but was unable to finish it due to a seven-year bout of writers' block. (Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? "Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.")

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

Verne wrote 50 pages, and never finished the rest. The book was rewritten by his son Michel as L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, along with several other works inspired to greater or lesser degree by his father's manuscripts. Esperanto enthusiasts are particularly saddened that in so doing, Michel expunged all references to support for the nascent language, of which Jules was a proponent.

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ia! Ia! Lovecraft started this novel in June 1922, but only wrote a small fragment, which was published afterh is death in the journal Leaves. According to Wikipedia, he described it as "a weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel." (Vathek being an 18th century novel about Arabia.) You can read the fragment that he actually wrote here. It starts quite stirringly, bemoaning our gray, citified, un-magical existence.

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

Yes, that Henry James. The "Turn Of The Screw" guy. He started writing this romance, about a young man who discovers he can walk through portals into the past, in 1900, but all the time-travel mechanics got too convoluted and gave him a headache. He abandoned it, only to return to work on it in 1914, writing another huge section. In the novel, Ralph Pendrel travels back and takes the place of his own ancestor, but then the woman he loves realizes he's a time-traveler and makes a great sacrifice to help him return to the present.

The Plant by Stephen King

This was King's famous experiment, where he serialized a novel online, and you were supposed to pay him $1 every time you downloaded a chapter. If the percentage of downloaders who paid $1 dropped below 75 percent, King threatened to stop posting the chapters. And eventually, that's what happened. The already-posted chapters have been removed from King's site. The novel is about a paperback editor who receives weird letters (and odd photographs) from a magical weirdo. The editor sics the cops on the magician, who sends him a strange plant in revenge.

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

A story of interdimensional travel including the titular tower (which turns out to be a far-future replica of the the bog-ugly Cambridge University Library), this was supposed to be the original sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. It ends abruptly and some people have accused it of being a forgery.

The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities by Samuel R. Delany

This sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand may never actually see the light of day. We asked Delany about it a while back and he explained:

I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in.

And after that, Delany's view of the gay community changed somewhat drastically.

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Adams was working on this book, a Dirk Gently novel, when he died, but he'd decided his ideas for it didn't work for Gently. So he tried first turning it into a standalone novel, and then reworking it into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy installment. The version which appears in the book of the same name does star Gently, and involves a client who wants to hire him to find the back half of her cat. According to Don't Panic, the book about Adams by Neil Gaiman (with revisions and updates by Guy Adams), the fragment which appears in the book is actually from several different versions of Salmon which were on Adams' various hard drives. What we have is pieced together from three files — Chapters 2, 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, Chapter 1 is from an earlier draft, and Chapter 9 is Adams' last known piece of writing. It's basically a mish-mash, and an assembly of working notes and fragmentary stuff.

Like the novels we're discussing, this list is decidedly unfinished — what are the books that were never completed, for whatever reason, which you would dearly love to read?

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder, Mary Ratliff and Cyriaque Lamar.

Kim, best known for playing Jin on Lost (as well as a slimy lawyer on Angel), will play a "mysterious staffer" at the Bureau of Adjustments, according to the Hollywood Reporter. (And if the movie is anything like the Dick story it's based on, this Bureau actually revises a fabricated reality around people.) And Mad Men's Slattery plays a high-ranking Bureau executive.

And there's a new plot synopsis: Damon plays a congressman who's on the rise in politics. Michael Kelly (Law Abiding Citizen) plays Damon's campaign manager and best friend. Damon falls in love with a ballet dancer (Blunt), but discovers a strange organization is keeping them apart. [THR]

Like many of Dick's short stories, "The Adjustment Team" is a tightly wound little nugget of paranoia and weirdness, which explodes in your face and then ends. We folllow a team of unruly bureaucrats, the Adjustment Team, who need to make sure everyone is place for when a synthetic reality is "adjusted" — including one real estate salesman, Ed Fletcher, who's married to a somewhat overbearing wife. Too bad the Adjustment Team relies on a lazy dog to make sure Ed gets maneuvered into the right place at the right time — and Ed catches a glimpse of how unreal his world really is, as everything turns to insubstantial greyness and all the people appear dead or deactivated.

As we reported previously, Universal is making this story into a movie, Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, and it's now filming. And as is semi-traditional with Dick's work, Bourne Ultimatum/Oceans Twelve scribe George Nolfi is taking a lot of liberties with the story. Instead of being married, Damon's character single — until he meets a lovely ballerina, played by Blunt. Explains Blunt to MTV:

It's like a modern love story, but it's got an ominous sci-fi backdrop to it It's going to be exciting and disconcerting and strange, which is what I like about [Dick's] work. It's very cool and clever. It's got a really tight script.

She adds that the focus of the story is not so much on Damon discovering that his world is a lie, or figuring out why everything is fabricated, but on the dark forces keeping the couple apart, and their will-they-or-won't-they romance:

The term soulmates is used so casually, but in this case, in this film, it is true. They are sort of destined to be together and they fight fate to be together.

