If you liked Star Trek... And who didn't like J.J. Abrams' breezy reinvention of the 1960s space adventure show, focusing more on the coming-of-age of Kirk and Spock, and their journey from rivals to friends? Anarcho-syndicalists, that's who.

...You'll Love Ringworld by Larry Niven. The defining "big object in space" novel, Niven sees your scary Romulan drilling platform and raises you a huge ring-shaped world orbiting a star, with "shadow squares" to provide a day/night cycle, and many weird ecosystems and cultures thriving on it. And if you enjoy that, delve into more classic space opera by Heinlein, Clarke, E.E. "Doc" Smith, David Weber and Lois McMaster Bujold.

If you liked Wolverine... Maybe you enjoyed the way the latest X-Men spinoff used the experiences of a lonely mutant to talk about the ravages of war. Maybe you just liked the purer distillations of mutant angst and feeling like an outsider in non-mutant society. Or perhaps you just liked the sexy mayhem.

...You'll love Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey. The tale of a lonely mutant in a town on the U.S.-Mexico border, this novel's young female version of Wolverine named Loup blew us away. She's been genetically engineered not to feel fear, and she becomes her town's secret superhero.

If you liked The Dark Knight... Who didn't love The Dark Knight's reinvention of superhero comics' "grim and gritty" cliches in an even more noir, even more mind-blowing vein? Whether you were into the portrayal of a Gotham City that destroys the best among its citizens, or you just liked the brooding, this film was instantly iconic.

...You'll love Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey, or just about anything by Richard K. Morgan. If you love noir anti-heroes squaring off with madmen for the future of a city that doesn't deserve saving, then you'll want to spend some serious time with Sandman Slim — sure, the city in question is L.A., and that's automatically less cool than the fictional Gotham. But still, the hero who's crawled out of Hell and now fights his power-mad former friend is the best fix for your Nolan Batman addiction right now. And for more noir, check out Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels as well as his noir fantasy The Steel Remains.

If you think you'll like James Cameron's Avatar... Okay, you can't really know if you're going to like Avatar yet, since it's just a couple of trailers and one preview day so far. But a lot of us are pretty pumped up about the cool concept, of a human put into a hybrid alien body to interact with cool blue aliens... not to mention all the war-machine technology and battle scenes.

...You'll love The Color Of Distance by Amy Thomson. Why not try another take on the idea of a human who's transformed into an alien-human hybrid to live among aliens? Juna is a human who lands in the rainforests of the planet Tendu, whose pollen gives humans deadly allergies. Juna's atmosphere suit gets ruptured and she nearly dies, but the planet's elders save her by transforming her into something like one of them. She learns their skin-color-based language and grows to understand their weird culture, and accept her own half-alien self.

If you liked Hancock... Maybe you liked the look at a more flawed superhero. Maybe you liked the alienation, or the feeling of futility in spite of great power. Maybe you enjoyed the cynicism.

...You'll love Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. In any case, you should definitely check out this smarter, cooler look at what superheroes would be like in the real world. Where Hancock fobs you off with repeated gags and muddled mythology, Grossman (an io9 contributor) gives you real psychological complexity and sharp characterization.

If you liked The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button... It sure did look impressive: a love story involving a man who ages backwards, and somehow keeps finding the same woman over and over again as she ages forwards in time. Set against the backdrop of history as it was, maybe you liked the epic feeling.

...You'll love Confessions Of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer. This is definitely a case where a book did it first, and way better. (Yes, Button was nominally based on a HAITE story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.) Greer both pioneered and perfected the "backwards-aging love story" concept, without ignoring the potential creepiness of a boy who looks like an old man having a crush on a girl his own age. Heartbreaking and epic, this is the story Button should have been.

If you liked Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen... Umm... Well, you might have enjoyed the battle scenes and huge robots fighting alongside military hardware. You might have been into the love story between Shia and Megan, or Shia learning to grow up and accept responsibility. Oh, whatever. Let's assume you liked this movie for the big robots and military hardware.

