The movie has an incredibly terrifying premise. Hundreds of people have gone missing from the tiny, isolated town of Nome, Alaska since the 1960s. These missing persons cases have never been solved. But then a psychiatrist named Abigail Tyler starts investigating a rash of sleep disorders in Nome, and discovers that her patients are all having the same visions of white owls who interrupt their dreams. And when she hypnotizes one of her patients to find out more about this "owl," he is reduced to abject terror and then flees her office to kill his family and himself. Another patient, when hypnotized, starts screaming in ancient Sumerian and starts levitating.

Eventually Tyler realizes the people of Nome are being abducted by aliens, and she has been too. Set her discoveries against the tragic backdrop of her husband's recent, violent death (by aliens?) beside her in bed, and you've got a mega-spooky idea. Plus, there is actual documentary footage from the "real life" Tyler's sessions with these patients. And she even manages to record herself being abducted by aliens who scream at her in Sumerian.

Having grown up utterly terrified by the alien abduction scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I understand why The Fourth Kind sounds scary. Plus it promised to be a pseudo-documentary, showing us never-before-seen footage of people who have evidence that they've been stolen from their beds at night by hostile aliens. Sealing the deal was a star turn by Milla Jovovich, who makes every action movie more awesome.

But the movie stumbled out of the gate by hanging most of its fear power on a fundamental dishonesty. There is no "archival footage." There are no "actual case studies." Instead, we get badly-acted, blatantly fake documentary footage which fuzzes out whenever anything alien happens. There is some interesting editing, where filmmaker Olatunde Osunsanmi shows the fake footage split-screened alongside a reenactment of the fake footage and you feel like you're either watching 24 or some kind of weird art-school critique of documentary realism. Unfortunately the ashen fake/real Tyler is such a bad actress, and her CGI-widened eyes so "alien," that you wind up with the sense that Osunsanmi and crew thought audiences for this movie would be so monumentally stupid that they would fall for anything.

I'm not against fake documentaries. I loved Paranormal Activity, which was effective because the actors seemed so effortlessly real. Nothing felt stagey or artificial about that movie's "documentary" evidence.

What pushes Fourth Kind from the merely bad into the actually insulting was the filmmakers' insistence that the documentary evidence was real. Actors from the "documentary" portions of the movie are uncredited, and many media outlets are still reporting that the footage is real. There was even an ill-fated Web campaign to create false professional credentials and publications for Abigail Tyler, but after investigative reporter Kyle Hopkins revealed them as fakes they were taken down. Here's what Hopkins wrote:

Try Googling "Abigail Tyler" and "Alaska." You'll get a link to a convincingly boring Web site called the "Alaska Psychiatry Journal" - complete with a biography of a psychologist by that name who researched sleep behavior in Nome. Except the site is suspiciously vacant, mostly a collection of articles on sleep studies with no home page or contact information.

Another site, www.alaskanewsarchive.com, features a story from the Nome Nugget about Tyler moving to Nome for research. The problem? The story is credited to Nugget editor and publisher Nancy McGuire, who says it's baloney and she never wrote it.Both the news site and the medical journal site were created just last month, according to domain-name research sites. Ron Adler is CEO and director of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. They said this week they've never heard of the Alaska Psychiatry Journal, or of Abigail Tyler.

So basically the movie's fakery was so badly done that people involved with the movie didn't even bother to create a convincing "Abigail Tyler" website that they could maintain once the movie came out.

What I'm saying is that Fourth Kind reeks of laziness. Despite having a great concept, it fails at every turn to make that concept convincing or menacing. And this lackluster mood permeates all aspects of the film - not just the poorly-executed hoax gimmick at its heart.

There are three competing, poorly-integrated stories vying for your attention in this movie.

First, there's the alien abduction story, and the mystery around what the aliens are doing, which is never solved. All we know is that the aliens are scary, and that they steal people out of their beds. We never understand why anybody would want to be hypnotized by Tyler and Co. after the first few people she hypnotizes kill themselves or get their backs broken when aliens possess them and distort their bodies. Even though Tyler has two credible witnesses to every single hypnosis session, including one that involves alien possession and levitation, those credible witnesses mysteriously never corroborate her story. So we see her screaming and crying when police arrive to arrest her for breaking her patient's back, and neither of her credible friends comes forward to say, "Actually I was there, I am a licensed whatever, and this guy broke his own back while having some kind of alien-induced seizure."

Second, there is the mystery of how Tyler's husband died. She remembers him being murdered by an intruder, and for most of the movie her psychiatrist friend is trying to hypnotize her so she can remember the intruder's face. But then it turns out that actually her husband shot himself, and she hallucinated the murder. And everybody, including her friend, knew this all along. But nobody tried to tell her. So we've got this hallucinating, crazed lady who is being allowed to hypnotize people? And who still has custody of her kids, even though her son is clearly scared of her? By the time the aliens "abduct" her daughter during a fuzzed-out documentary moment, you are ready for her to be arrested and put in a psychiatric hospital.

Finally, there's a whole "chariot of the gods" idea that's sort of flung into the story as if we weren't already up to our eyeballs in disbelief we couldn't suspend even if we wanted to. The aliens speak in ancient Sumerian, which a professor is inexplicably able to understand, despite the fact that the only access to Sumerian he has are from ancient texts. Nobody knows how the language would have been pronounced. Still, he figures out that the aliens are yelling things like "I am god," and using the word "destroyed" a lot. We also don't understand why they're still speaking an ancient language - you'd think by now they would try speaking English since they've been abducting Alaskans since before Sarah Palin was born.

So we're left with an absolute mess of crappily-done documentary footage, inexplicable aliens who act more like demons than scifi creatures, and a main character (Tyler) who seems like a complete crazy lady. Milla Jovovich still manages to shine, though it's hard when she has lines like, "My baby! They stole my baby!"

By the end of The Fourth Kind, you'll feel swindled - and not in the happy, they-fooled-me way. I can only assume that people who were scared by this movie, or even vaguely intrigued by it, were responding more to the movie's concept rather than its execution. There were a lot of ways Osunsanmi could have taken this movie to salvage it. He could have focused on making the documentary hoax convincing by creating believable footage and a smarter online presence. Or he could have pushed the movie over into the realm of Weekly World News camp, winking at the audience while also delivering some chills. Instead, he wrote and directed a movie whose earnestness is laughable - and whose "reality" segments feel more staged than Jon and Kate Plus Eight.

This is something I've struggled with in my own fiction, and it's a much messier problem than you would think. Even when you feel like your tough woman space captain and your sensitive young astro-biologist are incredibly well drawn and full of character and neuroses, and nobody would ever imagine they were the same person. And then you're looking over your novel for the tenth time, and you realize that they're all sounding absolutely identical.

It makes sense, in one way — your characters are all aspects of you, after all. They all came out of your head, unless you based them on your friends or other fictional characters. (And even if they're based on someone else, they're still your creations, when it comes down to it.) You're speaking through their mouths. But that doesn't mean they're doomed to sound like you, or like the same person. This is totally a solveable problem.

Here are some solutions to the issue, ranging from least crude to crudest. If the least crude solution works for you, then you don't need to worry about the rest of them — but I've used all of these methods at various times, and there's no shame in using tough measures on your characters.

1) Listen to how people talk. I have a feeling this is what "real" writers do. Don't listen to how people talk on television or in the movies — go to a bar or cafe and just listen to the conversations around you, and try to hear how people are speaking. If you can write down snippets of people's conversations without being a total creep, then do that. V.S. Pritchett writes about doing this when he was a young writer — and one of those snippets of conversation even found its way into a short story that he later published. Try to get a feel for the rhythms of conversation, and the way different people form sentences. Bottom line is, if your characters all sound the same, then they're not sounding like natural dialogue at all.

2) Try to "hear" your characters' individual voices. This is not really cruder than the first one, actually. If your characters are really that vivid in your head — if you really feel like they're real, breathing people that you've brought to life inside a living story — then you should be able to hear their voices. And they don't just sound different because they choose different words to express themselves — they are saying different things.

Say Space Captain Starjumper makes lots of definitive statements, because she's got lots of points to get across, while Astrobiologist Second Class Sparrow is constantly raising tentative half-questions. Maybe Captain Starjumper has an undercurrent of insecurity, and that's part of why she has to make sharp statements all the time. And Sparrow really knows more than he's saying. The way in which people say the things they say also provides the reader with more information.

3) Realize your characers are not talking to you, or directly to the reader. Unless you're really doing some kind of post-modern fourth-wall-shredding exercise, your characters are talking to each other. And think about what kind of reaction your characters are hoping to get when they say something. Not the reaction they actually do get — it's too easy to jump straight to that — but the reaction they expect. Fine, Navigator Angstrom's revelation that he turns gay whenever the ship is in hyperspace meets with a stunned silence. But was Navigator Angstrom hoping for a stunned silence? Was he trying to provoke an angry response, or some kind of accepting, reassuring statement? Was he trying to guilt-trip the captain for making so many hyperspace jumps lately? It sounds obvious, but it's often hard to remember: the response you're hoping for shapes the way you talk. And every one of these characters has a script in his/her head for how this conversation is going to go, whether it goes that way or not. You, as the author, know the way you want/need for the conversation to go, but you need to know what the characters want/expect as well.

Update: Zack Stentz, writer on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe, points out another helpful way of looking at this: "Every interaction between two people is on some level a negotiation for status." Remember that, and your characters' speech will automatically get richer and more interesting. Apparently this advice originates with Terry McNally, co-writer of Earth Girls Are Easy.

4) Try giving each character a few unique verbal tics, or habitual words. Maybe Captain Starjumper says "I declare" a lot, in between all those declarative statements she makes. (Okay, bad example.) Maybe Navigator Angstrom makes lots of puns, or tosses lots of sarcastic jokes into the end of every comment. Give
each character a few habits of speech, and maybe after a while those props will help you hear each character speaking differently. You may even be able to go back and take out some of these tics, if they get too repetitive, and if the speech around them has started to differentiate itself from the rest.

5) Go one step further, and give them catch phrases and stuff. This worked for Dickens, after all. A lot of Dickens characters basically have the same verbal habits over and over — the most famous of these, of course, is Mrs. Malaprop, who always uses words incorrectly, and gave us the term malapropism. But it's true of a lot of minor Dickens characters. And especially if you're going for humor, there's nothing wrong with having a character who comes out with variations on the same funny line on several occasions. Maybe your astrobiologist character constantly states the obvious, but prefaces it by saying, "I have made a cunning observation."

6) Realize that you may have, at most, three or four character "voices" and refine those. As regular readers of this blog know, I utterly, unreservedly love Joss Whedon. But he is a perfect example of a writer who has a few voices that he uses over and over. There's always the stilted British person (Giles/Wesley/Adelle), the funny, quippy nerd (Xander/Topher/etc.) and the lost/crazy girl (River/Echo/Fred/etc.) And the amazing thing is — those characters are all wildly individual and have tons of depth. You would never mistake Giles for Adelle, even leaving apart that she's way prettier. (Well, somewhat prettier.) Whedon may have a few basic voices that he reuses over and over again, but he finds other ways to make his characters unique and distinct from each other. He's also worked, over the years, to refine each of those voices and make the most of their strengths.

7) Vary your sentence lengths, and play with punctuation. If all else fails, try this. In real life, some people tend to speak in longer sentences, others in shorter ones. (Actually, we all vary our sentence lengths all the time, but our average sentence lengths vary quite a bit.) There's nothing wrong with just deciding arbitrarily that Captain Starjumper's average sentence will be five words long, while Navigator Angstrom's will be twenty. Also, you can try giving one character lots of emdashes or colons in his/her speech — but do this sparingly, and only for one character. In my new fantasy novel, I have one character who includes lots of parenthetical statements, and I put those in actual parentheses. But I made sure to avoid any funny punctuation games with any other character's speech, so it didn't start annoying the reader too much.

8) Adjust the French/Anglo-Saxon mix. Those of us who write in English are lucky — it's actually two languages in one. (Plus random language detritus from a dozen other languages.) We're speaking a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French, the language of the Normans who conquered England in 1066. And just as the Enterprise's engines are a mix of matter and anti-matter, your speech is a mix of French and Anglo-Saxon. And some people definitely use more words of Latin origin than others — it's often a badge of education and upper-class status to use lots of obviously Latinate words. So if all else fails, try experimenting with having one of your characters use more Anglo-Saxon words than the rest of them, or more fancy French words. Grab a dictionary of etymology and think about which words come from which language — you can give your characters a more Germanic or more French "voice" without actually making them speak a foreign language at all. You could also just try having some characters use more one- or two-syllable words than the rest, but this might be subtler and more fun.

Illustrations from Jovike, vivir_descalzo_mx and Terry McCombs on Flickr.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

Of course, making a black hole isn't the world's most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland's ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. "With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing...we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships." Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. "Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy."

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. "Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards", say Crane and Westmoreland, so it's merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future

So last night was the long-awaited debut of V, the show about beautiful aliens who show up and claim to come in peace and offer us lots of goodies... but turn out to be rapacious lizards in disguise. The pilot moves along at a brisk pace, introducing the aliens in the first 10 minutes and setting up various characters as anti-alien and pro-alien. The younger priest is suspicious, but the older priest is an alien-sympathizer. Elizabeth Mitchell's FBI agent is suspicious too, but her teenage son guzzles the Kool-Aid. The nice-suited African American guy is conflicted and doesn't want to be "that guy" any more.

By the end of the first episode, it's already made crystal clear that these aliens are up to no good. They've had sleeper agents on Earth for years, including Alan Tudyk's FBI agent. And other aliens living secretly among us are part of an anti-alien resistance, which may look like terrorists to the uninitiated.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, you can judge whether it's actually a broadside aimed at our president. The Chicago Tribune's Glenn Garvin seems absolutely certain it is:

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

Welcome to ABC's "V," the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it's also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president's supporters and delight his detractors.

The meme spread throughout the right-wing and left-wing blogospheres yesterday, with Ana-Marie Cox weighing in over at Huffington Post.

So now that you've had a chance to see the pilot for yourself, is it really all about how we would have been better off with McCain in the White House? Umm... Probably not. But it was definitely not a subtle episode. The aliens had "too good to be true" plastered on their faces from the beginning, and because the episode moves so fast, we're left wondering why anybody would have bought this dog-and-pony show in the first place.

And there are some little winks at the right-wing tea-partiers that may just be intentional, like when Anna (Morena Baccarin) talks about "change," and the sleazy journo guy asks her about universal health care. Mostly, though, the show seems designed so that you can project whatever ideology you want onto it — not unlike Anna's luminous screen, floating over the world's major cities.

The show isn't subtle, but that's part of the point — there are no hidden messages here at all. The messages are all right on the surface, and they're pretty basic science-fiction standbys, like "aliens who seem too good to be true usually are." Even the show's little jabs at the media and our dumb youth culture feel like they're just slapping a 21st century paint job on the show's 1980s fable. Media talking heads are blow-dried and dumb, young twerps enjoy tagging and Youtube — it's not exactly incisive social criticism.

I really doubt Obama is worried here.

The fast pace, though, is a good thing — that's one of the things that endeared me to this pilot in the first place. Anyone who remembers the original show is going to know these aliens are hucksters, so the faster that's revealed to the audience, the better. And compared to the pilot of FlashForward, which fixated on the crashy destruction and chaos attendant on the future vision/blackout in its pilot for several minutes, V got the disruption of the aliens' visit over fairly quickly, with one desultory plane crash.

Watching the pilot for a second time, the main problem that jumps out at me is that those two teenage kids are going to make me want to claw my face off. And it seems like Smallville's Laura Vandervoort is going to be somewhat painful to watch as well, with the woodenness. But getting to see Elizabeth Mitchell kick more ass and be less angsty than she was on Lost pretty much makes up for those drawbacks. And priest guy, who hails from The 4440, is still just as fun to watch as ever. Plus Baccarin can only get slyer and more engaging as the evil Anna, once her evil plans unfold.

I'm pretty sure this version of the pilot was significantly different from the version we saw at Comic Con. We knew the final sequence was going to be different — that laser shooting robot drone (in the clip above) was not there before, and the last few minutes were generally zippier. But also, my favorite scene is missing from the televised version. In the original version, when we meet Chad Decker, he's just had sex with the vice president's cougar-ish assistant, who promises to get him an interview with the Veep in return for the booty call. It lets us know right away that Decker is a man-whore, and is sort of hilariously trashy besides. In the televised version, that's replaced with a bland scene of him wanting to interview the Veep, but being told that he's just the talking head who reads the news. I have a feeling there were other weird, funny touches removed before the show aired, but I can't remember the others off the top of my head. This definitely felt a bit blander than the original pilot, although how much of that was editing and how much was just seeing it a second time, I'm not sure.

But despite some quibbles, this was a pretty fun outing, and a nice start to the series. It got us to the "OMG the aliens are evil lizards" part quickly and zippily, and set us up for three more episodes of alien intrigue and human gullibility, with an anti-alien resistance simmering under the surface. Now if those two teenagers can just get blown up in a tragic shuttlecraft accident, preferably next week...

"Once Upon a Time In Texas" was about the most important item on Hiro's "things to fix before I die" agenda. And that item was Charlie, the cute waitress whose life he tried to save from Sylar three years ago by traveling back in time 6 months. This time, Hiro traveled back three years to the moment when Sylar ate her brains, in another attempt to save her life. Then Hiro has the great idea to freeze time and pack Sylar away in the baggage bin on a Greyhound bus outside the diner where Charlie works.

Up until that moment, things had been going so well! Hiro was acting like a grownup (more or less) and HRG of the past was having a heretofore unknown office romance with a fellow agent. I liked the HRG retcon, where he has a budding romance with a competent, tough woman who is his equal and with whom he can talk about anything - unlike his family, whose minds he wipes on a regular basis.

But then Hiro once again used his powers in a way that once again reminded me why this show makes me regularly leave weird sweaty marks on my TV screen where I bang my inflamed head against it. (See clip.) First of all, he can stop time. SO WHY NOT JUST FREAKIN RIP SYLAR'S HEAD OFF WHILE HE IS FROZEN?! Second, if Hiro is going to inexplicably avoid the face-rippage, why not contain Sylar in a way that makes sense? How will a little duct tape and a bus stop Sylar from eating Charlie's brains? This is Hiro of the future - he knows how deadly Sylar can be. And yet this is his big solution? The thing he's done despite knowing it will push him closer to death than he already is? I am completely mystified, people.

