Note: I'm not including the Star Wars prequels here, because the big letdown was The Phantom Menace in 1999. After that, the other two movies couldn't really be letdowns.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This was the moment we realized Frank Miller wasn't really Frank Miller any more. He agreed to do the long-awaited sequel to his most famous and groundbreaking graphic novels, the story that redefined Batman for a generation — and he turned in a bland caricature of his earlier brilliance. You can complain all you want about the assitude of All-Star Batman And Robin and The Spirit, but TDKSA was the start of the hackery. Worst moment: When the Joker turns out to be the much-abused Dick Grayson, and Bats kills him without a second thought.

Fox's Reign Of Terror. Firefly should have been one of the great success stories of the 2000s. It's hard to remember now how invincible Joss Whedon seemed going into Firefly — with two hit shows under his belt, he was the writer of several huge movies. And now he was bringing his patented mixture of rollicking adventure and twisted artiness to a space opera. Sure, Firefly's "Cowboys in Space" thing may have confused people at first, but the show really does sell itself, after just a few minutes' viewing, thanks to vivid characters. The failure of the TV show didn't just damage Joss Whedon's career — it damaged media SF as a whole, helping to push us towards canned remakes and reboots. And Firefly's demise was just the first of a trail of broken dreams and disappointments, culminating in the cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the burial of the promising Virtuality.

NASA and the space program. The decade did hold some great achievements for NASA, including the Mars rovers and some probes traveling outwards into the solar system. But it's hard not to feel a bit crushed by the fact that NASA is retiring its fleet of space shuttles without having a replacement lined up. We're going to have to hitch a ride with the Russians from here on out, and it feels a bit, well, disappointing. Especially with science-fiction promising us that this is our time to explore the solar system and beyond it, the stars themselves.

Ang Lee's Hulk. Before this movie came out, I would have sworn that Ang Lee never made a bad film. His track record included arthouse sensations like The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm and Sense And Sensibility, but also the brilliant actioner Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. He was also perhaps the most artsy director to take on a superhero icon to date (no offense, Tim Burton). There was every reason to believe Hulk would be both epic and heartfelt — but instead, we got gamma-irradiated poodles, daddy issues and a Hulk who sulked. We probably won't ever get a really great Hulk movie now, after two failures, which sucks. The Hulk deserves a proper outing, in which he fights monsters and marauders and crushes buildings. The Hulk needs to discover that he's not the worst monster in his world, and have larger-than-life adventures. Ang Lee just wasn't capable of giving that to us.

The Matrix sequels. This seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, but maybe you need cyber-Colonel Sanders to take you back and explain to you how much we were all looking forward to The Matrix 2 & 3. Ten years ago, The Matrix was the freshest thing to come out in ages, despite playing on ideas that books had explored for years. Its blend of fetish and noir and cyberpunk and Hong Kong action felt viciously original. And there were just so many ideas for the sequels to explore, so many mysteries about the machine world to uncover. And then... we just sort of descended into muddle. And long rave scenes. And blind Jesus. Walking out of The Matrix Reloaded, I remember someone turning to me and saying, "Well, that wasn't even the best powerpoint presentation I've sat through lately."

Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis. DC Comics' biggest "event" storylines of the mid-2000s seemed to be groping towards a more adult, more flawed view of their major superheroes, with some of comics' most talent writers on board. But they overshot, landing in angstville and bombarding us with retcons that rewrote the "Satellite era" of the Justice League. As if in an attempt to capture the cachet of Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke two decades earlier, these stories gave us female heroes being raped or abused, and turning into murderers. And Batman saying to Superman, "The last time you inspired anyone was when you died." The melodrama was thicker than the walls of Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and yet when it was all over, it was hard to understand what any of it had been about. The superheroes were closer to a bickering family (calling each other by their first names all the time) and the threats they faced seemed more existential and less external.

Superman Returns. There were a slew of other disappointing superhero movies in the past decade — but mostly you knew going into them that they were going to be ass. Who really thought Brett Ratner would make a good X-Men movie? Even Spider-Man 3 showed every sign of being ass-flavored long before it came out, despite Sam Raimi's involvement. But this film was Bryan Singer coming off two great X-Men films and The Usual Suspects, and he was doing the gutsy move of making it a sequel to the two Donner movies instead of going for the standard-issue reboot. Singer doing Donner — how could it be bad? Uh. Well, there's the part where he changed Clark Kent into Stalkerman. And then there's the Son Of Superman thing. But also, maybe, there's just the fact that the Donner movies were of a different era, and you can't bring that back.

Heroes seasons 2-4. Just imagine, for a moment, if this show had lived up to the promise of its first season. I know it's almost impossible to picture it, but just try. This mutant soap opera thrived on showing us the complications and craziness that come from secret super powers, against the backdrop of a sinister mutant-hunting conspiracy and a super-powered serial killer. But the show wrote checks it couldn't cash, including showing us Claire growing into her heroic destiny and Hiro becoming a future shaved-headed badass. Most of all, the show ducked out on its very title, opting to show us histrionics and family squabbles in place of actual heroism.

Watchmen. It was perhaps the greatest graphic novel of all time — almost certainly the greatest superhero comic of all time — lovingly recreated on screen by the ultimate OCD nerd. Every panel of the comic, recreated as concept art, then as storyboards, then as living, breathing people in costumes, surrounded by CG. Finally, a movie made by us for us. Except. The result, though lovely as anything, looked sort of lifeless once you took it out of the Smashing Pumpkins music-video trailers. The characters didn't quite live and breathe — especially Silk Spectre II, who needed to be the heart of the story. And the ending wasn't just missing a giant squid, or some other huge monstrosity to replace it — it was also lacking a certain coherence and urgency. Once people start talking about power signatures, it suddenly turns into an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Maybe Watchmen could never have lived up to the book, but it could have been more thrilling than this, with a different Silk Spectre and a more thunderous ending.

Battlestar Galactica's big finale. I know that opinions will differ on this one — but just consider. BSG's finale was one of the most hyped things of recent years. We read endless interviews in which Edward James Olmos, Ron Moore and various others told us that the final episode would shake us to our very cores, and make us weep and smear paint and throw up on ourselves. Meanwhile, Syfy ran promos over and over again that said that "All Will Be Revealed," and I don't remember an asterisk leading to a disclaimer explaining that "All" in this context actually meant a limited number of things, not including how Starbuck came back from the dead or what the hell was up with the Opera House. Even if you think this was the most brilliant conclusion in history, you have to admit BSG promised too much.

The Lost World (1925)

There have been many movie adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel, but for our money, the original is still the best, thanks to some pretty amazing stop-motion animation showing dinosaurs trashing London. The groundbreaking special effects, by Willis O'Brien, gave rise to later classics like the original King Kong — and O'Brien trained Ray Harryhausen. This is also the only Lost World adaptation that Conan Doyle seems to have approved of personally. The whole thing is on Youtube, and here's the climax — skip to about 4:58 for the beginning of the dinosaur-rampage awesomeness.

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

Sure, it's a Disney movie, and it's got Kirk Douglas singing "A Whale Of A Tale." But it also has James Mason's understated, creeptastic performance as Captain Nemo, full of subtle menace. And the special effects still look pretty breathtaking, even 55 years later. Most of all, it captures the wonder and boundless curiosity of Verne's book.