It's just barely possible that this will still be a decent movie — but the phrase "missing the point by several light years" does spring to mind. [MTV]

The essay, called "Crazy Friend," is a winding, mildly obsessive tale of how Dick's stories guided Lethem out of childhood, into a turbulent adolescence, and at last settled him in a career as a critically-acclaimed writer. He begins by talking about his boyhood relationship with two cool older girls who didn't get why he thought Dick's writing was so important, and ends by introducing us to Lethem's life as a Dick fanboy and showing us snippets of his early writing about Dick (some interesting stuff). Ultimately, Lethem says, Dick is the archetypal "crazy friend" whom we've all known. And whom we all love.

Plus, we get to find out more about Lethem's tattoo:

I [selected] a gooey fictional substance that gives title to the book in which it appears – I dare you to think of another example.* I never wear sleeveless shirts, but word of my tattoo has circulated, slightly, a viral rider on my own moderate fame, and I'm occasionally called on by sly interlocutors to sheepishly exhibit it while signing at a bookstore. In two decades I've watched my spray can swell, shrink and grow slack with the changing contours of my arm, gain hairs, survive mosquito bites. The simple colors haven't faded badly, but the blue outline has blurred, victim of the entropy the spray-product Ubik was supposed to combat. Dick ensured Ubik's immortality; I've ensured its mortality.

If you've enjoyed Lethem's novels, or are a fan of Dick, this is a must-read.

Read the rest on Jonathan Lethem's website.

Writes member "humphrey" over at WhyWeProtest:

If Scientology were pretty much exactly the same but centered around Philip K Dick, my god — I'd want in, for his secret scriptures! The lectures on cosmogony! The resonant gnostic insights that made PKD's work so mythic!

The discussion devolves into some weird irrelevant stories about strange experiences with science-fiction authors and their cult followings. But there's also a nice thread where people ask which other SF authors would have been good choices to start a religion. The main recommendations: Isaac Asimov (his religion would have had a more thought-out cosmology) and Frederik Pohl.

But I bet we can come up with some other good ones — which classic (or recent) SF authors would you prefer to see as religious founders, rather than Hubbard? [Why We Protest]

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.

So why are these cities so overwhelmingly large? And where do they come from? Here's a list, by region:

North America:

The city of North Am (in Magnus Robot Fighter) does just what it sounds like — it covers almost the entirety of North America, giving you lots and lots of space in which to (what else?) fight robots.

The Maze is a huge network of underground parking garages that stretches all the way from New York to Los Angeles, in the movie Circuitry Man.

Lots and lots of SF stories predict a huge swathe of city stretching along the East Coast of the United States. One of the most famous is Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, which eventually stretches all the way down to Florida.

In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson, a mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or The Sprawl.

In He, She And It by Marge Piercy, the urban megalopolis that stretches from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop.

And similarly, in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins, a huge sprawling "Conglomerate City" occupies most of the East Coast of the United States.

There's also BosWash, the city that stretches from Manchester, NH to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was first predicted in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman.

The City in Transmetropolitan is commonly believed to be a megacity including New York and stretching as far West as the Great Lakes, which are referred to as its Western lakes.

The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone: In Halo, the former city of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana. And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city-state consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations.

In real life, some urban planners talk about an area called ChiPitts, which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh, and everything in between.

Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz, appears to cover a huge chunk of the former Texas and Arkansas, and becomes the capitol of an empire that rules the Western Hemisphere — and eventually wipes out its main rival, New Rome. (Map from Wikipedia page.)

Texas City, in the Judge Dredd comic, covers a huge area of the former Southwest — including Texas, of course.

Bay City is a massive conurbation covering San Francisco as well as its outlying areas, in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

San Angeles appears in many different works of fiction, and it usually encompasses Los Angeles, San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara. It's the setting for Demolition Man.

Mega-City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did, until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comic.

South America:

Sao Paulo/Rio: In Ben Bova's Mars, the rural poor stream into the cities of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such huge numbers, the two cities grow into "a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide, that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all."

Ciudad Baranquilla, aka Banana City, is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics.

Europe:

Greater London — in Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, London has grown outwards massively, swallowing up tons of villages and formerly independent towns. Clarke and Baxter describe London as spreading out, "kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories... the scattered, helpless city that lay helpless below" a passing airplane.

Edinburgh/Glasgow — it's not strictly speaking science fiction, but there's a lot of talk about these two Scottish cities combining into one megalopolis in the coming century. The two cities could soon be linked by a high-speed maglev train. But it doesn't appear that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet.

Metropia, in the animated film of the same name, is a massive network of subway systems and "undergrounds" linking all the cities in continental Europe. The world is running out of oil, so the leaders come up with the plan to link all of the subway systems into one huge network — which appears to be haunted.