...You'll love Hammer's Slammers by David Drake. This 1979 story collection, as much as Heinlein's Starship Troopers, is a landmark in the history of military science fiction. And it has the big hardware in spades — most notably the giant super-tank that the Slammers roll around in, which comes equipped with a massive 20 centimeter power gun that fires high-energy copper plasma. You might also really dig the Jon and Lobo novels by Mark Van Name, which are about a guy who makes friends with a giant artificially intelligent battlesuit, and they go off having adventures together.

If you liked Knowing... Maybe you liked the weird clues and all the numbers that secretly predicted all the disasters in the world. But most likely, you liked it for the same reason people seem to be liking 2012: for the apocalypse.

...You'll love Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. For a somewhat more light-hearted look at the end of days, you really can't beat this book. Or if you want a post-apocalyptic novel which shows how America continues after everything has collapsed and we've reverted to slavery and other nineteenth century institutions, try Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery.

If you liked Monsters vs. Aliens... With its A-list cast and zany monsters banding together to save the world, who didn't like this movie? Plus, it had a super-basic, but still welcome, message about being yourself and how it's OK to be different and all that stuff.

...You'll love Monster by A. Lee Martinez It's got the same spirit of fun, and a similar misfit cast of characters who save the day despite being weirdos. But it's maybe a little less kid-friendly, and the eponymous Monster is more of a slob who gets rid of the paranormal creatures threatening all the normal people, even though he'd rather just crash on the couch and drink beer. His paper gnome companion will definitely remind you of a cartoon character, and could easily be voiced by Hugh Laurie or Will Arnett in the movie version.

If you liked District 9... With its look at otherness, and the predicament of a human who accidentally gets infected with alien DNA and starts losing his privileged status, District 9's alien-ghetto tale was full of metaphors for the way humans treat each other.

...You'll love Mind Of My Mind by Octavia Butler. Nobody wrote about hierarchy, oppression and otherness better than Butler. And Mind Of My Mind deals with the idea of losing your humanity and becoming something unfamiliar and terrifying with incisive brilliance.

If you liked Moon... You probably got into the chilling depiction of loneliness on our only satellite and the slow madness that overtook our hero, played by Sam Rockwell. But you probably also loved the depiction of two Sam Rockwells, and the questions of identity this doppelganger story raised.

...You'll love Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley. If you want a really thought-provoking tale about cloning, you'll definitely want to check out Ophiuchi Hotline. Varley deals with a far-future society where only the dead can be cloned legally, then plunges us into a world of outlaws whose cloning goes far beyond the permissible.

If you liked Wanted... It probably wasn't for any vestigial supervillain trappings. In its movie version, this film was mostly about a man realizing he's inherited his dad's gunman powers, and getting inducted into a society of super-assassins. But more than anything, it was about becoming an ubermensch and realizing that the "little people's" rules don't apply to you.

...You'll love Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. If you really want a story of a super-assassin who has gone beyond traditional morality, you should check out the tale of Horza, a shapeshifter who has rejected the super-advanced Culture and is willing to do whatever it takes to win. Or if you just want the tale of an ubermensch who comes into his power, read Frank Herbert's Dune for the tale of Leto Atreides II.

Those are our book recommendations for the movie addicts in your life. What are your suggestions?

Thanks to Graeme, Meredith and Annalee for suggestions!

Many of our favorite fantasy books of the past year or so feature a self-consciously noir tinge. Perhaps the most buzzed-about of these is The Steel Remains by Altered Carbon author Richard K. Morgan — it's gotten an amazing reputation since it came out last January, but if anything the hype understated this book's greatness. Profane, riotous and utterly captivating, The Steel Remains follows three thick-skinned veterans of a terrible war against lizard people, as they investigate the rise of a new supernatural power that threatens to obliterate everything they fought for.

