This has been the dream of science-fiction fans and science-fiction authors since the days of "Clone Of My Own" (which is usually attributed to Isaac Asimov, but who knows if it's actually by him?) "Clone Of My Own" goes:

Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it's grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.

Clone, clone of my own,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.

There are about 29 versus more, but you get the idea. Actually, after reading authors like John Varley and Ursula K. Le Guin, the whole idea of the "opposite" sex has been thrown into question — surely, once we can all reconfigure our bodies at will, eventually we'll have some sort of sex tesseract.

But for now, here are the ways that science fiction offers, for us to meet our opposite-sex duplicates (and in some cases, have sex with them):

1) Cloning.

House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds:

Abigail Gentian, a wealthy woman, decides to explore the vastness of the stars — she she has herself cloned a number of times, and some of the clones are male while others are female. They all share Abigail's memories, and Abigail herself joins them without knowing which of them is the "real" her. And these "shatterlings" have sex — a lot. Especially in the novella Thousandth Night, there are tons of orgies in which all of the clones get together, making it a certainty that the "real" Abigail has been with her clones.

Time Enough For Love by Robert A. Heinlein:

Lazarus Long is the world's oldest human, and he decides not to undergo rejuvenation therapy, thus sentencing himself to death. His descendants convince him to keep on living, but he'll only do it if he gets to have a new experience — so two of his descendants become impregnated with opposite-sex clones of Lazarus. And after the opposite-sex clones of Lazarus are born, Lazarus raises them as his own daughters... and then has sex with them, of course.

"Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin:

This Nebula-nominated novelette, first published in Playboy, features a set of clones of a man named John Chow who died in a car accident, and some of them are female:

"All chips off the old block," Martin said valiantly. "But how can . . . some of you be women . . .?"

Beth took over: "It's easy to program half the clonal mass back to the female. Just delete the male gene from half the cells and they revert to the basic, that is, the female. It's trickier to go the other way, have to hook in artificial Y chromosomes. So they mostly clone from males, since clones function best bisexually."

Sadly, nine out of ten clones are killed, forcing the remaining clone to deal with unaccustomed solitude.

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley:

The character Tweed has clones who are male and female clones of the same individual, called Vaffa or sometimes Hygeia. They're super-strong, super-big and lethal.

NYX and various other X-Men comics:

X-23, a female clone of Wolverine, first appeared in the X-Men: Evolution animated series, but then made the leap to comics, just like Harley Quinn. Despite looking kind of silly, she's manage to stick around long enough to get her own miniseries and have her backstory explained. I don't think she and Logan ever hooked up, but they have fought, which is almost the same thing when you come down to it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:

As Zaphod Beeblebrox explains, the girl Lintilla "has now been cloned over five-hundred-and-seventy-eight-thousand-million times - and has thus created a problem in some quarters." All of the Lintilla clones are female — but the anti-clones, sent to get rid of the infestation of female clones, are male versions of Lintilla called Allitnil. When a Lintilla and an Allitnil come together, he gets the Lintilla to "agree to cease to be" — but Arthur Dent takes a liking to one of the Lintillas, and kills her particular Allitnil.

Hunted by James Alan Gardner:

Edward York is an illegal clone of one of the Admirals on the High Council, and due to genetic problems he's a bit stupid. But a female clone of the Admiral, named Samantha, turns out super-smart and resourceful. Together, Edward and Samantha travel, as brother and sister, travel to the planet Troyen to try and negotiate a peace between two alien species, the Mandasars and the Fasskisters.

Kyle XY:

Kyle and his fellow vat-baby Jessi aren't strictly speaking clones, because I think they had different genetic stock — as far as I can remember, Kyle came from Adam and Jessi came from Sarah. But they do come from the same vat, and they resulted from the same super-baby program. So they could be considered akin to clones, sort of. Worth mentioning, anyway.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimate Clone Saga:

Can't believe I forgot this one, since I have the trades at home. In the Ultimate version of the Clone Saga, they clone Peter Parker several times... including a female version called Jessica Drew. And Jessica has all of Peter's memories — S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to erase Jessica's memories and set her up with a new identity, but she escapes and takes on the identity of Spider-Woman. Thanks, kwschuttler!

2) Alternate universes

Parallellities by Alan Dean Foster:

Max, the main character of this novel travels through the multiverse, and finally meets an alternate female version of himself — and has sex with her. Later, he manages to find an entire planet populated by copies of himself. As the back cover copy explains:

Now Max was lost in a virtual sea of collateral worlds, confronting man-eating aliens, dinosaurs, talking frogs, dead Maxes, girl Maxes, old Maxes, even ghost Maxes. His only chance to escape the space-time continuum was to find Boles and hope the loony genius could rescue him. But how could he be sure which world was real, which Max was Max, and which Boles was the Boles who could stop the madness—or trap Max in the wrong world forever. . . ?

Red Dwarf, "Parallel Universe":

Our gang finds a device that's supposed to transport them home to Earth instantly — but instead it zaps them into an alternate universe. There, they meet alternate versions of themselves, including female versions of Lister and Rimmer (and Cat's counterpart is a Dog.) Rimmer has to fight off his female counterpart's sexual advances, while Lister actually does wind up in bed with his female version, Deb. And because in this alternate universe, it's the men who get pregnant, Lister winds up carrying his alternate self's baby.

Sliders:

Thanks to Xicer for pointing out this one: in the episode "Double Cross," Quinn meets an evil female duplicate of himself from (of course) another universe, and almost makes out with her:

Transition by Iain Banks:

This dimension-jumping novel mentions that it's quite common to enter the body of your alternate-universe self and find that the alternate self is the opposite sex. This is a known syndrome, which causes some discomfort or confusion among the universe-hoppers whom it happens to.

3) Time travel

"All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein:

This story features a young man who's tricked into impregnating his younger, female self — because it turns out he had a futuristic sex change at some point, which the reader doesn't realize at first. And then it turns out that he's actually the child of that union, meaning that he's his own mother and father — the mother of all time paradoxes, in other words.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold:

Daniel Eakins travels backwards and forwards in time many times, meeting himself and having sex with himself — over and over and over. But after a ton of trips, he actually meets an alternate-universe version of himself who was born female, and they shack up together at the beginning of time. It goes great for a while, until they get fed up with each other, and then Daniel's time-traveling female counterpart manages to erase herself completely from Daniel's timeline, so Daniel can never find her again.

Needless to say, this post would not have been nearly as fascinating without TVTropes.org, the fountain of all greatness. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was watching Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II TV movie. I was wondering why this post-apocalyptic story of tyrannical dominatrices and mutants was less interesting than Star Trek, and I couldn't escape the conclusion: Genesis II was less interesting because it was less fun — and especially less escapist. Instead of cool people on an awesome spaceship packed with fantastic toys, like Communicators and Tricorders, you had a guy trapped in Planet Of The Apes without any apes. And with an extra helping of Roddenberry's signature preachiness.

And I started thinking about escapism, and why we tend to look down on it. We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They're automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world's unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.

Escapism is the candy-coated pill, the sedative designed to lull you away from realizing quite how messed up things are — and how much culpability you, as a no-doubt middle-class person, have for the situation. Escapism is opium, soma.

The distinction between escapist and "realist" fiction isn't even a matter of utopian versus dystopian narratives — after all, much escapist fiction is dystopian, and plenty of realistic fiction has an utopian impulse at its core. But when movies or books depict someone escaping from the world's unpleantness, or just offer a vision which allows the watcher or reader to escape through their imagination, then we deplore the cowardice of anyone who seeks to run away from their problems in this way. Most of all, escapism is inherently just not serious.

Escapism: pulpy and tacky

Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case against escapism very potently in her essay "Escape Routes," gathered in the collection The Language Of The Night: Essays On Fantasy And Science Fiction:

What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured — like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always towards an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail.

And inside the padded cell people say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest.

They don't care if nobody outside is listening. They don't want to know there is an outside.

Because the most famous works of SF are socially and culturally speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Capek, Stapeldon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American SF, while riding on the tradition of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism.

That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all of the "relevant" problems.

She was writing this back in the 1970s, so the specific accusations about SF are outdated. But as a summation of the "escapism is childish and not literary" viewpoint, it's pretty much perfect. And as you can tell, a big part of the hatred for escapism comes from a desire to be literary, and to be taken seriously by the upper echelons of the (supposedly monolithic) literary world. Writing in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1976, Barry N. Maltzberg raged that the literary/cultural establishment "either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids."

One more quote. In his book On SF, Thomas M. Disch characterizes escapism as a "security blanket," and adds:

There are times when all of us would rather flee our problems than confront them head-on with the heightened awareness that genuine art forces on us. For such times, nothing will serve but escapism.

