Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

So here are the most insane SF soaps we could think of — but I bet we missed some good ones. What are your favorites? Pipe up in comments with the lurid details!

Top image by Dennys Ilic. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

Heroes

You can pick any character from this show and get a headache trying to figure out all the story twists he or she has gone through. Take Matt Parkman: He's trying to keep his marriage together — No, wait! Now he's living with Mohinder and co-parenting Molly the mutant-detecting girl! — No, wait! Molly is out of the picture! And now Matt is becoming an African-esque shaman! — No, wait! Now Matt is in love with Daphne the speedster, who's the Love Of His Life! — No, wait! Now Matt is back with his wife, and will never think about Daphne again! — No, wait! Etc. etc. etc. My favorite, though, is probably Peter's girlfriend trapped in an alternate dystopian future — whom we will never mention again! Ha ha ha ha urk. (Matt Loves Daphne wallpaper from Fanpop.)

Alias

This show started off pretty coherent — but around the third brainwashing or the tenth revelation that Sidney's mother's cousin was really the spy behind brainwashing Sidney to think her half-sister was a chicken. I defy anybody to explain to me the tangled backstory of the Bristow family.

The Cat Who Walked Through Walls by Robert A. Heinlein:

I made a dreadful mistake: This was the first Heinlein book I ever read — and it may have ruined me for Heinlein forever. In the late Heinlein novels, every character ever shows up, and they mostly have sex together, interspersed with a lot of drama and philosophizing. It's a sequel to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as well as Number Of The Beast, and features characters from several other books — including Jubal Harshaw, Lazarus Long and Hazel Stone, and it turns out that all of Heinlein's characters have previously unsuspected connections to each other. As reviewer James W. Harris puts it:

Having all of his "good" guys sound like a convention of smarmy talking wife-swappers is just gross. I hate to sound like a teenage girl, but damn, Heinlein's kissy-kissy talk and innuendo just made me want to puke. And making his classic characters act out in this limp-dick porn flick is just tragic. Having them go on and on about how they were going to kill people for bad manners is just a little psycho to me. Evidently a lot of people and situations annoyed the hell out of Heinlein and he used this book to vent. Some people want to call this satire but I think that's whitewash.

Maybe Heinlein lost his mojo and these multiverse stories were the best he could do. Personally, I thought The Rolling Stones was a perfect novel, and bringing back Hazel Stone was a fictionally fuck-up of an idea, ditto for the cast of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Maybe I am a prude because I just don't want the Hazel Stone, grandmother of Castor and Pollux, joking about being stretched out of shape by giant 25 centimeter cock.

All of Heinlein's personally favorite characters get put into a fictional juicer and blended into weird rabble of sex obsessed mob that chirp a weird innuendo patter and are almost impossible to tell apart. When I read these multiverse stories I can't help but believe that horniness was driving Heinlein crazy. These later stories are preoccupied with sex, killing people, responding to annoying people, the reliability of witnesses, rude people deserving capital punishment, and so on.

Venture Bros.:

At least this show is ridiculous on purpose — the ultra-demented story of the Venture clan has gotten more and more involved, with Sergeant Hatred's struggle against his pedophilic past taking center stage, and deformed clones and weird villain love affairs aplenty. Most of all, there are the labyrinthine family elements crossing over into everything, like the revelation that Dean was also the head of the Guild. The same characters and their families end up being connected in ever more improbable and weird ways, making our heads spin.

Battlestar Galactica:

I have four (or possibly five) words for you: "Hotdog is the father." Whaaa? There's also the great way Baltar went from being a slimy scientist to being a slimy politician to being a slimy cult leader — and what happened to the baby that Baltar and Six were going to have together? Oh and while we're on the subject, what about Saul Tigh being crazy-chicken in love with Caprica Six — until she has a miscarriage, and then he never thinks about her again? It all makes you want to grip your television and scream (in a Krazy Starbuck voice) "You're going the wrong way!"

Sonic The Hedgehog (comics):

According to the always great TVTropes website, this comic-book tie-in to the popular video game went whirling off on crazier tangents than a flying hedgehog on crack. To quote TVTropes:

The Archie Comics Sonic The Hedgehog series twisted Sonic's love life into a Gordian Knot: Originally hooked up with Sally Acorn, she got stuck ruling the country and shoved the relationship to the side to focus on her new duties, prompting Sonic to fall in with Mina Mongoose, starting a rivalry between the two women for Sonic's affection. He then started seeing Fiona Fox on the side, which not only pissed off Mina and Sally, but Tails, as well, who had a crush on her due to falling in love with a robotic duplicate created by Robotnik several years earlier (don't ask). Eventually, Mina got her own boyfriend, Sally got Sonic once again, and Tails got tossed into a brick wall by Fiona, who gave them all the finger to have a relationship with Sonic's evil clone from another universe. And that's not even counting the mini-tangle between Antoine, Sally, Bunnie Rabbot, and Antoine's evil clone from the same universe Fiona's new beau comes from.

Got it? Great.

Gundam Wing:

Okay, let's get this straight... Relena Darlian discovers she's really adopted, and her real name is Relena Peacecraft, one of the last survivors of the pacifistic (duh) Peacecraft tribe. And then it turns out that Zechs Marquise is her long lost older brother. Meanwhile, she gets obsessed with Heero, a young whackjob who keeps announcing he's going to kill her, not unlike the "I'm going to rape you" guy in Welcome To The Dollhouse. And that's just scratching the surface of the most confusing, tangly saga of all time, involving endless backstory and weird family crap.

Angel:

I was going to do Charmed, Angel's fellow WB series which had the whole "my ex-husband is a half-demon" thing, but Angel is so much more ridiculous — mostly because of Cordy, who is in love with Groosalugg, until she's in love with Angel instead, but meanwhile she's turned into a half-demon and then she becomes a Higher Power, until she comes back and has sex with Angel's son — who, as someone points out, is practically her stepson since she helped care for him as a baby — and then becomes pregnant and evil — until she gives birth to an evil god. Nothing on parent show Buffy was as incestuous and ridiculous as Cordy's arc on Angel. Oh, actually, wait — Cordelia was pregnant twice on Angel.

Robotech:

Sure, it was supposedly about the giant mechas, but it was really all about the tragic loves and the tormented Rick-Minmei-Lisa love triangle. To quote Wikipedia,

In early 2013, while sitting at an outdoor cafe, [Lisa] contemplates the love triangle between the three of them when she overhears two men talking about how women were "dealt all the aces" when it comes to relationships, to which Lisa says to herself "that's all you know...here's one woman who would trade every ace in the deck for one Rick Hunter.

Sigh. Twoo Love. Here's a great fanvid featuring the music of White Town. Yay!

X-Men (comics):

This, of course, is the most insane soap opera imaginable. At this point, the X-men have had illegitmate babies from the future, secret love affairs, doomed passions and multiple bad transcriptions of all sorts of accents, from Cajun to Scottish. My favorite ridiculous soap-opera twist might be Madrox's night of passion with two female members of X-Factor: Siryn and Monet, resulting in a pregnancy that isn't quite a normal pregnancy. But then there's also the whole insane Rogue/Gambit thing, the Scott/Jean/Wolverine/Emma love doodaddle, and of course Professor X turning out to be secretly in love with Jean Grey. That's just scratching the surface, really. If you want more info, check out the X-Men relationship map — which is probably already out of date!

