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.

I sat down with Buckell at WorldCon last week. First we talked about Arctic Rising, and where he is with it.

Buckell said:

It's a near-future cyberpunk ecothriller. I'm just working on the first third of it. It's the first of two books I'm doing for Tor, and both will be ecothrillers.

I'm trying to write something that's [politically] moderate ecological SF. I did something similar in short fiction in the last year, with my story in Metatropolis, and now I'm taking it into novel form. Some people called me a raging liberal for writing [that story]. But I want to piss off liberals and conservatives – all of their solutions are problematic. Dogma gets in the way of what need to be done about the environment.

There are already responses on the ground to what we're facing that are agnostic – in third world, for example, where people have already figured out ways to reduce your impact on the earth. It's criminal that it's hard for me to find a showerhead that doesn't have an on-off switch that's detachable. I grew up on a boat and all the showerheads were like that. Now I routinely use oodles of water because my showerhead doesn't turn off. Little things like that add up. In St. Thomas, people get water by catching rainwater on the roof.

I realized that there are not many people interested in engaging with this stuff. It's in the political background and in science magazines. But there's not as much engagement with it in science fiction as I've been hoping for. That's why I want to do a James Bondesque adventure with climate change. I love adventure. What I hate about polemical novels is two characters talking to each other.

I asked Buckell if he'd consider doing another franchise tie-in like he did with the Halo novel, and he said that he only did the Halo book because he truly loves Halo. There are few other franchises he feels that way about, but, he admitted, "If anybody was ever to ask me to do something Wolverine-related - good grief I'd do it in a heartbeat."

Instead of playing in other people's franchises, he's interested in creating his own. He said:

You become a mini-consortium if you can. Given how much fun I've had with Halo games, comics, and reading and writing Halo books, I'd love to do different media with my stuff. There's a possible chance of a graphic short story adaptation coming up for me. I would completely dig seeing cross media stuff happen with my work.

One of the most arresting aspects of Buckell's writing is his facility with fight scenes, which are incredibly hard to write well. I asked him what his secret is for planning and executing one of his trademark action-packed scenes. He said:

Fight scenes are all about the stakes. If you took a Jackie Chan movie and novelize it, it would be weird. In fiction, you have to figure out the consequences of the fight scene. What the stakes are, what led the characters there. You need to consider the emotional side of the fight to make it feel like it's a major problem the character has to overcome.

As an action-oriented, blow-things-up writer from the beginning, my juvenalia is filled with fight scenes, but I wasn't able to make them interesting until I figured out they exist in a larger context. The reader is reading it like "oh crap oh crap" and that's what provides the tension. Really effective fight scenes are no more than a paragraph – the important parts are the anticipation and fallout. The shorter you write, the faster it feels to the reader. A page-long fight is the equivalent of slow motion – you've brought the book to a standstill. You can do it stylistically in a John Woo flash, but if you want a balls-to-the-wall, ugly, brief human thing, you've got a paragraph to get to of the action, and then you need to get back into stakes.

When I write fight scenes, I spend time trying to draw out the environment [the characters] are in. Tim Powers taught me that characters need to interact with the physicality of the environment. A fight scene lets you block out the physical nature of something. They climb around in it, and that lets you describe the interior of an airship. You get to provide exposition as well as a fight scene or moments of drama. More effective to have a character back up and fall over a couch than to say "There's a room and a couch and then they fight."

Legion flight rings in Legion Of Super Heroes. The super-powered teenagers have a whole variety of powers and special gifts, but they can all fly — thanks to these gravity-negating rings. And ne'er-do-well time traveler Booster Gold also got hold of one of these rings and took it back to our time, using it to become a superhero.

Time Ring in Doctor Who, "Genesis Of The Daleks" Despite the name, it's more of a bracelet — when the Doctor gets separated rom his time machine, the TARDIS, his people give him a special bracelet that allows him to travel through time and space. That way, he can visit the birthplace of the Daleks without bringing along a conspicuous blue phone booth.