City Europe, in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, covers an enormous area of continental Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The city is made up of a series of "stacks" with the richest people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the wastelands below.

The south of England is occupied by Brit-Cit in Judge Dredd. Plus East Meg One is another mega-city in the Judge Dredd universe, which covers a big chunk of the former Soviet Union, including Moscow.

And of course, there's East-Meg One, the Soviet mega-city in Judge Dredd, which sprawls around the remains of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega-City One.

Africa:

Pan-Africa is a continent-wide quasi-state comprising several mega-cities in the Judge Dredd universe: they include Umar (the former Libya), Simba City (Cameroon), Luxor (Egypt), New Jerusalem (the northeast of Ethiopia), and Casablanca.

Gauteng is another one that doesn't appear to have popped up in science fiction very much, but it's talked about a lot in real life. In a nutshell, Johannesburg (a city already growing way past its capacity) joins up with Pretoria/Tshwane and a number of other municipalities, to form a single megacity. There are already plans to join them via a high-speed "Gautrain."

Asia:

Mega-Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis. An earthquake splits Tokyo in two, and as the city rebuilds, it gets even larger and much more sprawling, coming to be known as Mega Tokyo. Here's a map of Mega Tokyo, from B-Club Special (via Igarashi) Likewise, Akira takes place in Neo Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis of steel and neon. And the anime Cyber-City Oedo 808 takes place in a fictional future "Edo," or Tokyo, which is apparently much larger than the existing city.

And real-life urban planners talk about the Taiheiyo Belt, which will cover the Pacific coast of Japan including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

A single continuous robotic structure known as The Host covers almost all the islands of Japan, and 50 million people live inside it, in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai.

And of course, Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City covers most of Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama.

Australia:

Greater Sydney is predicted to encompass a region spanning from Melbourne, all the way up to Queensland along the coast. But as with Edinburgh/Glasgow and Gauteng, it doesn't appear that anybody's written science fiction about this megalopolis yet.

The South Pole:

A continent-wide city called Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic, in Magnus, Robot Fighter. Because robot-fighting is best served... cold.

And of course, the city of Holy Terra, or just Terra, occupies almost the entire planet's surface in Warhammer 40,000.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Map layout by Stephanie Fox.

The sleepy town of Point Reyes Station rests 90 minutes north of Oakland. There Anne still lives in the same house where her late husband wrote The Man in the High Castle. When Anne casually wandered over to the small bungalow rumored to be the home of a newly-local writer in 1959, she had no idea her visit would begin an intense and tumultuous love affair that would both inspire and haunt her for the rest of her life. As Anne and I sat in the Northern California sunshine on her back patio, overlooking the field where Dick reportedly saw a giant mask of evil in the sky, I kept remembering the line from Parsifal that Dick quotes repeatedly in VALIS, ‘You see, my son, here time changes into space,' and I was thinking about how in traveling those short 90 minutes north, I had also traveled backwards in time, closer to Phil, and closer to untangling the Gordian knot that was his life.

Anne witnessed first-hand the most prolific period in Dick's career, a five year stretch from 1958 - 1964 during which time Phil wrote many of his most celebrated novels including: The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Confessions of a Crap Artists, Dr Bloodmoney, We Can Build You, Now Wait For Last Year, and The Simulacra. Their marriage oscillated between pastoral scenes of the family at night beside a vernal pond on the property, eating fudge and listening to the local frogs' intricate songs, and dark struggles for power that pushed Dick to commit Anne to a psychiatric hospital (she was released two weeks later).

Anne began work on her memoir, The Search for Philip K Dick, more than two decades ago, but until recently the book was only available in an extremely rare and pricey edition costing more than a hundred dollars. Now, given the ease of self-publishing, Anne has revised the book and made it easily available for the first time ever. Anne is currently publicizing the release of her revised memoir, a book that may allow many of Phil Dick's readers to discover anew that the author's most outlandish worlds were in fact inner landscapes.

Q. Why did you write this book?

When Philip left in 1963 and filed for divorce I thought we were deeply in love and had a committed marriage and I couldn't make sense of what had happened. I was deeply emotionally involved with Phil for years although I picked up my life and went on for the sake of my four daughters and succeeded for the most part. Philip's death in 1982 was a terrible shock to me. Since nothing had ever been resolved between us I decided to try to write about what had occurred in our marriage and perhaps then I would be able to understand. Search ended up being a full biography as well as a memoir. It was the first thing I wrote aside from letters and grocery lists and I rewrote it fifty times trying to get it right. When I was l finished three years later I still didn't understand what had happened. I did figure things out to some extent when I revised the book in 2009. Even then Phil remains a mystery. Such a complicated man.

Q: Why have you chosen to revise the work and self-publish now?