Not surprisingly, Sylar escapes from Hiro's lameass trap, so then Hiro saves Charlie's life a new way. First, he sends his 3-year-old self back in time 6 months, so that he can fall in love with Charlie and not alter the paranormal romance timeline. (When you fuck with paranormal romance narratives, things really get ugly.) Then he convinces Sylar to fix the aneurism in Charlie's brain by promising to reveal lots of neat things about the future. Why Sylar falls for this is as mysterious as why Hiro continually does not freeze time and kill Sylar.

So Charlie is saved and Hiro says something like, "In the future you will be powerful but all of us will band together and destroy you and nobody will shed a tear." Oh boo freakin hoo. You think Sylar cares if anybody sheds a tear for him?

Then Charlie gets all whiny about how Hiro should have let her die, which is lame. It just feels really forced, like OK we get that she doesn't like that he cuts deals with serial killing madmen, but why would she whine about "why did you save my life when other people die?" He SAVED HER LIFE. That is an unqualified good thing, no matter how random fate is and blah blah blah. So there's a lot of narrative flailing that eventually leads to Hiro and Charlie making up (duh). But then! Evil carnival Samuel sticks Charlie into some nethertime region using the last juice from his dying time travel carnie pal.

Big reveal: Samuel has been trying to use Hiro all along, but has until now inexplicably not made any direct effort to control Hiro except through passive-aggressive mumblings about "changing the past." How was Hiro even supposed to know Samuel wanted anything from him, anyway? And why does he need to imprison Charlie? Anyway, the point is that Hiro gets all worked up and non-kidlike again, which is such a huge relief that you don't even mind when HRG's potential office fling gets her mind wiped so she'll forget about her crush on HRG. It's like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind plus some episode of The Hulk show from the 70s.

Will Hiro help Samuel change the past (which has something to do with a glimpse we get of a dead Suresh) in order to rescue Charlie from the nethertime? Unfortunately we won't find out next week, because it's back to Head Sylar - or Head Matt . . . or something.

James Turner, an editor for O'Reilly Media, claims that zombies share a kinship with Godzilla. His theory is that, just as Godzilla was inspired by the dropping of the atomic bomb, Western filmmakers (Romero aside) latched onto zombies in the wake of Three Mile Island, the recognition of AIDS, the Ebola outbreak, and similar medical and technological disasters. He goes on to posit that the increasing popularity of zombie movies involving a biological outbreak suggests a Western ambivalence toward biotechnology.

It's an interesting thought, though perhaps a bit reductive. Certainly zombies have been used to comment on biotechnology, but they've also been used to comment on a number of social issues, including consumerism, corporate greed, and the objectification of women. And what causes the zombie outbreak is often less important than what comes afterward. Still, Turner makes an interesting case that biotechnology-based zombies could evolve to more acutely reflect our biological and technological fears:

Blackberry-spawned abominations, anyone? Dawn of the Single-Payer Healthcare Undead? What about, They Came From H1N1?

He's far more convincing when he talks about the important differences between giant monsters and zombies, namely that it's the military and scientists who fight Godzilla, where zombies fall to resourceful and self-reliant survivors.

Americans must like the idea that, as out of control as our hubristic science might become, a good machete and a 12 gauge in the hands of a competent man or woman can always save the day. The 2003 bestselling title, The Zombie Survival Guide, offers the same message of self-reliance. (I'm not sure what lesson we can take from the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.)

A Brief History Of Zombies [Forbes]

The reason why I say that so emphatically is, there's a tendency to avoid watching a television show if you think it's already pre-cancelled. Why give your heart to a piece of ephemeral pop culture that won't even last the five-to-seven years that a successful show lasts? Why become fixated on a story you know won't end? Part of the answer is that we are science-fiction fans, and having our hearts broken is part of the deal. But you also have to keep the faith alive that it won't happen this time.

So in case you've missed our grindingly depressing coverage (mirroring everyone else's) of V's misfortunes, it's had a troubled ramp-up. First it was put on a production hiatus for a few weeks, then it was announced that showrunner Jeff Bell (who was showrunner on Angel's final season) was being demoted — he's still around as a writer, but he's no longer in charge. Then before the first hiatus was even over, a second hiatus was announced, and the show was on hold for at least a couple of months. And then the network decided to air only four episodes, this month, and then put the show on hold until after the Olympics, in March.

And today, there's the news that Scott Peters, the show's creator who replaced Bell as showrunner, was himself ousted. His replacement, luckily, will be Scott Rosenbaum, who's been a producer on Chuck and The Shield. Judging from the USA Today article, it sounds like the root of all these problems, including the production turnovers and delays, is the network's discontent with the show's creative direction. Here's USA Today's succinct explanation:

[T]he series remake has run into roadblocks. V's pilot episode was well-received by advertisers and critics, but ABC's late-summer decision to start the show two months earlier than planned – in part to dodge American Idol and the broadcast of the Winter Olympics, also in Vancouver – led to script problems, which forced reshoots and a five-week production break.

The first of three planned story arcs was condensed from six to four fall episodes. And the show will test viewers' loyalty with a three-month hiatus; remaining episodes won't surface until March. A promotional campaign that called for planes to skywrite red V's over national landmarks was scuttled after publicity over potential environmental effects.

And Thursday, in a response to the show's production problems, Peters (USA Network's The 4400) was replaced at the helm of the show by Scott Rosenbaum (Chuck, The Shield), though he is expected to stay aboard as an executive producer.

"We had a great pilot, then a couple of great episodes, but we had a disconnect on where we were going from there," says ABC Entertainment Group chief Stephen McPherson. Though no stranger to tinkering (he made extensive changes to the original Grey's Anatomy pilot), "I hadn't had the experience of that before." But McPherson accepts "a little blame for rushing them."

Mitchell, who plays hero FBI agent Erica Evans, says the resulting changes merely speed the pace of storytelling to pack a bigger wallop, including big cliffhangers in the Nov. 24 episode. Filming on that episode is set to wrap today, giving actors another unexpected 10-week break as the show is retooled. (Mitchell will trek to Hawaii to shoot new Lost episodes.)

So, yes. A troubled show, even before its first episode airs — and this does remind me a bit of similar behind-the-scenes stories about Bionic Woman, Dollhouse, Life On Mars, and countless other shows that had difficult gestations leading to troubled runs. But these things aren't fore-ordained, and a show can beat the odds.

Here are some reasons why I'm still cautiously optimistic about V in spite of all of the negative buzz:

1) The pilot really is great. From what I hear, the pilot that airs tonight is much the same one we all watched at Comic Con, and it's truly impressive. I went into the pilot expecting, at best, pleasant mediocrity or a watered-down tribute to the geek TV of our childhoods. And instead, I was surprised by what a cracking great piece of television it is. The story of the aliens who arrive promising great wonders, but quickly turn out to be a lot worse than we realize, is retold at a zippy pace and revamped for our wired, media-savvy culture. And it's provocative to have a show that says that despite all of our proud cynicism and air quotes, we're still suckers for the first super-advanced civilization that shows up offering us small-pox-infested blankets.

2) The cast is terrific. This matters a lot. You know who they never replaced during Bionic Woman's behind-the-scenes dickering? Michelle Ryan. You could have swapped in a dozen different producers, and it wouldn't have made Ryan watchable. In V, Elizabeth Mitchell is proving that her sparks of versatility on Lost weren't just illusions — she's really great as the show's heroine. (And how great is it that we actually have a female lead on a network show, who's not Michelle Ryan?) Given time, Mitchell could be as great as Lena Headey as Sarah Connor. Also, Whedonverse alums Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin are also just as great as you'd hope — and Baccarin is so natural as a smarmy alien leader, you'll almost forget Inara.

3) Maybe all the tinkering really will make it a better show in the end. Rosenbaum coming on as show-runner is actually great news — and if he can bring a bit of The Shield to V, then we'll be doing great. Also, I'm not entirely sad to hear they're tightening the pace. When I hear that six episodes were compressed to four, or that a show is going to cut to the chase faster, I often secretly rejoice — the biggest pitfall with a show like V is that the mysteries will be sustained for too long, that characters won't figure stuff out until long after the audience has, and that we won't get to see people fighting aliens until season three. As the SF Chronicle's Tim Goodman points out, this sort of molasses-slow storytelling has already overtaken fellow ABC show FlashForward (which might get renamed "inch forward" soon) — so it would be a shame if it happened to V as well.

4) We sort of owe it to ourselves to support any show about alien invaders. It's not as if we have a bevy of alien-invasion shows to choose from, or really a bevy of shows about aliens period. American television seems to have abdicated the territory it once owned, of first contact, alien attackers, galactic imperialists, and so on. I am prepared to apologize for mocking the boring alien makeup on shows like Star Trek: Voyager, if it means that we'll get aliens on TV once again. But for now, if there's even a hope of getting a show about meeting people unlike ourselves on television again, we need to grasp it with both hands.

5) I'm hoping that the creative stew of influences will still yield something really subversive and interesting. Peters, who created The 4400, is still on board as a producer according to USA Today, and Angel's Bell still seems to be in the mix as well. And the pilot definitely contains a huge dose of the paranoia and concerns about selling out that those earlier works were all about. (There's the journalist who's willing to ask only softball questions of the alien leader, as well as the religious figures who hitch their wagon to the aliens' star.) So maybe if those things remain part of V's DNA, and they aren't part of what gets sacrificed in the network's headlong dash to create soft and mushy enough for the general public to chew and swallow, then we'll still get a show that challenges us and reminds us that science fiction, even on television, can be a thing of amazement.

So yes, it's worth risking another disappointment. V is on ABC tonight at 8.

Chabon talks about how his eldest son startled a British attendant at the Smithsonian with his Dalek T-shirt, and then his other children had to regale the man with tales of their Cybermen and Time Lord shirts, until he understands they're a geek family. And then Chabon talks about how the new Doctor Who series has brought his family together, and sings the show's praises:

And if you aren't watching and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of the Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show's debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especial harsh pity of the geek.

As you might have gathered from its subtitle ("The Pleasures And Regrets Of A Husband, Father, And Son") Manhood For Amateurs is Chabon's collection of essays about being a man, and the various personas he's taken on. But even as he delves into the heart of his own struggles with maleness, Chabon invokes science fiction and comics, exploring topics as diverse as why Big Barda is the greatest superheroine, or why all futurism is now retro-futurism, and we've lost our starry-eyed optimism. Like manhood, these geek avatars gain their meaning from other people, they're public and subject to interpretation. They also change over time, like the Doctor. (Chabon, himself, has gone through incarnations, including being a "little shit" in his twenties, as he makes clear at various points.)

The Doctor Who essay, one of the last in the book, returns to the theme of the book's first essay: the solitary and communal sides of fandom. Chabon grew up, like many of us, as a solitary geek, with nobody to share his obsession with comics and science fiction paperbacks. The first essay talks about how he tried to start a local comic-book fan club, with his mother's help — they even paid $25 to rent a room for the first meeting, and only one other boy showed up, then immediately left before he could get sucked into this "loser's club." The Doctor Who essay is about how the new version of the show has given Chabon's children the gift of each other, and how fandom and families are the same, with their rituals and obsessions.

Most provocatively, in the earlier "Loser's Club" essay, Chabon even suggests that fandom and the artistic drive come from the same impulse, and even hints that fanfic and literature spring from the same well:

This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city — in every cranium — in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makees it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

Manhood For Amateurs isn't just notable for the honestly with which Chabon deals with every aspect of his life, including his insecurities and his relationships with women and his own children — it's also a more revelatory look at fan culture, and science fiction, through the lens of the personal essay. Anyone who's interested in discussing science fiction and its attendent genres for their personal as well as cultural significance should be checking out these essays.

More than ever, Chabon uses superhero comics, Star Wars toys and Doctor Who's Daleks as signposts to the masculine imaginary. He geeks out about these things as if they are the only points of certainty in a shifting, illusory world.

(The book is by no means perfect: At times, his opinion-spouting gets a little overwhelming, and by the time he gets to the section where he talks about women, about two-thirds of the way through, I was starting to wonder if Chabon really did live in some male-dominated enclave — but then a lot of the last third of the book is about women, and he addresses that criticism of his writing head-on. But my criticisms of the book mostly have nothing to do with its discussions of science fiction or geek culture, and they're pretty minor in any case.)

Manhood, Chabon seems to be saying, is improv. You create yourself on the fly, in roles as perplexing and diverse as husband, father, lover and friend, and hope to project an impression of knowing what you're doing. The fact that Chabon deconstructs masculinity while pulling together so many elements of science fiction turns nerd culture into a set of anchor points. You sort of expect Chabon to use comic-book and science-fiction icons to illuminate his inner world, the way in which superhero storytelling in Kavalier And Clay became a kind of emotional atlas. But it goes beyond that: one of the constants in Chabon's essays is the primacy of play, in the midst of all this role confusion. And geeking out is an essential ingredient of that play.

The discussions of play includes a very carefully considered history of Lego toys, and their development from abstract bricks to a world dominated by crudely representational minifigs. (We featured a "quote of the day" a while back, in which Chabon talked about how his kids were remixing these Lego sets and transcending the tyrannical corporate-sanctioned instructions.) He joins the chorus of people lamenting the fact that kids no longer roam free on their bicycles and skateboards. He narrates some bizarrely awesome-sounding games he and other kids played, based on the 1973 Planet Of The Apes TV series (not the movies, weirdly enough). And he talks about stargazing, and discovering our smallness in the cosmos, as well as the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock and how it's making him wonder why we've stopped obsessing about the far future.

All in all, Manhood For Amateurs is a much geekier book than you might have expected from its title, and yet also a much more personal book than most geeky essay collections. If you've suspected that fandom's signs and collections of ill-fitting clues were markers in someone else's inner cosmology, just as they are in yours, then you will definitely bond with this book.

How has the response been when people found out you'd be in this major genre reboot?

So far it's been pretty great. Our first sort of big dose was going to Comic Con to screen the pilot, and it was really incredible. I'd never seen anything like it, I obviously know - I'm a fan of a lot of scifi shows and genre shows and so there's a level of imagination and depth to the storytelling and it really draws people in. So seeing people react to some of our other cast members who have done other genre shows before was really incredible. When they embrace you, it's pretty great and complete and intense. In a way I feel like a bit of a newcomer into the world of it, and I hope I'm welcomed in. But the response to the story and to our show was really really incredible. We screened the pilot for 4,000 people and that's a really unique experience, you just don't, (you) rarely get a chance to see a piece of work that you've done with that size audience, and they seemed to love it. So it was really encouraging.

You said you were a fan of genre and scifi shows, what shows are you a fan of? Did they influence you at all while making this series about aliens?

Wolf: I grew up watching Star Trek and the original Battlestar and Six Million Dollar Man, Lost in Space, so I think there's a level of imagination in the storytelling, there's really no limits and that's really kind of exhilarating. For the most part, playing a newscaster who, as far as I know, is not an alien, is a human, a lot of my stuff has been interviewing people and acting as a media, so there's hasn't been a ton of special effects stuff. But there's been a bit - and interviewing Anna, the leader of the Visitors on the space ship, we work on a virtual set and then they create this world around us, it's really intense. I mean, to see what they're able to create nowadays, and our show winds up looking like a movie every week, because the limits to what people can accomplish on television seem to be blowing wide open, so there's really no difference between the effects an the storytelling that you see in theaters that you will now on television. So it's exciting to be part of a story that feels epic.

Your character [the news anchor] is ambitious but relegated to being just a talking head. And then when Anna, the leader of the aliens, tells him to ask only positive questions, he goes along with it. Do you think he'll ever actually try to get to the bottom of what's happening with these aliens?

I think he's just so looking for that thing that's gonna launch him, that I think his first thought when aliens land is, 'This could be it.' But only after his encounter with Anna, the leader of the Visitors, and she selects him to do this first worldwide interview where she's going to basically tell the human race why they're here, obviously then he knows he's got the opportunity of his lifetime sitting in his lap. So I don't think he foresees that he's going to wind up being manipulated the way that he gets manipulated, and I don't think he saw himself having to sell his soul to the visitors quite as quickly as he's asked to do it. As our story continues, you see him really fight the good fight. I think he's sort of morally up-for-grabs, because he wants, he's ambitious enough to go to great lengths to accomplish the things he wants to accomplish, but whether his better self or his lesser self will win out in the end is kind of, I think, the fun of his story.

The world treats the Visitors differently because they're so beautiful, do you think that's a real life metaphor for any existing groups right now because of the way that they're treated?

Absolutely, I do. I think one of the things that's intriguing about this version of this story is oftentimes when we imagine aliens and their arrival on Earth, we imagine these scary green men or monster creatures, and in our story they're beautiful, human-looking creatures. So the fact that so many people, because of their appearance, because of their message, fall in line and are inspired by them and feel a sense of hope that these creatures are actually going to do what they say and peacefully enhance the life that we're all living, I think if they were really creepy looking, not as many people would jump on board.

Yes, I think on the surface, there's definitely a commentary on why we embrace certain things and reject other things and that's one of the underlying themes, which there are many of.

With my character, with Chad, one of the themes that they're dealing with is how much faith we place in our media and is that faith honored and is it well-placed or is it ill-advised? And if you place that in the wrong hands, if there's somebody who's sort of morally up-for-grabs, potentially, like Chad Decker is, and you've charged him with getting the truth, you could have a very dangerous situation.

Did you base Chad on anybody that we know?

You know, yes and no. I mean, I think he's described in the pilot script as being an Anderson Cooper wannabe, so there's some of that in there I think. I mean, he's a modern day news guy who sort of lives and dies on people feeling like he's their buddy. It's not this kind of parochial father-figure news guy, he's more of your buddy who's going to give you the scoop. There's definitely a lot of people who I watch and have sort of drawn from, but hopefully he winds up being a product of who our producers and writers are creating.

To me, he's a really fascinating character, because I think he represents a lot about how we function, day in and day out. Which is I think we see the story we want to see oftentimes. And sometimes that's OK and sometimes that gets us into trouble.

Let's get the Mythical stuff out of the way first, shall we? Marvel's (Incredible) Hercules begins his latest and greatest storyline in this week's special one-shot, Assault On New Olympus, which guest-stars Spider-Man and leads into the regular series with plenty of other guest stars in issues ahead.