He goes on to say that certain trashy SF authors are as bad as Star Trek or Magnum P.I. (even though the latter show constantly bombarded us with Magnum's Vietnam War flashbacks.)

If you read these quotes carefully, a few things jump out at you. First of all, there's the equation of escapism with "pulp" traditions — which was obviously a big deal for authors like Le Guin and Maltzberg, who were trying to escape (sorry!) from the "pulp" label and prove that they deserved a higher grade of paper stock. And then there's the idea that escapism prevents your SF from being "relevant" or commenting on real-world issues — when, in fact, the most escapist narratives are often the most topical. (Just watch the original Star Trek.) There's the idea, which was way more prevalent in the 1970s, that explicit social commentary automatically made your work better or smarter.

There's also a certain feeling of disapproval, even dismay, that people are having too much fun. If I hadn't read tons of books by Le Guin and Disch, and discovered first hand how enjoyable (and frequently, how escapist) their work can be, I would think both authors wrote dry Socialist Realist works, in which their protagonists were born and died in the same gutter.

There has been a move to re-embrace escapism in recent years — Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay was about the fictional creation of a Golden Age superhero who was actually called The Escapist. And Chabon shows us exactly how The Escapist's real-world origins reflected the political and social trends of the 1930s and early 1940s, and how much his adventures reflect the struggles and traumas Sammy and Joey are going through in their real lives — everything from Sammy's secret homosexuality to Clay's family trapped in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe becomes part of the secret backstory of the Escapist and the League of the Golden Key. In Chabon's novel, backstory is the story — when you try to strip the League of the Golden Key and the other details from the Escapist's origin, you chip away at what makes the Escapist who he is, and the reasons why he does what he does.

It's no coincidence, of course, that Chabon has also been a champion of bringing the pulps back into the sphere of the literary — he edited two anthologies of mock-pulp science fiction stories for McSweeney's a few years ago, chock full of literary and genre superstars doing pastiches and homages to the plot-heavy stories of the past. Authors like Chabon and Dave Eggers are able to celebrate the pulpy and retro in a way that Maltzberg never could back in the 1970s, because they're already assured of their literary status, and need not fear being marginalized. (And meanwhile, the "new space opera" and posthuman SF novels that throng on our shelves are the very picture of escapism, with their heroes who live for zillions of years and can port themselves into new customized bodies whenever they feel like it.)

But in any case, we're now far enough from the pulp era that the "pulpy" label has lost much of its sting, even as unabashedly pulpy urban fantasy heroines in tight pleather pants are eating science fiction's market share for lunch. So maybe it really is time to reclaim the word "escapism" and transform it into a paean to works that liberate and illuminate us.

A theory of escapist art

So I promised you an explanation of why escapism is the highest form of art — and yes, there may be a slight amount of hyperbole involved there. At the same time, escapism has given us some of our greatest speculative art works, and has the potential to spawn even greater ones in the future, if we recognize it for what it is.

First of all, let's dispose of this false dichotomy between "escapism" and "realism." Neither of those things is ever entirely pure, and each always contains elements of the other. Any time you have a flight of fancy, or a grace note, or an elivening metaphor, in a "realist" work, you are engaging in escapism. Because whenever you invoke the imagination, or suggest another world (made out of thought, or images) beyond your protagonist's "real" world, you're allowing the reader a brief escape. And in fact, if you look at "real life," some of our "realest" experiences involve escape.

Think about that old literary standby, the "coming of age" narrative — it is the most pure escapist story you can have, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending. (More on happy endings later.) The "coming of age" tale is about someone outgrowing his or her childhood, and casting off the stifling restrictions of parents, school and conformist expectations. It is a story about reaching escape velocity, and bursting out of childhood's gravity well. This is never a tidy process in real life, nor is it often in literature. But it's the original escapist tale, and in many ways, it's the template on which all other escapist tales build.

The reverse is also true — escapist elements don't automatically make a work less realistic. Just as the "coming of age" story is about escape in the "real" world, it's more than possible to tell a realistic story about a world that repesents an escape from our reality. We've all accepted, by now, that you can tell a realistic story about that ultimate avatar of escapism, Batman. (Batman is in many ways a more escapist figure than Superman, because Batman is just like us — except that his amazing training and gadgets turn him into an unstoppable force.) Look at Paul Pope's amazing, stark graphic novel Batman: Year 100. And if you want SF that comments on real-world issues, it's hard to get more topical than the first few seasons of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

And that leads to another point — escapism can be incredibly dark. I said earlier that many escapist works are dystopian, and it's clearly true. The "last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world" story is full of escapism — for one thing, you're one of the chosen few, and you're incredibly special and wonderful as a result. You no longer have to pay taxes (like Le Guin's heroes), and you live in a world where the worst has already happened. And many escapist films are show someone escaping from an incredibly dark world, even if it's only through the power of the imagination. Think of Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, which is at its core a work about the escape into fantasy. Even if both the real world and the fantasy are dark and disturbing. Or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which takes place in a dystopian world and shows us Sam Lowry's flights of the imagination as well as his attempts to escape in real life. Did I mention that escapist works don't have to have happy endings?

At the same time, who says that realism is the best thing a literary work can aspire to? It really is true, as many SF writers have said lately, that we live in a world that's changing so quickly, that any attempt at pure realism will become historicism instead. And then there's the subjective nature of "reality." But most of all, realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can't show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that's happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions. We've all lived through historical moments where a new meme or phenomenon seemed to "come out of nowhere," only to look inevitable in retrospect, once we see all of the early indicators that we ignored at the time, because they were outside of the narrative we were telling ourselves about "reality."

If the goal of a literary work (and remember, "literary" is not synonymous with "good." More on that here) is to reflect "reality," then "realism" is one tool among many for doing so. And escapism is another.

I already suggested, above, that metaphors are inherently escapist because they take us away from the strict view of what the thing "is." And the reverse is also true: escapism is a metaphor. TV shows like Lost In Space and Star Trek are so transparently metaphors for the hopes and fears of the Space Age that it's impossible to watch them now without thinking about what people were living through at the time. You get as revealing a mirror into the Space Age, Cold-War psyche from Star Trek as you do, say, from John Updike's Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. The stuff Star Trek tries to say about the politics of the 1960s is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the stuff that it says without meaning to, about Manifest Destiny and the post-colonial project of redeeming the Third World.

We tend to think of escapism as a childish impulse, but that's by no means always true — like Brazil, or The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, many great escapist works are about adults, who are trapped as only adults can be, in prisons partly of their own making, and look for a way out.

Escapism also shows what we're trying to escape from — this seems like an obvious point, but it's one that often seems to be overlooked. This changes over time, and also varies from creator to creator. Some escapist works are concerned about breaking out of a totalitarian, oppressive state, others are more concerned with running away from middle-class American life. There's escapism from war, from conformity, from individualism, from failure, from success. Whether or not an escapist work explicitly shows us what we're escaping, it's still always there, revealed by what the escapist elements aren't. Escapism always reveals what we're escaping, and serves as a mirror of whatever the artist (or corporate overlord, as the case may be) views as the most horrendous elements of current reality. It's convex where dire reality is concave, like a plaster cast mold. If your goal is to get the clearest possible picture of "reality," looking at that reflection may be your best shot.

And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.

Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Returning to the Le Guin quote, it strikes me that what she's describing as escapism is actually better described as "weak story-telling." Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad.

If escapism is frequently tawdry and dull — if our culture gives us Transformers 2 instead of Superman II — blame the creators, don't blame escapism itself. In fact, holding a low opinion of escapism (and saying things like "It's just a movie about explosions and robots, don't expect too much from it") lets the Michael Bays of this world off the hook too easily.

Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"

The idea of traveling between alternate realities is a common theme in speculative fiction. Multiverse stories are a logical extension of allohistory, and a close relative of that other grand old convention, time travel. The idea is often explained as inspired by the Many-Worlds Interpretation first formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957, but its use in literature and storytelling has been long with us. Jorge Luis Borges used the theme in his 1941 story "The Garden of Forking Paths". There are earlier examples in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World of 1666 (recently revisited by Alan Moore) and in one of the stories in the One Thousand and One Nights. Ancient multiverses can be found in the Hindu cosmology and the nine worlds of the Norse mythos were around long before Jack Kirby.