The Planeteers' rings in Captain Planet and the Planeteers. These five rings give the Planeteers control over the four elements, plus Heart. (The band, I guess.) And when you put all five rings together, you can summon Captain Planet himself.

The tiara, bracelets and girdle in Wonder Woman. Diana has many amazing powers, but chief among them is the ability to accessorize. Her bracelets can repel bullets, her lariat is the only effective lie-detector William Moulton Marston ever came up with, and her tiara can be thrown much like a Batarang. In some versions, her girdle is also superpowered.

Frodo's ring in Lord Of The Rings. Not really science fiction, but still an important piece of super-powered jewelry. It lets you turn invisible, but too bad about the "corrupting your soul" and "letting Sauron's evil minions know where you are" stuff. I'll let Flight Of The Conchords explain it to you.

Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem in Harry Potter. This tiara-like thing was supposed to increase the wisdom of the wearer, but after Helena Ravenclaw stole it, it fell into the hands of Voldemort, who used it to make one of his horcruxes. So yeah, not all that wise really.

Pancho's jewelry in The Silent War by Ben Bova. Pancho, who's a woman despite her male name, has a whole set of weaponized jewelry, including an explodng necklace she can throw at bad guys, and earrings packed with miniature instruments of death.

Eddie Murphy's ring in A Vampire In Brooklyn. Apparently it not only turned whoever wore it next into a vampire, it also gave you bigger male endowment. Which makes total sense. Sort of.

Karolina's medic alert bracelet in Runaways. The alien Karolina Dean looks quite different from her fellow adventurers — unless she wears her special alien bracelet that allows her to appear perfectly human. Eventually, she learns to live without it.

The Flash's ring in The Flash. Almost forgot this one. Wally West would be naked without this piece of jewelry, since it contains his entire costume, super-compressed. The costume expands to clothe Wally almost instantly when he presses his ring. Or something.

The Mystical Amulet of Right in Captain Britain. I guess if you're wearing something with a name like that, you'd better know what you're doing. Wearing this turns Brian Braddock into Captain Britain, and it's part of the power to reshape the Multiverse.

Congo Bill's ring, from Congorilla. Congo Bill and the gorilla known as Congorilla wear matching rings, and when Congo Bill needs a little gorilla strength, or just a little "me" time, he can transfer his brain into Congorilla's body, and vice versa, by rubbing the ring. And no, "rubbing the ring to unleash the gorilla" is not a euphemism for anything.

The brooch in Beast Master's Quest by Andre Norton and Lyn McConchie. Laris, like most people on Arzor, carries her personal communicator disguised as a brooch or pendant. This saves her from having it taken away. "Even the detestable V'a'een must have assumed the communicator to be only a brooch and chosen not to take that away from her."

The tiara in Sailor Moon. I'm not exactly sure what Sailor Moon's tiara does, but it's pretty disco-tastic, and you probably wouldn't want her to throw it at you:

The pendant in "A Little Peace And Quiet," The Twilight Zone. Harrassed housewife Penny finds a pendant that stops time whenever she screams "SHUT UP!" But then she stops time just as nuclear missiles are about to wipe out her town. What to do?

Mrs. Brisby's amulet in Secret Of N.I.M.H. The old rat named Nicodemus finds a gold amulet which has mysterious powers, and he eventually passes it on to the meek field mouse Mrs. Brisby, in this film adaptation. Eventually, she's able to use it to jack up a house.

Necklaces in The Urth Of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Before going on deck in one of the "ships that sail between the suns," you must put on an artificial personal atmosphere, which consists of a necklace of linked cylinders. Throughout the novel, Severian is constantly worrying about his necklace and whether it's been damaged, since it's a lifeline.

The Foxhead Medallion in The Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan. Another fantasy one — Mat Cauthon gets this nice piece of bling after passing through the Rhuidean twisted-door ter'angreal. It protects against the One Power.

Necklaces in Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. Nashara has a necklace that seems pretty all purpose. You can put the pendant in your ear to use it as a communication/translation device. It also has some computer read-outs that let you know your status among the alien Gahe, and there's a remote-control function as well.