Fahrenheit 451

The original film version of Ray Bradbury's book-burning classic is a vivid, lurid masterpiece — I saw it as a kid, and it still sticks in my mind. But what did Bradbury think? He wrote, in the introduction to one edition of the novel:

And what do I think of the film?

I have heard those cries in the past of outraged authors whose books have just been gang-raped by a studio.

Such is not the case, luckily, with me.

I think that Truffaut has captured the soul and essence of the book. He has been careful and subtle in his shadings and motions. He has escaped making a technological James Bond film, and made, instead, the love story of, not a man and a woman, but a man and a library, a man and a book. An incredible love story indeed in this day when libraries, once more, are burning across the world.

I am very grateful.

Clockwork Orange

According to Wikipedia (although it's not sourced), original novelist Anthony Burgess felt Stanley Kubrick's film was brilliant — but almost too brilliant for our own safety. Whether Burgess really said that, he'll get no argument from the hordes of people who've loved this uncompromising, brutal look at hooligans and social control in a dystopian future. It's Kubrick at the top of his game, honoring and transforming the source material. (Note: We considered including 2001 as well, but since the book was written after the movie, we decided against.)

Blade Runner

Yes, this film takes some liberties with Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" But it's also one of the best reflections of Dick's constant paranoia and flood-of-weirdness storytelling methods. And of course, Dick himself wrote an ecstatic letter praising this film's vision and his belief that it would re-energize science fiction altogether.

1984 (1984)

It was almost required that this year would see a movie based on the famous George Orwell novel. Thank goodness this one didn't commit the thought crime of bastardizing Orwell's story of a totalitarian society that controls its subjects with constant surveillance and "newspeak." It's worth tracking the director's cut DVD which restores Michael Radford's original bleak color pallette and the original orchestral score (with no Eurythmics.)

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Of all the Dracula films throughout the years, Francis Ford Coppola's version came closest to capturing the original novel's darkness, with Gary Oldman making for a captivating Dracula. The whole affair drips with sensuality, thanks to some incredibly beautiful designs. (Screencaps from DVDBeaver.)

Handmaid's Tale

This was a troubled production, in which the original director dropped out and screenwriter Harold Pinter washed his hands of the thing. That meant that original novelist Margaret Atwood, among others, stepped in to revise the screenplay. Despite the problems, the resulting film preserves the key themes of Atwood's novel, about a fundamentalist culture in which many women are infertile and the few fertile women are given to high-ranking couples to give birth to their heirs. More importantly, it's a harrowing, weird epic.

Lord Of The Rings

Peter Jackson takes some liberties with J.R.R. Tolkien's epic three-volume novel, but nobody would deny that the resulting movie trilogy really is epic, and really does convey just why so many of us fell in love with these books in the first place. The full-length DVD versions of all three movies will take you the better part of a day to watch, but it's an absorbing story and never loses the feeling of great events taking place.

Call Of Cthulhu

This 2005 silent movie comes the closest of all the many H.P. Lovecraft adaptations of doing a straight-up recreation of Lovecraft's world. The campiness and cheekiness are kept to a minimum, and in their place, you see only the pure majesty of Cthulhu. The Old Ones are, the Old Ones were, the Old Ones shall be, indeed.

Children Of Men

We debated whether to include this one, since it makes such a radical alteration to the book's storyline — in the book, it's men, not women, who are infertile. But this, and several other drastic changes from P.D. James' book, don't detract from the fact that director Alfonso Cuarón crafts a pretty gripping film in its own right, which preserves the dystopian feel and obsession with reproduction from the book. And the film's use of long, single-shot sequences in which huge events feel like they're happening all around you, makes it hard to forget afterwards. Here's a video about the making of the film, including those amazing long takes. And apparently, James herself was happy with it.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick has probably had more of his books adapted to films than any other SF author — but Richard Linklater's film version of his undercover narc tripfest does the best possible job of giving you an audiovisual tour of Dick's universe. Watching this film, you feel as though you begin to understand what it might have been like to be Philip K. Dick — which is terrifying in itself.

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!

Dr. Horrible from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Okay, we hate to diss Dr. Horrible, because after all he is us and we are him. He's the little evil guy, just trying to get by and make his way in the world — and we totally identify with him, since the alternative would be identifying with Moist. But still — as evil geniuses go, he's pretty inept. Take the freeze ray he shoots his nemesis Captain Hammer with, which wears off prematurely. Or the death ray, with which he plans to shoot Captain Hammer afterwards — Dr. Horrible gloats too long, and Captain Hammer is able to seize the death ray away from him and shoot it at him. And then the death ray misfires — and Dr. Horrible comes out on top, thanks to his own blundering. Except for poor, poor Penny, killed in the crossfire.

The Monarch from Venture Brothers

Okay, first of all, a butterfly-themed supervillain? Doctor Octopus would cover his face with all four robot arms in shame. The poor Monarch is obsessed with destroying Dr. Venture and his family, but can't even get sanction from the Guild Of Calamatous Intent, let alone recognition as a threat from Venture himself. As series creator Doc Hammer states, "failure, that's what Venture Bros. is all about. Beautiful sublime failure," so it's tough to pick one incident. In Tears of a Sea Cow, after finally winning back Dr. Girlfriend and gaining membership in the Guild, the Monarch still can't keep from arching Venture, despite Guild regulations. He infiltrates Venture's lab and has sex with his guard robot GUARDO. Then Dean walks in on this, and The Monarch insists he's trying to infect the robot with Chlamydia, and manages to convince Dean that if he reports this scheme to his father, he'll be playing into the Monarch's plans.

Brainchild from The Tick cartoon

He gets fashion points, for replacing the upper part of his skull with a transparent dome, to show off his brain. And he succeeds where the other villains have failed — he captures the Tick, transforming him into a two-headed bluebird-Tick who speaks French. While he has the Tick helpless, he tries to auction him off — but this is where his scheme falls apart. Die Fledermaus disguises himself as The Rake, a made-up villain who looks like Die Fledermause, except with a rake tied to his head. And Arthur, meanwhile, frees the Tick.

Syndrome from The Incredibles

This is the classic evil genius over/underachiever problem: He builds a killer robot and programs it to attack the city, so he can defeat it and look like a hero. The only problem is, he makes the robot too smart and it develops a mind of its own, so it defeats its creator with easy. Later, he tries to capture the Incredibles' new baby, but its developing super-powers are too much for him.

The Brain from Pinky and the Brain

His catch phrase ought to be enough to clue you in: "The same thing we do every night: Try to take over the world." A true evil genius shouldn't have to try, and it should only take one night. In one of his most notable blunders, in the episode "That Smarts," the Brain manages to build a super-machine that boosts Pinky's intelligence, so they're both super-geniuses. But Pinky becomes depressed and decides to reduce his intelligence to become stupid again. But Brain, not realizing this, decides they might be better off with Pinky being the smart one and Brain being the stupid one — so he, too, reduces his own intelligence, leaving them both too stupid to operate the brain-adjusting machine.