Right from the start, Banks' Transition has superficial similarities to Michael Moorcock, especially the Jerry Cornelius stories. Both books feature amoral agents with shifting loyalties, flitting between versions of Earth. They party down in exotic locales, averting or causing global calamity — like rock stars trashing an infinity of hotel suites. Victorian airships and super-assassins abound. The theory goes that all of Moorcock's fiction is one big multiverse, from the Sword and Sorcery worlds of Elric of Melniboné or Corum Jhaelen Irsei to the decadent Dancers at the End of Time. All the various characters in these works are aspects or avatars of a stock cast of meta-players often compared to the Commedia dell'Arte theater tradition with its tricksters, oafs, and backstabbers. Jerry Cornelius is a 20th Century face of the slightly mis-named Eternal Champion. He's an anarchist secret-agent, a super-slick antihero whirling in a blaze of intoxicants and ready fuck anything that fucking moves. David Bowie as Doctor Who, turned up to fuckin' twelve! While quite entertaining, it should be no surprise that these quintessential examples of SF's New Wave movement can be a wee bit disorienting. Product of the times.

For a speculative fiction ride of sex, drugs, and rock&roll that's less experimental (ahem, easier to read), I prefer Mick Farren, singer of the proto-punk band The Deviants, White Panther Party member, and Elvis scholar. Out of print, but well worth the hunt, are his multiverse romps in The DNA Cowboys Trilogy and Necrom, some truly weird fun shit. The dimension-tripping demon Yancey Slide from those adventures also turns up in the more recent Kindling and Conflagration He also wrote the Victor Renquist novels, a series of vampire novels that aren't totally lame. 2002's Underland has the CIA, vampires, and Nazis duking it out with flying saucers in the Hollow Earth beneath Antarctica. Yeah. Hell, just track down anything you can by Mick Farren.

Along with Moorcock, two other Monsters of Multiverse Literature ( or "Mul-Lit") are The Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny and the series that inspired that, World of Tiers by Philip José Farmer. They have much more of a fantasy feel than the above, especially because of an overuse of courtly language in the former and centaurs and other classic monsters in the latter. You'll also find plenty of complex machinations by powerful groups or families (Zelazny is notorious for Daddy Issues) and decadent, lusty adventure (more of Farmer's bag in trade, but evident in both). I enjoyed both of these series as a teen, but to be honest that was a long time ago and my impressions are murky at best. I recall the fiveTiers with more fondness, but that might be due to the risqué covers by Boris Vallejo. I can assert with some authority that the reader should stop after the first five Amber books, do not read the second series, do not collect the recent stuff written by John Gregory Betancourt. Sadly, Amber suffers from a terminal case of Herberts' Syndrome.

The quirky standalone Roadmarks by Zelazny could be considered a multiverse book. In it, the space-time continuum is an actual highway accessible to a few. The protagonist tools around the centuries in a dusty old pickup running guns to the Persians at Marathon. Occassionally he passes Hitler, his VW bug parked at the side of the road looking for the weed-choked off road to where he won WWII. I'm going to try and fit in some Amber andTiers, maybe revisit Riverworld too, just for old time's sake.

Now that I'm thoroughly soaked in nostalgia, allow me to wax rhetorical on multiverse comic books I always liked. Yes, they're old, I'm old; get used to it, and get off my urine-covered stoop.

The capes-and-tights set is plagued with multiverses, and they're always having Ultimate Critical Infinity Wars — boooring. A refreshing change from all that was the " Zenith" strip in2000 AD (1987-1992). This was young Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's contribution to the British superhero deconstruction attack of the 1980s. It had battles between multiple Earths, hippie/fascist versions of the same superheroes, the Lloigor from the Cthulhu Mythos, and a hero who was a real asshole. Yeowell's brushy B & W artwork was a sweet counterpoint to the usual 4-color superhero look, too.

For graphical goodies of a more science fictional bent, you cant go wrong with the ligne claire and spacey psychedlia of Jean Giraud better known as Moebius, co-creator of Métal Hurlant magazine. The Airtight Garage is a series of artificial pocket universes built into the asteroid Flower 51. They are the playgrounds/battlefields for the likes of Lady Malvina, Major Gubert, the crew of the spaceship Ciguri, and Jerry Cornelius. Hey, whaaa? Yep, Moorcock allowed other artists, writers, and musicians the use of the character in a sort of Open Source deal. For a while Marvel had a problem with that and the character was renamed Lewis Carnelian for a while. Weird. There are songs about Jerry by Blue Öyster Cult and Hawkwind, but I digress. Moebius returned to the Airtight Garage in '96 with Man from the Ciguri from Dark Horse. All lots of fun.

Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is also often compared to Moorcock, and in many ways improves upon him. Frankly, when you want to read about sexy psychic spies fighting transdimensional evil, it's hard to top the Arkwright stories. I love Talbot's vision of alternate Britains, like the one where Cromwell's Revolution still rages on and the Puritans terrorize the skies from massive airships. The complex plot jumps around jarringly in the original series, before finally coalescing, as you begin to see the multiverse as Luther does. There is also an audio version with the voices of David Tennant and Paul Darrow, I've never heard it — but wow, fangasm. The later 1999 sequel, Heart of Empire from Dark Horse again, follows the story of Luther's daughter in a much more linear fashion, with absolutely gorgeous art and much of that retro-Victorian futurism the kids like.

I have a particular fondness for the idiosyncratic doodles of doom by of Matt Howarth. His anarchic city-world of Bugtown is the home of indestructible assassins, rockstars, giant sharks, and nuclear goddesses; all of whom flit through the most surreal and impossible alternate universes imaginable. The series Those Annoying Post Brothers and Savage Henry are just packed full of crazy. Many experimental underground musicians make regular appearances in Howarth's work. There are adventures featuring Conrad Schnitzler, The Residents, and Micheal Moorcock collaborators, Hawkwind. Geez, that guy gets his beard into everything. Howarth also draws great aliens that look really alien, like cacti crossed with really uncomfortable furniture. Look for the very funny SF Konny & Czu strips.

"So Grey", I hear you say, " how about something less reminiscent of your college-dorm lava-lamp days? Something more, y'know [describes a circle in the air] for the kids?"

Well, the most well known Young Adult books with multiverse themes would probably be Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Chris Roberson should be getting a lot more attention for his time-space tripping adventures of the Bonaventure-Carmody family in novels likeHere, There & Everywhere, Paragea, and End of the Century. Oh and big surprise, Roberson has worked with Michael Moorcock often.

For something different, try Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin. This is a collection of bright and witty capriccios about a woman who discovers how to shift to alternate worlds by being bored and dyspeptic in airport waiting rooms. As usual, LeGuin makes many wry observations about society and class. There's one story about a civilization of flightless avian people and their transcontinentaln migrations...the ending is beautiful. I could mention Dark Tower series by Stephen King or Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes but I'm just not into them, so I won't. Philip K. Dick's doesn't make the cut either: that's really only a duoverse.

I really loved Neal Stephenson's Anathem and it's all about the multiverse, but does it really belong with these other stories? Well of course it does! If for no other reason than it's completely different from the Michael Moorcock imitators. Yes, all the action takes place in one cosmos — going to another world is a one-way trip and requires a big honkin' generation starship. There is the mystery of Fraa Jaad, who appears to be able to move at will between the slightest possibilities. I noticed something odd, even though Stephenson beats us about the head and neck with tons of higher mathematics and metaphysics, he's awfully vague about the actual mechanism for traveling from one reality to another. This is probably the smartest move. Some writers do a lot of handwaving about Quantum and dress it up in blinky lights and an Einstein-Rosen bridge. But usually, it just boils down to closing your eyes and clicking your heels three times. How very apt for a thought experiment.

Multiverse stories are becoming more prevalent on TV these days. That kid from Stand by Me fought Nazi cavemen from Dimension X or whatever in Sliders. The color coded Charlie Jade looked interesting, but I haven't watched it yet. Lost has used the Many Worlds Interpretation, but they will try just about anything these days.

I see Leonard Nimoy is going back and forth in alternate worlds a lot these days (in Fringe and the Star Trek movie.) Glad to see that sort of thing again.

Somebody asked me recently if multiverses were the Next Big Thing in Speculative Fiction? I like the multiverse concept and would like to see different takes on it, that aren't all about decadent ubermensch and their interdimensional power struggles.

And honestly, we don't need Next Big Things. Trendy conventions in writing are a symptom of a lack of originality. Speculative fiction itself should be a glorious sprawling multiverse exploring all manner of settings and styles. Right now, too many of the worlds in the new book section are getting too recognizable, I'm looking at you Contemporary Urban Fantasy! And you with the top hat and goggles, we've talked before about this, you need to seek help.

So yeah, this trip down multiverse lane has been fun — but I think it points out a flaw in sub-genre stories. Why do they all start running together? Why so many Shadowy Conspirancies, Power Hungry Libertarian Scensters and Moral Relatavisim in a majority of these alternate reality adventures. The Multiverse must have more possibilities than that.