Other recent books in the "noir fantasy" niche include Richard Kadrey's Hollywood revenge saga Sandman Slim (which we reviewed here), China Miéville's weird detective story The City And The City (reviewed here), Elizabeth Bear's supernatural alternate history detective stories collected as New Amsterdam, John Shirley's psychic bounty hunter saga Bleak History, Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels, and io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer's hardboiled detective novel Finch, plus several others.

Fantasy detective stories are nothing new, of course, and neither are morally grey protagonists or dark storylines. The "vampire detective" and "urban ghost-hunter" genres are decades old at this point. But this new crop of books seems uniquely "noir" by virtue of its extreme nastiness. They're coarse and often overtly sexual, they often feature extreme graphic violence, and they seldom offer you a clear-cut right and wrong. Their protagonists are has-beens, losers, or not-quite-epic champions, with tarnished armor.

And just as classic hardboiled detective fiction often features assholes who are untouchable because they're rich, these novels often feature people, or things, who are too powerful to mess with — except that, instead of just having lots of money, these fiends tend to have mystical power or ultra-powerful friends.

These novels take place in cities and towns already crushed under the weight of history before the story even begins — Finch, for example, is VanderMeer's third book about Ambergris, his fictional city, and it takes place 100 years after Shriek: An Afterword, when the mushroom-like Grey Caps have retaken the city and are systematically oppressing the humans. And in Shirley's taut Bleak History, we come in in the middle of a struggle by a shadowy government organization to control psychics like Gabriel Bleak, who can see ghosts and communicate with The Hidden, a supernatural realm beyond our own. Bleak works as a bounty hunter, using his supernatural gifts to track down bail-jumpers. The government stooges remind each other that under the new rules, they don't need evidence to run them in.

Bleak History also features some appropriately lurid descriptions of New York as a hot, humid cesspit full of crooks, ghosts and thugs. Including this lovely Spillane-esque passage:

A few hours later, the sun was just down; the buildings of Manhattan, across the river, were wearing the last glimmers of sunset like Day-Glo caps on their rooftops. Bleak stood in the screen of trees, in Hoboken, and tried to make up his mind.

You know you're reading a noir-ish book when a simple description of an urban sunset turns garish, menacing and disturbing. As I mentioned in my review, the descriptions of the menacing decay of Los Angeles in Kadrey's Sandman Slim also stay with you. Like this bit:

Sometime while I was gone, Hollywood Boulevard had a nervous breakdwon. Vacant storefronts. Trash dissolving in the street. Nothing but ghosts here — shadows of runaways and dealers huddled in padlocked doorways. I remember the Boulevard full of wild kids, drag queens, manic Dylan wannabes, and tourists looking for more than their next fix. Now the place looks like a whipped dog.

Another thing that sometimes sets apart the protagonists of this new noir writing is their outlawed sexuality — two of the three protagonists in Morgan's The Steel Remains are queer, and we're never allowed to forget how much people despise them for it. The warrior Ringil Angeleyes is the gay swordsman you didn't know you've been waiting for, who'll sleep with anyone, including the mythical fairy-like creatures that are hell-bent on crushing the human race. (And then Ringgil will turn around and dismiss his sleeping-with-the-enemy stunt as a meaningless fuck.) At every turn, Ringgil is called a faggot by people who want to drum him out of decent society — but they can't, because he's a war hero and still the only hope they have of surviving. Another protagonist, Archeth, is a lesbian and the last representative of the mythic race of the Kiriath, aka the Black Folk, and both aspects of her identity are deeply offensive to the new wave of religious zealots who are taking over the Empire. Meanwhile, Bear's story collection New Amsterdam features a gay vampire detective, Sebastian.

Most of all, these books tend to feature tarnished heroes, who are facing people (and creatures) who are much more powerful than they are, and who think that they can rule over the festering sewer that is the city, and trample anyone who gets in their way. Whether it's ancient demons, rich assholes with magic, evil fairies, or government spooks, there's always somebody wanting to rule over the dungheap — and usually the only person standing in the way is an outsider who's past his or her prime. You also often sense that the world is heading the wrong way — in The Steel Remains, slavery has become legal and is fast becoming the Empire's main industry, while religious bigots are working to crush every last shred of culture or sophistication.