Cartman from South Park

At first blush, you wouldn't think that Cartman belongs on this list, but just consider his bizarre schemes. In the episode "Go God Go Parts 1 & 2," he's too impatient to wait for the Nintendo Wii to come out, so he puts himself in cryogenic suspension, and accidentally stays frozen until the distant future. Once in the future, he manipulates all the warring factions and changes history using a Time Phone, causing huge suffering just so he can get himself a Wii. Eventually, he gets trapped in a Wii-less time loop, because he keeps going back in time to try and convince himself not to put himself in suspended animation — and the past Cartman never listens to the future Cartman.

Mr. Glass from Unbreakable

Possibly the most elaborate scheme, for the least reward: he orchestrates several episodes of terrorism/mass murder, just to find someone who's invulnerable, so he can create/uncover a superhero to be his nemesis. Final proof that reading too many comic books will make you imagine a fourth wall when there is none. And of course, by so doing, he ensures his own defeat and incarceration.

Doctor Evil, from Austin Powers

This supervillain from the 1960s turns up in our world, unaware that time has passed him by and a million dollars is no longer much of a fortune. His schemes are great: set off all the world's volcanos at once, turn the Moon into a death star, shoot the White House with lasers, create deadly floods, bring back the dreaded Alan Parsons Project — but there's always some crucial flaw. It's hard to believe anything can go wrong with sharks armed with frickin lasers — even a child could make that work! But somehow, he manages to mess it up, again and again.

Lex Luthor from Superman

There have been many different versions of the scourge of Metropolis: the mad scientist who's mad at Superman because Superboy zapped his hair off, the business mogul who just wants Superman out of the way, the shadowy politician... but they're all kind of clueless when it comes down to it. Lex Luthor usually has everything you could possibly want — power, prestige, hot babes in chauffeur outfits, even the White House — but he still blows it all going after Superman. His battlesuit is emblematic of the problem: For one thing, it's a hideous green-and-purple color scheme. But also, it often goes wrong in the worst possible way. At one point, Lex gets his own whole planet of people who love him, Lexor, marries an alien princess. But then his battlesuit goes off during a battle and accidentally overloads the "Neutrarod," a spire he'd built to counter the planet's geological instability. And as a result, all of Lex's subjects die, including his wife and kid. He blames Superman, of course.

Doctor Doom

Like Lex, he's almost got it all, including his own country where everybody his his loyal vassal. He builds time machines and robot versions of himself, and even manages to build an Emotion Changer to force scores of supervillains to crash the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm. But every one of his schemes goes metal facemask up, because he over-reaches. At one point, he managed to steal the nearly limitless powers of the Silver Surfer, but lost them because he insisted on challenging the barrier the Surfer's master, Galactus, had put around the Earth. He's lost battles with Luke Cage and even Squirrel Girl, whose squirrels chewed through the wires powering his Doombots.

Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

The list is very eclectic and leaves out some genre superstars — no Iain M. Banks, Robert Charles Wilson or China Mieville here — instead, focusing on some up-and-coming writers and a few you might not have heard of.

It's also a bit slanted towards fantasy and the gothic: Catherynne M. Valente's well-received urban fantasyPalimpsest makes the cut, as does Cherie Priest's Boneshaker and Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree. More traditional fantasy also winds up on the list, in the form of David Anthony Durham's The Other Lands and Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale Of The Brothers Grossbart. Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts' novel which Kim Stanley Robinson said should have won this year's Booker Prize, also makes the cut.

The anthologies on the list are slanted towards the literary and eclectic: Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, the genre-busting Interfictions 2, and the Library of America's Gothic survey, American Fantastic Tales Boxed Set.

All in all, it's a list that's sure to provoke some debate, and hopefully gain some exposure for writers who deserve wider notice.

[Amazon.com]

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.

Futurama, "Parasites Lost"

Fry eats a dodgy egg-salad sandwich at a spaceship rest area, and the eggs hatch into tons of worms, who form a whole worm society inside Fry's bowels. So the Planet Express crew has to copy themselves into tiny little worm-sized robots, which they can control with their brains — so the robots can travel inside Fry's innards while the actual people (and robot, in Bender's case) controlling them remain safe and normal-sized.

Mobile Suit Gundam and Gundam Wing
The Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon suits included the ZERO (Zoning & Emotional Range Omitted) system, connecting to the pilot's brain via neural interface and giving the pilot real-time strategic data, and eliminating all pesky doubts. The system has one major flaw: the pilot tends to "hallucinate" the possible paths the suit can take, causing temporary insanity unless your mind is strong enough. Here's a battle between Gundam Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon.

Ghost In The Shell

Lots of people in this universe jack into android bodies and control them remotely — sending android "dolls" into danger while remaining safe. In this clip, Major Motoko Kusanagi controls two android bodies at once. Especially in "Solid State Society," she's frequently running two parallel processes, and manages to be in two places at once.

Cities In Flight by James Blish

Before humans can actually visit Jupiter in person, we send tele-operated robots with cool tentacles. Here's a relevant passage (thanks to Technovelgy):

For a wild instant he had thought there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform's roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot; a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope...

The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles...

"This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?"

Bug Park by James P. Hogan

In this awesome novel, inventors Eric and Vanessa Heber develop a new kind of telepresence — direct neural coupling — which shuts down your usual senses and connects them to neural feedback from robots, known as Mecs. The novel explains:

Ohira, who had been watching phlegmatically, nodded his head at the figures in the chairs. "You see, it's the way I told you. No ordinary VR helmets here. This connects straight into your head."

"DNC: Direct Neural Coupling," Heber said to Michelle. "That's what makes Neurodyne different."

She nodded. "I have read a little about it."

"Would you like to try it?" Heber invited.

Michelle moved her gaze to the empty chairs but looked apprehensive. "I'm not sure. I wouldn't want to get one of your little guys shredded or caught up in a wringer."

So of course the Hebers, and their precocious teen son, come up with the ultimate business model — tiny little bug robots controlled by tourists' minds, which can explore an insect theme park or even take part in insect gladitorial contests. But of course, bad guys want to use the DNC technology to power miniature assassins instead.

Robot in Invincible

The leader of the Teen Team superhero group, Robot gets promoted to join the Guardians Of The Globe, who are like the Justice League in the Invincible universe. Everybody thinks he's just a regular robot, but eventually they discover he's actually remote controlled by Rudy Conners, a disfigured man living in a tank of fluid.

Battle Angel Alita

Soon to be a movie from James "Avatar" Cameron, this series follows a cyborg assassin who's controlled several different bodies, including a Berzerker body, a "motorball body" and a TUNED body. (Thanks to Cash907Censored!)

The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr.

In a corporate-controlled future, advertising is illegal, so instead celebrities go around promoting products. This story's protgagonist has her personality put into a perfect robot body, while her real body is put "in the sauna room" and she becomes an advertising celebrity. Her new body is a "placental decanter," specially grown to be perfect, with control implants. "Little Delphi is going to live a wonderful, exciting life. She's going to be a girl people watch. And she's going to be using fine products people will be glad to know about and helping the people who make them."

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

The soldiers in this book are jacked into Soldierboys, Flyboys and other constructs, which they control with their brains. These machines allow the U.S. to run a remote-controlled war against various third-world countries. Protgaonist Julian Class controls his robot Soldierboy via a jack connected to his skull. Too bad that long-term connection to the Soldierboys and Flyboys has weird long-term effects, including "humanizing" you and making you averse to killing.

