We hadn't realized quite how many space zombies there are out there — especially if you throw in some edge cases like the Reavers. Zombies have been ruling the spaceways for decades, since Plan 9 From Outer Space and Astro Zombies (which is technically about a human space engineer who uses astronaut tech to turn Earthlings into zombies.)

Thanks to Ira Wile, Angela Cooper, Morgan Johnson, Austin Grossman, Greta Christina, Derek Powazek, Brent Cox, Alasdair Stuart, Kayobi, 92BuicLeSabre, and anyone else we missed!

Driq of Cliq, from Green Lantern.

Lately, Green Lantern is all about the space zombies, with the huge galaxy-spanning Blackest Night crossover event. Everyone who's ever died in DC Comics is being reincarnated as a "Black Lantern," wielding a super-powerful set of rings that Batman's skull coughed up. (Or something.) But really, my favorite space zombie from Green Lantern has to be Driq of Cliq, the lantern who dies at the hands of Sinestro — but his ring keeps him alive, and sort of sentient, indefinitely. He shambles through a ton of issues of the comic, before finally coming undone when Hal Jordan/Parallax deactivates all the power rings. Driq is like a space zombie super-mascot.

The Reavers from Firefly/Serenity

Okay, so they're not technically undead, but the Reavers are totally zombies in every way that matters. They're mindless shells of human beings who've lost their humanity and everything else except the lust to kill and destroy. Like the "Rage" virus survivors in 28 Days Later, the Reavers are pale, posthuman and terrifying. They haunt the spaceways, their vicious howling almost echoing through the void.

The Husks in Mass Effect

The geth, merciless alien artificial intelligences, have a secret weapon: they impale dead people on dragon's teeth, mechanical spikes which turn the corpses into Husks, zombie-like reanimated soldiers. The dead people's organs and insides are liquified and replaced by cybernetics.

The victims in Lifeforce

Note: We debated endlessly whether Lifeforce was about zombies or vampires — the three aliens discovered aboard the spaceship are definitely vampires, since they devour your life force. And it's based on a book called The Space Vampires. On the other hand, the vampires come to Earth and start renanimating loads of humans, who definitely seem more zombie-like.

The "death troopers" in Star Wars: Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber

We'll be reviewing this book in a few days, but here's one of the entrants for Del Rey's book trailer contest. The damaged prison barge Purge finds an Imperial Star Destroyer floating dead in space, and the Purge sends people over to scavenge for parts — but the Star Destroyer isn't empty after all. A new plague has turned some of its crew into the living dead, who roam in packs. Writes Schreiber: "They traveled together now, their swollen, disease-ravaged bodies pressing against one another, death as the final brotherhood... Their eyes never left his, and there was a slinking primitve slyness to their movement... Sartoris saw ropy strands of drool swinging from their mouths, human and nonhuman alike."

The Swarm in Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell.

Yet another set of zombies created by evil science, the Swarm is a bioweapon created by the distant human alliance — it turns you into a shambling, semi-telepathic zombie. And all of the zombies in the Swarm form a neural net, a hive mind that gets smarter the more people they bite.

Space Zombies

They're terrifying! They're relentless! They're Canadian! Triple Take Productions has crafted several black-and-white short films about zombies from space — including Space Zombies: Terror From The Sky!, in which alien zombies come to Earth to transplant cat brains into people. Or into themselves. Ummmm... it's not quite clear. There's definitely a cat brain transplant thing happening, in any case. I can think of several people who would be greatly improved by having cat brains transplanted into them.

Kai from Lexx

The last of the Brunnen-G, Kai is killed trying to save his people from the Divine Shadow — but instead of being destroyed, his corpse is reanimated as a Divine Assassin, who cannot be killed. And that's just one thing on the long list of stuff Kai cannot do, after being dead. Until finally, he wins his life back in a chess game. (Thanks, Disco Dave!)

The Necromorphs in Dead Space

Reanimated by some kind of unknown alien micro-organism, the Necromorphs are human corpses brought back to life, to attack and destroy the living. Any human who dies rapidly turns into a Necromorph, usually due to an Infector, which penetrates your skull with its sharp proboscis. Some Necromorphs are hideously mutated.

The Flood from Halo

These parasitic alien life forms create bodies for themselves out of the recently deceased, creating a quasi-zombie army that sprouts tentacles instead of human limbs or sensory arrays instead of heads. They alter the host organism's DNA by digesting, creating weird parodies of the human form.

Buckell writes, in part:

[In his presentation,] Geoff [gives] us the rundown on Venus and what planned missions to Venus are going to look like, or may look like if they’re approved. Then he suddenly reminds us all about Venus’s basic properties. It’s hot. Crazy hot. The pressure is off the chain. It rains frickin’ sulfuric acid! There’s no air.

Then Geoff says, all that aside, Venus is probably the second most habitable planet in the solar system.