And the heroes of noir fantasy aren't just damaged — they're traumatized. In The Steel Remains, all three of the protagonists are carrying around the weight of the mass slaughter in the war against the Scaled Folk and the pointless wars among humans that followed, plus Ringgil is scarred mentally by having watched his lover tortured to death by the Inquisition. In Sandman Slim, we're constantly getting flashbacks to Stark's years of fighting for his life in Hell's arenas.

So why are we seeing an upswing in noir fantasy now? I asked some of these authors, and they pretty much all saw their work as a continuation of noir themes that have always been present in the genre.

John Shirley says:

Think of Mordor — and how Mordor, and also the earthworks of Saruman, were always very industrial. And noir happens in the shadow of industry. So in The Lord of the Rings it was about the intrusion of the darkest side of the urban on the green heart of Middle Earth. Urban fantasy though is a mutt, half fantasy, half urban noir. Our era does seem morally challenged—we're stunned by the immorality of Wall Street. Trying to make sense of it we project it onto supernatural villains. Going back, my novels Cellars and City Come A-Walkin' were early fusions of sf, magical realism, dark pop sensibility and noir fantasy. Bleak History just continues that thread in my writing.

And Kadrey sounds a similar note:

Am I part of a movement? I don't know. Movements are like pandemics. There's always another one coming along to make you bleed out.

Cities have replaced the black woods of medieval Europe as the home of the Black Beast, ghouls and bloodsuckers. You can't hide in the woods anymore. We've clearcut them to make foldaway entertainment centers for Ikea. The only place left to be invisible is in the city. There are the empty industrial zones where no one ever goes and the crowded downtowns where no one ever looks at you. Plus, porn and cable.

I don't think that there's anything special about this era's stupidity and corruption. Every era is the worst one ever. Every century is the end of the world. The fantasy I write isn't dark it's logical. There's a French saying, "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur," which means, "We are born between piss and shit." In a world of shit, my heroes are the people who choose to be just a little less shitty.

Sir Galahad is dead. Good. Fuck him.

Writes Bear:

I'm not an expert on early fantasy, but I'm pretty sure Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser weren't the first noir protagonists in fantasy, and they are considerably older than I am (first appearing in 1939, quoth Wikipedia). So I don't think morally ambiguous protagonists are a modern phenomenon—but I do think that morally complex people are more interesting to write (and more engaging to the reader) than four-color heroes with whom the world conspires, so that there is always a morally unambiguous choice.

So, if it's a movement, it's one that's been going on for a long time. It's definitely a *conversation,* however!

(But then, I'm suspicious of literary movements and subgenres and marketing categories, so my own objective bias must be exposed.)

Adds VanderMeer:

Finch is a lot of things besides noir — a spy story, a surreal fantasy, a commentary on failed or occupied countries, a political statement about the last eight years of American empire, so I don't feel like part of a noir fantasy movement — I thought of Finch back in 1998, just didn't start work on it until 2005. But the appeal, I think is the built-in suspense and structure. You even see it in the Potter books, especially the early ones, which are all mysteries wedded to fantasy. Noir is a dangerous thing to use, though. In the wrong hands it becomes a series of cliches or it lends itself to the status quo. As for the anti-hero idea, while it's somewhat prevalent in noir, Finch isn't really a good example. John Finch is an honest, decent man in a bad spot. The real anti-hero is, in a way, the occupied city in which he lives. And the point of wedding noir to fantasy in Finch isn't to maintain the status quo but to explode it. Why are there several noir fantasies out recently? I don't really know. As an avid mystery reader, they all seem as different from each other as anvils, oranges, and bacon.