Sleep Dealer

Two different characters jack their nervous systems into robots, far away, in this incredible movie directed by Alex Rivera. Memo goes to work in the city in Mexico, where he's connected remotely to robots doing construction work in the United States — so the U.S. can import people's labor, without bringing in the people themselves. And Rudy controls a military drone with his mind — using it, among other things, to blow up Memo's family's house when Memo accidentally gets suspected of being a hacker.

Runners up: Suspended (InfoCom game), Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, City by Clifford Simak, Starstruck (comics), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

Thanks to Arthur Conan Smith, Kiala Kazebee, S.J. Edeards, Katrina James, Andrew Liptak, Greta Christina, Kate Dominic, Jessy Randall Carlos P. Diaz, FLIMGeeks, Espana Sheriff, Tom Marcinko, Barry Lukens, Lun Esex, Ashley Edward Miller, Allan Bostick, Jackie M, Star Killer, Jason Schachat, Bonnie Burton, Morgan Johnson, Paul McEnery, Izzy Oneiric, Jason Shankel and Kate Cowan.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Elizabeth Bear, DJ Chaotica, Larry-Bob Roberts, Zack Stentz, Daphne Gottlieb, Paul McEnery, James McGirk, Jessy Randall, Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Susie Kay, Kat Page and David Fraser for the suggestions!

The Mayor In City Of Ember
He's the textbook example of a corrupt mayor who's only interested in saving his own skin. He knows the underground city of Ember is on its way out, and soon it'll be uninhabitable due to power failures and dwindling supplies. But instead of trying to cope with the problem, the mayor tries to hoard as much stuff for himself as possible, in a secret room — and puts together meaningless commissions to study the problem. Here he is in this video, eating sardines in the grossest possible manner.

Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Okay, so Lando is the kind of scoundrel we love to watch. And he's a perfect counterpart for Han Solo. But would you really want him in charge of your city? His Cloud City of Bespin seems like a pretty corrupt, messed-up place. And then he goes inviting Darth Vader and his crew there, which is not good city planning at all. And then after Vader has demolished half the city in his battle with Luke Skywalker, Lando takes off and leaves his city behind. Call that leadership?

Aunty Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
She does keep the city of Bartertown humming along — except when she gets stuck into an idiotic power struggle with Master/Blaster, and everything grinds to a halt. Plus she rules with an iron fist, and forces people to fight to the death in a deadly arena. That's not the kind of leadership our post-apocalyptic cities need!

Mayor in RoboCop 2
He makes deals with drug dealers and criminals. And then he mismanages the city's finances and winds up handing the entire city over to the evil OCP. This clip pretty much says it all. And when he's in a tight corner, he just loses his shit.

Mayor Wilkins, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, season 3
Your average terrible mayor may let the city fall apart, or make deals with drug lords, or bulldoze your house for no reason. But a really awful mayor, like Wilkins, makes cozy arrangements with vampires and tries to kill off the town's only protector. And then tries to turn into a demon so he can eat the high-school graduating class. Now that's bad leadership.

Vilos Cohaagen, in Total Recall.
He's an evil administrator of the Mars settlement, keeping the mutants down and ruling with an iron grip. He uses mind-control and brainwashing to keep his minions in line. And worst of all, he won't give the people air. WTF, Cohaagen?

Mayor Bentham Rudgutter, in Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
He's always described as sitting "regally on his throne," or sitting "behind his desk with an air of utter command." He rules over New Crobuson, with its corruption and oppression — and he's not averse to making deals with the city's crime syndicates as well as its demons. He systematically rounds up dissidents and has them tortured, and he's not above imposing martial law if the situation gets out of hand.

Father in Equilibrium
Father rules over the city-state of Libria and outlaws all human emotion, even the love of a small puppy. To this end, he keeps the people doped up on a drug called Prozium, and keeps everyone under constant surveillance. (Similar to other figureheads like Big Brother in 1984, or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World — except that Father just rules over one city.) The only good thing "Father" has going for him is his kick-ass gun-centric martial art, gun-kata. Woo hoo!

Judge Cal, In Judge Dredd
This character, closely based on the Roman emperor Caligula, seized power after he had the Chief Judge of Mega-City One assassinated. In Mega-City One, the Chief Judge has absolute authority — an arrangement that's caused some problems on several occasions. So Judge Cal goes completely nuts, making it a crime to criticize him and appointing a goldfish as his deputy. He even shoots Judge Dredd! Dude!

Mayor Prentiss in The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
Prentisstown is not a nice place to begin with — there are no women, and the males can all hear each other's thoughts all the time, whether they want to or not. But Mayor Prentiss makes matters worse, by figuring out a way to control men's minds. He declares himself President and invades the neighboring settlement of Haven, where there are some women. And that's just the beginning of his reign of terror. Runner up: The mayors in Truancy by Isamu Fukui.

The Dog from A Boy And His Dog

This movie, based on a story by Harlan Ellison, contains a heartwarming relationship between 18-year-old Vic (Don Johnson) and his telepathic, super-intelligent dog Blood. It's just like Peabody the time-traveling professor dog in those cartoons — except that Blood helps Vic find women to rape and food to eat. At the end of the movie, Vic has to choose between the love of a (not terribly) nice woman and keeping Blood from starving — and a shot of meat roasting while Blood talks about how the woman didn't have such great taste gives you a hint of what Vic chooses.

Wall-E

Okay sure, you expect robots to survive the death of the planet — it's what robots do. But you might not expect there to be only one robot left on an otherwise desolate world — and for it to be a cute trash-compacting bot that befriends a cockroach and is obsessed with Barbra Streisand. Admit it — you didn't see that one coming.

Pets, generally

Check out this amazing clip from Exterminators: After The Year 3000, the film with the best title ever. Scroll forward to around 1:00 in — the cute kid in the convoy fleeing from the evil punk-rockers has his pet hamster with him! It's the amazing post-apocalyptic survival hamster. A lion survives in Twelve Monkeys. There's also a lion, as well as Kevin Costner's mule, in The Postman. And the tough post-apocalyptic hunter Harry in the movie Hard Knuckle has a little rat dog in his front pocket, sort of like a post-apocalyptic purse dog. (See awesome picture at the link.) Why is there always a lovable pet after a disaster has wiped out most of humanity?

Kids, generally.

As random dissheveled guy points out in this clip from the upcoming The Road, you don't really expect to see kids surviving a disaster that kills most of the adults. And yet, lots of them do somehow. Including the kid narrator in Mad Max, the gang of children in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Newt in Aliens, and Ed in Cowboy Bebop. Thanks to Madeline Ashby and JungleMonkey on Twitter for suggesting this one!

The mall girls in Night Of The Comet

The deadly radiation from the red comet passing over the Earth wipes out everybody — except for Sam and Regina, two valley girls, who just want to have fun. And go shopping, at the mall, even if it's full of zombies. (It's a well known fact that zombies love shopping malls.) Thanks to Misty S. and S.J. Edwards for suggesting this film!