A top science fiction agent, Virginia Kidd, picked Search up. She thought the book was going to be a big success and I would soon be on a lecture tour throughout the country. She sent it to Philip's editor at Doubleday, the logical place for it to be published, but because of some unfortunate literary politics it didn't happen. Virginia sent it to all the top houses but Philip wasn't that well known in the mid-1980's – we received great rejection letters but it didn't sell. I received some negative feedback from male friends of Phil's – Phil was their hero and they didn't want to read anything bad about him. It's a loving book but it is an honest book too. Phil's different personalities were too much for some of his friends to deal with and I certainly can sympathize with that.

Having written one book more or less successfully I continued to write. If I'd had the courage, I would have started writing much earlier in my life; I'd tried a few times over the years, didn't like what I had written, and gave up. After writing Search I started on a personal Memoir that I am still working on. I wrote two science fiction novels. I'm working on a literary novel. I'm hoping to publish my grandfather's letters. I've written a lot of poems. The experiences I had with agents over the years were frustrating. They would keep a book for a year or two, saying encouraging things, and then reject it – a huge waste of time. I decided to self-publish my own work starting with some poetry I had written in 2001 and 2002. I sent the poetry off to an excellent poetry teacher for feedback and he had it for so long that I started revising Search for Philip K Dick. The edited poetry came back but by then I was involved with Search and spent the next nine months on this revision. I am very satisfied with the way the self-published book looks and reads.

Q. Was this an easy book to write? Why or why not?

By now I've been writing Search off and on for 27 years! Sam Umland, a professor at the University of Nebraska went over it with me, and it was he who arranged for the 1993 Mellen publication. I had good feelings about that – contemplating a New York publication of a book about my family problems and Philip's problems was daunting as much as I would like to have been a published author back then. Now that I've revolved around the sun for eighty two years, I'm not as fearful of the truth. The truth is the truth and we're all a little weird and strange way down underneath.

Q. How do you want Philip to be remembered?

I've developed much more understanding of why Philip's work is important and of the amazing creative synthesis he achieved in his science fiction novels and stories. As far as how he is remembered, I feel Philip has gone far beyond any influence I might have on his posthumous image. He lived in his books and he's remembered by his readers. In my family my daughters and I remember him kindly despite the problems at the end of our marriage and the downward path of his next few years. As a person he was delightful to be around and live with, although I believe something dark hung around his life too.

Q. I know that in researching your memoir Search you read each of Philip's novels twice. What was that experience like for you?

I was amazed, when I read them in the order they were written, to find that they were a surreal autobiography. I loved the black sociological and political humor. I love his imagination. His novels and stories make me laugh out loud. The books deal with dark subjects but they are full of light. They prophesied the future both specifically and generally. The world has become Dickian or some say phildickian. I didn't like how he portrayed relationships between men and women. I liked the Point Reyes novels and the 1950's stories the best. I didn't like the later ones as much but I admired Scanner Darkly. I never did like Valis all that much. So much hoopla over that book and Phil's pink light experience. Philip told his longtime friend Ray Nelson that the pink beam of light occurred when two girl scouts selling cookies came to the door and a pink beam flashed from one of their glasses. I love that kind of Phildickian humor. I liked the woman in Timothy Archer, the first positive portrait of a female person.

Q. Finally, what do you think Philip would make of his current literary success?

He was such a different person later on it's hard to say. I'm sure he would be pleased. I thought it was a little sad when he received a large sum of money for his writing [in the early 80s] and all he could think of to do with it was buy a ham sandwich. It was nice he gave money away. He enjoyed seeing an early version of Bladerunner.

Q. Most of Philip's fans that have read The Man in the High Castle know that you ran a jewelry business for a time. Can you tell us about your artistic endeavors?

Phil wrote in The Man in the High Castle about the beginning of the jewelry business exactly as it happened. I started the business with Phil's help in 1960 when Laura was born and continued for 47 years until 2007 when I sold it. I'm somewhat known in the craft world. I've sold to some of the top galleries in the US, and to museum stores, and upper end gift stores. I had 13 people, some of them part time, working for me at one point. I was the largest employer in our town. (It's a very small town.)

The Search for Philip K Dick is available for order at Point Reyes Cypress Press.

David Gill is a Philip K Dick scholar who writes the Dick-centered Total Dick-Head blog, and teaches literature and writing at San Francisco State University. Excerpts from Anne's memoir are currently featured on the Total Dick-Head blog.

Photos, from top:
1. Anne and Phil at a friends house early 60s.
2. Dicks in front of Point Reyes house, most likely taken in 1963 towards the end of the marriage. In the back row Anne, Phil, and Anne's daughter Hatte, in the front row Tandy and Laura (Hatte and Tandy are Anne's daughters from her first husband Richard Rubenstein; Laura is currently helping to run the Philip K Dick Trust).
3. Anne Dick in front of one of her many sculptures. This photo was probably taken around 1970.