Special thanks to Alan Beatts and Chris Braak for their helpful ideas.
Top image from Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot, 1999.

Commenter Grey_Area is known on many worlds as Chris Hsiang. He brachiates through the endlessly forking branches of possibility frightening all the turtledoves.

In her essay collection Moving Targets Atwood explains that she doesn't consider the books she writes, including The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a future America taken over by a fascist government, and Oryx and Crake, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with genetically engineered creatures, science fiction, a genre she defines as "fiction in which things happen that are not possible today." Ursula K. Le Guin, whose novels like The Left Hand of Darkness have gained critical acclaim under the science fiction and fantasy labels, suggests that Atwood is not making a viable literary distinction, but rather protecting her works from "literary bigots" who relegate genre fiction to a "literary ghetto."

Le Guin doesn't begrudge Atwood her genre hair-splitting ("Who can blame her?" she says), but she actually believes that Atwood's latest book, The Year of the Flood, itself a continuation of the post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake is less successful as "realistic" fiction than as genre fiction. In other words, reviewing it as a strictly realist literary novel instead of a speculative work forces Le Guin to write a more negative review:

I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using the lively vocabulary of modern science-fiction criticism, giving it the praise it deserves as a work of unusual cautionary imagination and satirical invention. As it is, I must restrict myself to the vocabulary and expectations suitable to a realistic novel, even if forced by those limitations into a less favourable stance.

With its vague references to a plague that wipes out humanity and characters better suited to morality play than emotional depth, she suggests that Atwood's novel nicely elucidates science fiction's power to "extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire," but that it is somewhat less successful as non-genre literary work. Le Guin seems ultimately less concerned with what Atwood's self-segregation means to the genre than that Atwood's refusal to label her book as science fiction makes the novel's bleak future at once upsetting and absurd:

It is no comfort to find that some of the genetic experiments are humanoids designed to replace humanity. Who wants to be replaced by people who turn blue when they want sex, so that the men's enormous genitals are blue all the time? Who wants to believe that a story in which that happens isn't science fiction?

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood [The Guardian]

Standing here, in the middle of San Diego Comic Con, it's easy to feel as though the movie industry is a huge maw — sucking up every stray thought or tingle of creativity that anyone has ever had, and mashing them all into new reasons for Brad Pitt to grimace. Hollywood feels all-consuming, when you're surrounded by hype for upcoming comic-book and disaster movies.

I was actually going to do a list of "gloriously unfilmable books," but then I Googled to make sure io9 hadn't already done that post. We hadn't, but SciFiWire, Screenhead and hard-SF writer Mike Brotherton all have. And after I'd already started writing this post, Wired Magazine did one too. (And io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer and the CrazyMonk blog have great comments on the Screenhead post.) The unfilmable novels include some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, some masterpieces of thought-provoking science fiction, including Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Connie Willis, and some giant epics, like Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. I would add at least some of Iain Banks' Culture novels, some Joanna Russ, and a lot of Rudy Rucker's work.

(Incidentally, the movie of William Gibson's Neuromancer? Still definitely happening, according to inside sources I've talked to recently.)

So instead of doing a list of unfilmable novels, let's discuss the whole idea of a book being "unfilmable." First of all, is it true that there are "unfilmable" books (as opposed to books that shouldn't be filmed?). And what makes a book unfilmable? And finally, what do these supposedly unfilmable books tell us about the process of translating a book to film?

Jeff VanderMeer makes a really fascinating point in his response to the Screenhead post. He writes:

I also think this brings up a serious point: more novels should be unfilmable. Because this speaks to what about the form cannot be replicated in other art forms. When I was writing Shriek, one thing I had foremost in my head was to create something that couldn't be filmed (well, except for little excerpts of it...).

Yes, there are unfilmable books.

So is there such a thing as an unfilmable book? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "Yes." Sure, people used to say Lord Of The Rings and Watchmen were unfilmable, and they were proved wrong. But those two examples don't disprove the existence of the unfilmable book, as a species. Some books are too abstract, too complex, too idea-driven, or too non-mainstream to become a Hollywood movie, or any kind of movie for that matter.

Take Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and its sequel, Hylozoic. They're fresh in my mind because I just read Hylozoic recently, and there's so much in those novels that you could never possibly convert into a series of sounds and visual images. You have the nano-machines, the "nants," devouring the entire world and porting everybody to a virtual Earth simulation called "Vearth." And after the nants are turned back, you have a kind of global awakening via a network of Orphids, machines which turn every object fully interactive. And soon, everybody on Earth is quasi-telepathic and able to spy on each other via the OrphidNet. And people can expand their consciousness by connecting to a kind of group mind called the Big Pig. Oh, and they create plastic self-aware robots called Shoons, and contact giants from another plane of existence (the Hibrane) who show them how to "unroll the Lazy Eight" dimension. I feel like I'm barely scraping the surface here, and any Hollywood scriptwriter would need a week in a sensory deprivation tank after trying to turn this into a screenplay.

We went to a reading and booksigning for Jacqueline Carey a while back, and she mentioned, with obvious glee, that her magnificent "Kushiel" books couldn't be made into movies. Partly, that's because of their huge scope and complexity — but mostly, it's because of the subject matter. Especially in the first three books, the main character is a sacred prostitute who can turn pain into pleasure (I'm oversimplifying a bit), and sex work and S/M are woven into the story so deeply, you can't remove them without the whole thing falling apart. Not to mention, the fact that her story takes place in alternate France that worships the bastard son of Jesus Christ, who teaches that you should "love as thou wilt," including S/M as well as homosexuality. There are many ways to make a terrible movie of Kushiel's Dart, but no way to make a good one — at least within Hollywood.

Some books just aren't visual enough to make good movies — take Le Guin's The Dispossessed. You could, I suppose, make a somewhat lifeless film about a physicist from an anarchist planet who travels to a capitalist one. But it would be missing everything that makes The Dispossessed brilliant, from its exploration of the limits and virtues of Annares' utopia, to its dead-on depiction of academic politics, to the investigation of physics and philosophy that lie at the core of the development of "simultenaeity physics." How do you make a compelling movie about someone coming up with a new way to think about space/time?

Watchmen and Lord Of The Rings, by contrast, are both action/adventure stories. They were already woven into the fabric of tons of other superhero and fantasy movies long before they came to the silver screen. Turning them into movies required a deft touch, to be sure, but there was nothing in either work that was antithetical to the needs of the movie form. (Except, possibly, Watchmen's giant alien squid.)

And novels that are even more unfilmable than the ones mentioned above also exist. Some of them aren't particularly great as books either — there are novels that are so dreadful, so dull, or so pointlessly offensive that you'd go mad trying to adapt them. I've read many of these books, so I know.

I should add a caveat: even if a book really is unfilmable, you can always make a movie with the same title and one or two character names, with nothing else in common with the original. If you include works loosely inspired by a book, then yes, anything is "filmable."

Are there books that can be filmed, but shouldn't?

As to whether a science fiction novel shouldn't be turned into a film, that's slightly more of a value judgment than the question of whether it can. Many people — myself included — argued that Watchmen shouldn't be a movie. In my case, I was groping towards the theory that a movie that was faithful to the graphic novel would be both too dark and too dull. I wrote:

I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?... The Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Looking back at what I wrote, I'm not sure I made the case conclusively — I focused too much, in that essay, on discussing the things that Watchmen does that are unique to the graphic novel form, and discounted the possibility that the movie could do similar things in a different way. I didn't talk enough about the story itself, and the things about it that could, or could not, make for a good movie.

And then, a year ago today, I saw a bunch of footage and talked to Zack Snyder, and came around to the idea that his movie could work — it could be about the history of superhero movies, in the same way the graphic novel was about the history of comics. On the other hand, the actual movie that resulted really was a bit lifeless, as I'd originally feared — especially in the final act.

You'll find no shortage of novelists who feel their books shouldn't be movies, that too much would have to be sacrificed to the crudeness of the movie form.

But actually, thinking about it some more, I think it's a lot harder to argue that something shouldn't be filmed than that it can't be. If you're going to argue that it's possible to make a movie of your favorite book, but too much would be lost in the adaptation, you're shouldering the burden of proof. You have to identify just what elements would be lost — and make a stab at understanding how a work gets ported from "book" to "movie."

What does the process of adapting a novel to films tell us about movies and books?

Much of what Alan Moore said, in arguing that Watchmen shouldn't become a movie, is true of all printed works. You read a book at your own pace, with the ability to flip back and forth as you notice connections between things that happened in the previous chapter and things that are happening now. You do much more of the work of imagining the world in your head — even if there are illustrations. The book is frozen; the reader moves. It's the opposite of a film, in a sense.