The Book Of Dave by Will Self

Dave is an obnoxious, mentally ill cab driver in London, who scribbles in his notebook about the rules for surviving London traffic and his hatred of his ex-wife, who's keeping him from having custody of his son. He buries his book, and 500 years later, it's dug up after a flood destroys everything. And it becomes the foundation of a whole new misogynistic religion based on this crazy guy's ramblings. There have been plenty of other stories about bits of cultural flotsam surviving after everything else is gone — Mickey Mouse does it quite often — but this may be the weirdest.

Dinosaurs in Yor, The Hunter From The Future

You have to admit, you didn't expect dinosaurs to survive after the human race was all but wiped out, did you? Just like Planet of the Apes, Yor features a weird primitive world that appears to be the past at first, but which turns out to be our distant future. And somehow the dinosaurs have bounced back, maybe thanks to the radiation. They were only taking a siesta! There's also an android army, which makes a bit more sense.

Amazons in Warriors Of The Apocalypse

Nobody ever expects Amazon warriors to survive a global genocide. And even if you did, you wouldn't expect them to be amazons with eye-lasers, who get into an eye-laser-battle with some other dudes. Another runner up is the 1982 movie SHE, in which a giant in a tutu, a mummy in sunglasses, a Samurai, and bondage freaks all survive the end of the world.

Bob McKenzie in The Mutants of 2051 A.D., as featured in Strange Brew

Okay, so maybe you expected dinosaurs, purse dogs and Valley Girls to survive a planetary die-off. But Bob McKenzie? The co-host of Great White North, that recurring sketch on SCTV, eh? You really really didn't expect him to be the last human still alive. Check out his amazing technique for dealing with a post-apocalyptic mutant who's really not friendly. Thanks to Jeff Sparkman for suggesting this one! Another somewhat unlikely "last man" is Yorick in Y: The Last Man, who's just sort of a slacker escape artist — but he survives the disaster that kills all other men because he eats monkey poop.

Nuns

Nuns often seem to survive the death of humanity — maybe it's their religious faith, maybe it's the fact that they're sequestered from contagion and zombie outbreaks. Most awesomely, Donald G. Jackson's fantastic movie Rollerblade features a world where rollerblading nuns (with Nazi-esque emblems on their uniforms) keep the world safe from evil mutants — while rollerblading. (And they also use a switchblade to heal all wounds, causing a glowy smiley face to appear.) There are also some nuns holding out against the evil dolls-head-loving bikers in Survival Zone. And of course, who can forget Michelle Yeoh as a lone nun after the fall of civilization in Babylon A.D.? I'm sure Yeoh still has nightmares about it.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Madeline Ashby, Rory aka Cthul-who, Glamtasm, Jeff Sparkman, Luis Alberto Urrea and anyone else who helped.

Some people interpreted last week's top 10 list of silly alien prosthetics as hating on low-budget science fiction, or dissing the hard work of makeup artists — and that was definitely not the intention. But when you've seen the same few ideas crop up again and again, you tend to get a bit jaded.

For me, personally, Star Trek in the 1990s and early 2000s ruined me for boring humanoid aliens. After the endless parade of people in vinyl pajamas, with different smushy bits of latex on their faces every week, I got rubber-nose fatigue. There's a lot to love about 1990s Trek — Deep Space Nine was frequently brilliant and prescient, and Voyager had some standout episodes — but the infinite assembly of silly faces was not one of the things I loved.

Oh, and the picture above is from Davosmith's amazing Flickr set of Manchester's Fab Cafe. Here's another image from the same set, featuring another one of the creatures on this list:

So here are ten aliens that were obviously done on a shoestring budget, but which absolutely knock your space boots off:

10. The Daleks, on Doctor Who.

The evil genetically engineered cyborgs on Doctor Who are like mini-tanks with buzzing bee voices, and they scared the pants off generations of British (and some American) kids. They've had their ups and downs — if the first Dalek story you saw was "Day Of The Daleks," "Destiny Of The Daleks," "Remembrance Of The Daleks" or the recent one where they turn people into pigs and then dress in zoot suits, you won't understand what the fuss is about. Watch "Genesis Of The Daleks" or "Dalek." (Before you jump on me in comments, I do like "Remembrance," except the Daleks wobble horribly and look just decrepit.) In their prime, though, the Daleks glide along, rasping with anger and pointing their terrible egg-whisk guns. They're utterly cheap — and horrifying. And you only occasinally Runners up: debatable whether the Cybermen are aliens, but they do often look cool. Also, the Draconians and Zygons make the rubber-mask thing look brilliant, and the Forest of Cheem also doesn't look bad at all. I also like the Slitheen, but only design-wise.

9. The Aliens from The Arrival.

Directed by David "Pitch Black" Twohy, this 1996 alien invasion film was probably made for three Snickers wrappers and a handful of arcade tokens — but I really love the look of these aliens, and they way they move on their weird satyr-ish horse legs. Here's a slinky alien transforming itself into a hawt babe, probably because it just watched Species. Also, I love the flaps that cover up its brain, and how they undulate. Nice stuff!

8. The Visitors from V.

They look human most of the time, but when we get the occasional glimpse of their real lizard faces under their human masks, it's super-effective — as long as we don't linger. Here are a couple of choice moments. I love Diana picking at the shreds of her human disguise, like they're a scab (at about 4:00 in the first video). And the speech in the second video is the greatest thing ever:

7. Greedo and the other cantina aliens, in Star Wars.

Weirdly, later live-action Star Wars movies have never featured aliens that felt as interesting and lively as the first glimpse we got in that cantina scene. Of course, we've already exposited about our love for Greedo, but all of the quick glimpses of aliens in this scene have a liveliness that makes you feel like they're each the star of a cool story. Not bad for an underdog film with a tiny $8.5 million budget (not much even in 1977) whose crew was busy trashing the set and making fun of the Wookiee costume.

6. The Jem'Hadar in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

They actually jumped out at me when I was compiling pics for the post about silly-looking facial prosthetics last week — there was a picture of a Vorta surrounded by Jem'Hadar troopers, and I had to crop the Jem'Hadar out of the image, because they actually looked kind of cool. Something about the way their prostheses work with their faces really feels realistic, and all of those scenes of them struggling with their addiction to ketracel white feel engaging rather than run-of-the-mill. Runner up: Species 8472 in Voyager had some moments of genuine creepitude as well.

5. Black Oil in The X-Files.

A sentient alien virus that can live in hibernation for thousands of years, it appears as a liquid, not unlike crude oil. But it can move on its own, and it's sentient, and it can take people over. There's nothing cheaper than just having some black goo oozing around, and yet it's completely convincing and compelling, and doesn't feel like any life form you've encountered on Earth.

4. The Aliens in District 9.

Obviously, this movie's still fresh in our minds, but the downtrodden aliens in the film look different than anything we'd already seen. Their twitching face-tentacles can't help grossing you out a bit, even as their big pleading eyes lay claim to your sympathy. With a budget of around $30 million, this film is the equivalent of Star Wars or Alien back in the day — a low-budget film that succeeds thanks to a lot of inventiveness born of desperation. And great storytelling, of course. I almost left this film off the list, because we've covered it so much lately, but it clearly belongs.

3. The Vorlon from Babylon 5.

These energy-based life forms are among the First Ones, and inspire a quasi-religious awe among people who see them. So its fitting that their headgear and robes look so alien and unfamiliar. As Sheridan tells Kosh at one point, he can't even tell if it's the same Vorlon under all that covering, or different Vorlons in the same guise.