Not to be outdone, DC collects the recent Wonder Woman storyline Rise Of The Olympian in both hardcover and softcover, and it's well worth a look - I admit to being thrown by it when it was being published in single issues, but the destination is worth sticking around for; it's also the largest scale adventure for the character in years, as well. DC also has the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, a spin-off from Bill Willingham's Fables that sees fairytales' most deadly secret spy go globetrotting on her latest dangerous mission with wit, panache and some great art from Shawn McManus, for those who like characters who've been around before there were comics.

Talking of long-lasting characters, Ricardo Delgado's dinosaur epic Age of Reptiles returns this week with a new series, The Journey, which shows why dinosaur migration isn't as simple as it sounds. If you go in expecting an unusual, challenging but surprisingly beautiful read, you shouldn't be disappointed.

Much less beautiful (by design), Anthrax's Scott Ian writes Lobo: Highway To Hell, the first issue of which is out tomorrow and sure to be, uh, "heavy." Or something.

For those looking for more superheroic thrills, DC spins out The Great Ten from 52 (A plan only slightly flawed in that 52 finished over two years ago, and few people remember who The Great Ten were; they were the government-sponsored Chinese superteam). Marvel launches Paul Cornell's new Black Widow: Deadly Origin series, as well as a new Deathlok series (Deathlok: Pretty much, "What if Captain America was a cyborg with a bad attitude in the future?" It's as good/bad as that idea may sound to you).

And I guide you away from those in the tights and bright colors to my current hometown of Portland, where Greg Rucka's new series Strumptown is set. Yes, Stumptown (Rucka's new detective series, which he talks about right here, but comes from love of The Rockford Files and Magnum PI) may lack any sign of supernatural, sci-fi or urban fantasy hallmarks that would make it io9 material, but nonetheless, it's likely to be the best thing you could spend your money on at the comic store this week. Consider it recommended.

Just like last week, the week before that and every single one of these posts, you can meet all of the comics released to comic stores tomorrow on this here Diamond Distributors shipping list, and then find your closest comic store to purchase all the goodies mentioned here. You know it makes sense.

This is how we know that Russell T. Davies is no longer really involved in running the Sarah Jane Adventures: if RTD had been in the mix, "The Wedding Of Sarah Jane" would have been laced with little references to the Doctor as Sarah Jane's former boyfriend, who's showing up to stop her wedding to the cute new guy, Peter. As it was, the episode was remarkably respectful to the former companion, repeating several times that the reason she'd never gotten a bloke was because she was too busy saving the world herself, and she wasn't sure if any guy could deal with her weird life. Which is way better than the explanation RTD wrote: that she was still hung up on Tom Baker all these decades later.

So in "The Wedding Of Sarah Jane," she falls in love with a guy remarkably quickly and then agrees to marry him like a shot... so of course you know it's an evil scheme. The nice touch is that Peter Dalton isn't actually evil himself, or alien for that matter. He's just a pawn, who happens to be genuinely a good match for Sarah Jane. If they'd met under other circumstances, they might have gotten together normally, without any of this "fiendish trap" nonsense.

But the fact that Sarah Jane feels she can't tell Peter about her real life of hanging out with robot dogs sort of raises a larger point that the RTD version of Doctor Who has skirted around a few times: At this point, after all these alien attacks, there are just two kinds of people left: The ones who know all about aliens and are completely obsessed with learning all about them... and morons. So if Sarah Jane feels like she ought to date a man who can deal with her alien-fighting lifestyle, then her dating pool ought to be enormous. I guess this is a sort of suspension of disbelief thing, except that Doctor Who has gone out of its way to poke holes in it a few times.

In any case, the wedding episode was fun — and completely a rehash of stuff we've seen before, of course. Every time we see the Trickster, he gets a bit less interesting. His first outing, where he changed history so Sarah Jane died as a small girl, was fantastic — but since then, he's been stuck doing variations on a theme. Plus some homages: This time, we get a bit of the "Buffy's mom dates evil Jack Ritter" episode, a bit of every wedding episode ever, and a bit of the final episode of Sapphire And Steel, with the being trapped in the house that's floating outside of time and space.

Presumably a lot of regular Doctor Who viewers tuned into this one for the Tennant appearance, so I'll just say that the Sarah Jane Adventures is sometimes a bit better than this story, which felt a bit motionless, especially in its second half. At its best, the more young-kid-friendly Who spinoff is fast-paced, fun, a bit silly, and very reminiscent of classic 1960s and 1970s Who, with implacable monsters, young companions, and dilemmas that are soluble with large amounts of pluck. (Especially in its first season, the show ruled, and it's been making a major comeback this year after a weak second season.)

I never actually thought I'd say this, but I think a bit more RTD sentimentality could have served this story quite well — it had the Murray Gold "woooooooo" sad music for large chunks of the second episode, but it never quite felt like it got to the emotional root of what was going on — either the kids feeling left out or worried because Sarah Jane had someone new in her life, or Sarah Jane realizing that it's all a trap, and she can't really have romantic love as well as everything else she's built in her life. Somehow, the episode kept skimming over the really interesting bits - and Sarah Jane and the Doctor never quite manage to have a real conversation. I was sort of hoping they could have a chat about how she's becoming more and more like a human version of the Doctor, and what that's meant to her relationships. I know it's a show for little kids, but little kids like to know that these characters are real people, with feelings.

Other stuff: We got yet another otherworldly creature giving a speech about how the Doctor is fire and ice and chocolate and nougat and so on. It was really nice to see K-9 back in his element, and especially interacting with the Doctor once again. K-9's little rivalry with Mr. Smith is fun as well. I'm glad the Doctor realizes how terrific those kids are, and once again Clyde gets to be the hero, which makes me happy. And I guess it's good that Sarah Jane's arch-enemy rates the Doctor's respect — since the Trickster mostly seems like a very second-string villain at best, it's nice that the Doctor didn't just dismiss him.

Oh, and most of all, we're getting Sarah Jane built up as the defender of the Earth, without whom we're all toast. The first time around, there was a concrete reason for that — an asteroid on a collision course with the planet, that Sarah Jane needed to be there to deflect. But now, it's just more vague and all-encompassing. Without Sarah Jane, the aliens will just run rampant. It makes you wonder quite how ineffectual U.N.I.T. is these days.

Even though we thought the film Gentlemen Broncos rose above the bad buzz, to become an intensely personal film from a different person's perspective — awkward moments and all — some disagreed.

Entertainment Weekly complained that the film lacked the ever-present kitsch, and didn't celebrate its oddball characters as director Jared Hess has done in his previous works...

As they did in Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, the Hesses claim to celebrate the amusing qualities of misshapen people and their misshapen dreams, insisting that amateurism and bad taste (both in filmmaking and in life) are intentional artistic choices. The audience may have bought the act in Napoleon Dynamite. But this time, the act bombs.

AICN went even further accusing Hess of "Bully Porn."

Jared Hess doesn't make comedies. He makes Bully Porn. His characters, devoid of any likable qualities whatsoever, serve only to mope around pathetically, dressed in the hand-me-down isn't it ironic clothing of the late 1980's, to be laughed at for how miserable, lowly and despicably uninteresting they are. By us. The bullies. You see, this is supposed to be funny. We're supposed to giggle and chortle at the mom who wants nothing more from life than to make nightgowns for a living, or the indie-from-home filmmaker who grins like he's had reconstructive facial surgery. That's funny, right?

We knew this was coming, because a few audience members just didn't laugh the way we did during the screening. So we asked Hess if he was prepared for a potential backlash against this film. And how he walks the line between skewering these outcast characters, versus paying them homage.

Hess told us:

I don't really think about walking a line, I'm just doing what I love and casting the people that I love and ... it's funny. I think especially when Napoleon came out for the first time many people were like, 'Gosh this is condescending to rural America and their way of life; how dare he!'

And I don't know if these people have ever really been, you know, the people that didn't understand it, didn't really understood the love.

It's, for me, giving these smaller stories and characters that you normally wouldn't see in film, giving them a chance to be heard. In this fight, they've got bizarre life goals. It's still cool to be able to see them succeed in their own little sphere.

We also grabbed producer and snake-holding actor Mike White, and asked him what he would say to people that don't understand it and might accuse Broncos of making fun of science fiction fans and science fiction in general. Is it teasing or an homage?

I really don't think that that's true because I feel like Jared [Hess] really has an affection for all these people, and really relates to all these people — if you meet him, he does all the voices, it's like he really ... is inside it. I think Jared has a certain sensibility that if he's not into something, he just won't focus his attention on it. And the things he does focus his attention on are things he's really an enthusiast of.

I think some people don't share...I think some people don't have a sense of humor, period. And whether it's teen life or the troubles of a misfit teenager, or the travails of a writer who wants to write science fiction, some people, if all they want is for all of that to be taken very seriously, they're gonna have that reaction, yeah.

But don't mistake not taking something seriously for making fun of it. I think he wants to have fun with his characters and with scenarios, but I think the reason he chose this world is because he was that kid. I think he's more big-hearted than some people [see]. Some people come to it with their own prism.

We felt the movie was less an assault on the nerd culture and more an extremely personal revelation. Each of the characters struggles with his/her own failures, insecurities and successes — if anything, it was so realistic I almost cried when the main character threw up before getting kissed, because some of us might have been there before.

Whedon's open letter to Halcyon proves just why this man should be given the keys to the cyborg car:

An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners. From a Very Important Hollywood Mogul

Dear Sirs/Ma'ams,

I am Joss Whedon, the mastermind behind Titan A.E., Parenthood (not the movie) (or the new series) (or the one where 'hood' was capitalized 'cause it was a pun), and myriad other legendary tales. I have heard through the 'grapevine' that the Terminator franchise is for sale, and I am prepared to make a pre-emptive bid RIGHT NOW to wrap this dealio up. This is not a joke, this is not a scam, this is not available on TV. I will write a check TODAY for $10,000, and viola! Terminator off your hands.

No, you didn't miscount. That's four — FOUR! — zeroes after that one. That's to show you I mean business. And I mean show business. Nikki Finke says the Terminator concept is played. Well, here's what I have to say to Nikki Finke: you are a fine journalist and please don't ever notice me. The Terminator story is as formative and important in our culture — and my pretend play — as any I can think of. It's far from over. And before you Terminator-Owners (I have trouble remembering names) rush to cash that sweet cheque, let me give you a taste of what I could do with that franchise:

1) Terminator... of the Rings! Yeah, what if he time-travelled TOO far... back to when there was dragons and wizards? (I think it was the Dark Ages.) Hasta La Vista, Boramir! Cool, huh? "Now you gonna be Gandalf the Red!" RRRRIP! But then he totally helps, because he's a cyborg and he doesn't give a s#&% about the ring — it has no power over him! And he can carry it AND Frodo AND Sam AND f@%& up some orcs while he's doing it. This stuff just comes to me. I mean it. (I will also offer $10,000 for the Lord of the Rings franchise).

2) More Glau. Hey. There's a reason they're called "Summer" movies.

3) Can you say... musical? Well don't. Even I know that's an awful idea.

4) Christian Bale's John Connor will get a throat lozenge. This will also help his Batwork (ten grand for that franchise too, btw.)

5) More porn. John Connor never told Kyle Reese this, but his main objective in going to the past was to get some. What if there's a lot of future-babies that have to be made? Cue wah-wah pedal guitar — and dollar signs!

6) The movies will stop getting less cool.

Okay. There's more — this brain don't quit! (though it has occasionally been fired) — but I think you get my drift. I really believe the Terminator franchise has only begun to plumb the depths of questioning the human condition during awesome stunts, and I'd like to shepherd it through the next phase. The money is there, but more importantly, the heart is there. But more importantly, money. Think about it. End this bloody bidding war before it begins, and put the Terminator in the hands of someone who watched the first one more than any other movie in college, including "Song of Norway" (no current franchise offer).

Sincerely, Joss Whedon.

For this, Joss is forgiven all of Dollhouse.

(According to the Financial Times, real parties interested in Terminator include Sony, Twilight studio Summit Entertainment, and Media Rights Captial, the people behind Bruno. The rights will be auctioned later this month.)

An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners [Whedonesque] (Link updated, thanks all.)

Monday

If you didn't lose most of your Sunday to Syfy's V marathon, don't despair; they're continuing it today, from 8am through 7pm (And then again tomorrow, starting at 8am again). Jane Badler fanatics of the world, unite for one last time before Morena Baccarin takes over. Talking of remakes of beloved shows, AMC have a 15 minute Prisoner Preview at 2:45, teasing the reboot that premieres later this month (It re-runs throughout the week, if you miss it).

Of course, Monday wouldn't be Monday without Heroes; this week is the much-anticipated "Once Upon A Time In Texas" episode that sees Hiro try to save Charlie's life again, even though I thought we'd conclusively proven way back in the first season that he couldn't do that. Oh, Heroes, suddenly that House re-run on Fox at the same time seems that bit more interesting...

Tuesday

Having presumably primed yourself with the end of Syfy's V marathon, you'll be eagerly anticipating the premiere of ABC's brand new, now-with-extra-Scott-Wolf V, for the first of four weeks before a winter break. We reviewed it at Comic-Con and were pleasantly surprised by the "creepy and intriguing" update of the classic show. Here are the first eight minutes or so:

Meanwhile, AMC and FX are showing off their superhero movie chops: AMC has a doublebill of Batman and Batman Returns starting at 8, while FX shows the better-than-the-first-but-that's-not-necessarily-saying-much Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer at the same time.

Wednesday

Get your humpday started properly with AMC showing of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie at 9:45 in the morning, and then stick around for Reign of Fire - one of our favorite dragon war movies ever - at 3pm. In fact, when you add in more showings of Batman, Batman Returns and Batman Forever (at 8pm) and Batman Begins (at 10:30), you could pretty much just leave your television tuned to AMC all day.

But if you did that, you'd miss a new episode of Eastwick at 10pm on ABC. Considering I've never seen the show, I'll just quote the summary instead:

After Chad visits her one last time in a dream, a grieving Roxie resolves to fulfill his last wish — if she can figure out what it is. Hounded by Max, her replacement at the Gazette, about her kidnapping ordeal, Joanna grapples with her own lingering questions while dodging his and Kat, startled by a newfound ability, realizes that Bun's old friend Eleanor Rougement may have answers for both of them.

For those looking for documentary-esque thrills, Mythbusters investigate liquid nitrogen myths in a new episode at 9pm on the Discovery Channel, and, after rocking a marathon of Destination Truth from 8am through 3pm (There's also a new episode on at 9), Syfy celebrates the power of brand loyalty by bringing in Warehouse 13's Eddie McClintock to help track down the "Ghost Of Buffalo Bill" on a brand new episode of Ghost Hunters at 8pm.

Thursday

As if the V marathons earlier in the week weren't enough, Syfy has a Threshold marathon starting at 8am and running until 3 in the afternoon. Remember Threshold?

Because it's Thursday, it's time to give your TiVos a workout. At 8pm, you can choose between a new episode of FlashForward on ABC -

Mark, Demetri, Gough and MI6 agent Fiona Banks investigate a Blue Hand club and its possible connection to some recent suicides. Meanwhile, Aaron receives a surprise visit from a former army buddy of his late daughter's, Demetri comes clean with Zoey about his lack of a flashforward, and Nicole helps Bryce uncover the mystery of his flashforward while volunteering at the hospital.

- or a new Vampire Diaries on the CW:

On his birthday, Stefan is surprised by a visit from Lexi, one of his oldest friends. Still upset by the events at the Halloween haunted house, Elena does her best to stay away from Stefan, but Lexi gives her some unsolicited relationship advice. Elena and Jenna are surprised by a change in Jeremy's behavior. At Damon's insistence, Caroline tries to get his medallion back from Bonnie. Finally, Damon's offer to help Sheriff Forbes has sudden and tragic results.

Similarly, 9pm brings a choice between Fringe on Fox -

The Fringe Division takes on a puzzling investigation where victims are inexplicably disintegrating into ash. The shadowy case casts light on Special Agent Phillip Broyles' past and leads the team to the possibility of foreign Fringe Science. Emotions run high as the alarming events stack up and revealing personal details emerge about the leader of the Fringe Division.

- and what looks like a very fun episode of Supernatural on the CW:

The Trickster throws Sam and Dean into an alternate universe where they are characters in different television series, including a sexy medical show, a Japanese game show, a forensics show and a sitcom. The brothers realize the only way to get out of this world is to play along and become the characters in the shows. However, Castiel appears and warns them this universe is dangerous and they must get out before they become trapped.

(My suggestion: Watch FlashForward and Fringe live, TiVo Supernatural and try to pretend Vampire Diaries doesn't exist. Sorry, Kevin Williamson.)

Friday

Today's Syfy marathon? The third season of Doctor Who. Again, it starts at 8am: Set your TiVo to relive the awesomeness that is Martha Jones. Otherwise, you'll be left with nothing to watch until Smallville on the CW at 8 (Jor-El meets Chloe, Clark realizes that a younger version of his dad is on Earth and Zod keeps disappointing in the villain stakes).

That's followed by the Syfy double bill of Stargate Universe at 9 (Wherein Richard Dean Anderson guests with a crazy plan about how to bring the accidental crew of the Destiny home. Spoiler: It's only the sixth episode: It's not going to work), and Sanctuary at 10 (Magnus wakes up with no idea where she is, or why everything around her has been destroyed. I know how she feels).

If you're feeling like you're missing old friends, though, you could always tune in to White Collar on USA at 9, which counts Fringe's dear departed Charlie and The Middleman's Natalie Morales amongst its cast this week. Plus, of course, Matt Bomer, whom everyone keeps telling me is the new David Tennant in dreaminess quotant.

Saturday

Syfy seems to have forgotten that Halloween was the week before, with three horror movies: Open Graves (starring a pre-Dollhouse Eliza Dushku), in which American students abroad find a deadly boardgame, the remake of The Amityville Horror, and From Within, which apparently has something to do with a Christian questioning her faith when people around her get gruesomely slaughtered.

Thankfully, the movie that follows those three, Snakehead Terror features both snake-headed mutant pirhanas and Bruce Boxeleitner, so things seem to getting back to normal in the end. (Open Graves starts at 4, and each following movie comes two hours later).