Thanks to Graeme McMillan, Meredith Woerner, Annalee Newitz, Lauren Davis, Briana Cavanaugh, Chris West, Jeff VanderMeer, Andrew Liptak, Pete Gofton, James McGirk, Dennis Woo, Rachael Parker, Brian Williams, Rina Weisman, Chris Hsiang, Jessy Randall, David Fraser, Tim Todd, Chris Newman and Kiriko Moth, plus anyone I missed.

Tron

This is the all-time classic of trapped-in-a-game stories, and it's the first type of story that you see a lot — hero gets sucked inside the digital/computer world, and turned glowy or avatar-y. In this case, the evil Master Control Program is trying to keep the users from monitoring its functions, because it wants to gain absolute power. So when Flynn challenges its rule, the MCP digitizes him and then forces him to take part in a series of deadly disc-throwing, bike-racing, tank-battling games against computer programs.

Running Man

There's the "guy gets sucked inside video game" story, which is like Tron. And then there's the "condemned prisoner gets forced to take part in brutal gladitorial games in an ugly unitard" story, and this is the most perfect example. Partly because it features Arnold Schwarzenegger bringing his A-game, acting wise. But also, it gets major points for use of chainsaws and barbed wire and stuff.

Star Trek: "Gamesters Of Triskelion"

And this is the third type of "trapped in a game" story. There are some vaguely superior aliens (except that they kind of suck) and they kidnap other species and force them to compete/fight for their amusement. There needs to be a gangsta rap about hustling for the quatloos.

Doctor Who: Vengeance On Varos

Doctor Who has done many, many "trapped in a game" stories. There's "Vengeance On Varos," which is pretty much the classic "prisoners forced to take part in deadly games" scenario. There's "The Five Doctors," which is the epitome of "superior aliens kidnap lesser species and play deadly games with them for amusement, with the added wrinkle that the superior aliens are the Doctor's own species. There's also "The War Games," which is what it sounds like. And "The Celestial Toymaker," which features a superior alien games master who's inexplicably Fake Chinese.

Gemini Game by Michael Scott

This is another classic standard — teenage twins Liz and BJ create a hot-selling virtual reality game called Night's Castle. But then it gets invaded by an evil virus, causing havoc. Liz and BJ are trapped inside the game trying to fix it.

Death Race 2000

In a dystopian future, the totalitarian Bipartisan Party keeps an iron grip partly by distracting the people with its televised deadly cross-country race — and top racer Frankenstein is the latest person in a long line to bear that identity, having no choice but to race and/or die. In the recent remake starring Jason Statham, it's more like Running Man — another "felons forced to take part in deadly games" type deal.

Lexx, "The Game"

Kai plays against Prince in a deadly game of chess — and if Kai loses, his crewmates will die. But if Kai wins, he gets reunited with his soul. So Kai accepts Prince's terms, and Stan and Xev get turned into literal pawns.

Deep Space Nine, "Move Along Home"

Quite possibly the most annoying episode of DS9 ever, this episode features the Wadi, aliens from the Gamma Quadrant who force Sisko, Bashir and their friends to play really dumb games, with the refrain of "Move along home," every time they complete one of the asinine challenges. And then there's also the DS9 episode where O'Brien befriends the Tosk, an alien who's been bred to be the prey in a lifelong hunt.

Dungeons & Dragons (cartoon)

A group of kids gets on a spooky roller-coaster fairground ride at a fair, and winds up pulled into the dark world of D&D, where they must play the game in order to escape. Here's a clip from "The Dragon's Graveyard," the most controversial episode, which was almost banned because of its violence and because they contemplate killing their nemesis.

"Arena" by Frederic Brown.

This famous short story is basically the same deal as the Star Trek episode of the same name: Humans are fighting a bunch of lizard aliens, so super-powerful godlike beings pick one representative of each side and force them to fight in a barren landscape. The solution to the puzzle is different, and the human actually does take the opportunity to kill his enemy. You'll have to get your entertainment right here! There's also an Outer Limits episode with a similar premise, "Fun And Games," according to Wikipedia.

Legend Of Neil

We've raved about this webseries, about a guy who gets sucked into a World Of Warcraft-style online game world, before. Neil gets drunk and plays Legend Of Zelda, and decides to masturbate while asphyxiating himself with his Nintendo game controller, which somehow leads to him getting trapped inside the game, where he hangs out with psychotic fairy Felicia Day.

Arcade

From Albert Pyun (the director who brought you Cyborg and the original Captain America), and writer David S. Goyer comes this great movie, about a video game that takes over your brain. You must win the game — or get sucked inside it forever. Or something. It's all because they used human brain cells in making their new game console. Video game developers — do not do that. Human brain cells do not belong in your wii controller. They will turn Wii Boxing into a deadly death sport. Seriously!

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Two men enter — how many leave? (How many do you think?) This is another subset of the "hero forced to compete in a deadly arena" genre — here, it's humans forcing each other to take part in ritual combat in an arena. Mad Max is pitted against Stevie Wonder's second worst song, Master Blaster, and there can be only one victor. The "trial by combat" thing is a common feature in science fiction, including many many television episodes.

Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone

You know what's cooler than Arnold Schwarzenegger having to navigate a deadly maze of games and traps? Molly Ringwald having to do the same thing! Okay, maybe not. It's the handiwork of the evil Robodog, whose deadly maze is almost unescapable, even for classic brat-pack actors at the start of their careers.

Stargate SG-1, "Avatar."

There are at least a couple classic Stargate episodes featuring a deadly game of death — but "Avatar" is our favorite, because Teal'c kicks major ass in it. He gets stuck inside a V.R. game training module, where every time he dies, he's brought back to life. The only way out is to win or get inside the Elevator of Surrender. And every time Teal'c dies in the game, his chances of dying in real life due to a heart attack increase. Here's an awesome music video of the episode's events, to the sounds of Michael Jackson.

Philip K. Dick, Game Players Of Titan

It's a dystopian future, and the last inhabitants of a depopulated Earth amuse themselves by playing a board game known as the Game, for huge amounts of property as well as each other's wives. (Um, yeah.) The game is administered by the Vugs, amorphous gambling-loving aliens from Titan, who turn out to have different factions with their own agendas. The rules of the game start to change, and it turns out the endgame is a lot more sinister than you'd realized. Other notable Dick works: Maze Of Death, and The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch.

Farscape, "John Quixote"

Chiana brings back a fancy virtual-reality game, and Crichton gets sucked into it, finding himself reliving his exploits in the Uncharted Territories, and then moving on to a scary fantasy world. The game plays out Crichton's fears, and he encounters dark reflections of people knows in the real world.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Game."

We've already made fun of the silliness of this game once before. Trust Riker to get everyone on the ship addicted to a time-waster.

Vivian Vande Velde, Heir Apparent

Fourteen-year-old Gianne is connected to a virtual reality game of kings and intrigue, only to find it has a malfunction and she must win quickly, or it will kill her.

Ben 10, "Game Over"

Here's another one we featured in our list of suckiest fictional video games. Ben gets stuck inside a really weak game involving flying discs and aerial combat — and if the game controller is turned off, he'll be trapped there forever.

X-Files, "First Person Shooter"

In this Wiliam Gibson-scripted episode, Mulder and Scully find themselves inside a VR game with sexy-but-deadly cowboys. Good thing Scully's got riot gear and funky goggles. And a virtual machine gun.

Scooby Doo And The Cyber Bunch

A group of computer nerds makes a special video game about Scooby Doo, and our heroes get digitized and beamed inside the game in a very Tron-inspired sequence. There they must face killer video game icons, deadly tests... and computerized versions of themselves.

Lost In Space, "The Deadly Games Of Gamma 6"

Faux Klingons challenge Dr. Smith and the Robinson family to a series of games of death — and if they lose, the Earth is forfeit. Here's a great scene of Daddy Robinson playing Russian Laser Roulette (which turns into a bong if it doesn't shoot) with one of the Kling-nots, who blinks first.

Existenz

This is the total classic "sucked into a video game" movie — you never quite know if our heroes have escaped from the game or not, and the scene of down-and-dirty spinal installation of a weirdly organic-looking video game port in the guy's spine is pretty memorable.

series 7: the contenders, are you afraid of the dark "tale of the pinball wizard"

Charles Stross, Glasshouse

This one is sort of a social experiment as well as a game — a group of people volunteer to be ported into random bodies inside a simulation of 1990s Earth. The better they do of embodying their pre-ordorained roles, the more points they get. But there's no way out of the game, and over time it becomes clearer that the people running it are actually trying to create a new society.

The Game

It's vaguely five minutes into the future, and Michael Douglas applies to take part in an alternate-reality game where the game intersects with your real life. He can't ever quite escape from the tentacles of intrigue and stuff. Notable for being one of the first pieces of fiction about ARGs, as well as for its sinister game/life overlap.

Saw

People are trapped in a game by a psycho who makes them do puzzles. It's like every psycho GM you've ever gamed with, rolled into one.

Cube

In this classic by Vincenzo Natali, director of the upcoming genetic thriller Splice, a group of people wake up in cube-shaped rooms in a building that turns out to be cube-shaped in turn. They have to navigate a series of deadly traps to escape from the mega-cube, but their sanity starts to come apart.

Hellraiser: Hellworld.

In the umpteenth Hellraiser movie, there's an evil game, and someone commits suicide while playing it. And then all the other players get invited to a mansion where everything is the game, and (wait for it) you can never quit playing.

Nightmares

This early 1980s horror movie features four different stories wrapped together, and one (which we featured previously) shows Emilio Estevez taking on the "Bishop Of Battle" video game — only to find that if you win, the console blows apart, and the video game monsters come into the real world and attack you.