2. The 456, on Torchwood.

To me, this is the absolute best way to do an alien species on a budget. Shroud it in toxic smoke — and mystery — and just show little glimpses of evil tentacles. The way these creatures shriek and spatter the walls of their enclosure with alien puke will stick in your mind long after you're done watching the miniseries "Children Of Earth." This official still is actually a better look at the 456 than we ever get in the actual television show — and even in this image, they're somewhat indistinct and obscene looking. They're the perfect mixture of mysterious and disgusting, just right for aliens who want to molest your children.

1. The Xenomorph, from Alien.

The studio originally only wanted to give director Ridley Scott a $4.2 million budget, until he showed them storyboards and Mobius illustrations. But, says Scott in a recent interview, "The [revised] budget started out at $.8.2-million and ended up at 8.6, which I think in those days was still relatively cheap. We didn't have the money to do pretty well anything... But in a funny kind of way, you get very clever when there is very little money, because it makes you think." Scott had a stroke of luck when writer Dan O'Bannon took him aside and showed him H.R. Giger's art "like he was showing me a dirty book," and they brought in Giger to design — and sculpt — the alien costume and other alien artifacts. But the other key, says Scott, was disguising the fact that this was still a man in a suit:

We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director said, ‘I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.' So he brought Bolaji Bodejo to the office, and he was actually from Somalia, funnily enough," Scott remarks, having much later directed BLACK HAWK DOWN, which was set in Somalia. "I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies,' and he said sure. And he became the alien. I had him for two months. In the cockpit, there's a pack of cigarettes that says ‘Bolaji.'

Thanks to Alan Bostick, Alasdair Stuart, Madeline Ashby, @Nightwyrm on Twitter, Marlin May, Andrea Zanin, Melinda Adams, Rina Weisman, Micky Shirley, Susie Kameny, Greta Christina, Serene Vannoy, Rus McLaughlin, Minal Hajratwala, Annelise Ophelian, Seth Kaufman, David Fraser, and James Limbach for suggestions!

Antennae
The Pathetic Rationalization: Snails are already kind of alien, right? They're French, which is like being from another planet. And you can sort of imagine them twitching — which they never do, since they're glued to a guy's forehead. But if you squint, they sort of twitch. And back in the day, there was something kind of meta about using a television with an antenna to watch a guy with an antenna on his head.
The Reality Check: Sadly, those are the only nice things we can say about the antennae. They're totally silly looking, and your head will hurt trying to imagine a species that evolved looking just like us, except for the funny antennae.

Weird Ears
The Pathetic Rationalization: They're sharp. They're classic. We wouldn't find Spock nearly as slashfic-worthy without them. And hey — maybe a lot of species just evolved with extra sensitive hearing because there were a TON of really quiet predators on their worlds? And the pointiness or crinkliness makes the ears extra-sensitive? You know it makes sense.
The Reality Check: Ummm... They're just glue-on fake ears. Actually, Spock gets a free pass, but everyone who's sported potstickers or omelettes stuck to their ears since then has no excuse. None. It's unoriginal and cheap-looking.

Corrugated Foreheads
The Pathetic Rationalization: When the Klingons first started getting knobbly on their heads back in 1979, it was a step above the weird engine-grease-on-face look they had before. And it's definitely a step towards putting the "oid" in "humanoid." And think about it — all of those lumps probably provide amazing protection against getting head-butted, or hit on the head with an anvil. Befitting a warrior species, really.
The Reality Check: So let's just give Klingons a pass, Why not? Trying to sort out their cranial discrepancies gives us something to do on long evenings (even with the Manny Coto retcon.) But everybody else who's gotten the cornfield-on-head thing has to find a new gimmick, stat. It's gotten so there's an infinitely diverse cosmos full of different head injuries. Trek is, of course, the worst offender — but by no means the only one. Let's just agree that a head blob is not a species marker.

Body Paint
The Pathetic Rationalization: Who would want to diss the green women? After all, they're a staple of science fiction, with their Shakespeare appropriating, sexy-dancing ways. And if it wasn't for greasepaint, how would we ever have learned not to hate the half-black, half-white people? Plus, it makes total sense: On other planets, the sunlight is probably harmful at other wavelengths besides UV, and so people need to have green pigment to protect themselves against the UltraLime rays. Right? Right?
The Reality Check: Okay, come on. Any alien whose face looks like a five-year-old who got to go to the face-painting tent at the county fair is not passing muster.

Extra Heads Or Limbs
The Pathetic Rationalization: We all love Zaphod Beeblebrox (and we were deeply saddened when the long-awaited movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy didn't even try to give us a proper, convincing two-headed President Zaphod.) And the book makes it clear the extra head and arm are just a prosthetic decoration that Zaphod decided to try out, so it's not strictly an alien biology thing anyway. Plus, why wouldn't humanoids have an extra redundant bit here or there?
The Reality Check: In practice, it just looks ridiculous — just look at the TV version of H2G2.

Random Mythological Drag
The Pathetic Rationalization: Oh wow. It turns out all our myths about Kali/Shiva/Santa Claus/Satan/Patient Zero are based on a real being, who visited our world at some point in a time when people were easily impressed by fake horns. Dude, it actually makes total sense. It's not just an alien who happens to look like Papa Smurf, it's the alien whom all the Papa Smurf legends are based on. Can you not see it?
The Reality Check: Cheap Devil costume looks cheap. Also, the aliens-gave-us-our-mythology storyline is almost as tired as the humans-visit-prehistoric-Earth-and-become-Adam-and-Eve thing. Mostly, though, it's just a cheap gimmick for recycling terrible Halloween costumes as aliens.

Funny Glasses/Weird Contact Lenses
The Pathetic Rationalization: Umm... well, maybe they're really kind of reptilian but they're disguised as humans, except for the eyes. See above, about UltraLime radiation — maybe you need weird eyes to see in UltraLime light. (Not to be confused with ultra-limelight.) Plus who doesn't love the alien who looks like us, until he takes off his Ray-Bans? Communists and Anti-syndicalists, mainly.
The Reality Check: Umm... contact lenses? Silly glasses? Is there any way for that not to look cheap and ridiculous? That's actually not a rhetorical question — we'd like to know.

Biker Gear
The Pathetic Rationalization: Okay, so it makes total sense for aliens to come to Earth disguised as bikers. Like maybe their physiology is really really different than ours, but they just put on leathers and helmets so they'll fit in. That totally makes sense. Also, if you think about it, motorcycle gear looks a lot like a spacesuit. I bet you never thought of that. It only just occurred to us, actually.
The Reality Check: There's really only one question that applies here: Is your alien named Lobo? No? Then you just lost your only justification for making him/her/it look like a biker. End of story. Seriously, it looks cheap.

Crazy Hair
The Pathetic Rationalization: Well, a lot of species evolve to look kind of similar, except that they don't evolve the same kind of styling foam we do. Or maybe the water on their planet is more impure, so shampoo doesn't work the same way it does here. Did you ever think about that?
The Reality Check: Okay, really? Silly hair? That's all you've got? Manic Panic is a gateway to a strange new world? Let's just agree that a little dab will not do a whole new species. Our personal favorites are Doctor Who's Movellans — granted, they're robots, but we're supposed to think they're aliens at first, and what makes them an alien species? Silver Bo Derek hair. Yay!