Our research intern, Cyriaque Lamar, pored over the most wretched and bizarre book covers that ever defaced the bookshelves, and came up with the absolute worst and most inappropriate. Normally, I feel a little trepidation about saying we've collected the cheesiest or wrongest "of all time" — but in this case, it only feels right. So here are Cyriaque's picks, with his erudite commentary.

Cheesiest Book Covers:

Most Inappropriate Book Covers (Maybe NSFW):

Additional reporting by Cyriaque Lamar.

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:

A quick recap, for those of you just joining us: The first Hugo winner, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, was, in my humble opinion, possessed of some interesting ideas whose execution didn't do anything to elevate science fiction as a genre. The second, They'd Rather Be Right, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, has more merit than it probably gets credit for — but that's not saying much.

But now — now we come to number three. And fittingly, one of SF's Big Three is at the helm this time, and it really is a charm.

I'm gushing. I am, actually, mildly giddy. It's because, I'm a mite abashed to admit, until I picked up Double Star last week, I hadn't read any R.A.H. in longer than I can recall.

And since I can't say too much about the book itself without spoiling it — it's not a complicated story, and to summarize the plot in even the bare-bonesiest way might ruin the action for those new to it, as I was (it will be more fun if you don't even read the flap copy, I promise) — let me first talk about the author, and why, for all the criticisms typically leveled against him, he deserves his place of primacy in the canon.

For starters, that voice. Now, assuredly, by the time you get to the end of his oeuvre, especially in the case of anything written in the first person, like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Heinlein's style and tone and general sensibility can seem more like an impediment than an asset — the problem being that every one of his protagonists sounds exactly the same. The journeyman Heinlein fan can pick up a single page torn from any piece of his fiction, whether they've read it before or not, and recognize it as such within seconds.

But there's also something very comforting about that. Some io9ers will remember that I am an inordinately die-hard U2 fan. I'm not about to make any serious comparison between them and Heinlein, except to say that slipping into Double Star, rediscovering him after a few years away, reminded me of the sensation I get when I go back to my favorite band: Oh, yes — I remember this. Even when it's a story I haven't read or a song I've never heard, the general feeling of familiarity is there, and when you don't overdose on it, it's awful pleasant.

Heinlein's voice, too, is deeply accessible. And I think that's really important for a Hugo winner. To me, SF's other big award, the Nebula, decided on by the genre's writers and not just its fans, has always struck me as slightly less concerned about approachability. (Slightly — there's a lot of crossover between the two. But still: Samuel Delany's and Gene Wolfe's novels ain't won no Hugos.) Whereas when I pick up a paperback with "Hugo" on the cover, I expect a text that will exercise my brain but never strain it.

Double Star does that. And although it's not technically one of Heinlein's "juveniles," it's hard to imagine it didn't draw many of their readers — which, given its pre-civil-rights-era publication date and not at all subtle anti-racism theme, can only have been a good thing. And it's on this point that, to me, he truly earned his spot in the pantheon.

He is not an author frequently associated with Star Trek. People think of Harlan Ellison, or Isaac Asimov, or even James Blish. But honestly, I can't think of a more well-known SF writer than Heinlein who consistently beat the drum for those values for which the show (and much of the SF I love best) is famous: Equality among not just humanity, but among all species. Justice and fair treatment of others. Confidence in science and reason, but never at the expense of our emotional capacities. An unwavering belief that, though eminently fallible, Homo sapiens has within itself the ability to attain untold heights.

That's not to say he's perfect in this regard. Double Star is a product of its time and features all of one female character. And we don't hear too much from her, but she's more or less the same female character he usually wrote.* Still, he improved on that front as the years went on. (While no Beverly Crusher, a late-era Heinlein heroine is a hell of a lot hardier than Lt. Uhura ever has been.)

In other ways, too, Double Star is no masterpiece. I called out The Demolished Man for a predictable end reveal, and the one here is even easier to guess at. However, I'll say that the final passage, written from a different perspective, time-wise (and even character-wise), than the rest of the book, compensates for it, and then some. It's not anything groundbreaking, but it's elegantly, even movingly executed, and a rather neat trick for Heinlein, relying as it does on as an awareness of that persistent, instantly recognizable voice that pervades everything leading up to it.

Heinlein would go on to earn three more Hugos for his novels, tying him for the most with — and maybe this is kinda fitting too, given the notes above about women — Lois McMaster Bujold. Double Star is probably the least known of his four winners, but it's nonetheless where the award becomes worth paying attention to.

*In Heinlein's defense, I will say that an SF editor once told me that same female character he always wrote was essentially a not-that-idealized version of his wife, Virginia, who apparently was as pretty and brainy and horny and able to shoot a gun as we're told. Also, again, he basically wrote the same male character over and over again, too, so.

"Blogging the Hugos" appears every other weekend. In the next installment: The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber, from 1958.

Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found here.

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.

Criminal Activity

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Involuntary time travel comes with plenty of disadvantages, not the least of which is finding yourself suddenly and unexpectedly naked without any money. Fortunately, the predestination paradox can be a handy survival tool. Time traveler Henry often finds himself sent to the same points in time and space as his younger self, and teaches him how to find clothing, pick locks, and steal wallets. It's sort of like illicit father-son bonding, just with himself.

The Joy of Sex

The Time Traveler's Wife: Another unexpected side effect of time travel is that a horny, adolescent Henry is every now and then confronted with a nearly equally young, equally horny duplicate of himself. This makes for some rather spectacular instances of masturbation, but it's really awkward when his father walks in on him.

—All You Zombies— by Robert Heinlein: The Unmarried Mother was an intersex, though apparently female, teenager who was seduced by a mysterious older man. Many years and a sex change later, she, now he, is sent back in time, where he meets and makes love to a very familiar girl.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold: Daniel Eakins is the sort of time traveler who throws caution to the wind, sampling all that time travel has to offer: foiling assassinations, visiting great moments in history, and using his knowledge of the future to bet on the ponies. So it's no wonder that when he meets up with the same- and opposite-sex versions of himself, he tends to get it on with them.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: When the alien nudists get a hold of the time travel code tattooed on Fry's rear end, they're mostly interested in stealing artifacts from 20th Century Earth, although they do at one point take a time out for Nudar-on-Nudar nookie.

How to Win a Fight

The Kid: Russel Dritz's dirtbag ways may go back to his childhood, when he was picked on by bullies and lost his mother to illness. When Rusty, his younger self, ambles into Russel's life, he finds there are some subtle ways that he can change the past. First on the agenda: Getting the kid into a boxing ring so he can learn how to throw a punch.