Sunday

Worried about the truth behind Roland Emmerich's new destructo movie? Then don't watch 2012: Startling New Secrets on Syfy, which sounds as if it treads the fine line between Destination Truth-esque knowing parody and tacky sensationalism. Which, come to think of it, sounds pretty like the 2012 movie itself, actually... Instead, finish off your weekend with "Return To Malice," the latest, and no doubt entirely awesome, episode of The Venture Bros. on Cartoon Network at midnight. Let's face it: Brock would be disappointed if you didn't.

The panel included a lively discussion of trends over the past two years in fantasy and science fiction, and included Gollancz associate editor Jo Fletcher, Locus magazine editor-in-chief Liza Trombi, book critic Tom Whitmore, and bookseller Justin Ackroyd, who runs Australian mail order bookstore Slow Glass Books.

I asked panelists about whether there is a recent trend in which fantasy has overtaken science fiction in popularity, and everyone seemed to agree that this idea isn't a recent trend at all. Jo and Justin pointed out that fantasy has been more popular since the early 1980s, and that there hasn't been a big science fiction bestseller in years (though there have been big fantasy bestsellers, and bestsellers by mainstream authors who have written science fiction novels, like Michael Chabon). Tom pointed out that almost since science fiction became a recognizable genre, people have been declaring it dead.

Other trends we talked about included young adult science fiction, which is one of the most exciting, growing areas where science fiction is being published. Liza suggested that YA fiction is intriguing because authors can be more overtly polemical in it. Younger audiences have more patience for overtly didactic stories. We also talked about how YA fiction allows authors to tell SF "starter stories" aimed at people who aren't familiar with the SF canon. "It's about storytelling," Jo asserted, "plain and simple." When authors aim at younger audiences, they are free to tell stories that break away from SF traditions.

Finally, we talked about how paranormal romance is one of the biggest-selling subgenres that crosses over with SF and urban fantasy. I mentioned that I think there is a lot of prejudice against paranormal romance, especially among SF readers, because it's viewed as silly and girly. Jo explained that there is a lot of great writing in the paranormal romance genre, and mentioned that Charlaine Harris' non-Sookie Sackhouse novels are really quite interesting and multi-layered.

Then we talked about our book lists, which are linked below. Tom didn't have time to put together a list, but he did mention that he was excited about Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, UNSEEN ACADEMICALS.

Justin Ackroyd's picks

Jo Fletcher's picks

Annalee Newitz's picks

Liza Trombi's picks

I don't want to spoil Hunter Prey for you too much, but suffice to say it's a twisty thriller that will remind you a little bit of Enemy Mine and (surprisingly) of Treasure of Sierra Madre. There is no "treasure" per se, but Collora's tale of shifting loyalties among a group of aliens and their prisoner - stranded after a crash on an alien world - brings to mind classic movies about desperate, selfish men in who would rather die than work together to survive.

Shot on a microscopic budget in Mexico, the film's concept design is fantastic. Collora's greatest strength lies in creating settings of rich depth and designing characters who simply kick ass. It's easy to forget you're watching what is basically a labor of love when the design is so stunning and cool.

Hunter Prey asks a question that has preoccupied a lot of recent science fiction, from Doctor Who to the new Star Trek movie: When somebody has exterminated your whole planet, what do you do? One of Hunter Prey's characters is the only remaining member of his species, and a large part of the film is about whether he's justified in trying to exterminate the species that committed genocide against his own.

So when can you see it? Collora has just completed the movie, and is working out details on a distribution deal, but hopefully you'll have a chance to look at it in 2010. For now, revel in these exclusive stills from the movie.

The Wikipedia entry for the book says* that They'd Rather Be Right, also published as The Forever Machine, "has often been considered the worst novel ever to win a Hugo." So it was with muted enthusiasm that I logged into Amazon and ordered a used copy. (The book is no longer being printed, as best I can tell, although I see it's available for the Kindle.) I confess, too, that I didn't dive right in when the mailperson delivered it a few days later.

As it turned out, once I actually started reading, I was pleasantly surprised. This should come as no shock — first, my expectations were low, and second, the Wiki entry doesn't even have a citation for its claim; the only external link from it is to this review by Dave Langford (himself a Hugo winner in several categories), although the review is indeed unequivocally negative.

I'll certainly agree with Langford that Clifton and Riley do more telling than showing in this novel, and I'm of the opinion too that this is generally a bad thing. And I'll even buy that They'd Rather Be Right is "an implausible award-winner," as he puts it. And yet...

The story is about three men on the run — two professors and a grad student. They're in hiding in San Francisco because they've built a supercomputer into which only pure facts — no assumptions, no theories — have been programmed. The supercomputer, Bossy, isn't quite an artificial intelligence, because she never demonstrates any individual initiative, but she can tell right from wrong, and in the mildly dystopic future setting of the book, where the government uses "opinion control" to keep the public in line, she's seen as a threat to humanity's place of primacy. Or something. It's not entirely clear what the public's initial problem is with Bossy, and that lack of detail is the sort of problem that plagues the story.

The public is right to be concerned, though. What Bossy is, though it's never mentioned by name (probably because Vernor Vinge wasn't even a teenager at the time), is the Singularity. Is she the first Singularity in SF? I don't know. She's definitely the first in a Hugo-winning novel.

What Bossy can do is, through "psychosomatic therapy," take a normal person and erase years of accumulated stress from their cells, essentially resetting the person, freeing them from a lifetime of frustrations and problems stemming from the unfounded assumptions that start afflicting everyone shortly after birth — and making them more or less permanently young. The catch is that the patient has to be willing to give up all the biases and prejudices, about themselves and others, that have been pounded into them.

Yeah, it's a little silly, but far from the silliest idea in SF. And it's a metaphor, and Clifton and Riley's telling is such that you can suspend your disbelief without much trouble. (Certainly, their recognition that you have to want to change for psychotherapy to work rings truer than the Freudian bits in their Hugo predecessor.) And although Dave Langford is arguably right in his review that the big idea here is "lamentably undeveloped," on the other hand, there are a lot of different ways to write a good book. They'd Rather Be Right does have a lot — like, a lot — of those sort of pontificatory passages about How Dumb People Are and How Smart We Could Be. And I can certainly empathize with readers who hate that shit. At the same time, plenty of great authors — Heinlein, Asimov, Card, Simmons, Stephenson, and innumerable others – have done it with frequency, and it can be very satisfying.**

And in They'd Rather Be Right's case, it might even be healthy, because the one core idea the book focuses on — again and again — is How Little We Know, and how reflexively we adopt and cling to what we think we know as truth. Proponents of hard science fiction lament the dearth of scientific accuracy in the genre, but far more important to me than whether a fictional technology is possible is driving home an idea that is the very foundation of science: that we only know what we know, and that what we know could change at any moment, subject to additional data. Science's job is not to preclude.

Rather does some other things well, too: Its handling of telepathy rings utterly true; and if you've read as much Marshall McLuhan as I have, you may find its notion of multi-valued facts, as well as its calling-out of the specialist mind-set, eerily prescient. And the workout at the end of the book — tycoon Howard Kennedy's solution to the Bossy problem — isn't stunningly original, but Slashdot types should appreciate it. (The final chapter, however, could be cut completely and the story would be better for it.)

Anyway, I can see how it was an implausible award-winner. But still, it reminded me, several times over, not to assume anything I don't actually know (like how good a book I haven't read is), and it did so in a way that'll stick. I'm not sure I'd run out and hunt down a hard copy if I were you, but think about getting it if you've got a Kindle.

*At least, as of this writing. Wikipedia changes, you know.

**The tone and style of They'd Rather Be Right are especially reminiscent of another classic work of science fiction that usually doesn't get regarded as such: Atlas Shrugged. Clifton and Riley aren't as compelling of novelists as Ayn Rand, but their philosophy holds up a lot better under scrutiny; one could do worse than administer their book as an antidote to hers.

"Blogging the Hugos" appears every other Sunday. In the next installment, on November 15: Double Star, by Robert Heinlein, from 1956.

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

I have to confess, it's very hard for me to watch horror movies. It's not that I don't enjoy the occasional scare, and it's not that I'm worried about ghosts and monsters following home (although I will confess to a mild fear of zombies). No, it's just that when the body count starts rising, I start feeling, well, sad. I don't come out of the theater pumping with adrenaline; I'm too distracted thinking about the people who died and the loved ones they've left behind.

The plots of several pieces of horror are discussed below, so be warned there may be spoilers.

The movie that really hit this home for me is not a science fiction movie, but Wes Craven's Scream. In the movie's opening sequence, Drew Barrymore is terrorized by a knife-wielding serial killer one night while she's home alone. As the killer is chasing her down, her parents pull up in the driveway. For a brief moment, it looks like she's saved, but in the next shot, we see the parents, happy from a pleasant evening out, and their daughter pulled down by the killer before she has the chance to cry out for help.

How horrible. It's a suspenseful moment to be sure, but one that evokes horror more than terror. Horrifying that she was so close to salvation only to meet a brutal end, and horrifying that her parents will find their daughter mutilated on their lawn and spend the rest of their lives wondering what would have happened if they have come home just a little sooner. It's a scene tinged with more tragedy than terror.

Horror is a genre that picks and pokes at our deepest anxieties. It's a reminder that we live in an unstable world, and that no matter how careful or good we are, we could at any time be struck with death, disfigurement, or madness. A lot of horror movies appeal to our limbic systems, to that part of our brain that wonders what lurks in the shadows and triggers a happy release of hormone every time someone shouts "Boo!" And there is undeniably an artistry to that, to the sort of jumps and thrills so frightening that, weeks later, you're still checking under the bed for demons from Hell. But often the horror that still lingers for years afterwards are the ones that play on the less primal — but still very human — fears of losing the ones you love and being left alone in the world.

When Heartbreak Drives the Horror

Horror protagonists don't always make the best choices. They insult powerful witches, run up the stairs when they should run out the door, and try to capture the man-eating alien instead of killing it. And when Louis Creed buries his son Gage in the Micmac burial ground in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, we know it's a bad idea. He knows it's a bad idea. But he so desperately hopes that he can repair his wounded family that he is willing to make a terrible and utterly wrong decision. And when Gage comes back only to murder his mother, Louis too easily manages to talk himself into burying his wife in the same graveyard.

It should be a forehead-slapping moment, but it's depressingly relatable. That Gage comes back as an undead monster is pretty horrifying (he did make our list of scariest characters in film), but what's more horrifying is what grief can drive Louis to do. His grief is so potent, so unbearable that he's willing to make monsters out of his loved ones in the hope that seeing them again will mend his heart.

It's an idea that harkens back to WW Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," that famed exercise in truly depressing horror. After the Whites receive a wish-granting monkey paw, they wish for money, only to lose their son in an accident and receive compensation for his death. In that moment, they understand the nature of the monkey paw: it grants wishes, but in a perverse way. Still, the husband defers to his wife's terrible, maddening grief and wishes their son back to life. But, like Louis Creed, Mr. White must make his son dead again — knowing what comes back couldn't possibly be right — doubling his guilt and grief.

There are reasons why stories like "The Monkey's Paw" endure, and why its ideas find its way into so many other works of horror. They force us to access our fears of losing those closest to us, asking us how far we would go to keep them with us. Perhaps the most frightening thing about these stories that many of us will face terrible grief in our lives — and perhaps even guilt at the deaths of our loved ones — and we could be capable of making the same terrible decisions as the people in these stories, even if we don't get the opportunity to act on them.

When Losing Someone Makes Things That Much Worse

Even when grief and loss aren't the focus of a horror story, a moment of terrible loss can have more impact than even the most terrifying monster. 28 Days Later adds a frightening bit of realism to the zombie apocalypse, but it never forgets that the fear of losing your life is little match for the sadness that comes in a world suffused with death. When Jim discovers that his parents committed suicide in the face of violent death (leaving a note begging him not to wake from his coma), it's a bright spot of pain in a movie already filled with terror. But when our merry band of survivors becomes something of a family, with Frank playing the wise and protective father, the apocalypse seems survivable, almost manageable. Then Frank becomes infected with the Rage virus, and it's not just another zombie movie death. It puts a lump in your throat and reminds you that the zombie outbreak isn't all fun and killing the Infected — it's actually horribly sad.

This threat of loss adds dimension to other horror movies as well. Take The Ring, a film already terrifying in its J-horror weirdness. That The Ring turns a VHS cassette into an object of terror is incredibly impressive, but it's when Rachel's son Aidan watches the tape that the clock really starts ticking. Faced with the death of her son, Rachel must not only save herself, but survive long enough to keep Samara from killing her son as well. It adds a deeper, driving motivation to an already scary movie.

Joss Whedon is perhaps the master of this particular brand of horror. Though the series was filled with man-eating monsters, death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is often random, senseless, and poignant. Few moments in the show stand out as clearly as Joyce's death from an aneurysm, or Tara's from a stray bullet. The central theme in Buffy is that family and friends make life grand, even when your life is filled with mayhem and violence. In such a world, few things are as horrifying as losing part of your family, and such deaths always left the characters unbalanced, even psychotic with grief. Even the show's most calculated death, Angelus' slaying of Jenny Calendar, is designed to maximize heartbreak. It's not enough that Angelus kills her; he also has to place her in Giles' bed with a trail of roses leading up to it, in a mockery of romantic seduction. And that heartache, far more than fear, drives Giles to hate and try to destroy Angelus.

When Your Loved One Turns Monstrous

This is a staple of vampire and zombie movies, when you find you must destroy the creature wearing your loved one's face. Buffy tried this in the very first episode, turning Willow and Xander's friend Jesse bloodsucker and forcing Xander to kill him an episode later. It's not the strongest instance of this particular trope (I'm not sure if Jesse is even mentioned later in the series), but it's a solid introduction to the horrible nature of vampires. Zombie movies are stronger in this regard. Even Shaun of the Dead, a movie mostly devoted to the funny side of the undead, goes suddenly tearjerker when we learn Shaun's mother has been bitten by a zombie. This bit of sadness is then compounded by the ensuing debate over shooting Shaun's dead mother in the head. Even though everyone knows it has to happen, Shaun can't bring himself to let it happen, and even the normally logical Liz argues against it. And when his mother inevitably rises from the dead, Shaun is the one who must shoot her body, a shockingly tearful moment from the zombie romantic comedy.

It's another work from Stephen King, The Shining, that offers a more realistic view on why this concept is so horrifying. Jack Torrance is a man so driven to drink that he gives his soul over to the hotel for alcohol. In the movie, it's played more as slasher horror, with Jack Nicholson gleefully hunting down his wife and child, but it's a grim reminder that the people we love could become the people we fear, or that we ourselves might be capable of inflicting terrible harms on our loved ones.

When Hope Is Your Worst Enemy

Few genres are as relentlessly obsessed with death as post-apocalyptic fiction. In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, death abounds; most of the world is dead, bands of rapists and murderers prowl the road, and the protagonist's wife has killed herself. The protagonist is not concerned for his own survival — he's already dying — but for his son's. He's confronted with the wrenching knowledge that he might have to kill his son to save him from an even worse fate. But he hopes for something better, hopes that he will find good people with whom his son could make a future. The whole book is a dirge for civilization, but the father's hope might only leave his son open to future horrors — and tragically, the father dies without knowing his son will fall in with good people after all.

In The Walking Dead, zombies are less agents of fear than they are death incarnate, and the comic often plays on themes of hope and how we cope with loss. Hope is tragic as much as it is necessary for survival. A farmer keeps his undead family in a barn by his house, hoping there will someday be a cure. The survivors hope to rebuild some semblance of civilization, but lose some of their number every time they think they've found peace. And as brutal and horrible as death is for the ones who die, the grief of the survivors is far more powerful and frightening.

The Fear of Dying Alone

It's telling that the very first episode of The Twilight Zone , "Where Is Everybody?" deals with loneliness, and the human need for companionship. It's a theme that inspired one of the more unnerving episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In "Remember Me," Dr. Crusher sees the her son and everyone else aboard the Enterprise disappear, until she's the only one left (of course, it turns out that she's the one who has actually disappeared, in this case into a static warp bubble). The episode has a Twilight Zone quality to it, but it's especially bleak that Crusher is at the center of it. Here is a woman who has already lost a husband to the hazards of Starfleet, whose closest friends routinely put their own lives in danger, and whose son is joining the very military organization that took her husband. "Remember Me" is, more than anything, a metaphor for the very real possibility that she could end up alone. Even Garfield, of all things, played with this idea in its surprisingly depressing 1989 Halloween run, where the orange fat cat wakes to a future where his house is abandoned and he never exists.

Even the episode of The Twilight Zone that was most optimistic about the apocalypse, "Time Enough at Last," deals with loneliness. After a nuclear attack wipes out everyone around him, Burgess Meredith is about to commit suicide until he realizes there's a library full of books to keep him company. It's only when he breaks his glasses that he feels truly alone, and that loneliness is more frightening than anything that goes bump in the night.

(Thanks to Graeme for suggesting "Remember Me").

Yes, vampires. You knew they were coming, and here they are: Mainstream Culture's Favorite Super Creeps. But here's the question: Can a witch defeat a vampire? Which is quicker on the draw, the hypnotic gaze of a vamp or some kind of speedy spell to stake toothy nemeses? You'd think that years of watching Buffy would've given me an answer for this, but I'm turning to you for it instead. Don't let me down, people.

For those looking for clarification: This is a hypothetical generic vampire versus an equally hypothetical generic witch we're talking about here. Yes, Dracula would probably be able to defeat all but the most wizened witch because he's a particularly big and bad Big Bad, but what about Joe B. Vampire? We know the general vamp characteristics, but how useful is any of that against someone who can overrule the rules of reality with enough practice and preparation?

As with all the earlier polls, this one will be open until midnight PST tonight, and the winner will be named... and, perhaps, given a particularly fitting prize... tomorrow. Vote before you head out to your Halloween party of choice.

Hell House
Here's the first clue that you might not want to go to a particular house looking for treats: If it's called the Hell House. Okay, to be fair, in Richard Matheson's 1971 novel, the house is actually called the Belasco House, but even in the book that should be a clue, considering it was named after a man who performed unspeakable acts of "blasphemy and perversion" in it. Turns out that it wasn't necessarily Ernesto Belasco's fault, though; the house itself corrupts and feeds upon the weaknesses of all who enter. Which is to say: Don't count on candy.