Baldness (with Optional Buttcrack Attachment)
The Pathetic Rationalization: Maybe this species never evolved hair? Plus, it totally makes sense, if you ponder all the totally bald people you know in your own life — they're all kind of aliens, aren't they? Their heads are so shiny! And have you ever noticed that a fully bald person can raise his/her eyebrows much higher than the rest of us? I witnessed a bald man's eyebrows hovering around the top of his head the other day. And if you ever meet a woman who's got zero hair on her head, it really is true that she's from a nymphomaniac species that kills with sex. It's not even a metaphor, it's just true. Follicles dampen your sex drive (in women, anyway.)
The Reality Check: This is the absolute worst. We can give you the elf-ears, the eventful foreheads, the snail feelers. But baldness? Really? Also, given how frequently bald aliens also have anuses on their heads... it's just not a good idea.

Seriously, VFX industry. You gave us Gollum. You gave us Spider-Man swinging through the city without looking arthritic or epileptic. You gave us Doug Jones. You even managed to make Kelsey Grammer-as-blue-furry-guy look kind of acceptable. What the hell?

10) Top 10 Star Trek Movies.

Yes, I know. There are only 10 Trek movies, before the new one. (At least this is one top 10 list where nobody can complain that something important got left out.) Mike Scott with the New Orleans Times-Picayune has been ranking the previous 10 films from worst to best. You won't be shocked to hear that Star Trek V is the worst, followed by all the TNG films except for First Contact. Then Star Trek III is the sixth best, followed by Star Trek VI. Scott still hasn't revealed his top four, but the only remaining films are First Contact, Khan, Voyage Home and The Motion Picture. (TMP? Really?) There's also the top 10 Star Trek movie scores.

9) Top 10 Star Trek Moms.

This one is just sort of hilarious, including human moms like Beverly Crusher and Amanda Grayson... but also the whale in The Voyage Home and the Horta in "Devil In The Dark." How come nobody ever puts the Horta on a mother's day card? It's over at TrekMovie.

8) Top 10 Star Trek Villains.

This one makes me sort of sad, since it turns out there aren't actually ten great Star Trek villains. IGN tries valiantly, but winds up packing their list with characters like Kruge (from Search For Spock) and Weyoun (from Deep Space Nine.) Another site, Emagill, winds up packing their list with "the Conspiracy bugs" and Silik. (Neither site mentions Tomalok. Or Kor, from "Mission Of Mercy.") Even Film.com's "top five Star Trek villains," which is a lot less ambitious, winds up including Lursa and B'tor. Really? (Khan belt buckle from Zomboy.)

7) Top 10 Weirdest Star Trek Videos.

This list seems like another super obvious candidate, since if there weren't bizarre fan-made Trek videos, YouTube would have to shut down or become the Susan Boyle channel. Several of these I'd seen before, like the Star Trek Vs. Star Wars video, the Star Trek sex faces video and the Star Trek/A-Team opening credits video. But there's also this pretty awesome coffee commercial, paying homage to Sulu's destroyed coffee cup in The Undiscovered Country and that Voyager episode:

6) Top 10 Star Trek: TNG episodes.

With 178 episodes, and many of the strongest individual episodes in the franchise, there's plenty to choose from. EW picks a fairly solid list, including the "four lights" episode, the "Worf's cha'Dich" episode, and the "is Data human" episode. Plus a couple of clunkers, like the "Wesley's Starfleet Academy adventure" episode. Graduate student and self-proclaimed geek Martin McCrory has a somewhat more rock-solid list, including some bold choices.

5) Top 10 Cheesiest Star Trek Classic Creatures

This list is going to make the salt vampire cry — which will only make it need more salt. Poor salt vampire. Wired has a list ruthlessly mocking some of the creature design on the original series, including my personal favorite, the Mugatu. Just as long as they don't do anything similar for classic Doctor Who.

4) Top 10 Original Star Trek Babes

It's not all scantily clad women — it includes the awesome Romulan commander from "The Enterprise Incident," for one — but this list from Gather.com also showcases quite how ahead of its time, fashion wise, the original Trek was. Check out Andrea the Android's sexy/crazy strap outfit.

3) Top 10 Star Trek Characters.

This one seems like such an obvious idea, but few sites have assayed it. From the original series, this list at Fix My Internet Now! only includes Kirk and Spock, but then goes pretty heavy on the TNG and DS9 characters. Like all right-thinking people, they completely leave out Voyager and Enterprise. (Actually, I'm kidding. My own top 10 list would have included B'elanna Torres, "Trip" Tucker, possibly T'Pol and possibly Tuvok. Becuase I obviously have a soft spot for Vulcans.)

2) Top 10 Star Trek Inventions That Exist Today.

J.J. Abrams likes to say that Trek's 1960s vision of the future has come true, and a couple of different sites have stepped up to bear him out. Filmjunk has a list of Star Trek inventions that we're already using today, including basic stuff like portable memory, bluetooth headsets and biometrics, but also location finding. Networkworld has a somewhat more exciting list of inventions that are now in development, including phasers, tractor beams, cloaking devices and hyposprays. Probably the best list of this type, though, is at Space.com, from Technovelgy's Bill Christensen. It includes stuff like the Tricorder, the communicator, the Universal Translator, "credits," and more.

1) Top 10 Star Trek Technobabbles from Cinemassacre.com.

I can't believe they managed to pick just ten of these, although to be fair like half of them are Data or Geordi. I love the idea that this is "science that's made to sound plausible and realistic, but really it's full of shit." In general, the video is priceless:

So there you are. All we need now is for someone to add this top 10 list to their own top 10 list of Star Trek posts, and the recursiveness will be perfect.

Oh, and here's a runner up:

Best Unintentionally Funny Star Trek Fight Scenes

Sadly, there are only nine things in this list at Unreality Mag, so it doesn't really belong in a list of top 10 lists. But it's a wonderful tribute to the unrestrained, juggernaut fighting style of William Shatner. Including this great smackdown:

The Ballad Of Halo Jones. Moore was writing for 2000 A.D., Britain's long-running science fiction adventure comic best known for its Judge Dredd feature. Moore saw that most of England's "IPC girl comics were heading for that last great midnight feast in the dorm," and that 2000 A.D. had a bigger female readership than anyone realized. So he pitched a comic about an ordinary young woman — not "another Tough Bitch With A Disintegrator And An Extra Y Chromosome" — having adventures in space in the far future. The result is one of the most unique space operas of all time, featuring crazy adventures and silly humor and lots and lots of bleakness. (Jones' friends tend to drop dead on her on a regular basis, and in the final volume, she gets involved in a bloody space war.) The whole thing is available as a single hardcover volume from Titan Books.

Captain Britain. Moore started writing for Marvel Comics in the U.K., and took Captain Britain on a tour through alternate universes. This may be the first time that the Marvel Universe's "normal" version of Earth is referred to as Earth 616 in comics, and it also features an evil Prime Minister of England, who wants to round up all the superheroes and put them into concentration camps. I read these comics when they were reprinted as X-Men Archives Featuring Captain Britain a few years ago, and was amazed at how fresh and weird they still seem. They'll probably never be reprinted again, but those reissues can be tracked down, and there's also a collected edition. Also notable: Moore's work on Marvelman, aka Miracleman, which is even harder to find these days (and which I've never actually read!)