The Gem of Amara in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. In the big cross-over episode between Buffy and Angel, a magical ring allows Spike to become invincible, and to wander out in the daytime. Too bad it falls into the sweaty hands of an evil sadist whom Spike hires to terrorize Angel.

The Thing's ring in his 1970s cartoon. Apparently instead of being stuck as the rocky-skinned Thing, Ben Grimm had a ring that allowed him to change back and forth. He would chant, "Thing Ring, Do Your Thing!" Okay then.

The Eye Of Agamotto in Doctor Strange. That's some serious glam-booty jewelry right there. Doctor Strange sports a nice brooch holding his cloak together, which is also one of the major sources of his awesome powers. Plus it helps him blend in in Greenwich Village.

The bracelet in Dial H For H.E.R.O. It's sort of a bracelet, sort of a watch. Mostly, it's a dial that turns you into a different superpowered being every time you use it.

The quantum bands in Quasar. This superhero wears fancy bracelets (sort of like wrist braces for RSIs) with super-powered jewels on them that allow him to tap into the Quantum Zone. They're fused to his wrists, but he eventually loses them to various other characters, including Phyla-Vell. In similar fashion, Captain Marvel and Rick Jones wear "Nega-Bands" that enable them to switch places.

Freedom Ring's ring in Marvel Comics. Apparently he was a short-lived gay superhero in the Marvel Universe, who only existed long enough to get killed off and make for some yummy pathos. He gets hold of a ring that alters the very fabric of reality, which a supervillain named the Patternmaster dropped, and finds out its special abilities when he accidentally creates an ice-cream sundae. Later, he uses the ring to restore his legs after he loses them, and then to make himself stronger and faster. But then he dies. Oh well.

The Mandarin's ten rings in Iron Man. This somewhat caricaturish Asian villain has ten rings that give him absolute power, except when he's facing a guy in powered armor. I do like the "anti-technology field" though.

Lex Luthor's kryptonite ring in Superman. The bald eagle of evil makes a special ring with a kryptonite setting, so he can bring the Man of Steel to his knees. But it costs Lex his hand due to radiation exposure. Later, Batman gets hold of it, and keeps it in his belt pouch, where the radiation will only affect body areas adjacent to Batman's belt. Nothing to worry about.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Thanks also to Kaila Hale-Stern, Hiya Swanhuyser, Meredith Woerner, Dorian Katz, Mathtew Cokeley, S. Bear Bergman, Rachael Parker, Morgan Johnson, Brian Williams, Rus McLaughlin, Austin Grossmna, Douglas Wolk, Kiala Kazebee, Luis Alberto Urrea, Cindy Urrea, Genevieve Valentine, and @CleverUserName, @Soapboxx, @Dahveed76 and @Nightwyrm on Twitter. And, as is always the case with these sorts of articles, I found this great round-up of comic book rings at Comics Should Be Good right when I was about to be done researching this piece. But it's great stuff.

The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held this past February, is a yearly event that brings literary professionals together to examine current trends and new technologies in the publishing world.

One panel, called "Where Do You Go with 40,000 Readers? A Study in Online Community Building," included John Scalzi (author of Old Man's War), Tobias Buckell (author of Halo: The Cole Protocol), and Patrick Nielsen Hayden (editor of the science fiction publisher Tor Books); the panel was moderated by Ron Hogan of Beatrice Books. All three of the panelists are bloggers as well. A video of the panel has just gone up (we've put it at the bottom of the post), and here's a quick summary of the highlights.