I think people who believe that any novel that's brave, or complicated, or emotionally rich, will automatically make for an unfulfilling movie are slightly selling the medium of film short. You can do a lot in visual shorthand in movies, and there's a lot more scope to convey information in a way that will go over the heads of some viewers but resonate with others. Any film worth its photons works on multiple levels, for different audiences. A decent actor can convey a whole chapter's worth of backstory with a meaningful look.

Maybe, when adapting a book to a movie, there's something like T.S. Elliott's "objective correlative": you can put in visual cues, props and hints that stand in for complicated ideas and emotions inside a book.

My favorite book-to-film projects include Adaptation, which takes Susan Orlean's introspective work of journalism The Orchid Thief and turns it into a bizarre pomo story of two screenwriter brothers struggling with an inscrutable story. And then there's American Splendor, the film which adapts Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics the only way you could: with a mixture of documentary and reenactment, with the two crossing over in a surreal fashion.

Of course, both of those movies experiment with the movie format to try and do justice to a quirky, unusual book. It's hard to imagine a science fiction movie doing something similar, unless it was a low-budget indie like Primer or Moon. Certainly, the kind of big-budget movie that a book like, say, Neuromancer demands is not going to support much in the way of stylistic experimentation. But maybe there are other ways of doing what those films do — bringing in some of the metatextual quirks of the books by adding a narrative voice-over, say, or a Verhoeven-esque set of fake commercials.

But really, that brings us to the biggest problem with adapting movies to books — big-budget Hollywood film genres are much more restrictive than book genres, at least right now. You have superhero films, disaster films, space-horror films and the occasional space opera. But that can always change — it was only a decade ago that you could count the number of satisfying superhero films on one hand, and now it's the "it" genre.

So maybe instead of hoping that your favorite book never becomes a movie, you should hope it does — and in the process of being filmed, it expands, just a bit, the circumference of Hollywood's narrow sphere of possibility. After all, it never hurts to be optimistic.

The SharedWorlds project sends teens on a two-week camp focusing on science fiction and fantasy, at Wofford College in South Carolina. Assistant director and instructor (and io9 contributor) Jeff VanderMeer curated the discussion, asking the authors, "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

Those four authors listed above, plus Elizabeth Hand, weighed in, and the evocative descriptions will make you want to dust off your passport and go traveling. The five chosen cities couldn't be more different from each other — some (like London) are shiny and high-tech, others (like Venice) are ancient and crabby.

In the process, you learn a lot about what each author considers fascinating about cities. Le Guin and Moorcock both seem to find the weight of history, settling onto a city or driving it into the ground, compelling and fecund with storytelling possibilities. Miéville seems to find London's lack of planning, its crazed ad-hoc development, exciting. Nalo Hopkinson finds Kingstown's mix of high and low technology, cobbled together, to be futuristic in a William Gibson-esque way. And then there's Hand's forceful argument that Reykyavik is like an outpost on an alien world.

Most fascinating of all? No cities in the United States — and none in Asia, either. I would have expected somebody to reach for Shanghai or Mumbai, which are being touted as the most "futuristic" cities by many observers. My personal pick? Hong Kong. I lived there for many years, and its crazily shifting landscape (buildings constantly being torn down, put up, torn down again, and tons of bizarre business schemes blossoming all over) felt like a future megacity at times.

The full list, with each author's comments, is well worth checking out. [Shared Worlds]

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

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

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

2. Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells

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

3. "Late Night Final" by Eric Frank Russell

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

4. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

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

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

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

6. Emphyrio by Jack Vance

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

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

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

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

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

8. Pretty much anything by Robert Heinlein

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

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

9. Absolutely everything by Robert Anton Wilson

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

10. Wheels Within Wheels by F. Paul Wilson

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

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

Le Guin has already won Nebula Awards for The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Tehanu, a story called "The Day Before The Revolution," and a story called "Solitude." (At least, that's according to Wikipedia.) Her latest Nebula comes for Powers, which came out in 2007. Here's the full list of Nebula winners, via Tor.com:

Novel: Powers - Le Guin, Ursula K. (Harcourt, Sep07)
Novella: The Spacetime Pool - Asaro, Catherine (Analog, Mar08)
Novelette: Pride and Prometheus - Kessel, John (F&SF, Jan08)
Short Story: Trophy Wives - Hoffman, Nina Kiriki (Fellowship Fantastic, ed. Martin H. Greenburg and Kerrie Hughes, DAW Books Jan08)
Script: WALL-E - Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter (Walt Disney June 2008)
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) - Wilce, Ysabeau S. (Harcourt, Sep08)

Also honored during the Nebula Award Weekend were:
* A. J. Budrys — Solstice Award
* M.J. Engh — Author Emerita
* Marty Greenberg — Solstice Award
* Harry Harrison — Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master
* Joss Whedon — Ray Bradbury Award
* Kate Wilhelm — Solstice Award

Meanwhile, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Awards, which go to writers whose works explore gender, honored two writers: Patrick Ness, for The Knife Of Never Letting Go, and Nisi Shawl, for her story collection Filter House. According to the press release:

A panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2008 jurors were Gavin J. Grant (chair), K. Tempest Bradford, Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente.
The Knife of Never Letting Go begins with a boy growing up in village way off the grid. Jury chair Gavin J. Grant explains, "All the villagers can hear one another's thoughts (their "noise") and all the villagers are men. The boy has never seen a woman or girl so when he meets one his world is infinitely expanded as he discovers the complications of gender relations. As he travels in this newly bi-gendered world, he also has to work out the definition of becoming and being a man."

Juror Leslie Howle praises Ness's skills as a writer: "Ness is a craftsman, plain and simple. The language, pacing, complications, plot this story has all of the elements that raise the writing to something well beyond good. Some critics call it brilliant. It's a page-turner, and the story continues to resonate well after reading it. It reminds me of the kind of classic SF I loved when I was new to the genre."

In addition to the Tiptree Award, The Knife of Never Letting Go also won the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize (U.K.), which celebrates contemporary fiction for teenagers, and the Guardian Children? Fiction Prize.

Publishers Weekly, which selected Filter House as one of the best books of 2008, described it as an "exquisitely rendered debut collection" that "ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings." Tiptree jurors spotlight Shawl's willingness to challenge the reader with her exploration of gender roles.

Juror K. Tempest Bradford writes, "The stories in Filter House refuse to allow the reader the comfort of assuming that the men and women will act according to the assumptions mainstream readers/society/culture puts on them."

Juror Catherynne M. Valente notes that most of Shawl's protagonists in this collection are young women coming to terms with womanhood and what that means "in terms of their culture, magic (almost always tribal, nuts and bolts, African-based magical systems, which is fascinating in itself), [and] technology." In her comments, Valente points out some elements of stories that made this collection particularly appropriate for the Tiptree Award: "'At the Huts of Ajala' struck me deeply as a critique of beauty and coming of age rituals. The final story, 'The Beads of Ku,' deals with marriage and motherhood and death. 'Shiomah's Land' deals with the sexuality of a godlike race, and a young woman's liberation from it. 'Wallamellon' is a heartbreaking story about the Blue Lady, the folkloric figure invented by Florida orphans, and a young girl pursuing the Blue Lady straight into a kind of urban priestess-hood."

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award's identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year's Honor List is:

* Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing (Bantam, 2008)
* Jenny Davidson, The Explosionist (HarperTeen, 2008)
* Gregory Frost, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet: A Shadowbridge Novel (both published by Del Rey, 2008)
* Alison Goodman, Two Pearls of Wisdom (HarperCollins Australia 2008), published in the United States as Eon: Dragoneye Reborn (Viking 2008), also Eon: Rise of the Dragoneye in the United Kingdom
* John Kessel, Pride or Prometheus (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2008)
* Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels (Knopf, 2008)
* Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (Harcourt)
* John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (Quercus (UK) 2007), original Swedish title Låt den rätte komma in (2004), first published in English as Let Me In, St. Martin's Press (2007), Translated by Ebba Segerberg)
* Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania (Tor, 2005), The Tourmaline (Tor, 2006), The White Tyger (Tor, 2007), The Hidden World (Tor, 2008)
* Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy of Stone (Prime Books)
* Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (Canongate U.S., 2007)
* Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (Harcourt, 2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panspermia is the term for the most scientifically plausible version of this concept, but it isn't necessarily what science fiction usually presents. The panspermia hypothesis holds that the building blocks of life are not found exclusively on planetary bodies but are instead found scattered throughout the cosmos, and it is these spaceborne particles that are at least partly responsible for life on Earth. There's a little circumstantial evidence for the theory (although far, far more to support the reliable old "Life comes from Earth" hypothesis), and there is something undeniably fascinating about the subtext – the aliens are already here, and we are they. But science fiction barely ever depicts the actual theory of panspermia, mostly because it's just a physical process that takes billions of years to play out and is pretty boring unless you're willing to get really mystical.