The Saga Of Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was a low-selling horror comic when Moore took it over, and he transformed it into a supernatural/weird science epic that still helps to define all of DC's "mature" horror/supernatural comics, including all the Vertigo Comics line. My favorite is still the first volume, in which Swamp Thing discovers that he's not Alec Holland turned into a plant, after all — he's a plant that thinks its Alec Holland, thanks to a weird chemical accident. And he becomes the guardian of The Green, the spirit of all plant life on Earth, which is nearly usurped by the insane Jason Woodrue. All of a sudden the Swamp Thing has, not just pathos, but also a soul and real relationships, especially with the prematurely white-haired Abby.

V For Vendetta. This one, you've probably already read — but if you haven't, you should rush out and track down a copy. It's a dystopian future, and England has collapsed, giving rise to a new fascist regime run by a psychopath who's in love with his computer — literally. So it's up to the Guy Fawkes-masked anarchist vigilante known only as V to help topple the hateful oppressive regime, but his methods — especially his way of recruiting a successor — leave a lot to be desired. Just as much as Watchmen, V4V is a fantastic exploration of whether the ends justify the means, and the individual's relationship with a messed-up society.

Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? Of all Moore's work on DC's main characters, this is my favorite. (Yes, more than "The Killing Joke" or "For The Man Who Has Everything.") DC was winding up its Superman stories, in preparation for John Byrne's classic reboot. So Moore had the opportunity to write the final Superman story, in which he shows how Superman's foes become darker and more horrifying, until finally Superman has to resort to the ultimate sanction. Superman disappears soon afterwards, and is presumed dead, but 10 years later, a reporter investigates. You'll have a hard time viewing other Superman stories the same way after reading this one. Luckily, it's collected in a single volume along with all of Moore's other DC Universe work — including the amazing Green Lantern short story about the aliens that don't have any concept of light or colors.

1963. Moore (with regular collaborators like Steve Bissette, Dave Gibbons and Rick Veitch) put out a six-issue miniseries of pastiches of early 1960s Marvel comics, with titles like Tales From Beyond, Tomorrow Syndicate and Mystery Incorporated. They feature made-up superheroes like Horus, and even though they claim to be stand-alone issues of different comics, they have a continuing storyline of sorts. Plus hilarious fake ads and crazy letters to the editor. It's Moore at his most goofy and fun, and paying homage to superheroes instead of trying to recreate them or drag them into the "real world." (And it's more fun, for my money, than Moore's later Tom Strong's Terrific Tales and Tomorrow Stories anthologies.) There's no collected edition, as far as I know, but I used to see the individual issues in the dime bins at many comic book stores. Amazon now has them all for between $1.00 and $15.00 per issue.

From Hell. Moore and artist Eddie Campbell piece together all the clues about Jack The Ripper, in a huge, sprawling story of Victorian politics and Satanic rituals. The mystery isn't who killed those women — it's why, and as the graphic novel goes on, it peels back layer after layer of Victorian society to reveal more and more twisted reasons for the violence.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you've only seen the horrendous movie, you owe it to yourself to track down the comic. A set of famous literary figures, including Edward Hyde, Mina Harker, Allan Quartermain, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, team up to save the British Empire from a series of otherworldly threats. My absolute favorite is volume two, where our heroes face off against the Martian Tripods from War Of The Worlds... and this time it'll take a bit more than the common cold to put those alien scumbags out of action. As with 1963 and several other Moore works, the fake ads accompanying the comics are worth the price of admission all by themselves, and Moore also includes some amazing text pieces. It's a journey into retrofuturist Victoriana. And thank goodness there's a third full volume coming soon, after the slightly disappointing hardcover oneshot The Black Dossier.

Promethea. Okay, this is blasphemy, I know — but the first 12 issues of Promethea might actually be my favorite Moore work of all time. I'm not saying it's better than Watchmen, just that it holds a special place in my heart. With Promethea, we come full circle to Halo Jones — it's another tale of an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances, except this time around our heroine, Sophie Bangs, is inquisitive and curious. She pieces together the history of Promethea and figures out her own way of turning into the heroine, which requires an individual act of creativity. Promethea's not just your average superhero — she's an avatar of creativity and storytelling, and she may be destined to destroy the world instead of saving it. (In the end, it's actually a lot more complicated, confusing and — yes — rewarding than that binary implies.) The more Sophie discovers about magic and fables, the more powerful she gets and the closer Moore and artist J.H. Williams come to finally taking the comics medium apart altogether. (The first two volumes are my favorites, but the rest of the series is, at the very least, fascinating and memorable.) Oh, and did I mention it's an alternate 1999 with superheroes and weird cyberculture? And an android supervillain called the Painted Doll?

Top 10. Another comic which Moore created for his America's Best Comics imprint was Top 10, the story of a super-powered police squad in a world where pretty much everybody has weird powers. In contrast to Extraordinary Gentleman's literary exploration and Promethea's magical journey, Top 10 is mostly just hilarious wicked weird fun. At times, it really does read like a version of Hill Street Blues set in a world of flying people and superstrong blue men. My favorite character: the exoskeleton-wearing canine police sergeant, Caesar. Moore gave supercop Jeff Smax his own spin-off graphic novel, and later did an amazing prequel called Top 10: The 49ers. It's all pretty addictive stuff. Science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo later did a Top 10 miniseries, which captured the inventiveness of Moore's world pretty well but wasn't quite as magnetic.

Note: I know I'm leaving out his other big ABC series Tom Strong, which I like a lot, but not quite as much as these other series. Feel free to protest and throw sharp objects in comments.

With Dark Horse and, surprisingly, Marvel pretty much phoning it in in terms of their major releases this week (The HC version of Stephen King adaptation Dark Tower: The Long Road Home and a rescheduled hardcover collection of Orson Scott Card's second Ultimate Iron Man series being Marvel's two exceptions), it falls to DC to pick up the slack... only they're having an equally quiet week: If you're not interested in the hardcover collection of shenanigans surrounding superhero marriage in Green Arrow/Black Canary's Wedding Album, Justice League origin Vixen: Return Of The Lion or virtual reality leading to wholescale destruction in Wildstorm's Number Of The Beast, then you're almost out of luck... but I'll keep DC's must-have book of the week until later.

Image Comics keep the interest flag flying with the first issue of Zero G, a scifi whodunnit monster movie on paper, while Avatar offer up the first official issue of new Warren Ellis superhero series No Hero.

But the two picks of the week are IDW's paperback collection of Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier comic, and the first issue of DC's Top 10 Season Two, Zander Cannon and Gene Ha's revisit of the Alan Moore series from a few years back that puts Hill Street Blues into a room with superheroes and sees what comes out afterwards — Witty, filled with pathos and beautifully illustrated, it easily dominates the slow week (and would, to be fair, do so on a busy week as well). Add it to your shopping list immediately.

While you're adding things to lists, you can find a complete list of this week's new comic releases here to see what else you might want to think about, and then use the Comic Shop Locator Service to find out where your closest local store may be. Just... stay away from the financial news for awhile, okay?