Sandman Slim follows the adventures of Jimmy, aka Stark, aka Sandman Slim, who was dragged down to Hell as a cocky teenager and somehow survived for eleven years, before busting out. The only person he cared about is dead, and he's out for revenge — and he doesn't really care what he has to break to get it. Along the way, he gets dragged deeper and deeper into the politics of the L.A. magic scene, the ongoing feud between Hell's generals, the schemes of angels, Homeland Security, and the decadent plans of L.A.'s filthy rich magic users.

As someone who's read every novel by Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Richard Stark/Donald Westlake and Ross McDonald at least once, I found the frothiness and nihilism of the novel instantly appealing. Here's one especially Spillane-esque section, from towards the end of the book:

There's only one problem with L.A.

It exists.

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will...

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance camersa and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

In another section, Stark visits a house full of rich magician assholes and scenesters, and describes them using timeless phrases like "They shit cancer."

Another crucial ingredient in the noir formula, a massive cast of corrupt day-players, each with his/her own agenda and hypocrisies, also manifests pretty well in the book. It takes place in a universe that will seem familiar to anyone who's watched Supernatural or read any of a dozen other dark urban fantasy novels set in a vaguely Judeo-Christian universe. Angels are dicks, demons are pretty nasty, and the world is full of monsters of various stripes — including humans, who are usually just out for their own gain.

But Kadrey also laces his novel's set-up with a fair amount of wish-fulfillment: Besides having survived a long stint in Hell and returned to talk about it, Stark is also almost impossible to kill thanks to a Nietzschean "whatever doesn't kill me" type thing. Early on in the book, he gets shot multiple times, and the bullets only cause him a bit of discomfort. He's got a magic knife that can cut anything and start any car, and a magic key that can transport him anywhere, including Heaven or Hell. And a Veritas, a kind of magic eight-ball that answers questions truthfully, but snarkily. Oh, and he knows special Hell magic that nobody else on Earth knows. So he gets to have the perfect heroic combination — he's miserable and filled with self-loathing and bitterness, but he also has a toychest full of awesomeness that most people would kill their extended family for.

In other words, it's the perfect escapist storyline — for some reason, escapism actually works better with a permanently grim and/or depressed hero. Just look at Batman.

Oh, the other thing about Sandman Slim is that it's frequently side-splittingly funny. Stark has sworn to kill all of the people who sent him to Hell and had a hand in killing his girlfriend. But the first co-conspirator he catches up with is Kasabian, who was sort of a pathetic lapdog back then and has now been consigned to running a video store in a crappy neighborhood. Kasabian shoots Stark, who decapitates him in turn. But Kasabian doesn't die (magic knife, remember) and Kasabian's disembodied head sits on a shelf for much of the rest of the novel, commenting on the action and begging for cigarettes. The whole book is like that — gruesome slapstick mixed with down-and-dirty Hammett-esque mayhem and double-dealing.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of a slightly darker, cleverer version of Monster by A. Lee Martinez, the last book about a semi-human monster who defends the world from other monsters that I read. Where Sandman Slim has a jump on Monster is in its hero, who is both more tormented and more sympathetic than Monster's sad-sack protagonist.

Sandman Slim's main drawback is its plot, which doesn't bear much examination — about halfway, or maybe two thirds of the way, through the book, the exposition starts getting thicker and thicker, and various characters pop up to explain stuff, and then other characters jump in to explain those explanations. Soon enough, the simple tale of a horrendously scarred bastard who crawled out of Hell to kill a bunch of people who deserved it gets more and more muddled with a lot of other stuff. It sort of overpowers the fun revenge rampage you've been primed for since the start of the book — but the good news is, there's still plenty of death, destruction and despair to go around, and the book's final big action set pieces are a lot of fun. It's easy to see why people were talking about it at Comic Con.

All in all, Sandman Slim brings a pleasingly loathesome L.A. vibe to its tale of Hell's inmate's progress. As you'd hope for a novel in the "urban fantasy" genre, the city itself is one of the novel's main characters, teeming with crack dealers and Brad Pitt lookalikes and neo-Nazis — oh, and angels and demons and assorted other nasties. If you've been hoping someone would bring the full-strength SoCal toxic waste to the urban fantasy game, then Sandman Slim is your poison.