The basic premise of the discussion was that using blogs and newer media like Twitter can make publishing a more successful enterprise - a not particularly startling assertion in 2009. But the panelists delved into the nuances of what really makes a difference. Patrick Nielsen Hayden noted the appeal of successful bloggers goes beyond just their ability to write:

As an editor who's always look for good, promising new writers, obviously the ability to write an entertaining work of popular fiction is absolutely paramount, but on a secondary level, somebody who can keep an audience engaged with their personality and their thoughts on a variety of topics that aren't the incredibly boring subject of writing is a big plus. It basically suggests somebody who's going to flourish in the new media environment…

Towards the end of the panel, John Scalzi returned to this idea and succinctly spelled out the relationship between his roles as blogger and science fiction author:

When you build those 40,000 people or 4,000 people or however many you have because what you write is interesting to them and they come back again and again and again you develop an interest in yourself as an author. There's somebody in this room who once said the next generation of authors will be performers as well and there is something to that. My performance is not necessarily what I'm doing now, for example my performance is on my website on a daily basis. It makes a difference.

Of course, it's all well and good to trumpet the coming of this bold new media as the next big thing, but does it actually translate to increased sales? Nielsen Hayden gave a resounding yes to this question:

We published John's first novel, Old Man's War, as a hardcover original. Like most hardcover originals from unknown science fictions writers it shipped a very few thousand copies and went back to press almost immediately, and by the time a year had elapsed we had sold nearly like nine thousand copies in hardcover, over two-thirds of them through online sources, mostly Amazon. Which is to say the brick and mortar book industry mostly treated it like any first novel and it took them a long time to realize their lunch was being thoroughly eaten by online sales because John already existed online.

Moreover, a web presence is not only useful in driving up print sales; increasingly, it can be an end in itself, and a more popular one than traditional sources of science fiction at that. Scalzi discussed the impact of the Tor Books website offering original short fiction:

I think one of the things that was very useful for Tor to do, quite honestly, was they they did from the outset publish some original fiction. And I think that is something that is very useful, not just for upcoming authors but for existing authors…The short fiction market is kind of in turmoil at the moment and people are wondering where they're going to be able to find short fiction and how it works and where we go from there. The fact that Tor from the outset is doing short fiction has made quite a difference. I'll give you an example using my own particular story. We did, after The Coup, which came out when Tor.com debuted and after two weeks, more people had clicked through to read the story, or at least look at the story, than the combined circulation of the big three science fiction magazines.

One of Tor's advantages is that it actually pays writers a decent rate compared to the prestige science fiction magazines. Tor's online content pays about 25 cents per word, while their print counterparts pay about 7.5 cents per word. Scalzi draws the obvious conclusion:

Tor.com fiction is generally some of the best short fiction out there and it is specifically because it is paying a professional rate as opposed to a lot of the rates being paid in the genre.

They acknowledged that Scalzi's model for success can't really work for everyone, considering a huge part of his audience appeal is derived from the fact he's been writing online since 1998 (I'm not even sure how aware I was of the internet in 1998, but, in my defense, I was ten at the time). Still, there's always something new and different that those seeking to build a web presence can make their own, as long as they're able to do it in 140 characters or less:

Scalzi…Part of the reason that I have this audience I have is I was able to spend ten years building it. Now necessarily this is not…something that is necessarily practical for every writer to do. Every writer cannot replicate this because [to Nielsen Hayden] you say it's an early advantage and simply…

Nielsen Hayden: …right now there is just time for people who are suited to the medium to be early adopters of Twitter and become the huge Twitter stars of the future.

If I understand what he's saying, and I think I do, I believe this means Shaquille O'Neal will be the next big science fiction writer. I am very much on board with that.

Tobias Buckell, on the other hand, detailed common misconceptions about how online readerships work. Essentially, online marketing strategies can never have marketing as the sole, perhaps not even as the primary, purpose:

For an example, because I do have some credibility of being an author of a blog that's been around for a while and I've used it to leverage some of my success is that I will usually see a new writer with a first novel run off and create a website that is purely promotional and I have to say that one of the words I mentioned when I was first talking about what success I do have was ‘authenticity'…When I also do consulting for corporations occasionally about how to roll out some new media, like how to integrate Twitter or how to bring a blog to their website is always their first impulse is they want to speak to the customer, they want to deliver a press release, they want to tout their products. They're not interested in a conversation, they're not interested in building, like we said, a community. And so one the amazing things I've found is the honesty and authenticity to go out there and try to engage produces more long-term results, stronger result than just sort of vomiting content.