Monster House

Sure, the eponymous house from this 2006 animated movie may have been possessed by the spirit of a vengeful carnival giantess, but that doesn't really explain the "eating people" thing, nor the house's ability to use a telephone (Is the telephone part of the house? Or did the house break off a piece of itself to be able to dial the number?). And while it looked like the house was destroyed, and the spirit released, at the end of the movie, we're not convinced. After all, doesn't the bad guy always come back in a sequel? As the movie demonstrates, though, anyone approaching the house, even if garbed in inventive and amusing costumes, don't tend to fare well. Or leave, for that matter.

House of Mystery/House of Secrets/Sinister House Of Secret Love
Two of these three houses are probably very familiar to anyone who's read some Sandman at some point. The Houses of Mystery and Secrets were firmly placed in Morpheus' dream realm in that series, along with their owners, Cain and Abel - But both of them, and the little-known third house in the family, existed long before that, as settings for the Crypt Keeper-esque introductions in three horror anthology comics throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies. While both the Houses of Mystery and Secrets have since been revived both in Sandman and their own series (Both focusing as much on the houses as any characters), the poor Sinister House has been left unopened for decades, keeping that love that little bit more Secret. Candy possibilities: Nil for Mystery and Secrets, but don't be too surprised if the Sinister House is so grateful for the visitors that it gives you something after all.

House

One of the favorite films of the teenager that was Graeme at the time, this 1986 horror comedy about a Vietnam vet who ends up living in a haunted house that's also responsible for the disappearance of his son offered up the dubious pleasures of George Wendt in a non-Norm role and three increasingly disappointing sequels that proved that, even though you think you've cured the House of its Hauntedness, there's always more left somewhere (You hear me, Monster House?). Nevertheless, being the haunted house in a horror comedy, trick or treaters should best be warned: "Ironic" deaths based upon your costume are probably all but guaranteed.

House
No, I'm not getting forgetful in my old age; this 2006 novel shares a name only with the 1986 movie - Well, that and the idea of a Haunted House. But in this "Christian Horror" novel, there's one easy out from this (and any) terror abode: Sacrifice that impresses Jesus. Quite how much he'd be impressed with trick or treating - or the whole Halloween concept in general, for that matter - is open to question, however, so I wouldn't ring that doorbell thinking you've got an easy out, if I were you.

House On Haunted Hill

If someone offers you what seems like a ridiculous amount of money just to stay one night in any particular location, it's a fair bet that said location is haunted. And likely to try to kill you. On the plus side, Frederick Loren's house may be haunted, but it only seems to become supernaturally active after midnight, meaning that any trick or treaters before the witching hour should find themselves able to leave intact (Although, most likely, without any snack success). Just don't say yes if he asks you to come inside and join the party.

The Haunted Mansion

Disney's favorite ghost-filled abode may be 40 years old this year, but isn't spooky ageless, when it comes down to it? Ignore the Eddie Murphy movie version and you're left with probably the only place on this list where trick or treating is most likely not only accepted but encouraged. Yes, you'd probably have to sit on a weird train thing taking you through the entire house to meet all the various ghouls and beasties and ask each one if they'd want a trick or a treat, but still. It's a Disney thing: Kids enjoying themselves is what it's all about.

It seems to me that there are five basic characteristics of a scare fail, though I'm open to the idea that there may be more. Humiliation knows no bounds, after all. Allow me to elaborate.

Failure of the Monster
An ill-conceived or shabbily-constructed monster is perhaps the most common source of scare fail. Possibly the worst offender - at least in recent memory - is The Happening, a monster movie whose "monster" was basically wind in trees. Pretty trees. Not "I rape you" trees like in Evil Dead, or "I eat you" trees like in Poltergeist. No, just nice, leafy New England trees that you want to climb in or laze underneath. Nothing reeks of fail more than the moments in this film when director M. Night Shyamalan builds up the tension, shows you a zillion suicides, and then zooms into the monster - which looks like a bucolic scene from a Hallmark card!

Other monster failures can be traced to a lack of imagination, which certainly plagued the zombie/disease things in I Am Legend, as well as unmemorable beasties from the flick Boogieman and Stephen King's worst scare fail novel, Cujo. I should caution that a cheaply-constructed monster does not always equal scare fail. The partially-glimpsed yuck monster in The Descent may have been a fairly ordinary Gollum-like creature, but it scared the crap out of audiences because of the scary things it did. Meanwhile the giant monster robots in Terminator 3 were awesomely (and expensively) done, but completely unscary. In fact, the instant I saw those harvester Terminators I had to restrain myself from yelling SCARE FAIL! right there in the theater.

Of course no discussion of monster fail would be complete without mentioning the completely disappointing dragons in Reign of Fire (is Christian Bale a glutton for monster fail or what?), as well as the utterly pathetic Godzilla from Roland Emmerich's Godzilla. The best part of Emmerich's Godzilla is that he's totally creamed by the REAL Gojira in recent Japanese flick Godzilla: Final Wars. That G vs. G fight was totally meta, and totally rectified the fail.

Failure to Build Tension
Exhibit A for the failure to build tension is the haunted spaceship fick Pandorum. The characters are walking, walking, walking down those long, dark corridors, and then the monster LEAPS out. Yes, it probably made you jump because you'd almost fallen asleep during the build-up. Pretty much any movie that relies entirely on jumps and shocks is basically admitting to suffering from scare fail. Several entries in the Friday the 13th franchise, most notably the much-hyped Jason X, suffered from this problem.

Movies like The Shining, Paranormal Activity, and 28 Days Later make excellent use of tension, showing you bits of terror in between moments of nerve-wracking waiting for something to happen. Tension fail is sort of like blowing your wad too soon, or maybe too late. Think of how disappointed you were when the big reveal about the once-scary Borg from Star Trek was that they were controlled by a greasy torso with an English accent. Or when you realized the entire Saw franchise was about a guy in a stupid mask. Just as fear and intrigue reach their peak there's a giant "blah" instead of a scream.

Failure to Make Me Care About Characters Dying
When the headless horseman stabbed little kids to death in Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I really did not care. It's not that I don't think kids are nice little creatures; it's that I didn't care about these particular kids at all. Kill 'em for all I care. How about spooky Halle Berry in Gothika? Do you really care if she's having sex with the devil or crazy or trapped in an alternate reality? No, you don't. You just want her to shut up.

Even though 2012 isn't out yet, I'm already filled with torpor by the trailer. While I care abstractly about the destruction of my home state of California, I don't give a crap about whether the main characters are able to outrun that earthquake. Of course the worst is when you actually dislike the characters so much that you want them to die. Like the annoying, whiny medical students in Flatliners. Go ahead and have your damn near-death experiences UNTIL YOU DIE, people. And the snotty teens in I Know What You Did Last Summer? I actually think they deserve to die.

I should add that some soon-to-be-dead characters are intended to be loathsome, like the hipsters in House of 1,000 Corpses (including a snacky Rainn Wilson). You're supposed to be amused by watching these kids die, so that's not a fail.

But when fear turns to a kind of bored, satisfied schadenfreude, that is major scare fail.

Failure to Engage in Diverting Quippery
How many movies have you seen where the intrepid heroes are trying to have amusing banter, with each other or the monsters, and you begin to clutch your head in pain? This happens a lot in the movie version of Doom, as well as all the Blade movies. (In Blade, one character actually says to the vamps, "Go ahead... Bite me.")

Or how about this amazing quip-off from the tragically unscary Van Helsing:

Anna Valerious: We Transylvanians always look on the brighter side of death.
Van Helsing: There's a brighter side of death?
Anna Valerious: Of course. It's just harder to see.

Huh?

And another fail moment in quippery, from Hannibal Rising:

Petras Kolnas: What did I ever do to you?
Hannibal Lecter: Aside from eating my sister? Nothing.

Cannibalism jokes! In a movie about a cannibal serial killer! Fail. You want good horror quippery? Just watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or one of the scarier episodes of Doctor Who.

Failure to Create A Scenario That Scares A Broad Range of People
Like monster failures, the failure to create a broadly scary scenario is probably at the root of most scare fail. For example, there is an entire subgenre of scary stories, like the Left Behind franchise, which is only scary for religious Christians. Stick an atheist Jew like me in the theater, or your typical J-horror fanatic from Tokyo, and you get a whole lot of fail. Same goes for movies like Reefer Madness or even a 1970s drug scare flick like Altered States. If you don't think drugs are a Scary Bad Thing, these movies will fail to fill you with The Fear.

But then there are other scenarios that fail because they are too murky to really bring on the shivers. The Mothman Prophesies is like this, with its nebulous alien/moth guy visions. Vagueness is almost never terrifying. Then there are haunted house flicks like 13 Ghosts and Amityville Horror. Some people are scared of old houses, but most of us feel pretty ho-hum about them. Is Satan in the basement? Really? Well, why don't you just call the Ghostbusters or Buffy or something? There are, of course, ways to do hauntings brilliantly - witness the haunted housing project in Candyman, which couldn't be more mind-blankingly scary.

The scary scenario fail also tends to creep up on formerly scary movies over time. Movies that are over 20 years old start to look campy rather than scary - witness the once-terrifying monster movies of the 1930s, or pretty much any slasher made in the 1980s. Still, there are some scary movies that stand the test of time, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 50s version), The Shining, or (maybe) The Exorcist. I'll leave unanswered the question of whether we should deem a movie guilty of scare fail simply because it hasn't stood the test of time, or whether we should evaluate it within its historical context.

One scenario that clearly fails the fear test is the "real life alien abduction" story, which is returning to haunt us next week with The Fourth Kind. Unlike Close Encounters, an emphatically fictional flick which made abduction seriously terrifying, Fourth Kind is in the same subgenre as Communion (Whitley Strieber's autobiographical tale of being anally raped by aliens when he was a kid). It's supposed to be scary BECAUSE IT'S REAL. But what if you don't think aliens are real? Fail.

Fear can be highly personal, dependent for its effectiveness on your beliefs or experiences. But in order to avoid scare fail, it must transcend highly specific shocks and rain terror upon the masses.

We've collected 38 of the wrongest, weirdest, freakiest and most horrifying sex scenes from science-fiction and horror movies. You may want to get your ophthalmologist to put in those eye-blurring eyedrops before watching some of these. There are severed penises, severed heads, evil trees, dolls inseminating Jennifer Tilly, Satanic rituals and alien women who drain men's sexual vitality, usually killing them. Freud would get stuck in an endless feedback loop of WTF trying to figure out what these clips say about the people who made them.

Like much horror in general, a lot of these clips depict stuff that you would be, well, horrified to see happening in real life — except that in this case, it's all so absurdly campy and unreal, you mostly just question your taste in choosing to watch this stuff. However, a disclaimer does apply: if you're upset by weirdly graphic and physically impossible sex acts, a few of which involve badly choreographed violence, then don't watch these clips. We are not going to pay your therapy bills.

(Some of these clips are ones we've featured on the blog before, in the past couple years' worth of "found footage" posts.)

We already featured one dreadful oral sex moment up top, but here are several more:

And here are some clips of monster sex that may make you want to take up a vow of celibacy:

And then there are the horrendous insemination moments:

And finally, just a general collection of "holy crap WTF" moments:

As always, you can download the whole thing as a printable PDF by clicking here.

This time around, we're not sticking an hyperlinks in the PDF version of this calendar, because that makes it way harder to make corrections to the calendar when people point out problems. Instead, here's a list of all the conventions in November, with URLs:

Friday the 6th:
Aki Con
Neko Con (thru Sun) Convention
Pacific Media Expo

Saturday the 7th:
Zenkaikon
King Con Brooklyn
Cincinnati Comic and Anime Convention

Sunday the 8th:
Seattle ComiCard Convention
Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention

Friday the 13th:
Dotcon
Izumicon
New England Fan Experience
Windycon

Friday the 20th:
Anime Crossroads
Anime USA
Another Anime Convention
Bishie Con
Daisho Con
Yule Con
Philcon
Zona Con

Saturday the 21st.:
Boston Super Megafest
Virginia Comic-Con

Friday the 27th.:

Tomodachi Fest
OryCon
Chicago Tardis 2009

Saturday the 28th.:
Atlanta Anime Day

Research by Cyriaque Lamar. Design by Stephanie Fox.

As you know, we only deal with science fiction and urban fantasy here, so Hannibal Lecter and the like are absent from this list — but feel free to call out your favorites in comments.

Get started with 71 - 80!

Additional reporting and writing by Lauren Davis and Caitlin Petrakovitz. Special thanks to Sean Dooley, and Kyle Rowe and IFC's non horror list, which made me remember donkey boy.

This is by no means comprehensive (there are more space monster movies, not mention many of the companions on Doctor Who were real screamers), and it's not all horror, but we have a nice sampling of folks screaming aboard spaceships, on alien worlds, and in the cold of space.

Set in the city of Ambergris that VanderMeer invented with his collection City of Saints and Madmen, the novel takes place after the once-oppressed "grey caps" have risen up from their underground ghettos and taken over the city. Mysterious and seemingly magical in previous stories, the grey caps are revealed in this novel - intriguingly - as bioengineers who can convert plants and animals into weapons, surveillance devices, superpowered implants, and even entire buildings. The city that was once run by industrial/colonial mafia-style companies is now entirely run by the grey caps, and our main character Finch has been enlisted to serve in their puppet police force.

VanderMeer is at his best when imagining the vast, alien, and yet strangely recognizable history of Ambergris. Built on the dead bodies of natives, then atop the oppressed grey caps' tunnels, and finally out of the imperial pursuits of warring companies, the city is like a puckered scar of historical traumas. Now its entire architecture is being rewritten by grey cap biotechnology, buildings evaporating into dust or rising up out of weird plants to form spongy, reeking structures. Half the citizens have been transformed by spore infections, converted into souped-up "partials" or simply killed by mushroom toxins.

The novel begins with ambiguous hero Finch investigating the extremely bizarre murder of a human and a grey cap, who appear to have been dropped improbably from a very great height onto a sofa in an apartment. Making matters worse is the fact that this investigation is being watched closely by his grey cap boss, who insists that he carry a spore gun that leaks weird fluids all the time.

Like any noir gumshoe, Finch finds himself drawn into a conspiracy far vaster than anything he'd imagined. With the help of his rebel librarian friend, and his spore-eaten partner, he discovers that the grey caps have a terrifying plan that involves two enormous towers they're building near the harbor. But he also discovers that there are insurgencies within insurgencies whose reach goes far beyond Ambergris' boundaries - possibly into other worlds. Finch's own family history connects him more deeply to the city's deep political structure than he ever realized.

Surreal and at times intoxicating, Finch is ambitious in a way that few genre novels ever are. VanderMeer has tried - and, often, succeeded - in blending fantasy, science fiction, and crime fiction into something delightfully evil and strange. He's converted the traditional hard edges of noir fiction into the foggy, fungal shapes of magical science realism. Especially when Finch is exploring Ambergris' new biotech contours, which inevitably lead into its industrial past, you get a visceral sense of what it means to discover that what you thought was magic was actually just advanced technology. This is a very difficult idea to depict using imagery and mood, but VanderMeer does it brilliantly.

There is a David Cronenberg feel to the universe of Finch, with its gooey guns and spore surveillance devices. But it's also a kind of Lawrence of Arabia story, which is what will keep you reading. You never quite know what sort of weird new narrative path you'll be led down, and that's exciting.

While the experiment of the novel is laudable, it sometimes fails frustratingly. The novel begins agonizingly slowly, which undermines the rapid pace required to tell a successful detective story. As if to make up for this problem, VanderMeer has written the entire novel in noir-esque sentence fragments that begin to grate on the nerves almost immediately. This is particularly tragic because so much of the author's charm lies in his lush prose.

While Finch may be flawed, it's ultimately a rewarding read. Even if you've never read any of VanderMeer's other Ambergris stories, it stands well on its own and is testimony to how mind-boggling and affecting science fiction can be when released from its usual cliches.

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder.

Gossamer (Looney Tunes)
Cute? Look at him. He's basically a hairy valentine in tennis shoes.
Terrifying? He tries hard, but he's ultimately no match for Bugs Bunny. Then again, no one is.

Giant Killer Rabbits (Night of the Lepus)
Cute? They're your average giant mutant bunny rabbits.
Terrifying? Actually, they just seem more adorable when they're gigantic and raiding people's kitchens. But I suppose that whole eating people business could be scary. Maybe.

Beep the Meep (Doctor Who)
Cute? Passably. It helps that he looks like giant puffball.
Terrifying? Absolutely. Meeps are a murderous species who revel in pain, torture, and galactic domination. And Beep is the worst of the worst and a notorious war criminal.

Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (Ghostbusters)
Cute? He's basically a giant version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Plus, I've had a soft spot for him since the cartoon.
Terrifying? He nearly destroys New York with his deliciously sugary body.

Lenore, the Cute Little Dead Girl
Cute? It's right there in the name.
Terrifying? Not on purpose, but let's just say you should probably keep your pets (and yourself) clear of Lenore.

Hello Cthulhu
Cute? He might be an unspeakable horror, but he's a huggable one.
Terrifying? Honestly, he's no match for Hello Kitty.

Mogwai (Gremlins)
Cute? Sure, for now.
Terrifying? Just try feeding them after midnight and see if they're still they're still so cute.

Wolvogs (Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood)
Cute? These genetically engineered dog-wolf hybrids look like adorable domesticated puppies.
Terrifying? They may look like dog pups, but wolvogs hunt and kill as vicious wolves.

Beryllium Miners (Galaxy Quest)
Cute? They look like little children, at least until they open their mouths.
Terrifying? They look like they'd happily chow down on any of the Galaxy Quest cast members.

Were-Rabbit (Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit)
Cute? Just about everything Nick Park designs is at least a little bit cute.
Terrifying? He's a strictly vegetarian monster.

Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors)
Cute? Despite the teeth and the thirst for human blood, she is pretty cute when she's small.
Terrifying? Even forgetting the business about eating people and wanting to take over the world, Audrey II's most frightening aspect is her ability to convince milquetoast Seymour to kill for her.

Goblins (Labyrinth)
Cute? In an adorably ugly sort of way.
Terrifying? They're by no means the most critters in Labyrinth, but they do an impressive job of slinking around in the shadows and stealing infants.