Allegedly, this book actually came out in June or July, even though my review copy says August. Which is why we only just got around to reviewing it. Anyway, it's out now: [Amazon]

People talk about Comic Con as the place you go to create the next geek-entertainment sensations — and it's definitely true to some extent. But it's by no means that simple. Nerd tastemakers do get their first look at the next summer's movies, and they do start spreading buzz — but the event is probably best at helping smaller projects get more exposure. If a movie, TV show, comic or novel goes into Comic Con with tons of buzz already, the best you can hope for is simply to keep the momentum going.

Look at last year — Comic Con 2008 had a clear winner (Watchmen) and a clear loser (The Spirit). And the bad exposure at Comic Con definitely hurt The Spirit, but it's hard to argue the event helped Watchmen all that much. Meanwhile, Star Trek stayed away from Comic Con 2008, and did better than almost any movie that actually did panels there. (Looking back, Wolverine did a panel, and it grossed less than Trek domestically.)

So the io9 brain trust got together and figured out which projects we feel came out of Comic Con with more buzz than they had going in. It's highly subjective, but these are the ones we heard more excitement about after SDCC was over.

#1: District 9

This film excited us more than any other. District 9 went into Comic Con with a ton of viral marketing, and not much else. After a full year of wacky alien segregationist signage (Comic Con 2008 was plastered with the stuff, and now it's on bus shelters) we were starting to wonder if this film was just an excuse for an ARG. Then we got to see the actual movie — and suddenly Moon wasn't the only standout indie movie of the year. It didn't hurt, too, that producer Peter Jackson put his considerable mojo to work promoting it. (We managed to corner Jackson for a few minutes of geeking out about monster movies, and he explained how D9 came out of the ashes of the failed Halo movie.) The raves about District 9 were both unanimous and ubiquitous, with everyone either gushing about having seen it or wishing they had.

#2: Zombieland

Another sleeper project, and one that features the overexposed undead, Zombieland crawled out of a buzz grave at Comic Con. This movie was just so gleeful and so outrageously gonzo with its mayhem, and the panel was full of great quotable soundbites. (As opposed to the bland boilerplate we heard on some other panels.) The former TV pilot script does a great job of reinventing the buddy comedy in a fresh way, from the characters named after towns to the pairing of the paranoid Jesse Eisenberg with the gung-ho Woody Harrelson. We were wowed, and so was a capacity crowd in Hall H. The L.A. Times says simply, "Zombieland keeps the movie genre alive."

#3: V

This was a television franchise we weren't sure we wanted to see back again, and yet another remake/reboot that we were leery of. But this show opened our bleary eyes with its moody, weird and scary pilot. The cast, including Firefly's Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk and Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell, were snappy and fun to watch. And the old "beware of aliens bearing gifts" trope still turns out to have a decent amount of life left in it. The 4400's Scott Peters brings the right amount of paranoia to a story where the terrorists turn out to be anti-alien freedom fighters, and the media is lying to us all along. We heard several people marveling afterwards that a V remake could be so intriguing. Hollywood Reporter says the screening and panel got a strong Comic Con response."

#4: 9

We've been excited about this film since we first saw Shane Acker's award-winning short film, and every clip has gotten us more thrilled. But the movie's presentation, in the cavernous Hall H, won an uproarious response from people who had never seen anything quite like its style. Rolling Stone's Douglas Wolk (who was on our io9 panel on Thursday) praises its "rich, run-down visual design." The L.A. Times says 9 "snagged" the audience. We felt the excitement in the room, and heard people wondering afterwards about just what kind of movie would get both Tim Burton and Wanted's Timur Bekmambetov on board as producers. (We'll have exclusive interviews with Acker and Bekmambetov, later in the week.)