If you've got forty spare minutes and you really want to know more about this, you can watch the full video below:

[Bowling To The Future]

Oh, and there will be some spoilers here. But I won't reveal who Luke's daddy is or anything.

Metatropolis is unusual for a number of reasons. It's available as an audiobook now - narrated by Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan, Kandyse McClure, and Alessandro Juliani - but it's coming out as a print anthology this summer. It's a shared-world anthology, but it's not based on a world created by one particular author, with a bunch of other writers trying to stay faithful to the Master's vision. Instead, it's a near(ish) future setting that editor John Scalzi and the contributors worked out amongst themselves.

And it's strangely optimistic, once you get past the premise that the United States has all but collapsed and old ways of living are being wiped out. Most of the stories in the book offer something between a trickle and a flood of hope. The biggest theme in the book is that once our current unsustainable way of living finally unsustains, something better may rise up as a result out of the chaos. But on the other hand, the chaos will be plentiful.

And most of that optimism is centered on cities, or city-like strutures. Most "fall of civilization" storylines show cities turning into unliveable nightmares of violence and bad hair. It's only in little rural communes and enclaves that you can survive the collapse of everything. But Metatropolis turns this cliche on its head, with some future cities that seem quite nice, surrounded by suburbs and countryside that are referred to as "The Wilds."

In particular, the Cascadiopolis of Jay Lake's story "In The Forests Of The Night" and the New St. Louis of Scalzi's "Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis" are places you could imagine wanting to hang out. Cascadiopolis is an anarchist commune built near what's left of Portland, Lake's hometown, where everybody works to create green technologies. And New St. Louis is more hierarchical, but also extremely eco-friendly, with vertical farms and genetically engineered pigs who create ultra-rich fertilizer and whose urine that can be used to stabilize plastic. Both places are all about sustainability and "zero footprint," even as they keep out the outside world with paranoid levels of security. Towards the end of the book, we learn that these megacities have a loose confederation, including non-U.S. cities like Shanghai, that allows people to travel among them.

In Tobias Buckell's awesome story "StochastiCity," we visit a version of Detroit that's more like what you'd expect in a futuristic dystopia, complete with private security guards from a company called Edgewater, who crack skulls of anyone who gets in the way. But even there, super-organized eco-anarchists have a scheme to hoodwink Edgewater and take possession of one huge building, turning it into a vertical farm and building a mini-eco-paradise in the middle of the urban hell.

That's another major theme of the book's five long stories: people creating unconventional social networks. In Buckell's story, it's "turking," in which people subcontract a task out to dozens, or hundreds, of individuals, none of whom know the whole story. In Karl Schroder's story, "To Hie From Far Cilenia," this turns into an alternate reality game, Oversatch, where fictional countries like Cilenia and Sanotica are not just overlaid on the real world, but they supercede it. (To join the game, you need to wear special glasses which let you see a display of the alternate reality.) And instead of "turking," people actually "ride" other people by looking through their eyes and telling them what to do or say. And in Lake's story, we see how trust networks are still vulnerable at the level of human interaction, because someone who's good at social engineering or especially charismatic will always be able to find a way in to a supposedly closed system.

As I mentioned, the optimism in the stories is tempered with a lot of chaos, and we get to see a lot of the downsides of this shiny future. If you happen to be in the wrong city, or outside the cities altogether, life can be pretty horrendous. Besides the somewhat thuggish security contractor Edgewater, we also see how organized crime has stepped in to take some of the roles that government has let drop. All the same, I'm not sure how realistic a picture of our urban future the book is supposed to be - at times, there seemed to be a bit of wishful thinking mixed in. And here and there, there are huge chunks of preachiness about environmentalism, recycling, cars, sustainability, and other green topics.