Shmee (Squee)
Cute? Squee's teddy bear has seen better days, but he's still cuter than the Doughboys from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.
Terrifying? Shmee provides emotional comfort for the perpetually terrified Shmee, but he also encourages Shmee to take violent revenge on his enemies. Of course, it could all be in Shmee's head.

Pac-Man (Blade: Trinity)
Cute? If you happen to like pomeranians.
Terrifying? It wasn't enough to make a vampire pomeranian; the vamps of Blade: Trinity had to create a mutant vampire pomeranian with xenomorph mouth.

Woodland Critters (South Park)
Cute? In a Disney sort of way.
Terrifying? Anything that comes out of Cartman's brain is automatically terrifying, but the woodland critters get extra points for possessing satanic powers and holding blood orgies. Also, they're trying to ensure the birth of the Antichrist.

Nubbins (Sanctuary)
Cute? It's doubtful anyone would bother taking care of the troublesome little things if they didn't resemble fat chinchillas.
Terrifying? They're basically tribbles with teeth. They're cute and cuddly until they start breeding and eating. And when they get hungry, they can take down the most vicious predator.

Bunnicula
Cute? He's your standard bunny: long ears, fluffy tail.
Terrifying? Maybe if you're a vegetable. Or a conspiracy-theorist cat.

The Denizens of Halloweentown (The Nightmare Before Christmas)
Cute? There's a reason they've been lining the shelves at Hot Topic all these years.
Terrifying? The Oogie Boogie is especially nightmarish, but the rest of Halloweentown gives a good scare, even when they don't mean to.

Sully (Monsters, Inc.)
Cute? That one child calls Sully "Kitty" throughout the entire movie pretty much sums it up.
Terrifying? About as scary as a monster from Sesame Street. But he does make his living terrorizing children, so we'll give him a pass.

Bun-Bun (Sluggy Freelance)
Cute? Yes, even while wielding a knife.
Terrifying? With a violent temper and the ability to produce switchblades seemingly out of no where, Bun-Bun is a force to be reckoned with. He's been known to slay telemarketers, the Easter Bunny, and anyone else who gets on his nerves.

Ickis (Aaahh!!! Real Monsters)
Cute? Unfortunately for him, yes. The small children he's supposed to be scaring frequently mistake him for a bunny rabbit.
Terrifying? Not as much as he'd like, but he gives it a solid try.

The Gingerbread Men (The Tick)
Cute? And delicious.
Terrifying? They're thoroughly evil and pretty clever, but because they're made without preservatives, they tend to go stale after a while.

The Gingerdead Man
Cute? This one falls a bit more on the disturbing side.
Terrifying? A psychotic killer resurrected as a knife-wielding cookie and voiced by Gary Busey? Actually, yes, it's pretty terrifying.

Reynardine (Gunnerkrigg Court)
Cute? Sometimes. He's trapped in the body of a stuffed wolf.
Terrifying? He's a body-stealing demigod, although at the moment he's confined to a single body. Still, he can shift into a pretty intimidating wolf form.

The Rabbit of Caerbannog (Monty Python and the Holy Grail):
Cute? From a distance.
Terrifying? It's not just the fact that the rabbit can decapitate you with its teeth. It's the awful can opener noise it makes when it does it.

Evil Children Everywhere
Cute? Creepifying to be sure, but reasonably cute.
Terrifying? Absolutely. It doesn't matter if they're banishing you to the cornfield or sacrificing you to the Devil; evil children are always utterly terrifying.

Note: This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, just a rundown of the eras in horror comedy. Feel free to suggest titles, or whole epochs, that we may have missed out.

The 1920s stage plays

In the 1920s, playwrights decided to spice up their stage plays by adding more horror elements, creating silly haunted-house and monster stories like The Bat, The Cat & The Canary and The Gorilla. Some of these, like Canary, got adapted to silent movies. The 1925 Lon Chaney film The Monster also features a comic-relief character, but isn't really a full-fledged comedy.

Abbott And Costello And Laurel And Hardy And So On

In many ways, the 1930s and 1940s were the heyday of the "clean" horror comedy, which featured monsters without any real gore or violence. Laurel And Hardy did A Live Ghost in 1934, the haunted-house movie The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case in 1930 and A-Haunting We Will Go in 1942. The Three Stooges also dabbled in horror-comedy with short films like 1943's Spooks!. And then going into the 1940s, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Bob Hope, among others, brought the genre to new prominence. There's also the hilariously titled Zombies On Broadway. Let's put on a show!

1960s Anarchy

The 1960s saw a slew of trippy novels, movies and TV shows in which horror elements often jostled with comedic ones — several of Peter Sellers' 1960s comedies often veer into horror at odd moments. At the same time, monster sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family ruled television with their zany portrayals of monsters who were just like us — almost. This was also the era that gave the start of the long-running Scooby Doo cartoons, and a slew of cute/funny images of monsters, from the Frankenberry cereal to the Count on Sesame Street.

Self-Aware Campiness

Susan Sontag published her famous essay on "camp" in 1964, but the 1970s really backed up the camp truck to our door, and dumped a load of glitter on our front steps. Horror comedy was no exception, with Vincent Price starring in two mega-campy Dr. Phibes movies, and other over-the-top horror films like Please Don't Eat My Mother and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes taking over cinemas. Most of all, Rocky Horror Picture Show became a defining movie for a whole ripped-fishnets-sporting generation.

The self-aware horror spoof genre took off way more in the early 1980s, with movies like Creepshow mocking the genre's cliches. And in general, the horror-comedy movie genre really came into its own in the 1980s, diversifying into a bunch of thriving sub-genres.

Ghostbusters, Gremlins and more

1984 saw the release of both Ghostbusters and Gremlins, sparking a new onslaught of cute/scary monsters and ghosts, including four (!) Critters movies. I'd also put 1986's Little Shop Of Horrors and Haunted Honeymoon into this category: wide-eyed protagonists coming face-to-tentacle with weird, slimy or fluffy-but-nasty creatures. According to Box Office Mojo, both Ghostbusters films and the first Gremlins occupy three out of the top four best-selling horror comedy slots of all time.

Troma comedies in the 1980s and beyond

Troma deserves its own category, for its sheer volume of output if for no other reason. Although it's best known for the Toxic Avenger films and Surf Nazis Must Die, there are just so many weird, over-the-top and just plain wrong Troma films out there, you could fill a bookshelf with the DVDs. And really, Troma is just the tip of the iceberg of a slew of direct-to-VHS and direct-to-DVD movies that we've seen in the past 20 years ago, with a ton of cult auteurs pushing the boundary between scary and funny.

1980s Werewolf/Vampire Humor

Teen Wolf (1985), An American Werewolf In London (1981), Fright Night (1985), Mr. Vampire (1985), Once Bitten (1985), Vamp (1986) and Love At First Bite (1979) were just some of the cocaine-fueled laughs at Universal monsters. Here's a photo of Grace Jones at a vampire strip club, from Vamp.

Body Horror/Comedy

The Reanimator films and Brian Yuzna's Society, among others, take the David Cronenberg trope of the human body being transformed into something gooey, icky or disturbingly awful, and they find the silliness and subversive humor that lurks just behind that, with gore, decapitated limbs still moving and lots of oozing goop all providing opportunities for slapstick and discomfort. The 1980s were also the heydey of Frank Hennenlotter's over-the-top violence and bodily destruction, in films like Basket Case. I'd also stick Peter Jackson's Dead/Alive into this category. In many ways, this genre has been the gift that keeps on giving, as evidenced by the awesomeness of 2006's Slither.

The Rise Of Sam Raimi

Classic Sam Raimi films deserve their own category, especially the Evil Dead films and Army Of Darkness. Bruce Campbell in his prime, rocking the chainsaw hand, against the legions of dead. Good times.

Christopher Moore

No discussion of horror-comedy would be complete without mentioning the 1990s and 2000s novels of Christopher Moore, especially his vampire classics Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, You Suck: A Love Story, and Bite Me: A Love Story, plus his zombie Christmas tale The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale Of Christmas Horror.

Creature Features

Tremors (1990), Arachnophobia (1990), Lake Placid (1999) and Eight-Legged Freaks (2002) were just some of the slew of tongue-in-cheek monster-rampage films that came out in the 1990s and early 2000s. My fave is probably Lake Placid, just for the amazingly deadpan performances by Bill Paxton and Betty White, among others.

Buffy Etc.

Joss Whedon's Buffy empire, including a movie and two television series, pretty much deserves its own category, and it came along with a slew of other TV shows and books featuring (frequently female) heroines facing tongue-in-cheek magical/horrific threats, including Charmed and Xena: Warrior Princess.

The Chucky and Leprechaun Films

I have no idea where those fit in, so I'm putting them here. These are like the silly counterparts to the already quite silly Jason Voorhees and Freddie Krueger films. Chucky is a weird doll that comes to life and attacks people (I guess — I've only read a comic-book adaptation) and there have been a million films about a silly leprechaun going around disemboweling people and controlling their minds. And rapping. And dancing.

Horror Spoofs

The Scream films in the late 1990s jumpstarted the slasher-movie genre with their knowing humor and sly horror-movie references. And then with the release of Scary Movie in 2000, the floodgates opened. There have been a ton of horror spoofs, many of them with the word "Movie" at the end of their titles. Plus the upcoming Transylmania, which exactly one person is excited about. (And we know where you live.)

Zombie Rom-Coms

Shaun Of The Dead, Planet Terror, Jennifer's Body and Zombieland all, to some extent, use the reanimated dead as a backdrop for character-focused comedies. (Okay, so the rom-com thing in the subhed is stretching it slightly — they don't all feature love stories, exactly. But some of them do.) Zombie comedies that are less character-focused include the Nazi epic Dead Snow, the zombie slave masterpiece Fido, the zombie sheep masterpiece Black Sheep and the incredibly nasty Zombie Strippers. Plus Bruce La Bruce's Otto, Or Up With The Dead People. Oh, and there's also last year's Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead. No, really. There's also Jon Heder's webseries Woke Up Dead.

Meanwhile, in the world of books, many people see Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide as humorous, rather than as the indispensible handbook it is. There have also been a decent number of funny zombie books, including Breathers: A Zombie Lament by S.G. Browne, the mash-up Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, and several others.

Not entirely sure how it fits in, but horror spoof John Dies At The End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin (under a pseudonym) is selling like hotcakes on Amazon.

Sources include Wikipedia, BoxOfficeMojo, IMDB, Scared Silly and the book Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy by William Paul.

Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

It's almost Halloween, but you still need an idea for a DIY costume that will be the envy of all fanboys and girls across the galaxy? Lucky for you, Star Wars fans are a crafty bunch and they have plenty of tips for everyone from the most-advanced to the laziest costumer.

For those of you wanting to create a more authentic look to your Boba Fett costume, here's a handy video tutorial on how to weather his cape using a pizza cutter, cardboard and spray paint!

For the younglings in your life, here's a super-easy craft tutorial on how to make an adorkable DIY Kids' Yoda costume by Craft magazine's Susan Beal:

I used an Empire Strikes Back Yoda action figure for inspiration, and carried him around the fabric store to loosely match fabric colors to him and his outfit. The central piece, a simple brown robe, is altered from an adult T-shirt, and the other elements (a hat, snake, belt, and walking stick) are all quick sewing projects using basic templates.

If your Padmé Amidala costume is ready to go but you're not sure how to make your face look less like you've been wrestling with Acklays and more like you're ready to make out with a Skywalker, then this is exactly what was used on Natalie Portman in the films!

Check out these Padmé Make-up Pointers from Revenge of the Sith Make-up Supervisor Nikki Gooley:

Make-up by Nikki Gooley
Foundation: Make-Up Forever Face and Body foundation was applied in shade # 03. Concealer: Gooley used Shu Uemura Mark Concealer with Yves St Laurent Touche Eclat Concealer in # 03 under the eyes.
Powder: Gooley applied Visiora 003 Powder.
Eye shadow: Stila powder shadow in Barefoot Contessa # 33 was applied all over the lids. Then it was worked it up into the socket and blended out with Stila in Moonlight # 38. On the top lids, the lashline was lined with Stila shadow in Java # 8. Gooley then dabbed her browbones with Calvin Klein Eye Gloss.
Brows: Brows were filled in with Stila Convertable Eye Color Liner in Teak.
Mascara: Gooley used a classic favorite, Maybelline Great Lash in Black.
Cheeks: Stila Convertable Cheek Color, a cream blush in Peony, was dabbed on the apples of the cheeks and blended up onto the cheek bone.
Lips: Stila Lipstick in Jo was applied, then blotted. Gooley then used Elizabeth Arden 8-Hour Cream over the top of the lips. Gooley says that although it's usually used as a skin cream, she loves using it on lips because it gives them a nice, natural sheen.

Don't forget to give your dog a chance to show off his Sith or Jedi pride too! Craft magazine Senior Editor Natalie Zee Drieu made these cute Ewok, Darth Vader and Princess Leia dog costumes from felt, cotton fabric, yarn, and ribbon!

The trick about making quick Halloween costumes and especially ones for dogs is that you don't have to be perfect. Time is of essence here and we are all busy crafters. Since most of the costumes will only need to be worn for a few hours at most, cutting corners is definitely okay in my book. If you don't know how to sew or need to get it done in a snap — fabric glue, hemming tape, and sticker Velcro works wonders! Also, I used existing doggie jackets as pattern templates. Using these help me fit the dogs better and I didn't have to worry about doing too many fittings or wasting time creating patterns from scratch.

For the truly last-minute Star Wars costume, you can always print out and wear these vintage and prequel masks right now! Or do a mash-up and be a Sith Luchador!

• Vintage Star Wars masks
• Revenge of the Sith Masks
• Clone Wars Masks
• Star Wars Lucha Libre Masks

While you're in the Halloween crafting spirit, here are some handy templates from Starwars.com to print out to make your own Spooky Sith-O-Lanterns! Or try your hand at sculpting a Halloween Yoda Pumpkin.

Get more inspiration for your own Star Wars costume by checking out the Rebelscum Halloween Costume Contest Gallery!

Once you're finished with your costume, be sure to post them to the io9 Scifi Halloween Costume Show!

Bonnie Burton is a Senior Editor for Starwars.com. She is also the author of the books "Draw Star Wars: The Clone Wars" and "You Can Draw: Star Wars." You can find her 24/7 on Twitter & on Grrl.com.

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

It's not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It's the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we'd get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.

That was the idea behind this chart – I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that's to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war's popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.

Predictably, the human-made apocalypse is a perennial favorite. The way we go about it, though, is always changing, as you can see on the chart, where I've broken up the "human made disaster" into subcategories.

The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.

The easily spotted trends make the patterns' total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there's a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.

That's an overly simplistic way of looking at it, though. It's not that the moment of destruction is boring; it's that it doesn't even matter anymore. There are an increasing number of books and films, like The Road and Zombieland, which pick up after the catastrophe and sometimes don't bother to explain what happened at all.

Disaster porn is no longer the point of the apocalypse. It doesn't matter how the world ends, just that it does. Making it to the End doesn't mean the story's finished; much of the time, it's only just gotten started. Stories of the End have never been about ending – they're about the beginning that comes after.

Preceding victory with annihilation disguises how dizzily optimistic some of these narratives are. Stories about the End are so beautifully paradoxical; they are some of the most powerful affirmation stories we have. They can hardly be classified as optimistic, but no matter what happens, even if the End came by human hands, in most stories we are fixable. For the most part, we have faith that though we may screw up, and very badly, we will learn from our mistakes and the world will be better for it.

When the survivors wander around, they're looking at a burned-out shell of a world, but it's still a clean slate. A clean slate full of radiation and cannibals, maybe, but still. I think everyone's had that feeling of wanting to just heave everything out the window and start over. That's what is at the heart of apocalypse stories: the opportunity to rebuild the world in a radically different way.

During the pilgrimage through the wasteland, the survivors – and the readers – are left feeling ostracized from reality. The characters are probably more concerned with where their next meal is coming from, but the reader sees how they are cut loose from the anchors that previously protected us from being overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of existence. The only way to fix it is to find new ways of looking, new patterns to create meaning in the new world.

Destroying the world in books about apocalypse is one way we can entirely take ownership of it. We can only see the world the way we have been raised to, the way our parents saw it, so we need to raze the old world and build a new one in its place in order to have a world that is really and entirely our own. The story of the End, after all, is not nearly as compelling as the story of the Beginning that comes after it.

This is hardly the final word; more a collection of observations and theories. I won't claim any more than that, because if there's one thing I learned while researching apocalypses, it's just how much humans like to see patterns in things – and that when patterns start getting too neat, you've done something wrong. There are still some things about the chart I don't understand – the three points where the natural apocalypse overtakes the human apocalypse, for example – and it doesn't take into account the effect that movies or television had on books. As will any discussion of a large genre, there are some necessary overgeneralizations. But it's a starting point – have at it.

Chanda Phelan just graduated from Pomona College, where she completed a thesis on post-apocalyptic literature. You can read her blog at phnuggle.wordpress.com.

Chart by Stephanie Fox!

There's a scene early on in Gentlemen Broncos where science fiction novelist Ronald Chevalier (the always wonderful Jemaine Clement) is holding a workshop on fantasy naming. A young girl tells him that she has a troll character named Teacup. He scoffs and explains that there are rules for naming trolls, and that a troll mother would never name a child "Teacup;" only a little girl would.

It's as if writers Jared and Jerusha Hess anticipated what the critics would say about Gentlemen Broncos, namely that the film disobeys the conventions of movie storytelling in favor of their own strange and gleeful energy. Gentlmen Broncos is a movie well aware of what it doesn't do, of what rules it doesn't follow, but it doesn't care. It's naming its troll Teacup whether you like it or not.

That said, Gentlemen Broncos isn't Napoleon Dynamite. Where the latter is a character study of an unusual protagonist, the former is, by contrast, a highly metafictional narrative about creativity and adaptation, with a hero, a villain, and a solid resolution.

Benjamin Purvis, a teenager nominally homeschooled by his loving but distracted mother (an appropriately out-of-it Jennifer Coolidge), spends most of his days writing pulpy science fiction stories. When he attends a writing conference keynoted by Chevalier, his favorite writer, Ben's latest endeavor, a wild tale called Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years falls into the hands of two conference attendees. One is Tabatha Jenkins, a fellow homeschooler who quickly elbows her way into Ben's life. Where Ben is quiet and shy to the point that he doesn't like people reading his stories, Tabatha is brazen, projecting a strange, confident energy. She is utterly without shame, but also unafraid of doing or embracing things that could be perceived as weird, and her remarkable joie de vivre makes her oddness charismatic where it should be off-putting.