What science fiction more properly deals with is exogenesis, which simply states that humanity or its genetic ancestors didn't always live on Earth. That generally means one of two things – either an ancient alien race introduced life to a previously dead Earth (sometimes as part of a larger directed panspermia project) or a bunch of humans from some other civilization colonized Earth, a fact that somehow slipped the minds of their descendants (you know…us). Plenty of science fiction deals with both, including two of the big science fictions works currently in the news. (The occasional spoiler may lie ahead.)

Outlander
One of the most satisfying little details of everybody's favorite Vikings vs. aliens epic is its answer to why Jim Caviezel's character, the alien Kainan, looks exactly like the Norsemen and how he can possibly speak their language.Outlander solves both of these problems by revealing Earth is an "abandoned seed colony" of Kainan's spacefaring civilization. Unfortunately, the whole notion that Earth was colonized by an interstellar race really opens up a far bigger plot hole than the one it was meant to fill. After all, Kainan's people would have had to have "seeded" Earth eons ago. If they could pull off planetary engineering on that sort of scale way back then, you'd think they wouldn't have so much trouble with a bunch of bioluminescent dragons. In the end, it's probably best not to think too much about the logistics of the whole abandoned seed colony concept. Because, ultimately, the very inclusion of the idea in the first place is, like so much of Outlander, awesome.

Battlestar Galactica
In both the original and new versions of the series, humans originally came from Kobol, the legendary planet of the gods, and Earth is just the fabled lost colony. The new series is busy dealing with Earth, so it's entirely possible a couple "What the frak?" moments still lie ahead that will reveal humanity actually did come from Earth. The original series, however, left no doubt that Kobol was where we all came from, as the no-budget god-awfulness that is Galactica 1980 established contact between the Galactica and contemporary Earth. Flying motorcycle chases ensued.

Star Trek
The Next Generation episode "The Chase" sought to acknowledge and explain the genetic improbability of a galaxy full of nothing but humanoid aliens with rubber foreheads. The solution – ancient aliens who, upon finding themselves all alone in the galaxy, seeded various planets with their genetic codes – is surprisingly deft, and actually turns a three-decade failure of imaginations and budgets into something almost elegaic. As one would expect, Picard takes this existence-altering revelation in his usual stride, while the Cardassians look a bit grumpy.

Stargate
Honestly, between all the genetic engineering, forced relocations of ancient humans, and universe-altering civil wars between godlike aliens it all gets a bit difficult to keep track of which species actually came from where. In short, a bunch of plague-decimated demigods maybe used this thing called the Dakara superweapon millions of year ago to shoot their genetic information throughout the Milky Way, which maybe had something to do with humanity's evolution. Or maybe not.

Babylon 5
Since we might as well finish off the sweep of nineties science fiction, the Centauri initially tried to dismiss Earth as one of their lost colonies. Sure, this probably wasn't true, but how else are you going to haze the new interstellar species?

Isaac Asimov
Most aliens seem to create life on Earth for slightly more practical (well, relatively speaking) reasons than the Star Trek aliens' "monument to our existence." Asimov imagined Earth as an eons-old alien experiment not once but twice – in "Jokester", the aliens did it to explore the concept of humor, while in "Breeds there a Man…?" the aliens are engaged in a more vague exercise in genetics. There’s also "Death Sentence", where an anthropologist for the Galactic Federation discovers that a previous civilization created a planet of robots as part of a larger psychological experiment. Realizing the Federation will surely have to destroy the planet as a potential threat, he decides to take his dire warning to one of the robots' biggest cities: New York.

Wildstorm Comics
The Kherubim people sent their genetic seed throughout the universe in a bid to conquer the universe without their genetic descendants even knowing it, which they then followed up by actually conquering much of the universe.

Ringworld, by Larry Niven
It turns out we're all part of a larger plan by the Pak race to create a galaxy full of ultra-lethal, ultra-intelligent superhumans. Apparently, the plan failed because there wasn't enough of the right kind of fruit.

Mission to Mars
In this Brian de Palma stinker, a bunch of Martians that didn't flee their dying planet shot the neighboring Earth – then a barren chunk of rock – full of the building blocks of life because…um, because they wanted to take Gary Sinise on a tour of the universe? (And that was probably the least nonsensical part of that movie.)

Salvage Rites, by Eric Brown
One of the very few times when a race made from directed panspermia confronts their creators, this short story finds a group of Benedictine monks in a cathedral-shaped starship seeking out what is, for all intents and purposes, God.

South Park
In easily the most awesome use of the concept, the anniversary episode “Canceled” revealed Earth for what it really is – one giant reality show. At least in South Park, someone is actually bothering to watch.

Starliner, by David Drake
In this 1992 novel, the narrator explains that no one bats an eyelid at botanists cross-breeding plants from different worlds because panspermia is "no longer a hypothesis but simple observation." Not the most earth-shattering application of panspermia, but still.

Ej-es by Nancy Kress
A rather less mundane spin on that same idea, as members of an interstellar marine corps realize a deadly plague on one planet threatens all the intelligent species in the universe – because panspermia makes them all genetically related.

Doctor Who
The classic "City of Death" features a more accidental case of aliens creating life on Earth. In the midst of all the ridiculously complex art forgery, random acts of violence, Monty Python cameos, and endless location shots that prove the thing really was shot in Paris, writer Douglas Adams somehow squeezes in the origin of all life on Earth. As it turns out, an exploding Jaggaroth ship kickstarted the whole "life" thing. That was nice of them.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Speaking of Douglas Adams, his most famous work envisions the noblest version of the alien-built Earth. Indeed, the emphasis here is on "built", as Earth is not a planet at all but instead a ten million year old computer program supervised by hyper-dimensional mice designed to determine the question to life, the universe, and everything. Of course, as is so often the case, this wondrous philosophical pursuit was interrupted by a bunch of hairdressers, TV producers, and telephone sanitizers from the planet Golgafrincham, who obliviously managed to replace the native humans and almost wreck the entire program. All of which rather neatly leads us back to wandering, forgetful colonists.

The Hainish Cycle, by Ursula K. Le Guin
In ancient times, colonizers from the planet Hain came to Earth and, for a time, coexisted with its native hominids. Whether the settlers ultimately killed the native Earthlings or simply bred them out of existence is anybody's guess, but the Hainish now consider modern humans their descendants.

Women of the Prehistoric Planet
This MST3K entry builds a whole parable of post-War American-Japanese relations around two rival alien races, time dilation, and giant iguanas, with plenty of sixties-era chauvinism left to go around. After a whole lot of silliness (as that previous sentence probably suggested) the marooned lovers Tang and Linda settle down on the titular prehistoric planet, which they decide to call…well, I think you can guess, but it rhymes with "Mirth."

Earthsearch
The classic BBC radio series had one of the best twists on this idea, as the four teenaged survivors of the massive starship Challenger search for Earth-like planets to colonize. It's slowly revealed that the planet they call Earth has some rather unrecognizable geography, but that the Earth-like planet they finally do discover, with its saltwater oceans covering two-thirds of the planet, sounds very familiar.

The Twilight Zone
But stories don't get much more familiar than the 1963 episode "Probe 7, Over and Out." Astronaut Adam Cook finds himself stranded on a faraway planet just as nuclear war is breaking out back home. He encounters Eve Norda, an alien who cannot understand his language. The pair ultimately agrees to start a new life together on the planet that Eve keeps calling "Irth." Judging by their first names, I’m guessing they'll do just fine.

Q: For the Hainish Cycle of books you invented over 80 different inhabited worlds, each with its own cultures and physics...

A: No, no, thank you for saying so, Steve, but if I really had, I would admire myself tremendously. I would be in awe of my own staggeringly great mind. What I did was give the illusion of there being all those different worlds. That’s called art, or fiction, or something. The rule is, you only invent what you have to. And that’s pretty much what’s right in front of the reader. Let’s say it’s an ansible. I do not, in fact, invent the ansible. I do not explain how it works. I cannot, but shhh. I simply present the device as working, and as coming from a society which is far in advance of ours in science and technology, having spaceships that can travel nearly as fast as light, et cetera. And this background or context creates expectation and softens up the readers’ credulity so that they’re willing to “believe in” the ansible—inside the covers of the book. After the ansible had been around for a while, I invented the man who invented it, Shevek, in The Dispossessed. And he and I played around with some pretty neat speculations about time and interval and stuff, which lent more plausibility to the gimmick itself. But all I really invented was a) the idea of an instantaneous transmitter and b) a name for it. The reader does the rest. If you give them enough background/context, they can fill in the gaps. It isn’t just smoke and mirrors. There has to be a coherent vision of how things hang together in that society/culture/world. All the details have to fit together and be thought through as to their implications. But, well... it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. What else is any fiction?