Jumanji/Zathura

In this Robin Williams vehicle (and its quasi-sequel, directed by Jon Favreau), there's a board game and stuff from the game becomes real and invades the real world, menacing our heroes' lives. In the second movie, the board game is actually an outer space game, and the entire house gets whisked out into space, where the kids are menaced by aliens and helped by a friendly astronaut.

Evolver

Wow. How did I not know about this movie already? Every time the video game system Evolver is activated, it learns and "evolves" becoming more powerful... and more deadly. And Evolver is played by William H. Macy. And in this trailer, John "Q" DeLancie explains to us how Evolver hates to lose and will just get smarter and harder to beat, until...

The AV Club's "Gateways To Geekery" series recommends Robert Sobel's Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1972 novel For Want Of A Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won At Saratoga as the gateway drug for alternate history virgins:

This effective blending of the fanciful and the banal is what makes For Want Of A Nail such a good place to start. The writing style, by its very dryness, achieves a wonderful balance between the counterfactual history-which goes into tremendous depth, with endless variations springing forth from the most minor historical divergences-and the fictional wonders, to the point that when a huge corporation, the invented Kramer Associates, ends up as a nuclear power near the end of the book, it seems like the most reasonable thing in the world. For those interested in the "history" part of "alternate history," the book is incredibly well-researched and meticulous in its presentation of real-world historical figures; for those who like the "alternate" part, it's fascinating for how those figures play a completely different role in this always plausible, yet entirely unpredictable, divergent path of American history.

And if that book grabs you, the AV Club suggests a few classics, like Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years Of Rice And Salt, as well as the harder-to-find Norman Spinrad novel, The Iron Dream. But the Club warns newbies off Turtledove ("his body of work is intimidatingly vast, and not very good") and says Roth's The Plot Against America "works best as literature, with its historical aspects often coming across as flat or not entirely credible." No mention of other oft-raised classics, like Fatherland. Or The Yiddish Policeman's Union, for that matter. (Although both books do get mentioned in the comments.) [AV Club]

In an interview in The Jewish Daily Forward, Lethem explains that his collection of four Dick novels — A Maze of Death, Valis, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer — aims to prove that Dick's religious writing and his bizarre science fiction aren't separate, but come from the same source. Lethem will be editing and contextualizing these novels, and the result will be the third collection of Dick novels released by the Library Of America.

Lethem explains to the Forward how his relationship with Dick began just a little too late for him to meet his idol:

I was getting ready to drop out of college. I wanted to write novels instead, so I conceived the idea that I should run away to California and deliver myself to Philip K. Dick and be his acolyte. He died. I went anyway. By dumb luck I introduced myself to [a journalist and critic] who was running his estate. He ran it as a club. I was a junior member. Dick's work was rather miraculously revived into public life…. It's very rare for anyone in literary history to come back from being totally out of print to being in the canon. And that's what happened.

And Lethem says his new Manhattan novel Chronic City, coming out in October, "is in some ways back to his territory, but in a very different way, in a way I never could've conceived when I was 21 years old and trying to be the next Philip K. Dick." Lethem says he's influenced by Dick's "sense of humor, his perverse commitment to his own ideas of what's funny or interesting, his sense of velocity and strangeness." [The Jewish Daily Forward]

During an interview with HitFix, Gilliam mentioned his admiration for Dick's work, and when asked about the possibility of adapting The Man in the High Castle, Gilliam revealed that he would be meeting with Dick's daughter to discuss bringing a different Dick novel to the screen:

One of the things that is... there's another one that people don't know called "The World According to Jones." Do you know that one? That really fascinates me... where we're in a world where basically everything is relative. It can't be black and white because there's a more religious fundamentalism that we're talking about. So now everything is relative. And then the idea that a guy comes along that can see the future, and it is not relative... that intrigues me, and I don't know exactly how to do it.

The book is actually The World Jones Made, a 1956 novel set on a post-apocalyptic Earth. After clashes between political and moral ideologies led to a devastating nuclear conflict, a world government, called Fedgov, instituted a strict orthodoxy of moral relativism. Anyone may believe what they want, but any person who tries to impose their beliefs upon others — or asserts a belief as fact — will end up in a labor camp. But one man, Floyd Jones, has an unusual precognitive ability, and quickly goes from telling fortunes at a carnival to instigating a war against an apparently unintelligent alien species.

It's easy enough to see how, despite it being one of Dick's less acclaimed novels, Gilliam would be attracted to Jones. It's chalk full of moral ambiguity, high concepts, and oddball bits ripe for Gilliam's visually powerful imagination — atomic mutants who perform in live sex shows, humans who genetically engineer themselves for life on Venus, and spore-based aliens. But I can't help but wonder if Gilliam's dreaminess is too good a match for Dick's, and if the combination of the two would yield too abstract a film. Still, if Gilliam does move forward with a Dick adaptation, the product should be, at the very least, a fascinating watch.