Say what? I’m intrigued, as Geoff goes on to explain that if you go high enough up into Venus’s atmosphere, the pressure is standard, the heat normal, you’re above the sulfuric acid-raining clouds, and then tells us that there, normal breathable Earth air is a lifting gas. So if you were to, say, enclose a mile-wide structure in a bubble, and fill that with normal breathable air, it would float.

In other words, you get a scientific justification for Cloud City. As long as it’s a giant floating marble.

Hell yes. And then maybe could you fill the floating marble with radio-controlled zombies, please? And like fight them? Yes, you could.

The Big Idea: Tobias Buckell [via Whatever]

The third novel in Buckell's series about a group of space-going humans descended from Earth's Caribbean cultures, Sly Mongoose is set in the wake of a human rebellion against alien colonizers. These aliens believed it was their “burden” to help humans shed their “savage ways” via enslavement and mind-control, and have finally been beaten back by a group of elite human fighters called the Mongoose Men (though many are women).

But now a new alien threat haunts the human planets. A mysterious plague has hit cargo ship on its way to Chilo, a planet where over a dozen cities float in the upper levels of a dense, high-pressure atmosphere of poisonous clouds and burning surface temperatures. The plague, spread via biting, turns humans into zombie-like creatures who communicate via transmitters that grow out of their necks and cause them to merge into a collective mental entity. Luckily a seasoned Mongoose named Pepper happens to be on board that cargo ship, and manages to escape (though not after an awesome, bloody battle). He shoots himself into Chilo's atmosphere in the hopes of reaching a city where he can raise the alarm and call for reinforcements before the plague spreads.

Pepper crash-lands on Yatapek, one of Chilo's poorest floating cities, and that's where things get really interesting. Buckell isn't content to give us a human-on-alien war that's spectacular in its technological scope. He wants to ground that war in a social reality whose roots go back present-day Earth, where the differences between rich and poor are often greater than between friend and foe on the battlefield.

While many of Chilo's cities are technological marvels where everyone has brain implants that wire them directly to an augmented reality system, Yatapek is struggling to survive off biodome farms and tech that's over a century old. The city makes money from a small mining operation and tourism. Most of its residents live in layers of favelas sandwiched between industrial factories. How will Pepper ever hold off a sophisticated alien zombie threat from a city whose resources are so meager?

Eventually Pepper strikes up an unlikely partnership with one of Yatapek's young mining equipment operators, Timas, who has seen what he believes is an alien roving the supposedly-dead surface of Chilo. This alien could become the key to understanding the zombie threat. Together with a representative from the techno-democratic “consensus” of Chilo's richer cities, Pepper and Timas hatch a plan to hold off the zombies, save the planet, and kick some alien ass. In the process, they fight pirates, uncover dark extraterrestrial secrets, and engage in a giant air battle so exciting that the only way to describe it is to yell “fucking cool!” in your best high-on-Mountain-Dew voice.

In many ways, Sly Mongoose has a deceptively simple plot. The novel's thoughtfulness becomes more apparent each time Buckell invites us into the social systems of Chilo's cities. Never preachy or heavy-handed, Sly Mongoose nevertheless tells a powerful story of post-colonial peoples fighting desperately for their freedom from an alien force that wants to co-opt rather than kill them.

Sly Mongoose [via Amazon]

The trailer for Tobias Buckell's latest novel Sly Mongoose has been out for a while (the book hits stores in August). Instead of focusing on the process of writing or why he's qualified to write this book, Buckell made a trailer that focuses on world-building. The selling point of Sly Mongoose, according to this trailer, is the insanely cool planet where it takes place and the floating cities that cling to its upper atmosphere. We don't get much of a sense of the plot, just a sense of place. And if the plot is as cool as this planet, you'll be sold.

By far my favorite subgenre of scifi book trailers is for the subgenre of erotic fiction. You don't see this kind of book plugged a lot at cons, or in the magazines, but you sure see it a lot on YouTube when you search for "book trailer scifi." I love this trailer for Lexxie Couper's novel Shifting Lust — the music totally works, plus there is a shape-shifter "like no other" and lots of long, loving shots of VR-looking semi-naked people. What is the plot? Um, plot? You want a plot?

Another way to go if you want to promote your book is to go totally lo-fi. That's what Jeff Sommers did with his trailer for futuristic Mickey Spillane-style noir book Digital Plague. What I like about this trailer, aside from the fact that there is a lot of gratuitous "kill kill kill" stuff, is the fact that it really conveys the novel's sense of satiric fun as well as its shoot-em-up premise. Like the trailer for Sly Mongoose, this trailer won't give you much of a sense of the plot, but you do get a feeling for the world where it's set. I wonder if this means book trailer makers think that scifi books sell based on world-building rather than on plot or narrative structure?