[Vice Magazine, thanks to Justin Rocket Silverman]

It's funny, when you think about it, that so much attention gets paid to the McCarthys, Atwoods, Lessings and Roths of the world, who are known for their lit writing but try their hand at speculative fiction here and there. There are really just a handful of them who've made an impression, whereas there are tons of SF authors who've gone the other way — and yet, people seldom talk about it.

Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe are all writers whose names come up a lot when you talk about science fiction authors who have become beloved of the lit-mongers. To some extent, I think Shelley, Wells, Verne and Poe predate the genre-ification of SF, since they were writing at a time before the term was invented. In any case, they've all long since been embraced as fully literary. (Well, mostly. Of Poe, critic V.S. Pritchett famously said he was "a second class writer, but a fertilizing exclaimer.") "I get the sense that Wells in his day was a "novel of ideas" guy/polemicist who was later gerrymandered into SF," says Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics.

H.P. Lovecraft was clearly a genre writer in his time, thanks to his association with Weird Tales and other magazines. Nowadays, he's the subject of a book-length essay by fancy-pants French guy Michel Houellebecq, and the prestigious Library Of America has collected his stories.

Stanislaw Lem. A few science fiction authors have gotten published in the New Yorker, but Lem was a regular fixture there for years. Lem's satires, in which Ijon Tichy encounters weird time paradoxes, surrealistic societies and philosophical dead-ends, are tailor made for the lit crowd.

Gene Wolfe also got his work published in the New Yorker, as well as other fancy literary magazines. He's been compared to Proust, G.K. Chesterton and Dickens by critics in the Washington Post and other places. (I read a bunch of Wolfe's short stories the other day, and the Dickens comparison seemed particularly apt — they felt almost too 19th century for my taste, but he was clearly doing a good job of capturing a certain smoky industrial revolution feeling to his otherworldly stories.)

Ursula K. LeGuin is another author that nobody even questions the literariness of any more. Her latest book, Lavinia, has been greeted as a pure work of literature, with tons of articles about her contributions to the literature of ideas. The Cleveland Plain Dealer names it one of the best books of 2008, without regard to genre.

John Crowley is the uber-example of someone who crossed over — his earliest novels (The Deep, Beasts and Engine Summer) were pure SF and fantasy. His fourth book, the fantasy novel Little, Big, not only won the World Fantasy Award for best novel, but also praise from mega-critic Harold Bloom. He's since won a American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and he teaches at Yale.

Octavia Butler is another obvious choice. Just look at this gigantic list of journal articles about her, which appears to be outdated in any case. Including things like "Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred," from the journal Contemporary Literature.

Philip K. Dick is another one I barely feel the need to justify. Just read this disturbing excerpt from an article in Lingua Franca:

WHEN THE NOVELIST PHILIP K. DICK DIED IN 1982, THE INFLUENTIAL literary theorist Fredric Jameson eulogized him as "the Shakespeare of science fiction." At the time of this encomium, Dick was hardly famous. The author of more than fifty books, he had an enthusiastic following among science fiction fans. But he was rarely read by anyone else.

These days, Dick is far better known. Vintage publishes his fiction in a uniform paperback edition. Hollywood filmmakers transform his stories of imaginary worlds and conspiratorial cartels into movies like Screamers and Total Recall. Meanwhile, academic critics laud him as a postmodernist visionary, a canny prophet of virtual reality, corporate espionage, and the schizoid nature of identity in a digitized world. Indeed, beginning in the last years of his life and continuing to the present, these critics have played a key role in the canonization of Philip K. Dick.

But did Dick return the favor? Not exactly. To their considerable anguish, Dick's academic champions have had to contend with the revelation that their hero wrote letters to the Federal Bureau of Investigation denouncing them. In these letters, Dick claimed that Jameson and other literary theorists were agents of a KGB conspiracy to take over American science fiction. When he sent these messages, Dick was not in the best state of mind: He frequently heard voices and saw visions, often bathed in a mysterious pink light. Even so, the news of his surreptitious campaign against his academic admirers has left some of them deeply disturbed.

Harlan Ellison shows up in a surprising number of college syllabi, including a lot of science fiction writing classes but also a lot of generic "advanced composition" and English classes. His most commonly assigned story seems to be "Repent, Harlequin! Said The Tick-Tock Man." It's assigned often enough that there's a study guide for it. And as his bio proudly notes, he had a story in the 1993 Best American Short Stories.

Samuel R. Delany has easily become a lit-nerd must-read, thanks to his dense, challengiang narratives. It also didn't hurt, notes Wolk, that he's written smut and literary theory as well. "I've quoted him in a theory context," Wolk says. Check out this progression of Delany book covers, from lurid to literary:

William Gibson was heading for literary status for ages, thanks to his cyberpunk classics like Neuromancer and Count Zero. But when he switched to writing books set in the present, with Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, it became fashionable to talk about him as influential in his own time. The New York Times called Spook Country "the first post-post-9/11 novel." He was interviewed in the California Literary Review, and people started talking about the quality of his prose.

Kurt Vonnegut caused some debate among the people I asked about this topic. Was this literary idol ever considered a science fiction author? On the pro side, people cited the ultra-pulpy original covers of Player Piano and Sirens Of Titan, his first two books. "Where do you think [his fictional science fiction author] Kilgore Trout came from?" asks science fiction critic Mike Berry. On the other hand, his early stories appeared in Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. If anything, one person suggested, Vonnegut is going the other way: He used to have literary cache, but now lit-snobs find him embarrassing. So it goes.

Jonathan Lethem got suggested by several people including Susan Marie Groppi from StrangeHorizons. It took me a while to remember that Lethem actually did start out as a science fiction author, before becoming a literary darling. (Check out his story collection The Wall Of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye, which contains a bunch of stories that wouldn't be out of place in a typical issue of Asimov's or Analog. And at least one, "Vanilla Dunk," was in Asimov's.)

Ray Bradbury belongs on this list, if only for Fahrenheit 451, which is taught in college lit classes everywhere. Type the term "fahrenheit 451 sparknotes" into Google and you get 9,000 results, thanks to desperate term-paper-writing kids all over. (I didn't even type in that phrase. Google auto-suggested it.)

Weird-cyber author Rudy Rucker pops up on college syllabuses you'd expect, for science fiction writing classes. But also classes in rhetoric, and philosophy.

James Tiptree, Jr. gets on the list, if only because the male persona of writer Alice Sheldon has garnered lots of attention from gender theorists. The recent award-winning biography by Julie Phillips sparked more interest in Tiptree's life in the mainstream media, but also started people paying more attention to Tiptree's mind-bending stories, especially "Houston, Houston, Do You Read."

Neal Stephenson is another author who seems like an obvious inclusion. His latest book, Anathem, was greeted everywhere as a serious novel, not particularly as a science fiction book. Here's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post:

For the past 30 years I've been a zealous advocate for literary science fiction and fantasy, arguing that writers such as Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, John Crowley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Howard Waldrop and a handful of others are significant American authors, as well as artists of the first rank ... Neal Stephenson has established himself as one of these genre-transcending gods, read passionately by geeks and fans, but also admired as a novelist of ideas, a 21st-century Thomas Pynchon.

(He goes on to say that Anathem is a bit of a disappointment, actually.)

To be honest, I'd forgotten about Thomas M. Disch until I read the above quote, and then smacked my forehead. Before he died, Disch was as well known for his criticism (The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of) and poetry as for his fiction, a surefire way to get literary cache. The Telegraph even called him "excessively literary by the standards of his time."

Dan Simmons is in the process of transitioning to literary icon, according to some of my friends who monitor such things zealously. (They have a monitor board, and it lights up when a previously-tagged author starts to swim upstream towards the literary spawning grounds.) His use of literary allusions, especially Keats, probably doesn't hurt. Salon.com proclaimed him a literary master in 2002.

Howard Waldrop is as well known in lit circles as he is in speculative fiction circles. Dirda, once again, champions him as up there with Dick and other postmodern storytellers.

Carol Emshwiller won an NEA grant and a Pushcart Prize, and has had her stories in lit journals like McSweeney's and the Voice Literary Supplement.