How to Become Rich and Powerful

Back to the Future, Part II: The 2015 version of Biff decides that all of his troubles would be solved his he had been extremely wealthy in the past. So he steals Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean and, with a 2015 sports almanac in hand, travels to 1955, when he gives the almanac to his younger self. And it seems to work: Biff is rich beyond his wildest dreams, he's quietly had his rival George McFly murdered, and he's married to George's now artificially-endowed widow Lorraine. Of course, it all goes to hell when that pesky Marty McFly appears on the scene.
Gargoyles "Vows:" In move that revealed the entire series as one big predestination paradox, David Xanatos travels back in time on his wedding day to give his younger self a collection of priceless gold coins, along with instructions on how to invest the proceeds from their sale. Is it cheating? Probably, but in Xanatos's mind, it makes him the very definition of a self-made man.

By His Bootstraps by Robert Heinlein: When Bob is pulled thirty thousand years into the future by a slightly older, though no wiser version of himself, he discovers that humans have become a primitive, compliant people. Diktor, a fellow native of the 20th Century, explains that a technologically advanced person could easily become king of these sheep-like folks, and gives Bob a list of 20th Century items to bring to the future. Bob complies, but travels to a point ten years before he meets Diktor. It takes Bob a shockingly long time to realize that he's in a Heinlein story and that he is himself Diktor.

How to Win the Girl of Your Dreams

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: Fry is distraught when Leela, the love of his life, is won over by an older and more mature stranger named Lars. When Lars is revealed to be Fry's older (and this time wiser) duplicate, Fry should probably recognize that he could woo Leela if only he'd successfully reign in his adolescent nature. But it being Fry, he fails to take the lesson to heart, and quickly moves on to another girl.

How to Travel Through Time

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter: In Baxter's sequel to H.G. Wells The Time Machine, we learn that the Time Traveller didn't build his device completely unaided. A mysterious benefactor gave the Traveller a sample of a radioactive substance to study, a substance that ultimately makes time travel possible. Of course, like all mysterious strangers in time travel stories, the Time Traveller's benefactor is, in fact, an older version of himself.

How to Save the World

Heroes "Five Years Gone:" One of the great things about the power to travel through time is that if you get that whole "save the world" business wrong the first time, you can just keep trying. And Hiro Nakamura has the added benefit of traveling through time to change events himself, and leaving instructions for his much less bad-ass past self.

Doctor Who "Time Crash:" The Doctor meets up with himself a great deal, if for no other reason than two or three or five Doctors are better than one. But sometimes it's just to ensure a little predestination paradox magic. The Fifth Doctor watches the Tenth Doctor create an artificial supernova that cancels out a giant hole in fabric of reality. Naturally, the Tenth Doctor only knows how to do this because he watched himself do it when he was the Fifth Doctor.

Doctor Who "The Parting of the Ways:" Rose Tyler gets her own predestination paradox going when she looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS gives her the power to transcend time and space, letting her leave the message "Bad Wolf" to herself in the past that ultimately lead Rose and the Doctor back to this time and place.

Teen Titans "Titans Tomorrow:" When the Teen Titans travel to the future, they're eager to see what they're like as adult superheroes. But the future is unexpectedly bleak, with many of the Titans turned to violence and destruction, tearing the United States in two and turning the Western half into a police state. Fortunately, the Titans are able to learn from their future selves what set these events in motion, and are able to prevent their dystopic future.

Babylon 5: To add another wrinkle in the predestination paradox, Jeffrey Sinclair finds that his entire life is being guided by his future self from the past. Sinclair eventually learns that he is the great Minbari historical figure Valen, and Sinclair must eventually travel back in time, become Valen, and write the prophesies that will guide Sinclair's life in the future. Fate, or proof that his talents transcend time and space?

Connor MacLeod from Highlander.

Born in 1518, he is an Immortal, doomed to walk the Earth and watch everyone he loves grow old and die — but eventually, he must battle the few other remaining Immortals for the Prize. And in the end, wait for it... there can be only one.

Captain Jack Harkness from Torchwood.

He's just your average run-of-the-mill con man from the 51st century, until he dies, and the temporarily all-powerful Rose Tyler brings him back to life. Only now, he's a "fixed point in time and space," eternally young and invulnerable forever, no matter what. His wife dies of old age, his daughter is the same age as him, and eventually (maybe) he'll be just a head in a giant jar.

Jenny Sparks from Stormwatch and The Authority.

Born in 1900, she stops aging when she reaches her 20th birthday. Maybe its to do with the fact that she's a being of pure electricity. In any case, she befriends Hitler, visits an alternate universe where she marries an alien prince, and finally gets to join two of the Wildstorm Universe's biggest super-teams, until she finally dies at age 100.

Wolverine, from the X-Men.

Logan used to be just a guy with a tremendous healing ability, but recent comics (and his new movie) revealed that he's actually ageless, and fought in the Civil War and every big war since then. He can smoke as many cigars as he wants, and he never gets weird cigar-related wrinkles. Various comics have shown him surviving long past the end of the world, or at least vastly outliving all his compatriots.

Enoch Root in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon.

One of the great mysteries of Cryptonomicon was how Enoch Root managed to show up, hale and hearty, 55 years after he dies in 1945. We eventually do learn that Root has the secret of rejuvenation, which he uses to keep himself (and sometimes others) alive.

John Carter of Mars, from the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Even before he gets whisked off to Mars, aka Barsoom, he's mysteriously gifted with eternal youth. And no matter how many times they try to kill him, he always comes back. (Although sometimes, he comes back on Earth instead of Barsoom.)

Nick Fury and (maybe) his Howling Commandos, from Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Nick Fury (the comics version, not the movie version played by Samuel L. Jackson) fought in World War II, where he gave his eye for his country. But he's miraculously still young and spry in the present day — and he didn't get frozen in an iceberg, like Captain America. Instead, Nick Fury got exposed to something called the "Infinity Formula," and (at least in some versions) so did his men, including "Dum Dum" Dugan — who's now been going by "Dum Dum" for 70 years.

Lazarus Long, from Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein.

Born in 1912, Lazarus Long is the third generation of a selective breeding experiment by the Ira Howard Foundaiton, so he lives for nearly two thousand years in good condition — with only the occasional rejuvenation treatment required. And he eventually finds out that he actually can't die.

Claire Bennet, from Heroes.

The cheerleader doesn't really seem to need saving — it turns out that even scooping her brains out can't kill her, and it's been hinted she'll stay young and healthy forever. At least, Sylar believes that hundreds of years from now, only he and Claire will still be running around, and eventually they'll fall in love. Or something.

Richard Alpert, from Lost.

Is he a hero? We're still not sure. He's definitely taken part in some questionable decisions, but who hasn't on this show? In any case, he's mysteriously ageless, whether we see him in 1954 or the present day. Here's hoping we find out his secret this coming season.