The other person who happens upon Yeast Lords is Chevalier himself. Chevalier, with an endless collection of leather jackets and surgically attached to his Bluetooth ear piece, long ago won legions of fans with his series about harpies who shoot lasers from their breasts. It's easy to see Chevalier as a parody of the self-celebrating author (something Clement does with pitch perfection), especially when he presents a slideshow of the forty-some odd pieces of cover art he drew for his first novel. But even as we're laughing at the absurd harpy folk art, there's something deeper underneath. Chevalier was once an excited dreamer who compulsively doodled his bizarre fantasies; now he believes there are rules for naming trolls and his creativity has suffered. He simply can't recapture that crazy imaginative energy he once had, although he can certainly recognize it when he reads Yeast Lords.

Tabatha and Chevalier both want to adapt Yeast Lords, though each does it in a sort of underhanded way, and Ben's original vision gets poked and prodded into new shapes. Interspersed with the main narrative are scenes from Yeast Lords itself, with Sam Rockwell playing the story's shaggy-haired hero, Bronco. These scenes are crammed with all the strange ideas that swarm through Ben's brain: stolen testicles, cyclops turret men, rocket-powered battle stags, and yeast that gives you superpowers. These scenes are pure, straightforward fun, but they also show us first-hand Ben's own vision for Yeast Lords. As Chevalier takes over the story, we see how he changes and bastardizes Ben's original ideas, with Rockwell playing a very different version of Bronco. And as Tabatha and her friends adapt Yeast Lords as an amateur movie, we can experience the same disappointment Ben feels, that the characters and special effects never quite live up to the version in his head.

Gentlemen Broncos has been accused of asking audiences to laugh at the very characters it claims to celebrate: the weirdoes and misfits. And yes, it's easy to laugh at Ben's mother, who makes popcorn balls for every occasion and designs nightgowns that could double as space opera costumes, and Lonnie, Tabatha's lip-smacking filmmaker friend who invites less than flattering comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite. But the Hesses are, in fact, asking you to be a little repulsed by these characters and then look deeper, to see if they know something we don't. Yes, they may not fit into normal society, they may have values that differ from ours, they may make ugly nightgowns and crappy movies, but they're having fun. They're trying to live their lives on their own terms and be creative and pursue their wildest, wackiest ideas. Gentlemen Broncos may invite you to laugh at their foibles and their quirks, but it also invites you to go home, pick up your sketchbook, your camera, or that novel you're working on, and create something as great, as strange, and as utterly your own as Yeast Lords.

Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have collected these nineteen stories to explore the supposed divide between mainstream literature and speculative fiction. They've written an eye-opening and informative introduction as well as compiled dozens of quotes by the individual authors on the subject of Sci-Fi vs. Literary Fiction or"Li-Fi"*. Writers and fans in the field have long complained of being marginalized by the general public and even more so by the literary elite. How did this happen and who's to blame? Does it even freakin' matter any more?

Before Hugo Gernsback there was no separate science fiction genre (or "scientificton" as Gernsback called it, Forrest Ackerman popularized the current two-word term). Writers from Mary Shelly, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Twain used themes of the fantastic in their works that are still considered classics of Literature today. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells explored advancements in contemporary science and technology and were lauded by audiences around the globe inspiring millions.

As Gernsback and later, John W. Campbell and others codified early science fiction traditions they were deeply mired in the pulp magazine traditions. Fun stuff to be sure, but the gee-whiz boys' adventure stuff was very lacking in well-rounded characters and well-crafted plotting. It has been pointed out recently that even notable award winners of the 1950s weren't really turning out timeless prose. Let's face it, the SF Ghetto was constructed from the inside out and zealously maintained from within.

Around 1970 followers of the New Wave movement like Moorcock, Aldiss, and Disch tried busting out of the ghetto but could never find a large enough audience. An incursion in the other direction occurred in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was shortlisted for the Nebula for Best Novel. It lost to Rendezvous with Rama which, with all due respect to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, is a novel with some cool science and a great setting where not much actually happens. In a 1998 Village Voice essay Jonathan Lethem called this moment "a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream". Really? Maybe it was just too soon. In the decades since Lethem made that morbid observation popular culture has become very accepting, if not downright starved for science fiction and its fantastical siblings. Granted, much of that is re-hashing Space Opera pastiches from the 50s or teen vampire fluff, but science fiction prose continues to grow, mature, and inspire. Besides, I really can't imagine Pynchon as a Guest of Honor at a big convention. Although he would probably like filking.

To me these concerns over genre distinctions are silly but will probably never go away. Booksellers and librarians will still need some classifications so that they can direct you to the right shelf. There will always be a handful of literary elitists in pooh-poohing our favorite books as escapist drek. And deep within the bowels of SF fandom, grumbles will continue about certain writers abandoning the field for snootier credentials (O hai Mr. Vonnegut & Ms. Atwood!). Or even worse, Outsiders coming in to completely destroy all their precious memories of Astro-King vs. the Bimborgs of Pluto (admit it, a remake of that would totally rock.). The thing to remember is that the distinctions between types of literature are not walls with razorwire to be patrolled. They are shifting vague zones— grey areas, if you will.

The Secret History of Science Fiction is all about authors mixing it up, exploring, Boldly Going where they like and never sacrificing quality. These stories are good enough to make The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley pop his cartoon monocle. You'll get profound and often disturbing looks at the human psyche and what we do to each other. The effects of science and technology upon society are also explored in this volume by writers who really know science fiction, not just slumming. Instead of quick summaries of these worthy reads I'm going to close with a few quotes by the authors about this whole imaginary divide of imaginations.

Gene Wolfe:

What we now normally consider the mainstream – so called realistic fiction – is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived.... It's a matter of whether you're content to focus on everyday events or whether you want to try to encompass the entire universe. F you ga back to the literature written in ancient Greece or Rome, or during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, you'll see writers trying to write not just about everything that exists but about everything that could exist.

Connie Willis:

The thing I have always liked best about science fiction is that it defies definition.
It keeps constantly reinventing itself – and just when you thought stories about robots or time travel or first contact had been done to death, it thinks of some brand-new story to tell.

T.C. Boyle:

I've thought about the domination of the literary arts by theory over the last 25 years — which I detest – and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level – moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

It seems to me that SF is standing, these days, in a doorway. The door is open, wide open. Are we just going to stand there, waiting for the applause of the multitudes? It won't come; we haven't earned it yet. Are we going to cringe back into the safe old ghetto room and pretend that there isn't any big bad multitude out there? If so, our good writers will leave us in despair, and there will not be another generation of them. Or are we going to walk through that doorway and join the rest of the city? I hope so. I know we can and I hope we do, because we have a great deal to offer – to art, which needs new forms like ours, and to critics who are sick of chewing over the same old works and above all to readers of books, who want and deserve better novels than they mostly get. But it will still take not only courage for SF to join the community of literature, but strength, self-respect, the will not to settle for the second rate. It will take genuine self-criticism. And it will include genuine praise.

Here is the complete Table of Contents:

Introduction by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel
"Angouleme" Thomas M. Disch
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" Ursula K. Le Guin
"Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" Kate Wlihelm
"Descent of Man" T.C. Boyle
"Human Moments of World War III" Don DeLillo
"Homelanding" Margaret Atwood
"The Nine Billion Names of God" Carter Scholz
"Interlocking Pieces" Molly Gloss
"Salvador" Lucius Shepard
"Schwarzchild Radius" Connie Willis
"Buddha Nostril Bird" John Kessel
"The Ziggurat" Gene Wolfe
"The Hardened Criminals" Jonathan Lethem
"Standing Room Only" Karen Joy Fowler
"10^16 to 1" James Patrick Kelly
"93990" George Saunders
"The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" Michael Chabon
"Frankenstein's Daughter" Maureen F. McHugh
"The Wizard of West Orange" Steven Millhauser

*That latter term was coined by that merry prankster Orson Scott Card. Say what you will about the guy, "Li-Fi" is pretty Goddamned fucking funny.

The Secret History of Science Fiction may be purchased here, here, or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Real Literary Critics as Chris Hsiang. He will not get off their lawns.

Here's why. For hundreds of thousands of years, life was brutal. It still is for a good chunk of the planet. The technology and wealth we enjoy in North America is a very new development in history, and I think we miss the challenges of day-to-day survival in our comparatively easy modern lives. Some people will even create problems if they have none.

Everyone's had a psychotic girl- or boyfriend, right? Well, lots of ‘em really are just nut-flavored bologna. They have a neurochemical imbalance or ate too many paint chips as a kid… but some people look for drama and emotional upheaval for reasons they can't explain themselves, reenacting the shortcomings, chaos, or abuse of their childhoods.

Surprise. These drama kings and queens might be exactly the kind of person you'd want at your back during the zombie apocalypse or the aftermath of a comet strike. Each of our nut-flavored friends is a sponge. They're ready to soak up as much as trauma as anyone can dish out. They have the stamina, heart and depth to keep on slogging through the radioactive bugs even long after the last shotgun shell is gone.

They're not the only ones. I like to think I'm the kind of guy you'd give the keys to the bomb shelter and I'm extremely boring and normal - wife, kids, mortgage, bleh - ha ha - except to say that I grew up fascinated with books like Lucifer's Hammer and The Stand.

We like to be scared because we have a huge capacity for fear. The most basic element of storytelling is conflict because we respond to it.

For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

Sure, the hot-sex-with-our-last-breath and the gunfights are fun, too, but ultimately my novels boil down to the ability of some people - the greatest of us - to overcome nearly any hurdle. I back my heroes into corners just to watch them wiggle free.

People are tough. We're evolved for less food; more exercise; less sleep; less security; more paranoia. The irony is that we're so good at what we do. We strive for more food; less exercise; more sleep; more security; less paranoia - and we've succeeded.

Look around. Humankind has remade the entire face of the planet, blanketing Earth with electrical grids, highways, super-agriculture, shipping lanes and aircraft, even wrapping the sky in satellites. It's easy to complain about your bills or morning traffic or the neighbor's neglected, ever-barking dogs (you know who you are), but these are fantastic problems to have.

The grocery stores are loaded, we have the industrial strength to roll off three cars per household, and every other family has enough money to spare to feed two dogs and a cat even though they don't have any inclination to walk Sparky and Spot every day and choose instead to leave their canines to noisily go insane, each set of dogs fenced off inside their own isolated little patch of suburbia.

Anybody with a computer to read this blog is richer than 99.99% of the human beings who've ever lived, and yet we can't help imagining what things would be like if we had to start over. Nuclear armageddon. Superflu. The living dead. Nanotech.

Give me a wild scenario and some smart good guys and I'm happy - just so long as the lights stay on and there's iced tea in the fridge. I'd really rather not be sifting through the rubble for canned food and medicine while we keep one eye peeled for roving gangs of illiterate cannibals.

Guest blogger Jeff Carlson is the bestselling author of the Plague Year trilogy. His latest novel, Plague Zone, comes out next month.

Crucial Stories

There are so many terrific, iconic stories by HP Lovecraft that no introductory list could ever satisfy completely. But here are eight stories and novellas that will introduce you to the main concepts in Lovecraft's world, as well as exposing you to some of his obsessive preoccupations. You can read the full text of all of these stories at Project Gutenberg.

"At the Mountains of Madness"
The tale of an ill-fated expedition to the mountains of Antarctica, this story explains the ancient, alien history of Earth as well as giving us a glimpse of "the Old Ones," the "shoggoths," and some backstory on the "spawn of Cthulhu." When the expedition discovers an ancient, alien-built city buried beneath the ice, they also find out what led to that city's demise. And let's just say it had to do with giant, shambling, polymorphous beings. What's great about this story is that it explains how many of the spooky, seemingly-magical beasts we encounter in other stories actually have an extraterrestrial (or biotechnological) origin.

"Call of Cthulhu"
While it may not be the very best of Lovecraft's stories, this tale introduces his most legendary monster and the madness it can bring upon the world. Just one glimpse of the tentacled visage of Cthulhu, and the non-Euclidean geometry of his city, is enough to turn an entire boat of tough sailors into shattered husks.

"Shadow Over Innsmouth"
One of my personal favorites in the Lovecraft canon, this story is also one of the more thoughtful, character-driven pieces that Lovecraft ever wrote. It's the tale of an antiquarian who comes across a forgotten, decaying New England town filled with oddly-mutated people who worship a strange deity called Dagon. Here we see Lovecraft dealing with an issue that preoccupies him in many stories - the terrifying and seductive results of a carnal intermingling between alien monsters and humans. Our hero is at first repulsed, then fascinated, by a town whose alliance with Cthulhu's spawn has resulted in a strange (and possibly beautiful) hybrid culture.

"Dunwich Horror"
Here Lovecraft delves deeply into the power of a mystical book he mentions in several stories, the Necronomicon by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred." A young antiquarian seeks the mysterious book at Miskatonic University (another favorite fictional institution of Lovecraft's), and then discovers that it holds a key to stopping a terrible force growing inside the barn of a local farmhouse.

"The Colour Out of Space"
One of Lovecraft's most straightforwardly science fictional stories, about a meteorite whose color begins to colonize everything around itself.

"The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"
Sometimes called Lovecraft's only novel, this story is really more of a novella. It is also, like "Innsmouth," a revealing character study as much as it is a tale of historical terror whose claws reach into present-day Providence, Rhode Island. Ward, a young antiquarian (yes, Lovecraft has a lot of these), becomes interested in the papers of his ancestor Curwen, a man who grew rich trading in mysterious items from overseas, as well as in the slave trade. Curwen also built a house outside town, atop a vast underground catacombs devoted to nefarious experiments with the undead. Slowly, Ward is consumed by his obsession with Curwen, eventually attempting a dangerous experiment that will allow him to communicate with this once-powerful wizard from beyond the grave. There are several autobiographical flourishes here too, as Lovecraft sets the story in places familiar to him in Rhode Island, as well as bringing in characters who resemble historical figures in Providence history. It's an incredible, must-read Lovecraft story, full of the historical details that he loved as well as an alternate history of the slave trade that involves spirits as well as people.

"The Horror at Red Hook"
This is Lovecraft's classic story of the ghoulish goings-on beneath the cosmopolitan streets of New York City, where the writer lived for a few years in an immigrant neighborhood known as Red Hook. Here you'll see Lovecraft's usual obsessions - the horror of miscegenation/hybrid cultures, ancient forces from prehistory - set in an urban landscape rarely glimpsed in his generally-rural tales.

"The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
This is another of Lovecraft's near-novels, and is a crucial part of the author's surreal "dream cycle" of stories that involve the swashbuckling dream hero Randolph Carter. Unlike Lovecraft's usual heroes, who tend to be nerdy antiquarians or shivering half-monsters, Carter knows how to use a sword and trick the gods. In this adventuresome tale, we follow Carter through the dream world, from a city of cats (Lovecraft was very fond of these furry creatures), all the way to the Moon where a god of space (an "outer god") known as Nyarlathotep or the Crawling Chaos tries to trick Carter into abandoning his quest to dwell one day in a perfect city he once dreamed about.


Crucial biographical details

Though his stories are fantastical, Howard Phillips Lovecraft often pulled bits of his real life into them. Raised in Providence, Rhode Island, at the turn of the twentieth century, Lovecraft was a sickly child who was passionate about both ancient history and astronomy. Some of his first writing is about astronomy, in fact. His fixation on history was related in part to his fascination with pure Nordic cultures, and he once described himself in an essay as a "chalk-white racist."

But he was also a bundle of contradictions. When Lovecraft became a young man, he began contributing to - and eventually editing - the premiere pulp science fiction/horror zine of his day, Weird Tales. Through the group of friends he made while contributing to Weird Tales, he met an independent businesswoman named Sonia Greene. A Jewish immigrant to New York City, she brought Lovecraft to the city and they eventually married. So despite Lovecraft's horror at miscegenation, and his protestations that he was a racist, the one romance of his short life was with a Jewish immigrant.

After their marriage deteriorated, Lovecraft returned to his hometown of Providence in the mid-1920s, where he wrote some of his very best stories. Though he was poor, he was happy living with his aunt in a large house, and often spent his days hiking around Providence and writing in the city's beautiful, light-filled library called The Atheneum. When his aunt died, and then his good friend Robert E. Howard (author of the Conan books and a Weird Tales contributor) committed suicide, he fell into what today we would probably call clinical depression. He grew steadily more destitute, ate poorly (he mainly consumed bread, candies and coffee), and his health declined. He died at the age of 47, in 1937, shortly after completing his novella "The Shadow Out of Time."

The definitive biography of H.P. Lovecraft is S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: A Life.

Crucial literary connections

Two of Lovecraft's best friends and correspondents were Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, both contributors to Weird Tales and famous pulp authors in their own rights. Howard's work is probably remembered more today, with the help of the Conan movies, but Smith's work is usually deemed of higher literary merit. Prime Books is about to issue a handsome collection of Smith's stories called The Return of the Sorcerer.

Another of Lovecraft's great friends and literary champions was the writer and editor August Derleth, who kept Lovecraft's work in print long after the writer had died. In fact, it is probably Derleth's editorial efforts we have to thank for Lovecraft's cult status today.

One of Lovecraft's greatest influences was the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, who wrote about faeries and dreams in a poetic style that finds its way into Lovecraft's work as well. Like Dunsany, Lovecraft wrote reams of poetry but is largely remembered for his fantastical stories.

Crucial adaptations of, and immersions in, Lovecraft's tales

There are so many amazing stories, comic books, and movies that have been influenced by Lovecraft - not always in a good way - that it would be impossible to list them all. But here are some standouts.

Dreams in the Witch House
This was Stuart Gordon's entry in the "Masters of Horror" series on TV, and it's a great, modern-day adaptation of the Lovecraft story. There is even a moment when we see some terrifying geometry that is, in fact, sort of terrifying. Gordon has adapted several other Lovecraft tales, some more faithfully than others. While Gordon's Re-Animator is a true cult classic, it shares almost nothing with the Lovecraft story that inspired it, other than the main character's name, Herbert West. Same goes for Gordon's film From Beyond, which was inspired by Lovecraft too.