Methodology: To some extent, this is just based on years of reading critics, and seeing who actually gets published in literary magazines and stuff. I also did a search on college syllabuses to see which authors are actually getting taught in college lit classes. And I polled my Twitter and Facebook homies.

(I'm leaving out some "urban fantasy" ish writers like Kelly Link, China Mieville or Neil Gaiman, in the interests of keeping this list from being too long. Plus once you get into magic and fantasy elements, you have to talk about the "magical realism" vogue of the 1990s and how that intersected with lit fiction and fantasy. And this is a blog post, not a book.)

Also: I'm not talking here about mainstream success, or having your books made into movies, or becoming a household name. I'm talking about acclaim from lit-nerds, a community that's just as insular as science fiction fans. As a member of both communities, I know they both have their odd grooming rituals and fetishes. An author like Philip K. Dick has long since passed the point of being "cool" for lit-nerds to discover. Now, if you're a lit-nerd and you haven't read Dick, your compadres just look at you pityingly. Ditto for Le Guin or Delany. Nobody in lit circles bothers to call them literary any more, they just are.

Finally, as I said above, this is a partial list. Feel free to suggest other people I left out.

Talking to George R.R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin, NPR program To The Best Of Our Knowledge turned a discussion of genre boundaries. On the one hand, LeGuin talked about why science fiction and fantasy don't get the same respect as literary fiction:

To be labeled a genre writer, in the eyes of about 90 percent of readers, is to be labeled [as] second-rate. Face it. So obviously a lot of people bristle and say "Well, all right, I'm a scifi writer and I'm proud of it." I just wish they'd forget the darn labels. A lot of my books, they don't classify easily as scifi, or god help us, science fiction. They may be fantasy, but that may not be the important thing about them. These genre labels are marketing labels. They make it easy for readers who are addicted to a certain type of fiction to find it, in the library or the bookstore. They make it real, real easy for the publisher to sell it. Otherwise, they are useless. And they can be very useless, when you get writers like me, or like Michael Chabon.

People who say they don't like science fiction often haven't read it, adds Le Guin.

Martin, meanwhile, quoted Faulkner as saying the only stories worth telling are ones about a human heart in conflict with itself. But he was less concerned with tearing down the divide between science fiction and literary fiction than with merging SF and fantasy. He says SF, fantasy and horror all fit under an umbrella of "weird stuff," and really it's just the furniture that's different:

I'm 60 years old, and I come from a time where, at least, science fiction, fantasy and horror writers did move easily from one [subgenre] to another. That's not so true for new writers breaking in. When I was young, when I was just breaking into the field in the 1970s, science fiction was much more popular than fantasy. Today, the reverse is true. And there are some science fiction writers who seem threatened by this, and [they react by] drawing these hard distinctions between science fiction and fantasy, and saying that they're two totally opposite things. I don't think they are totally opposite things, and that's where my "furniture rule" comes in. I think they're basically the same thing, and what varies is the furniture. You have an elf in one and an alien in the other, and both of them perform the same literary function as a trope of the respective genres.

So maybe if we stop trying to draw such stark distinctions between fantasy and science fiction, the next step will be tearing down the distinctions between speculative fiction and "literature"? In any case, Martin feels sad when he sees a section in a bookstore labeled "literature" instead of just "fiction."

And why has science fiction been losing ground to fantasy? Martin says it's because we're no longer optimistic:

The social changes of the last 50 years [have] made the future someplace that we no longer want to visit the way we did when I was a kid. I mean, back in the Fifties and Sixties, when science fiction was perhaps as popular as it's ever been, we really had a lot of belief in the future. I mean, we couldn't wait to get to the future. The future was going to be much better than anything in the present. We were going to have robots and flying cars and all these labor-saving devices... Now, most people think their children are not going to have better lives than they do. They think their children are going to have worse lives.

[To The Best Of Our Knowledge]

Says LeGuin:

Bit once, OK; bit twice, you're stupid. I think a couple of my books would make very good movies, but you've got to have somebody who really believes in you, really believes this book would make a good movie, not, 'I'm going to buy this book so we can use her name, and then I'll make the movie I want to make.' However, I got wonderful letters of condolence for months after the Sci Fi Channel's version of A Wizard of Earthsea. People were so sweet, so mad! I do have wonderful readers. They write the nicest damn letters.

[Locus]

Science fiction isn't particularly positive when it comes to democracy. Democratic governments are too quick to rush into stupid wars and give power to despots, like Senator Jar Jar in the Star Wars prequels. Doctor Who shows some mob uprisings in a happy light on occasion, but also lampoons democracy as a system that forces politicians to pander to the people, or else get electrocuted, in "Vengeance On Varos."

Winston Churchill famously said democracy is the worst system of government — apart from all the others that've been tried. But Winnie The Chill never tried living under a council of artificial intelligences, or a merged mega-consciousness. Here are some ideas for a post-democratic form of government from science fiction:

Let the artificial intelligences call some of the shots.

Considering that our voting machines may already be choosing our candidates for us, it may just make sense to let truly independent AIs run the show instead. We'll see how long farm subsidies, corporate welfare and earmarks last when you have a system of AI control in place.

Maybe the most famous example of government-by-AI is Iain M. Banks' "Culture" novels, in which the artificial "Minds" govern without corruption or undue favor. They're not entirely impartial, because they appear to have whims and idiosyncrasies in some of his books. But the main criticism people have leveled at them is that they're "too good." In place of laws, people in the Culture are governed by reputation and good manners, and even the Minds can gain or lose reputation according to their behavior. Only the best Minds get to be Hub Minds, controlling whole biospheres themselves.

The novels of Isaac Asimov also often depict a "robocracy" ruled by machines or computers.

Give the keys to the White House to a merged consciousness.

In Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, the Edenists live in peace on space stations orbiting gas giants. Their secret of harmonious living: "Affinity," a form of telepathy where everybody is linked. All Edenists join together to create a government in a process known as "Consensus," where they link all their minds together. When an Edenist gets old, he/she can back up his/her consciousness and live on for hundreds more years inside the habitat, before gradually becoming submerged into the habitat's shared consciousness.

Try techno-democracy, with a system of distributed government.

In Tobias Buckell's new novel Sly Mongoose, we discover that the inhabitants of the planet Chilo use brain implants to allow a large cross-section of their populations to control their representatives directly. "There are three hundred thousand people from a variety of Aeolian cities voting on my every word because I'm their avatar, emissary, diplomat, or whatever you would like to call me," says Katerina. She signed up for this duty when she became a citizen, and was randomly selected. She has all of their voices "sitting behind her skull," and if she doesn't do a good job, she could be fined, exiled, or lose her citizenship. Just imagine if you could vote on every word that comes out of George W. Bush's mouth!

Give the techno-hippie/green/feminist socialist utopia a chance.

In novels like A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski and Woman At The Edge Of Time by Marge Piercy, everybody lives in harmony and everything is decided by the collective. In Ocean, the underwater happy lesbians are actually called the Sharers of Shora, and they share everything together. They live on rafts, or in the water, and use the verb "share" as much as possible. In the utopian future of Edge Of Time, everything is communal and people live in small towns that are "own-fed" (self-sustaining) and peaceful. Men breast-feed and everybody lives according to rituals and customs.

And then there's the happy future of Star Trek and especially The Next Generation. Want and deprivation have been eliminated, nobody owns anything, and everything is peaceful and mellow unless Deforest Kelley is yelling in your ear. Thanks to inventions like the replicator (and an apparently inexhaustible supply of energy) the citizens of the Federation can make anything they want. And though we only get hints here and there about the government of the Federation, it's clearly not a democracy — there's never any mention of voting, and we see the Federation Council and President making decisions in a somewhat unilateral fashion.

Or try anarchism.

There are a few examples of functioning anarchist societies in science fiction. In Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, for example, the anarchist followers of Odo split off from the mainstream society and form their own quasi-anarchist society. In theory, there are no laws on Anarres, and you can do whatever you want with your time. The main constraint is that you need to be able to work with others and gain their support in order to have access to the scarce resources on the planet. There's no property, so everything is shared, but our hero Shevek discovers over the course of the novel that there are still structures of authority, and you still have to kiss the ass of the man.

And then there's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, his main venture into anarchism. The lunar citizens have no written laws, and no way of enforcing contracts except based on someone's reputation. As one of Heinlein's mouthpieces says:

We don’t have laws. Never been allowed to. Have customs, but aren’t written and aren’t enforced — or could say they are self-enforcing because [they] are simply way things have to be, conditions being what they are. Could say our customs are natural laws because the way people have to behave to stay alive.

Thanks to Lauren Davis for research help.