Runners up: Superman (who ages in some versions but not in others), Kane from the sword-and-sorcery novels by Karl Edward Wagner, Wonder Woman, Samantha from Bewitched, Dorian Grey, The Endless from Sandman, Thor, Takeshi Kovacs from Richard K. Morgan's novels, John Amsterdam in New Amsterdam, Peter Pan, Earthworm Jim, Aes Sedai from the Wheel Of Time, Kai on Lexx, and a host of robot/cyborg characters.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Thanks also to Matt Jones, Ron Hogan, Ekaterina Sedia, Jason Shankel, Missy Feigum, Hiya Swanhuyser, Victor Infante, Jefferson Robbins, Jessy Randall, Stephen Tiano, Becka Robbins, Jennifer Brissett, Ashley Edward Miller, Andrew Liptak, Paul McEnery, Ryan Britt, Yoz Grahame, Shannon Rosa, Espana Sheriff, Lisa Heselton, Lane Kneedler, Naomi Alderman, Darren McKeeman, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Shane O'Brien, Hanne Blank, Lucas Zen Hannon, Mariah Bear, Lun E'Sex, Micky Shirley, Swill Magazine, and anyone else I forgot!

One of our favorite blogs, Biology In Science Fiction, posted some random thoughts about science fiction books, including the recipe for making Stranger In A Strange Land a slim pamphlet:

Stranger in a Strange Land would have been much much shorter if in Heinlein's future America effective birth control had been invented before a manned expedition was sent to Mars.

She also points out it could be a fantasy book, without changing the plot, if "Michael Valentine Smith had been raised by wizards instead of Martians."

She also explains the main problem with Asimov's decision to link his robot novels and the Foundation series: it makes "the humanity's expansion onto many worlds, the creation of the Galactic Empire and its replacement by the Foundation ultimately due to the meddling of a couple of mind-reading, mind-influencing robots. I'd like to think that we'll conquer the universe without the nudging of telepathic robot nannies." [Biology In Science Fiction]

First, here's a quick disclaimer. The vast majority of science fiction is to some extent concerned with a heroic individual struggling against a large, probably oppressive society - so a huge amount of science fiction could be considered libertarian to some degree. What sets apart the books on this list - and there are certainly tons of others out there that would make worthy additions - is that they are actively concerned with exploring explicitly libertarian philosophy in a science fiction setting, and many on the list below have been specifically singled out as such by libertarians themselves.

1. News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance by William Morris

Of all the utopian books that appeared towards the nineteenth century (the most famous of which is probably Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward), one of the very few that saw a perfect future as fundamentally libertarian was 1890's News from Nowhere. Written from an anarchic-socialist perspective, Morris imagines a future where the community controls the means of production and existing social structures are a thing of the past, with cities, money, divorce, and courts all now obsolete.

2. Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells

There are a bunch of potential candidates when it comes to Wells's writings on libertarian utopias, but his 1924 book is by far the best. Scientists from our world stumble upon a parallel universe with an Earth thousands of years more advanced than ours. No governments exist because children are firmly indoctrinated to understand one single, solitary point: respect the autonomy of others. With this one simple rule in mind, there is no need for social institutions, and the people of that world spend their days enjoying their genetically engineered perfection and all the free love they can handle.

3. "Late Night Final" by Eric Frank Russell

This 1948 short story looks at a spaceship in orbit above the planet it has come to invade. As the crew learns how to communicate with the anarchic natives down on the surface, the command structure slowly crumbles. Eventually, presented with the opportunity of a peaceful, completely free life down on the surface, the invaders abandon their ship until only the captain is left. Russell's 1962 novel The Great Explosion also follows bumbling militarists from Earth as they encounter three long-isolated colony worlds that have since evolved into rather unusual societies. The third and most positively portrayed planet, K22g, has become a peaceful, libertarian society whose people call themselves Gands after their inspiration, Mohandas Gandhi.

4. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Originally published in 1956 as Tiger, Tiger!, Bester's novel of teleportation and revenge foresaw many of the elements that continue to dominate science fiction to this day. Of particular interest to libertarians is his depiction of corporations, oppressive mega-conglomerates that rival governments in their scope and power. The novel's protagonist, Gully Foyle, is defined by his growing individualism and self-reliance - the characteristics of the quintessential libertarian hero - which he uses to gain vengeance on those who abandoned him in his hour of need.

5. "The Last of the Deliverers" by Poul Anderson

Anderson's 1957 story imagines a world where limitless solar energy has made the geopolitical order of the Cold War obsolete. The world is now organized into countless little autonomous communities, and people are free to do pretty much whatever they want. Although there are enough people who still want to raise crops or make goods to prevent societal decay, most people spend their time pursuing leisure activities such as sex and hunting. To the interest of nobody, the last two true believers in the old world order - one a capitalist and the other a communist - pass the time arguing the relative merits of their systems, totally ignoring the fact it's all academic now anyway.

6. Emphyrio by Jack Vance

This 1969 novel follows Ghyl Tarvoke of the planet Halma, where the ruling lords have outlawed mass production by the populace and use the resulting masterworks of the world's artisans - which they then mass produce - as the linchpin of their interstellar trade. Following the example of Halma's legendary hero Emphyrio, a figure of liberty and rebellion, Ghyl leads a revolt against Hamla's aristocracy, rocking the foundations of the planet's society.

7. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin

Set in her Hainish Cycle universe, this book won both the Nebula and Hugo award in 1974. Among other topics, Le Guin explores the society on Annares, a large, habitable moon of the planet Urras on which revolutionaries from that planet settled so that they might realize their dreams of an anarchic utopia. Two centuries later, the revolution has stagnated and hierarchical structures are reemerging, even if no one on Annares is willing to admit it. Le Guin wasn't kidding when she put "ambiguous" in the title - lots of anarchists and libertarians believe Annares is portrayed in a fundamentally positive light, while capitalists tend to see Annares as an outright dystopia.

Also worth checking out is 1973's "The Day Before The Revolution", which depicts the historical and ideological background of Odonianism, the anarchic thought that pervades the worlds of The Dispossessed. There's also the introduction to her short story collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters, which offers a succinct summary of why she finds anarchy so interesting to explore:

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

8. Pretty much anything by Robert Heinlein

If you're looking for science fiction with a libertarian perspective, you really can't go wrong with Robert Heinlein, particularly his later works. His constantly evolving politics, tempered with an always iconoclastic belief in individual freedom, led him to place seemingly contradictory ideas in his books, from his advocacy of the sexual revolution in Stranger in a Strange Land to the complicated militarism of Starship Troopers.

But The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is probably his most comprehensive exploration of his libertarian ideals, not to mention one of the most successful attempts to couch his beliefs in a compelling narrative. One of the book's main characters, the "rational anarchist" Professor Bernardo de la Paz, explains at length how government - any government, even democratic ones - is an inherent threat to individual freedom. Considering the repressive lunar society presented in the novel, it's a difficult point to argue, although Heinlein is the first to admit that once the revolution is over most people would rather choose the security and laws offered by some new government over the uncertainty of true freedom.