Dagon
A truly great Stuart Gordon adaptation, however, is Dagon - based on the short story "Shadow Over Innsmouth." While some of the movie is by necessity campy - sorry, but there is just no way to represent the church of Dagon without some seriously goofy outfits - it captures the poignancy of the original story. The ending of this movie is possibly the most truly Lovecraftian moment I've ever seen committed to film. (See a NSFW clip from the movie here.)

The Resurrected
Based on "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward," this horror movie is true to the original, but occasionally uneven in execution.

Call of Cthulhu (movie)
This silent film is set during the era when the story is supposed to take place - the mid-1920s. So the modern-day filmmakers have tried to create what they imagined a movie of the story would have looked like if it had been released at the same time as the short story itself. And they succeed incredibly well. This is retro-futurism at its finest, with gorgeous, expressionistic sets that look like something out of 20s horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Call of Cthulhu (RPG)
My favorite role-playing game ever, in which you can choose to be in a 1920s Lovecraftian scenario, or a contemporary one. Either way, you have to try to finish each quest without losing too many sanity points. Yes, the game has sanity points. Need I say more?

Hellboy (comics)
While the Hellboy comics created by Mike Mignola are not directly retelling any particular Lovecraft story, they are set in the world of the Lovecraft mythos. Several Lovecraftian monsters and wizards make appearances in Mignola's comics, and Mignola's illustrations are in my opinion the very best way to climb inside Lovecraft's crawly, dark imagination. (The image at the top of this post is a portrait of Lovecraft by Mignola.)

The Atrocity Archives
The first book in Charles Stross' Lovecraftian "Laundry series" of stories and novels, this set of stories takes us into a Lovecraftian world where a secret group called The Laundry deals with otherworldly phenomena and Nazis try to harness the powers of Cthulhu.

Evil Dead Trilogy
Sam Raimi's splatstick homage to Lovecraft begins with people who decide to mess around with a copy of the Necronomicon - and find out what it's like to do battle with the dead, from our dimension and others. The series begins with the movie Evil Dead, and ends with Army of Darkness.

Spike TV has an official clip from the new trailer (which is available in much higher resolution over at Spike's site):

But it turns out there's less to the Klingons than meet the eye in some scenes. According to this snippet of making-of footage which turned up online recently, some of the Klingons were actually little kids in Klingon costumes, shot from angles to make them look like grown-ups, so the sets would look huge. It's great to see J.J. Abrams being super nice and supportive with his diminutive Klingon actors:

There's also a new snippet of a scene where Young Kirk argues with his brother, which hints at the whole "abusive Uncle Frank" storyline we never got to see in the movie. (That's Uncle Frank's car that young Kirk drives off a cliff.)

Firstly, yes, I know that witches aren't monsters, but if you're working your way through Halloween icons, there's no avoiding the fact that the old Elphaba has created quite a following for herself. And, let's face it; if there's anyone you could see having a fair chance against a supernatural spirit nemesis, someone who literally has a few (magic) tricks up her sleeve is as good as anyone. So! Witches Versus Poltergeists! Go!

Our take: It depends on how experienced the witch would be, but we're of the opinion that witches can easily communicate with those in the spirit realm - Even mean, chair-throwing ghosts like poltergeists. If she couldn't ease them into submission with some well-chosen words, we wouldn't be surprised if a couple of hexes couldn't take care of things faster than you can say "Bippity-Boppity-Boo." But what do you think?

As usual, voting is open until midnight tonight, and the winner of this match will find themselves advancing to tomorrow, and so on until the final showdown on Hallowe'en itself. Vote early, vote often, fight fans.

Thanks to Titan Books for sending us these exclusive extracts from the BSG season 4 companion book, out now to coincide with the release of the direct-to-DVD "The Plan." No, they won't explain that whole "Opera House" thing, but they are pretty fascinating.

So here are five things you never knew about Battlestar's final season:

1/ As the production began the casting process for an actor to play Starbuck¹s father, they realized that they needed a performer who could not only act, but was also an accomplished musician. That¹s not a small thing to ask, and at one point, the production thought they might have a solution get musician Bear McCreary to play the part himself! McCreary agreed to audition. "I thought, he¹s about the right age, he's a good looking guy, he'll look good on camera, and he can play." laughs director Michael Nankin. "Why not?". During the audition, however, it was mutually decided that music
was where McCreary¹s considerable talents lay! "For the good of the show, and of humanity in general," McCreary jokes on his blog, "I didn't get the role"

2/ Aaron Douglas does an extremely good impression of Edward James Olmos, to the extent that if Olmos was away from set when a read-through has been scheduled, Douglas would stand in and read Olmos' lines

3/ The interest with going the whole hog in blowing Gaeta's leg off was influenced by the question of who may have been directing the episode. "There was a rumor that Quentin Tarantino was interested in doing an episode and his schedule only allowed him to direct during the dates that 'Faith' would go into production," explains [episode writer] Seamus Kevin Fahey. "So, there was a small element of making it this bloody, awful, insane, Tim Roth squirming in the back of Mr. White's car-type teaser. It didn't work out, but I remember that being a germ of inspiration while working on those scenes. Director Michael Nankin did an amazing job with that sequence. It's so brutal. I loved it." Presumably if Tarantino had directed, someone would have also had to lose an ear.

4/ The ship, the Battlestar Galactica, was absolutely integral to the series. Besides lending her name to the show, she was where most of the action of the series had taken place - and so choosing the right way for her to make her exit was important. "Once we had decided that Galactica was going to get to Earth in the distant past, the question was, 'Well, what are we going to do with the ship?" says Ron Moore. "We played around with that quite a bit in the fourth season.". The writers discussed various options before making the decision to send Galactica and the rest of the fleet into the sun. "At one point we talked about maybe burying the ship, and maybe in a flash forward to contemporary times, there were these mounds of unknown origin in Central American," recalls Moore. "That was something Bradley Thompson was talking about. We were going to have someone digging into one of these mounds and discovering metal - and there would be the side of the ship. We also had a version where Adama decided to burn the Galactica, like Cortez burning his ships when he got to the New World"

5/ Ron Moore, a self-confessed Navy buff, says the scenes portraying the build-up to the attempted mutiny aboard the Demetrius were specifically influenced by the Caine Mutiny, a 1954 film set aboard a US destroyer and starring Humphrey Bogart. In the film, the crew are successful in their attempt to remove the single-minded Captain Queeg (Bogart) and are court-martialled on their return to port. Moore was also interested in the look of the Caine, which was a run-down, clausrophobic ship, and the Demetrius also took on those properties, Moore was so pleased with the resulting set that he called the art department together to praise them personally. This initially caused panic amongst the crew until they realised the summons was for good news, not bad.

Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion Season Four on Borders.

As near as I can find out, there's only one horror movie that actually involves Alzheimer's directly: in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea (1999), scientists are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. So (as one naturally would) they genetically engineer SUPER SHARKS with amazing brains. What can possibly go wrong? Oh, yes. The shark thing, is what can go wrong.

Here's a good chunk of that movie, which conveniently starts out with the foolhardy scientists explaining their scheme to Samuel L. Jackson, and ends with indications that things are going wrong. (I do not think Jackson, at any point, utters the words, "Get these motherfucking super-sharks out of this motherfucking seabase." More's the pity.)

But that movie just uses Alzheimer's as a plot device. If you're looking for stories that actually play on our fears of Alzheimer's and what it means to our tenuous grasp of personhood, you have to look a bit further afield. And as Sir Michael Caine says, Alzheimer's is scarier than any shark, no matter how big.

But here are the ways in which i think we're starting to see the rise of horror that takes about Alzheimer's, obliquely rather than dead on.

Forgetting:

There's been a rise in stories about people's memories getting siphoned off. I have a vague but vivid memory of reading a comic book (or maybe seeing a TV show) with baddie who exults in erasing people's memories, and says things like, "I just took your memories of your mother," with a smirk. But I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this — almost as if my memory had been erased, fiendishly. And googling has turned up nothing. (Any suggestions?)

(Update: Thanks to everyone who commented. I think Ian Cyr is right, and it's a recent issue of Green Lantern Corps. by Dave Gibbons et al., featuring a baddie with mental powers. Although, someone reminded me The Surgeon General does something quite similar in Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and, yes, Gibbons again. But it's fascinating how many other examples people came up with.)

In any case, there are lots of other examples of recent stories about mind-erasure. Dollhouse is an obvious example, which asks explicitly what's left of us after our memories have been stolen away. (And comes up with a moderately hopeful answer, over time: There's still something that remains even after our minds are gone, although it's hard to define.)

Heroes has the walking plot device, the Haitian, who mostly just shows up and zaps some of your memories whenever HRG or someone else needs a little memory lapse — then wanders off to do his own thing, until he's needed to henchman up again. But there is that one super-creepy bit where HRG is interrogating his former mentor in Russia, and he gets the Haitian to zap bits of the mentor's memory, piece by piece, gloating the whole time. You get the full scariness of being unable to remember your mother, or your wife, or other bits of your past.

Torchwood season two had Adam, the guy who insinuates himself into your memories. Smallville had Lex getting some super-advanced electro-shock therapy, which erased seven months of his memory, and being shattered as a result. DC Comics grappled with the ethics of the magician Zatanna erasing people's memories in "Identity Crisis." Acheron Hades in the Thursday Next series has shown a propensity for zapping people's memories as well. Various X-Men have gone around zapping memories of late, including Rogue, Professor X and Jean Gray. (And in
one recent X-Men comic, Emma Frost sadistically erases an assassin's only happy memory, vowing to do worse if the assassin comes back. In Mark Millar's Authority issues, the Evil Doctor also gets off on nuking people's memories.

The 2001 movie Time Lapse features someone who's been dosed with a memory-erasing drug, rushing to stop an evil nuclear scheme before his memory goes away completely. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind featured people paying to have memories selectively erased, only to discover how terrifying that is in practice. And Dark City was all about people's memories being rearranged every night.

I feel like this is just scratching the surface — there's a lot of fiction right now talking about how fragile your memories are — and how, if they go, what's left may or may not be recognizeably "you."

The shambling hordes:

And then there's the fact that we're seeing a proliferation of zombie movies, which are all about people who are falling apart physically and have lost all of their personality and sense of identity. As someone who's lost a few close relatives to Alzheimer's, slowly and horribly, it's easy for me to recognize how zombies are a metaphor for this dissolution of the self. People with Alzheimer's are still conscious and aware, they still move around and seem to respond to stimuli, but as disease progresses they get less and less capable of reasoning or having any kind of meaningful interaction with anyone around them. It's heart breaking and horrible — the person you knew is still there, but no longer really him- or herself.

As I pointed out a while ago, the zombie movie which comes closest to depicting the awfulness of losing a parent to Alzheimer's is Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also sometimes called Braindead:

Quasi-zombie movie I Am Legend even makes the link clearer by showing that the "zombies" still have vestiges of humanity and are capable of caring about each other. In the movie's original ending, Robert Neville is able to get through to the zombies and help them remember they used to be people — he comes up with a cure for their condition, and is able to get through to them. Because their real problem isn't that they're feral or mindless — it's that they've forgotten themselves.

The movie Fido also plays with this fairly explictly, by having the main character's dad become a docile, enslaved zombie by the end. He's still recognizeably the same old dad, but the biggest change is that he's lost most of his mind.

Obviously, a huge part of the zombie fad simply comes from the fact that they're a cool way to have an apocalyptic scenario — they're unstoppable and nasty, and if they bite you, you're screwed. They have many of the hallmarks of a good monster: loud, relentless, biting, overwhelming. But at the same time, as the zombie genre continues to expand and diversify, people are using zombies as metaphors for a bunch of different things — and one of those things, clearly, is having a loved one disappear, inexorably into the mists of forgetting.

So if it's true that we're only just seeing the beginning of the onslaught of dementia in our rapidly aging societies, you can expect to see more fantastical and science-fictional stories that attempt to capture the madness of it all. As Caine says, no monster can ever be as scary as Alzheimer's... but some monsters can help us come to terms with it.

Thanks to Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Capt. Snowdon, Lynae Straw, Michael Wilson, Martina de la Cruz, Nivair H. Gabriel and anyone else I missed.

Also the episode had the greatest title ever: "Strange Attractors."

Before we could get to Claire's lesbian subsubsubplot, which is actually getting genuinely good because it's showing us a smart, competent side of Claire we never saw before, we had to endure the crappy King Jeremy the Wicked subsubsubplot. Remember that last week, HRG went out to find a healer kid named Jeremy he'd once "bagged and tagged." But it turned out that Jeremy had grown a flippy power, where his touch could heal or kill. And he'd accidentally killed his parents.

This little Jeremy detour was inserted into the story so HRG could try unsuccessfully to assuage his guilt for ruining so many mutants' lives. Turns out Jeremy is an unpopular kid in town, and that the cops want to hold him because he's so different and writes about death and other emo things in his journal. HRG argues with these close-minded cops who are in fact correct that Jeremy murdered his parents. Then he calls icy Tracy, who pretends to be Jeremy's aunt and pulls political strings to get him released (how her NYC connections would help in a rural Southern town is never explained). But then boo hoo! Jeremy feels so bad about being a murderer that he decides to do the old murder-hands on somebody who is mean to him as he's leaving jail.

So Jeremy is put back in jail, HRG feels guilty some more, and Tracy storms off in a huff. But not before Samuel the dirt power man can appear and whisk Tracy to the carnival (thus adding "carnival whisking" to his improbable dirt powers list). He tells her that she should bring Jeremy to the carnival, which is "home" and will allow him to be with "family." Tracy scoffs at the idea that being a carnie is a good fate for King Jeremy the Wicked, but takes a compass from Samuel anyway. Boy does she feel bad about turning down Samuel the carnie whisker when she comes back and finds out that two of the corrupt cops have chained Jeremy to the back of a truck and dragged him through town until his face is a road-eaten skull. It seems like Jeremy basically wanted to die, since he has a chance to kill the guys who are about to turn him into red asphalt but doesn't do it.

HRG has another emo notch in his glasses now that he's learned Some People Can't Be Saved Even When You Pull Strings.

In one of those Sprint-sponsored minisubsubsubplots about Hot Tattoo at the carnival, we also learn that the carnival can be easily found when you mail people geotagged photographs of the carnival from your cell phone. Carnies, beware. The geotags will give you away every time! So don't geotag. Thank you for this sponsored message.

But let's catch up with psychic Matt and his Head Sylar, shall we? There is an essentially flawless scene of utterly mad cheesiness where Sylar takes over Matt's body and humps wifey (see above). Then he munches an apple and talks about forbidden fruit. Insane with jealousy that Head Sylar is making it with his lady, Matt spills the beans to wifey and says he has somebody trapped in his head and she has to take their kid and leave. While wifey is gone, Matt discovers that guzzling alcohol makes Head Sylar weak, then disappear.

We get this long, goofily disturbing scene where Matt is muttering "make those voices go away" while swigging shots of tequila. As bad as that was, at least he wasn't seeing rainbows, right? But THEN the real switcheroo happens, because (as Sylar says proudly to Matt) "while you blacked out, I slipped right in." So the whole drunk thing was a ruse to totally take over Matt's body! Now Sylar has a Head Matt. And wifey thinks Matt is all better but it's really Sylar who is controlling him.

There is also some really bad quippery thrown in where Sylar says stuff to Matt like, "Why don't you accept your power?" Is this really the issue, here? Let's just stick with "I hate you because you sucked me out of my own brain and I want my body back." Isn't that enough of a conflict? Do the writers have to add in this bogus, X-Men ripoff conflict of "I embrace my powers but you don't"?

Luckily, Claire is starting to rock my world, and I'm not being entirely sarcastic when I say that. First of all, the show isn't taking the easy way out with her budding lesbo relationship. She doesn't reject girl-lovin roomie Gretchen out of hand - carefully saying she "doesn't know" what to do. And then there's a scene where she goes seriously lesbotastic with Gretchen in their dark dorm beds. That's right - she asks Gretchen to PROCESS FEELINGS with her. Nothing is hotter than lesbian relationship processing. Unfortunately, the psycho sorority girls bust into their room just as the processing is getting really carnal. They're being kidnapped for "hell week," forced to look for "treasures" in a creepy slaughterhouse while wearing skimpy pajamas.

Of course it's all part of the invisible sorority girl's scheme to kill Gretchen and isolate Claire just the way "Uncle Samuel" wants. And that's where things get cool, because Claire is anti-useless and figures out that a mutant is stalking them and trying to kill Gretchen. And she ALSO figures out that she "needs" Gretchen after she admits to being a virgin.

That's right, if this were Battlestar Galactica that revelation would have been followed by a Quiznos commercial where a voice would intone, "IT HAS BEEN REVEALED - CLAIRE IS A VIRGIN." And then somebody would take a giant bite of a really drippy sandwich with lots of curly sprouts on it.

After all that, I figured Heroes would do the usual TV thing and kill of Gretchen. Just as Claire is all "yes I want you to munch my sprout sandwich," invisible girl would gouge her lungs out with a meathook or something. But no! She tries to do it, but Claire gets invisigirl with a hook first! You know what this means, right? Claire is going to lose her virginity to a girl!!!! Despite the drunken Matt and the "sliding in" Sylar stuff, this Claire-the-competent-bisexual subsubsubplot made this one of the best episodes of Heroes all season. And not just because of the scene where Claire and Gretchen are stuffed in the trunk of a car after the sorority "kidnapping" and almost kiss. It's because I like seeing Claire be an action hero instead of a whiny kid or daddy's "Claire Bear."

There was even a cool dirt power moment that made sense. Samuel visits Jeremy's home town and converts the courthouse and jail to dust in revenge for the whole red asphalt thing.

So, to sum up, here were the plusses in this episode:

1. Emo kid eliminated
2. Head Sylar slides into a blacked-out Matt
3. Lesbian processing
4. Dirt powers that made sense almost erased the badness of "carnival whisking" power
5. Lesbian bonding
6. Invisible sorority meathook fights
7. I got to take Tuesday off which is why I didn't have to post this recap until today
8. Geotagging can reveal the location of mutant carnivals which is why Sprint phones suck
9. HRG asks Tracy if they can have closety mutant sex and she says no because it would be better if they could just be themselves openly
10. I totally made #9 up sort of