But the way you know these urban settings have succeeded in their worldbuilding task is, they provide a backdrop for some cracking city adventures. Scalzi and Buckell, in particular, keep you guessing about where their stories are going and provide fun yarns where you root for their underdog protagonists. These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there. [Amazon]

Buckell is collecting his blog entries about writing into a condensed book, which will eventually see print but is online as a wiki right now. So far, he's put up the introduction and a few chapters, plus a set of the articles he wrote for Speculations about being a "NeoPro."

Reading Buckell's writing advice on the heels of Samuel R. Delany's About Writing is pretty illuminating - Buckell is much more concerned with the ins and outs of making it as a writer, although both authors offer some nuts-and-bolts advice. So far, Buckell's advice seems less philosophical, but probably more helpful to today's beginning author. I especially love his explanation for how to avoid creating a copy of a copy of classic science fiction stories - go back to the "original source" material and do your own research. Buckell seems to be adding stuff regularly, so it's worth bookmarking.

[A Draft In Progress via Tor.com]

Of course, plenty of original movies do get turned into books - but they're usually rushed novelizations, written in a month by someone who's juggling ten other deadlines and adding speech tags to the movie script. If you're lucky, you get a few extra insights into the characters and one or two scenes that the adapter added, or which were cut from the movie before or after filming. Plus, of course, the movies that get their own book adaptations aren't usually ones which could benefit from a really smart dose of storytelling. Movie adaptations of books, meanwhile, are usually disappointing for a whole different set of reasons.

But every now and then, a movie comes along down the pike that actually cries out for a smart, interesting book that brings out the ideas simmering below the surface. Here are ten movies that I'd love to see a really smart book version of, and the authors who would write them in my fondest dreams.

Twelve Monkeys. Cole (Bruce Willis) travels back in time from a plague-ravaged future to try and discover the source of the virus, but he ends up tangling with his own past in unpredictable ways. I was torn between listing this one and director Terry Gilliam's other dystopian epic, Brazil. But of the two movies, I think I'm more desperate to read a really thoughtful novel of Monkeys, preferably written by someone who watched the film with Gilliam a few times. There's so much confusing stuff in this movie, especially Cole's causal loop - is he creating his own dystopian future, or is he simply trapped in the logic of already-existing events? Did the scientists send Cole back on purpose to make sure their plague-ridden timeline "happens," as some have suggested? (In which case, why would they be worried about that, given that it's already happened?)
Who should write it: Marge Piercy, author of Woman On The Edge Of Time. She knows all about time travel, madness and the long reach of dystopia.

The Fountain. Meredith suggested this one - there's already a graphic novel adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's original screenplay, the one he never got to film. But there's no prose novelization of the actual movie, which I found to be a huge let-down despite its sprawling, ambitious plot. Judging from the results of our recent poll, many of you consider The Fountain an underrated masterpiece. Maybe a book could flesh out some of the confusing stuff about the present-day cancer cure and just what's going on with that weird tree-in-space sequence.
Who should write it: I'm going to go with Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn. He might be able to ground the present day stuff and add some life to those lifeless characters, and when he's channeling Philip K. Dick, he does weird-and-fantastical quite well. Maybe it would all feel epic and personal, the way I think the film was supposed to.

The Brother From Another Planet. John Sayles' story of an escaped slave with weird feet who lands up in present-day New York is one of my favorite films, although I haven't seen it all the way through in a decade. Joe Morton is fantastic as the mute escapee, who has a strangely close relationship with technology.
Who should write it: Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose, has dealt with themes of slavery and alien cultures in a lot of his writing.

Sleeper. Wikipedia claims this film is loosely based on the H.G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes, but I would say "loosely" is the operative word. And this is such a crazy slapsticky subversive novel, complete with humans impersonating robots, Orgasmotrons, a fake utopia and nose-cloning. And so much more.
Who should write it: Douglas Adams, if he was still alive? Actually, I'm going to go with io9 contributor Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible), just because I think he could nail the neurotic Woody Allen tone, while doing a lot to flesh out the absurdity of this freaky dystopia.