9. Absolutely everything by Robert Anton Wilson

Probably the only author who exceeds Robert Heinlein in fusing science fiction and libertarian thought is Robert Anton Wilson, who has written several trilogies that are equal parts futuristic yarns and philosophical explorations. The Illuminatus Trilogy! (coauthored with Robert Shea) is primarily concerned with anarchism, with several appendices ostensibly written by the books' several anarchist groups that provide extensive theoretical ruminations on the topic. 1979's Schroedinger's Cat trilogy looks more directly at libertarianism, considering an alternate universe in which the Libertarian Immortalist Party has turned that world's United States, known as Unistat, into an authority-free utopia.

10. Wheels Within Wheels by F. Paul Wilson

Wilson's 1979 novel looks at a massive conspiracy that threatens the liberty of an entire interstellar Federation. As Pete Paxton and the granddaughter of his old partner, Jo Finch, struggle to uncover the truth, they must face Machiavellian political operators and a ruthless telepath. The novel is a classic example of the struggle between individual defenders of liberty and shadowy governmental figures who look to take freedom away for their own ends, but that's not why I included it on the list.

The book is also the inaugural winner of the Prometheus Award, a yearly honor given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society for the best science fiction book that explores libertarian themes. Past winners have included Harry Turtledove, Neal Stephenson, and Terry Pratchett; a full list of past winners can be found here and is as good a place as any from which to develop a libertarian science fiction reading list. (You also really can't go wrong with awards that have given special honors to Patrick McGoohan for The Prisoner and Joss Whedon for Serenity. You just can't.)

Space opera is best described as a genre of science fiction that is about adventure, often pitting the protagonists against powerful opponents, with broad themes, characterizations and actions throughout. The actual science that defines science fiction is not necessarily at the forefront of the story.

Military science fiction, on the other hand, is about conflict of the worst kind, involving all-out warfare. Oftentimes, the main characters are part of a military organization and are involved in conflicts much greater than their own parts, but they might be pivotal to the overal conflict to some degree.

To be very fair, there is a lot of overlap between the two different sub-genres. Stories that may fall firmly within the space opera side may also carry elements of military science fiction, whereas the opposite is very true, in a number of cases.

Of all the space opera stories that come to mind, Star Wars is right up there at the front, although that's not necessarily the first one out there. Physical flaws aside, the six films span a very epic story of the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker and his redemption. We see the fall of a massive government undermined from within, the rise and fall of an Empire and the rise and realization of new heroes and destinies, all set in front of a backdrop of a series of galactic wars. While combat is certainly one of the most intensive, exciting and interesting parts of the Star Wars saga, I've never really thought of it as a strictly military story.

The intentions and themes between the two genres are what often sets them apart. Military science fiction tends to attempt to provide commentary on real-world events, placing the conflict out of context for readers to pick on on themes that mirror those found in real life. Starship Troopers looked out of the Second World War, and examined themes such as facism and a society where all-consuming, total war was necessary. World War Two was the closest that the United States and the world has ever come to a total war, and it is unsurprising that these themes would be at the forefront of authors' minds. Beyond that, however, there is a larger theme that I've often found within most of the military science fiction stories that I've read, and it parallels the sort of mentality that is required in a military force - the Other.

For a military to function, there is an absolute requirement of cohesion, of uniformity and of discpline. During the 1300s to the 1400s, an event in Europe occured, now refered to as the military revolution, when European armies adopted rank and file formations, formalized and standarized training and uniforms, all stemming from the invention of the firearm. Armies seek to break up individuality and provide a group mentality, of teamwork. Otherwise, it would be unable to function correctly. In doing, so, enemies are vilified - just look at what enemy Japanese, German, Vietnamese and Iraqi soldiers have been called in recent conflicts - and in doing so, they are labeled the Other. They are against what you are against, and oftentimes, the others in military SF stories are portrayed as insectoids, an extremely alien figure, completely dehumanized. Protagonists often reconcile or examine these relationships and their role in any interactions, whether it's questioning whether their duties are right and justified, or even looking at this dehumanization and uniformity within society. Othertimes, such as in Timothy Zahn's Cobra books or Ender's Game, the central characters themselves are the others - changed by their training and/or enhancements, that place them at odds with society.

In contrast, Space Opera is about construction, inclusion. Where Starship Troopers looked at the world aflame after the Second World War, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy looked at the world rebuilt, watching as a society fell apart, and was restored through the actions of the characters. While military actions or simple melees have often been a part of these stories, they lack the central elements (although they might incorporate them) that define military science fiction. Other broad themes are incorporated as well - the swell of discovery, seen throughout the Ringworld stories, is another major theme that I would like to point to. In some of the more sophisicated modern stories, such as Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, we witness the efforts of humanity to rebuild under strict guidelines of the Singularity, with broad politicial overtones, punctuated by action and excitement.

Both military science fiction and space opera are about culture, but it is the methods in which they both approach their stories that helps to set them apart. space opera looks to culture through the eyes of construction, of vast worlds and the connections that hold society together, overall looking to inclusion, while Military science fiction examines what happens when those bonds break, and the disintigration of society, and seeking to examine the exclusions found in society.

Star Wars concept art above by Ryan Church.

1. Samuel R. Delany (1942- )
His 1975 novel Dhalgren is a hugely complex, at times incomprehensible tome reminiscent of the works of Thomas Pynchon. It also showcases every imaginable form of human sexuality, including a long-term polyamorous relationship between the protagonist, his lover Lanya Colson, and a gang member called Denny.

2. Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)
It would be a stretch to say Farmer invented sexual science fiction (especially considering some of the people on this very list predate him), but he did shatter the mainstream notion that sex had no place in science fiction. His 1953 short story "The Lovers" was an overnight sensation for its sophisticated, intelligent depiction of love between a human and an alien, which he followed up with five more stories in a similar vein in his 1960 anthology Strange Relations. He explored unconventional relationships both allegorically within science fiction and literally in his 1962 novel Fire and the Night, which looked at an interracial relationship before they had gained widespread social acceptance.

3. Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)
Nothing if not an iconoclast, Heinlein was a militarist who also passionately believed in free love, at least if his writings are to be believed. It's actually not that hard to reconcile when seen in terms of his ironclad libertarianism, which led him to foresee a future where homosexuality was fully accepted, public nudity was commonplace, and couples were far from the only acceptable number of people for romantic relationships. A noted advocate for polyamory, his works consistently shattered taboos, ranging from relatively mundane topics for the 1970s such as open homosexuality to a full-fledged incestuous romance between immortal time traveler Lazarus Long and his own mother - and all of that was in just one book, 1973's Time Enough for Love. But perhaps his crowning achievement for mixing sex and science fiction was his wonderfully twisted 1959 short story "All You Zombies", in which time travel and a sex change operation allows the story's protagonist to become both his own mother and father, not to mention just about everyone else who appears in the story.

4. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- )
Le Guin has extensively studied alternative conceptions of gender, both as a critical theorist (in such essays as 1976's "Is Gender Necessary?") and in books like The Left Hand of Darkness. Her novel, published in 1969, considered the Gethenians, a humanoid alien race with no inherent gender. Instead, Gethenians experience the activation of either male or female sexual organs in roughly monthly cycles. To humans, this means they constantly switch genders, although this is a rather quaint notion to the Gethenians themselves.