[HitFix via /Film]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an interesting project.

It's a project like no other. We've never had a complete text of a novel in comics. Not [like this], with word balloons coming out of people's mouths and sequential artwork. We definitely consider it an experiment, but the first issue has been more successful than, certainly, I could have ever dreamt. Reviews were giving it four out of five stars, saying "This is great, if you love Philip K. Dick, you'll love this." When you're inside that bubble [working on the book], you sometimes think, "'I can only hope that people will enjoy this," and people seem to dig it. I was really happy, because the first issue is not Deckard blowing away androids. There's a big difference between Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but I'm glad that people are sticking around for the actual thing and not just hoping for Blade Runner the comic. This is a much deeper, bigger, project.

Did you wish that you could've re-arranged scenes to start with something more explosive? "Suddenly, there's a gunshot!"

We really can't change things, we are doing the text. In upcoming issues, there will be flashbacks where you see that kind of thing. We do like Deckard blowing away androids, but we're not going to throw it in for no reason. It's got to be something that's already in the text.

We're happy with the fact that the story goes into areas that the movie didn't. In Warren Ellis' backmatter essay [for the first issue], he talks about Mercerism, which is a religion in the book which - to the best of my recollection, I saw the movie about three years ago, last time - isn't in the movie. There's nothing about John Mercer, this character going up a hill and the people of Earth basically logging on to his experience to become more empathetic. There's nothing like that in Blade Runner, and it's such a cool concept, and something that's very visually interesting - something that Tony Parker, the artist, and Blond, the colorist, who we're very lucky to have, can really do some great stuff with. That's something we couldn't do if this was just Blade Runner. It's something you can only do with the original Philip K. Dick text.

How did the book come about?

Philip K. Dick's daughters, who have a company called Electric Shepherd Productions, contacted Ross [Richie] and Andy [Cosby, Boom! Studios co-founders] in 2008, and were impressed with what Boom! had done. They wanted to do a project that was really cool, but off the beaten track. They thought we were the ones to do it.

So how does the process work? Does Tony break everything down and decides who goes where? Do you, as the editor, place the word balloons and decides what goes into which panel?

It's Ross Richie. We have the text, and he turns it into a script, with panel descriptions, what the characters will say, what the captions will say, everything like that. Then we send it to Tony, and Tony is great at looking at panels and deciding how much to put into it. And when he's done, we send it to Blond and we send it to [letterer Richard] Starkings. And Starkings is a master of, "How does everything work?" He came up with idea for the first issue of some of the text being embedded, so it's not just caption box after caption box; some of the captions will be in the art.

It was our marketing director Chip Mosher's idea to bring in Richard, and he's just a godsend. There are a lot of great letterers out there, but Tony and Richard are such smart guys that they really make it work, this strange thing of having an entire text in a comic. The reason why we get good reviews is because of them. Those guys make it work.

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep #2 is available in comic book stores today.

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.

One of the most immediate surprises about DADOES is how true it manages to stay to both the comic medium as well as the original book; I'd expected something more akin to an illustrated book, large chunks of type occasionally punctuated with short comic sequences, but that's not what you get here. Instead, Dick's writing is broken into caption boxes and speech balloons and, impressively, it works - Yes, some pages seem wordy, but not so much that they're unreadable; whether the distribution is down to letterers Comicraft, artist Tony Parker or editor Ian Brill, it's a great job.
Artwise, Parker does well. There are some moments of discontinuity from the text ("Long robes" become noticably shorter in his hands, for example), but not so much that it pulls you out from the story, and he handles the space and choreography of the page well. I'm less in love with the coloring by Blond, which gives everything a glossy, generic texture, but willing to let that go as a sign of my obsessive nerditry; it doesn't stand in the way of the visuals, and you could argue that it speaks to some theme of synthetic/fake nature from the story itself.

It seems pointless actually reviewing the writing, in a way; Dick's novel is very Dick, complete with the imagination and surrealism he always offers, and complaints about the lack of drama in the issue's close become particularly ridiculous when you remember that this is literally just the first 24th of the book and never intended to build to a particular cliffhanger that'd bring you back next month. What may surprise many, though, is full of information this issue is; even allowing for the amount of text contained in this issue, there's a lot of stuff to learn, and remember. Whether this will be off-putting for some more used to less-filled monthly comics, though, remains to be seen (It's interesting that the first issue comes with a short essay in back from Warren Ellis, and that Matt Fraction will be providing a similar piece in the second; fans of those writers definitely should enjoy this, if they're not already familiar with the book).
As a comic, then, it works - Surprisingly, and against expectations. But there's still a part of me that wonders why someone would choose to read this over just reading the original book, which gives the full story in one sitting, as opposed to over a 24-month period; as good as the visuals are, and as interesting as the comic is as an object, the question of "Why?" looms large, if unspoken, on every page.

The first issue of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is released tomorrow.