#5: Felicia Day

Comic Con is pretty much Felicia Day's home town, but this year she ruled more than ever. Her panel for The Guild was one of the big hits of the Con (we heard people talking about it days afterwards) and her booth for the Guild was a major destination. Tubefilter says Day had an "entrance typically reserved for A-list movie stars" at her panel, where she announced Wil Wheaton was joining the cast. And Dark Horse announced a Guild comic. But oh yeah — she also starred in the unaired Dollhouse episode, which completely rocked our world. And Joss announced that her post-apocalyptic survivalist character would be turning up again in Dollhouse season two. All she needed was the announcement of a musical about cyborg Penny, and she'd have ruled the entire con.

#6: Tron 2

Actually, the biggest winner of Comic Con 2008? Was probably Tron Legacy, or Tron 2.0, or Tr2n. Whatever they're calling it this week, the Disney sequel generated as much excitement with one amazing surprise clip of lightcycles as any other property did with a whole panel and banners everywhere. This year, Tron built on that excitement, with a clip that showcased more of its storyline. But honestly, nothing about Tron's Comic Con panel generated a tenth as much chatter as the recreation of Flynn's arcade, complete with video games we'd only played in our dreams. And a real lightcycle. That was all people wanted to talk about for days.

#7: Richard Kadrey

His new novel Sandman Slim comes out in August (we'll be reviewing it soon) and we witnessed several awestruck conversations about the cyberpunk veteran's Comic Con prowess. People talked about his three-book deal with Eos, and Sandman Slim has gotten raves from Cory Doctorow and William Gibson. There were whispers that Hollwood was paying attention, and that's part of what Comic Con is for.

#8: Stargate Universe

The Stargate franchise is rivaling Star Trek for number of consecutive years on the air, and number of shows with things like SG-1 or DS9 after the franchise name. So there's been some doubt as to whether SGU would be true to Stargate and feel fresh and interesting. But the new trailer got people ramped up, and the producers said the right things about keeping this show true to the franchise's traditions. And then Robert Carlyle said the thing about how everybody was going to die. And we were pretty much sold. We also overheard tons of hallway conversations from people surprised they were stoked about Stargate again. The San Diego Union Tribune calls SGU "promising" and says it's one of a few shows that prove "there could be light at the end of our sci-fi TV apocalypse."

#9: Sherlock Holmes

Everybody expected Iron Man 2 to be fun and to feature Samuel L. Jackson swaggering as Nick Fury. And awesome Tony Stark banter and outbursts. We even kinda expected War Machine to turn up. Iron Man 2 lived up to our expectations. But none of us expected Robert Downey Jr.'s other movie to be so much fun, and so full of Victorian verve and rocky bromance between Downey and Jude Law as Watson. We were disappointed when producer Joel Silver told us this film wasn't steampunk, but we certainly heard lots of people suddenly talking about Sherlock. Associated Press quotes Downey as calling Sherlock Holmes an "intellectual superhero." So yeah, Iron Man didn't lose any buzz, that we could see. But Sherlock noticeably gained some.

#10: Avatar

James Cameron's space epic had the biggest hype, and thus the most to lose. So it's not surprising there's a bit of an "Avatar backlash." But like we said yesterday, even most of the detractors were saying things like, "I still think it'll be great, but..." And while the footage we saw wasn't photorealistic, it was an improvement on any CG world-building we'd ever seen before. As long as this movie avoids coming across as too preachy, it stands a great chance of capitalizing on Comic Con excitement. When you have the Kansas City Star reporting that a packed room of screaming fans gave Avatar a "resounding endorsement," that's buzz.

Flynn's Arcade image by JoelTelling on Flickr. Felicia Day image by GeekGirlDiva on Flickr.

Says Kadrey:

Science fiction and the human body are inextricably linked through velocity. Both forms (the flesh and the word) are hurtling toward a future that is probably a hundred times weirder and more unexpected than anything we're yammering about today. I embrace with the future by throwing words at it. I obsess about speeding bodies by documenting and modifying them, trying to guess the forms they'll take as they hurtle off the cliff of the future. I wonder what we'll be like and look like when we hit the bottom and start rolling to the edge of the next cliff.