5. William Moulton Marston (1893-1947)
Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, may not have the literary credentials of the other people on this list – although he did invent the lie detector test, for what that's worth – but his creation of the first female superhero might have the most pop culture impact. His personal idiosyncrasies, which included living with his wife and girlfriend in a polyamorous relationship, influenced the character's subtext, often leading to Wonder Woman being tied up by other Amazons in situations that evoked bondage imagery (there are entire sites devoted to tracking this very phenomenon). In an era when even recognized comic book geniuses like Will Eisner were content to rip off Superman, it took an uncompromisingly unique individual like Marston to create the first and still the best superheroine, and the medium is infinitely better for it.

6. Joanna Russ (1937- )
One of the first and most important lesbian science fiction writers, Russ confronted sexism head-on in the 1970s with a number of works, both fiction and non-fiction. Her most notable science fiction was probably 1975's The Female Man, which considered four women living on four different parallel universes who then travel between each other's worlds. The different universes include a universe where the Great Depression is still going strong, one that is essentially the same as the real world, another that is a utopian society without any men at all, and a universe where the two genders are literally at war. Russ uses this multiversal backdrop to compare how the various characters' situations influence their conceptions of gender politics and sexuality.

7. Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987)
Better known by her male pseudonym, James Tiptree Jr., Sheldon spent her science fiction career methodically deconstructing supposed boundary lines of sex and gender (she herself was bisexual). She looked at the nature of sex, at times characterizing it as a playful expression of human free will, but otherwise seeing it more as an animalistic force in such stories as "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" and "The Screwfly Solution." Her 1975 novella "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" dealt with three male astronauts thrown through an anomaly in space to an Earth inhabited solely by women, which Sheldon characterizes as a peaceful but stagnant society. "The Women Men Don't See", on the other hand, depicted two women who used an alien abduction as an opportunity to escape the limitations of their lives on Earth. She depicted sex with a frankness and clarity that was exceptional for science fiction authors of the day, male or female.

8. Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950)
His 1935 novel Odd John is one of the earliest to explore sexual themes in science fiction. Following John Wainwright, a British mutant with extraordinary mental abilities, the novel in part addresses the sorts of relations a superhuman such as John could have with regular people. Although Stapledon never quite comes out and says it explicitly, Odd John almost certainly suggests that Wainwright has sex with both his own mother and a young boy. Ultimately, he concludes that all relations with normal humans are morally wrong on the grounds that his advanced intellect makes any such act essentially bestiality.

9. Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985)
The same year as Philip José Farmer's "The Lovers" broke new ground with love between species, Theodore Sturgeon shattered the taboo against depictions of homosexuality in science fiction with his short story "The World Well Lost." The story follows a pair of seemingly male and female alien lovers who visit Earth and become celebrities until their home planet demands their extradition. When the aliens reveal to one of the astronauts tasked with bring them home that they are both male and that their crime is love, he sets them free, in part because he nurses a secret love for his copilot. The story was so controversial that it barely got published; the first editor Sturgeon showed it to actively called other editors, demanding they not publish it. Thankfully, Universe magazine saw it differently, and science fiction is infinitely better for it.

10. John Varley (1947- )
His "Eight Worlds" stories depict how technology manages to make homophobia obsolete (well, more obsolete). In a future culture where people can change their gender instantly, there is little room for views that see homosexual relationships as different from heterosexual ones, as a person could wake up one day in one relationship and go to sleep in the other.

Top image from Clyde Caldwell's cover illustration for Farmer's Strange Relations.

Around 200 of Allan Grant's Life Magazine images are online now at Google, and they show some of the wirework that went into the lunar exploration scenes. Plus you can see how the film used little people in astronaut outfits in the background, to create a greater sense of perspective. In addition to working on the film as screenwriter and technical consultant, Heinlein also published a "Destination Moon" novella around the same time.

Tons more photos at the link. [Beamjockey, via BoingBoing]

Reading Peter Crowther's anthology, I was struck by how little had changed, in some ways, about our ideas of artificial intelligence, since Asimov's and Heinlein's tales, not to mention novels like Gerrold's When Harlie Was One. We still have many of the same themes, including A.I.s coming of age, trying to become more human, struggling to understand humanity, or exploring religion. A number of the stories could easily have been written in 1970.

Other commonalities: Many of the A.I.s are female, especially the ones who have lovely bodies that male humans fall in love with or are seduced by. (Alll but one of the collection's authors are male, I think.) A couple of different stories reference HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are two or three stories about an A.I. that's fractured into different personalities, or a composite of personality fragments.

And yet there are many nuggets of innovation scattered throughout the collection. I really liked "Adam Robots" by Adam Roberts, in which two robots named Adam find themselves in a virtual Garden Of Eden, trying to unravel a modified form of the Adam-and-Eve story. (You expect there to be a twist involving what happens when one robot takes the apple of knowledge, but it's not what you expect.)

The story "Sweats" by Keith Brooke has probably the cleverest, and most surprising, concept of them all: someone creates an artificial personality out of pieces of different people's minds, and then installs it into the body of a hapless teenager. This artificial personality is designed to be a cold-blooded killer and sent to murder a politician — so one of the people whose personality traits is used to create this composite mind is arrested for murder. Can we hold someone responsible for a crime committed by a collection of his personality traits mixed with those of others? This story also incorporates a virtual afterlife (like Second Life, but only for reconstructed personalities of the dead) and is vastly entertaining, except that it has one or two plot twists too many and stops holding together by the end.

Also super entertaining is the story "The New Cyberiad" by Paul DiFilippo, in which two artificial intelligences in the distant future decide to build a solar-system-sized time machine to return to the present. They want to collect some present-day humans to repopulate the future, which is now devoid of organic life. It turns into a bizarre, rolicking quest narrative that contains witty nods at Gerrold, Clarke, and several other writers. At one point, the two boy-robots create a girl-robot to handle routine tasks, and then they both fall in love with their creation in a pastiche of the Pygmalion story. It gets more and more demented.

Also a fun read is "The Highway Code" by Brian Stableford, in which a sentient truck grapples with a road-centric version of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

There are a few other clever ideas, but for the most part this anthology felt stronger on ideas than execution. A lot of the writing left me sort of underwhelmed, and there are almost no memorable characters or really strong moments in the collection. Many of the stories in the book felt like they needed a bit more fleshing out, or perhaps a tighter focus, to change them from cool ideas to actual stories.

And then there were a few moments that I found actually embarrassing, like this bit from James Lovegrove's "The Kamizaze Code." A man and a woman (who are lovers) discuss sneaking a bit of code out of a top-secret Ministry Of Defense facility, and we get this bit of dialogue:

"I've thought about that too," said George. "You could smuggle it out... dump it onto a flash drive, then you take the flash drive to work with you..."

"Can't do that. We're not allowed to take equipment onto or off the premises. That's one of the things we're searched for every time we enter or leave."

"I know, but a flash drive is very small. About the size of a marker pen. And they don't do body cavity searches, do they?"

Jennifer caught his drive, and grimaced.

"It'll work," George insisted.