Possible Worlds This little-known film stars Tom McCamus as a man who keeps journeying through different alternate universes and having a relationship with the same woman (Tilda Swinton), which always seems to end badly. And then there's a twist, which I won't reveal here but which we gave away in a found footage.
Who should write it: Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife.

S1m0ne. Andrew Niccol's most disappointing film totally deserves a novel told from the point of view of Al Pacino's character, a third-rate movie director who creates a virtual actress to save his troubled movie - and then has to deal with her becoming a superstar. A novel might be able to make the movie's premise more believable and dispense with some of the VFX problems that dog the movie, and a tight focus on Pacino's POV would allow us to probe the psychology of a man who brings to life an irresistible virtual avatar, in a cross between Pygmalion and Cage Aux Folles.
Who should write it: Amy Thompson, author of Virtual Girl, who manages to make that novel's skeezy programmer who creates a gynoid and then tries to enslave her actually sympathetic.

The Matrix Trilogy. No, not just the first movie. I want to see the whole trilogy as one sprawling, insane novel about cyber-avatars. I want all of the lame discussions about free will in the second movie and all of the lame everything in the third movie to be beaten into submission, and the whole disappointing mess transformed into a seamless whole, the story of humans trapped in a virtual world rising up against their machine overlords, while a virtual man-in-black becomes a megalomaniac.
Who should write it: That's the hard part. There are so many cyberpunk authors I'd like to see try their hand at it. But in the end, I'm thinking Charles Stross.
He does sprawling post-human stories really amazingly well, and might add a whole extra conceptual layer to the Wachowskis' somewhat facile world-building.

Primer. This knotty time-travel movie actually stands on its own remarkably well, but I'd still like to see a smart, thoughtful novel that deals with all the of the intersecting timelines and unraveling protagonists.
Who should write it: David Gerrold, author of The Man Who Folded Himself, still possibly the weirdest time-travel novel of all time.

Slither. You might think this is just another over-the-top body horror movie, about alien parasites who infect a town's residents. But this movie goes so much further, showing how a woman can't escape her abusive husband. The parasite infects her husband first, and then all of the people whom it infects afterwards speak with the husband's voice, so she's constantly trapped. It's up there with Society and Dead/Alive in the disturbing horrific social commentary sweepstakes.
Who should write it: The great d.g.k. goldberg, if she was still alive. Otherwise, I would say Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl In The Ring.

Sunshine. The screenplay is available in book form, but there's no novelization. I loved this film, but many people don't seem to agree, and maybe a really strong novelization could help win over the doubters, especially if it made the slasher-movie third act feel like it grew naturally out of the rest of the story.
Who should write it: I'm thinking maybe Stephen Baxter, who's shown a talent for writing madness as well as planetary disasters and space exploits.

Note: I was going to include Galaxy Quest on this list - but realized it already has a novelization, by Terry Bisson. Who, by amazing coincidence, is probably exactly who I would have chosen to novelize that movie. Has anyone read Bisson's Galaxy Quest novel, and is it as good as it ought to be? It's only one cent on Amazon (plus a few bucks' shipping, of course.) Also, did you know that Christopher "The Prestige" Priest has novelized David Cronenberg's Existenz?

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]

According to Publisher's Weekly, the anthology features:

Near-future paradigm shifts in everything from race relations (in Ted Kosmatka's vivid and moving “N-Words,” where cloned Neanderthals encounter violent hatred from Homo sapiens) to the morality of uploaded consciousness (in Blake Charlton's clumsy but charming “Endosymbiont”), with varying success. The hero of Jay Lake's “The Future by Degrees” invents an energy-saving thermal superconductor only to be pursued by corporations protecting their business, with predictable results. Pepper, the mercenary hero of Tobias S. Buckell's Crystal Rain, refuses to assassinate a dictator in the morally contrived “Resistance.” Considerably more powerful is Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's “Spider the Artist,” which combines African folk tales and advanced robotics in a chilling story about a rising social conscience in the Nigerian oil fields.

I can't wait to dig into it!

Seeds of Change [via Amazon]