"Why not use your body cavity then, if you're so confident?"

"Becuase you have a body cavity better suited to the task. Trust me, I know," he added, with what he hoped was a safely salacious smile.

First of all, eww. Second of all... so this is a top secret facility without any metal detectors? And third of all, they don't let you take an ipod to work?

Bottom line: There are a few memorable stories here, and most of the other stories have something interesting to say about the nature of A.I. But this is probably one volume you'll want to take out of the library or buy a used copy of.

[Amazon]

Get a Cylon to steal some ballots. When President Roslin was about to lose the election to Gaius Baltar, she decided desperate times called for under-handed measures. She gave her aide, the secret Cylon Tory Foster, permission to steal a box of ballots and replace them. It would have worked, but for the eagle-eyed Felix Gaeta and the uncharacteristically squeamish Bill Adama.

Kill the other candidate in a virtual world. It worked for the Doctor, in the Doctor Who story "The Deadly Assassin." To make a long story short, the Doctor put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency of his home planet, Gallifrey, to escape from trumped up charges of murdering the last president. The Doctor won the election by default — because during the campaign, he took some time out to meet up with his opponent in the Matrix, a virtual dreamscape, and slaughter him ruthlessly. (Serves the guy right for being named Chancellor Goth. What's next? Mayor Emo?) The Doctor didn't actually claim the presidency until a year later, when he decided the best way to prevent an invasion of Gallifrey was by helping the invaders take over, and THEN defeating them. Despite being the only president to turn his inauguration into a party for marauding tinfoil monsters, the Doctor was popular enough that the Gallifreyans begged him to take office again.

Brainwash everybody in the country via telepathic satellite. It worked for the Master, the Doctor's nemesis, on Doctor Who. Maybe because the Master was so impressed by the Doctor's election-stealing prowess, the Master stepped up his game and got himself elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, thanks to the Archangel satellite network broadcasting pro-Master messages into people's brains.

Brainwash everybody in the country via telephone. Satellite too high-tech for you? There's always Ma Bell. That's what worked for Tempus, an escaped alien psychopath, who came to Earth under the fake name John Doe and ran for president in Lois And Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman. Tempus used his amazing alien technology to control everyone's minds via telephone, making everyone think he was a "darn nice guy." Everybody voted for him — except those telephone-hating Amish people.

Replace both candidates with green slimy aliens. As various commenters pointed out, I somehow forgot to include Kang and Kodos in my roundup — how could I have forgotten them? Finally, two candidates who behave with a modicum of decency and respect towards each other. So what if they're evil monster guys? What are you going to do — vote for a third-party candidate? Oh, and they're from the Simpsons.

Hit everybody in the country with an Acid trip. It sort of worked for the Brotherhood of Dada, enemies of the Doom Patrol. Their leader, Mr. Nobody, decided to run for president, and harnessed the power of Number None, who's a hallucinogenic bicycle linked to the discovery of LSD. (This was when writer Grant Morrison was doing a LOT of drugs, I think.) The Brotherhood traveled around the country in a psychedelic bus, causing acid trips, and finally went on television to spread the Dada message.

Something similar worked for Max Frost in the campy 1968 movie Wild In The Streets — he got elected president partly by spiking the D.C. water supply with LSD. When he won in a landslide, he passed a new law saying everyone over 30 had to live in retirement homes and do LSD every day. Far out, baby!

Discover a parallel world which solves all our problems. In the Philip K. Dick novel The Crack In Space, Jim Briskin is running to be the first black president of the United States — in 2080. (That's optimism for you.) Briskin's campaign gets a tremendous boost when a gateway opens to a parallel Earth, where humans never evolved. It's the perfect solution to the overpopulation problem, and Briskin capitalizes on it. (This one's a bit iffy, but I still like it.)

Manipulate probability itself to make the improbable happen. In the Justice League of America comic, Dr. Julian September split seven photons, and discovered that he'd managed to destroy their synchronicity, allowing him to manipulate probability to his liking. Among other things, this allowed him to become president of the United States and win a Nobel Prize. Eventually the Justice League found those photons and rejoined them.

Use telepathy. In Marvel's New Universe comics, a supervillain known as Philip Nolan Voigt, aka Overshadow, used his telepathic abilities to be come the president of the United States in the 1988 election. His running mate? A mind-controlled puppet Mike Dukakis. (Probably the only way Dukakis could look presidential, actually.)

Disguise a whole bunch of candidates as one candidate. That way, you get one composite candidate who's better prepared, and more well-rounded, than any one person. That's how they cheat in the story "The Election," by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Shaara. In the year 2066, a computer called Uncle Sam administers a series of tests to find the person who's most qualified to become U.S. President. But the presidency has become so complex, the computer can no longer find anyone who's qualified. So the authorities secretly have a bunch of experts in different fields take the test in their subjects, and pretend to be one super-qualified person.

A similar stunt worked great in a novel I read years ago, but now can't find any information on, including the title. A group of identical clones run for president and pretend to be one person, dazzling crowds with their multi-faceted brilliance.

Get someone who knows how to control machines with his mind. That's what Linderman did on Heroes, to ensure that Nathan Petrelli became a U.S. Congressman at the end of the first season. Micah, the kid who can make any machine do his bidding, interfaced with the electronic voting system and added a quadrillion extra votes for Nathan. Because who would ever vote for "flying man" otherwise?

Implant a brain chip in your candidate that lets you tweak his message in real time. Can't believe I forgot this one, since it's one of my fave novels — thanks to Fanfilmbook (among others) for bringing it up. In the novel Interface, which Neal Stephenson co-wrote with his uncle George Jewsbury, Illinois governor William Cozzano suffers a stroke and a shadowy business coalition called the Network has a chip implanted in him. Ostensibly, it's to heal him from his stroke, but it actually allows the Network to control what he's saying in real time. If his speech isn't going over well with audiences, they can jolt him in a different direction. Puppet candidate FTW!

Hack the vote. The scenario in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is a bit hard to swallow — who would ever believe that people would trust electronic voting machines with no paper audit trail? Nevertheless, that's what happens in the lunar election, allowing the supercomputer Mike to steal the vote in favor of his libertarian buddies. Something similar worked for Robert A. Booth, the final president of the United States, who won reelection in the Judge Dredd comics by sabotaging the voting computers. Luckily, it could never happen in real life.

Additional reporting by Katharine Duckett.

Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1993): A continuation of Prelude to Foundation, it continues the life of psychohistorian Hari Seldon as he develops his theory to create a society to replace the crumbling Galactic Empire. Like the original Foundation, it consists of a series of interconnected stories.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The first three stories in Forward the Foundation were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine prior to his death in 1992. By the time Asimov succumbed to kidney and heart failure, he had a complete, albeit unedited, draft of the book. Asimov’s third memoir, I, Asimov was also published after his death, as was a final collection of short stories and It’s Been a Good Life, a compilation of Asimov’s diaries and personal correspondences collected by his wife Janet, which for the first time revealed that he had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion a decade before his death.

Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K. Dick (1976): Nixon stand-in Ferris F. Fremont occupies the White House and has turned the United States into a police state, by inventing a fictitious group of home-grown terrorists. Science fiction writer Phil Dick finds himself the target of this new paranoia while his friend, record executive Nick Brady, starts hearing voices from an alien entity that may be God. And the entity, Valis, is prodding Brady to overthrow the corrupt commander-in-chief.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? Dick submitted the manuscript (under the title Valisystem A) to his editor, Mark Hurst, who sent the novel back for minor revisions. But rather than make the changes, Dick reworked the concepts into an entirely new novel, VALIS. Dick gave the Valisystem A manuscript to fellow science fiction writer Tim Powers, and eventually Arbor House acquired the rights to publish it, but retitled it to avoid confusion with VALIS. Dick’s early rejected non-science fiction works, Gather Yourselves Together and Voice from the Street also enjoyed posthumous life.

For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939) by Robert Heinlein: Heinlein’s first novel outlines a roadmap from America’s Great Depression to a futuristic utopia. Engineer Perry Nelson experiences a bad car accident in 1939, and wakes up in the year 2086. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman, is reprogrammed to remove his outdated sexual mores and jealousy, and learns about the technological and social advances that have passed him by.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? The book was rejected by several publishers, possibly due to its depictions of nudity and sexual liberalism. Although the ideas in For Us, The Living fed some of Heinlein’s later works, he was not eager to see this early effort come to life. He attempted to destroy every copy of the book. But Heinlein did give the manuscript to at least one friend, and Robert James, a Heinlein scholar, eventually found it stashed away in a garage. And so, despite the author’s best efforts, it found its way into print.

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002): The unfinished novel, collected with other Adams works in a volume of the same name, promised to be the third volume of the Dirk Gently series, but Adams was considering remaking it as another volume of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Why wasn’t it published while he was alive? While Adams was still deciding what to do about Salmon, he suffered a fatal heart attack, and now we’re left with Eoin Colfer to give us a new Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl (2008): In Clarke’s final novel, 15 year-old Ranjit Subramanian achieves fame when he publishes the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Meanwhile, an alien empire realizes that humans have developed nuclear weapons and decides the planet must be wiped out.
Why wasn’t it published while Clarke was alive? As Clarke was working on The Last Theorem, his health began to deteriorate. So he tapped his longtime friend, Frederik Pohl, as his collaborator. Clarke sent Pohl 100 pages of notes, only 40 to 50 pages of which contained fully written text. Even Clarke had difficulty deciphering the notes, but Pohl wrote out the manuscript, the final version of which Clarke reviewed just days before his death this past March. But Clarke offered a more direct farewell to fans in the form of his 90th birthday video:

Living longer than Heinlein allowed Asimov to have the last word in the debate, bashing the release of Heinlein letters Grumbles from the Grave. After sneeringly jabbing Heinlein for making editor John W. Campbell never reject one of his stories, he says:

Furthermore, although a flaming liberal during the war, Heinlein became a rock-ribbed far right conservative immediately afterward. This happened at just the time he changed wives from a liberal woman, Leslyn, to a rock-ribbed far-right conservative woman, Virginia.

Asimov's favorite Heinlein novel was Double Star, an appraisal echoed by critics like James Blish. He did not like the way Heinlein tried to subtly alter his work for the period he was writing in:

Heinlein, on the other hand, tried to keep up with the times, so that his later novels were "with it" as far as post-1960s literary fashions were concerned. I say "tried" because I think he failed.

The contemporary reader can be forgiven for assuming "rock-ribbed" is a metaphor for the unprotected sex a right-winger would presumably endorse. It does after all mean "firm and unyielding."

Heinlein and John W. Campbell were already friendly when he wrote him this letter on November 2, 1940. Heinlein had seen a short-story contest advertisement in another magazine, and wrote a story for it. Later he decided the story, called "Life-Line," was too good for the contest, so he sent it to Astounding. Campbell immediately accepted the story at 1 cent per word, which meant a total of $70 for the whole thing. (It appeared in the Astounding at right, and you can read it here.)

In this letter — reproduced in Grumbles from the Grave, a collection of such letters — Heinlein seeks to the settle his arrangement with Astounding, and perhaps reconcile his own warring self.

He starts by describing how he rejected an offer of work from another magazine:

.. . I turned it down, stating that the rate for my own name was higher than that. (I may let them publish "Lost Legacy" under a pseudonym, as it is one that I really want to see published. I am going to give a slight amount of rewriting to make it science fiction rather than fantasy, but still let it say the things I want it to say.)

Having touched on my personal policy to that extent, I feel obliged to be more specific, since it concerns you, too. I am going up, or out, in this business — never down. I don't want to write pulp bad enough to slip back into a lower word rate, a hack attitude. As long as you are editing, at Street and Smith or elsewhere, you can have my stuff, if you want it, at a cent and a quarter a word, or more if you see fit and the business office permits. I won't use an agent in dealing with you, although I now have one. Neither my name nor the name of Anson MacDonald will be made available to any other book at the rate at which you buy from me, and, if I get an offer of a better rate, I will let you know and give you refusal, as it were, before switching. I write for money and will sell elsewhere for a materially higher word rate but I feel a strong obligation to you. No other editor will get the two names you have advertised and built up at the rate you pay.

I seem to have drifted a long way from stating my own policy and intentions. I will probably go on writing, at least part time, indefinitely. If you someday find it necessary to start rejecting my stuff, I expect to take a crack at some other forms, slick perhaps, and book-form novels, and in particular a non-fiction book on finance and money theory which I have wanted to do for a long time, also some articles on various economic and social problems. I have an outlet for such things, but it would be largely a labor of love - maybe ten dollars for an article into which has gone a week of research, and slim royalties on books in that field. Howsomever, I might crack the high word rates on general fiction at the same time. One never knows - I never expected to be writing pulp, or fiction of any sort, but it has paid me well...to my surprise!

Addendum to remarks about my own policy: You may possibly feel that my wish to get out of the field of science fiction and into something else smacks of ungratefulness, in the view of the way you have treated me. That is the very reason why I am looking forward to another field. I dislike very much to have business relations with a close personal friend. The present condition in which you like and buy everything I write may go on for years. If so — fine! Everybody is happy. But it would be no pleasure to you to have to reject my stuff, and certainly no pleasure to me. And it can happen at any time — your editorial policy may change, or my style or approach may change, or I simply may go stale. When it does occur, I want to cut if off short without giving it a chance to place a strain on our friendship. I don't want it to reach a point where you would view the reception of one my manuscripts with a feeling of, "For Christ's sake, why doesn't he peddle his tripe somewhere else. He knows I hate to turn him down." And I don't want to greet a series of returned manuscripts in my mailbox with a feeling of, "Good God, what does he expect for a cent and a quarter a word? The New Testament?" Nor do I want you taking borderline stories from me simply because you hate to bounce them. I suspected that might be the case with the tesseract story.

'Heinlein Gets The Last Word' by Kurt Vonnegut on December 9, 1990 [The New York Times]

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

Corporations will own your ass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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