Walton says, among other things, she always snaps up extra copies of Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi and all of John M. Ford's books, because she's always giving them away. Other commenters mention Catherynne M. Valente, Pamela Dean... and Walton herself. (As for me, it's not science fiction, but I was just complaining the other day that I can't keep a copy of Small World by David Lodge on my shelf because peopel always borrow it and don't give it back, and the person I was talking to had the exact same problem with Small World. I've also loaned out/given away multiple Kushiel's Darts and keep a box of d.g.k. goldberg's Queen Of The Country Where They Sleep Till Noon to give away.)

How about you? What books do you hang onto, in order to get rid of? [Tor.com]

According to the workshop's home page, This Is Not A Game author Williams and Dogs author Kress assume you already know the basics of writing, and how to tie your shoes and stuff:

Taos Toolbox will be a "graduate" workshop designed to bring your science fiction and fantasy writing to the next level. If you've sold a few stories and then stalled out, or if you've been to Clarion or Odyssey and want to re-connect with the workshop community, this is the workshop for you!

This is not a workshop for beginners. We won't teach you correct manuscript format or what an adverb is and why you shouldn't use one, because we'll assume that you already know. We want to concentrate on giving talented, burgeoning writers the information necessary to become professionals within the science fiction and fantasy field.

Though short fiction will be enthusiastically received, there will be an emphasis at Taos Toolbox on the craft of the novel, with attention given to such vital topics as plotting, pacing, and selling full-length works.

Assuming they've solved the whole "Taos Hum" problem (probably caused by aliens rubbing their legs together), it sounds like a pretty great program for aspiring novelists. More details, and application materials, at the link. [Taos ToolBox]

As the Cyberpunk Project writes in an essay called "Neuromancer Afterlife":

"I am the dead, and their land."

With life redefined, so comes a new afterlife. New gods, new demons, new inhabitants. And many different levels, reincarnations. The body can be remade, copied, clones carry on the family line. Cold sleep, cryogenics extending presence, slow wasting. Cons tructs, down loads of the soul, ghosts. Digital purgatory, brain death.

"For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible."

Omnicient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Demons or gods, they possess power. They are worshipped and feared. The AIs. Religion has advanced with technology, heaven and hell can be interfaced with, the powers addressed. Science has brought back that which was previously done without. Some hint o f symbiosis, of the immortal hive. Others fear them like the lords of Hell. To themselves, they just are. They exist, they reside. They are the infinity of angels on the head of a pin, the threads of the matrix. They, It, is All.

"To live here is to live. There is no difference."

Memories are virtual, we relive them without physically manifesting. Perhaps the mind can be reproduced, decanted into a simulated environment. Perhaps what we ta ke for granted every day is such an experience. It is the age old question of who we are. How do we define ourselves? Bits, bytes? By the flow of information, by wiring, by memory, data? In the Virtual age, what do we become? And were do we go? Is this salvation?

Several people in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Super-hacker Case meets his girlfriend Linda Lee, who was murdered in Chiba City, but her consciousness lives on in the cyber-matrix. And then he and his friends have to steal a ROM containing the personality and memories of McCoy Pauley, aka The Dixie Flatline. And at the end of the book, mocking inhuman laughter suggests that Pauley may have been reanimated permanently in cyberspace, thanks to the help of Neuromancer/Wintermute. As one book puts it, he gets an unsettling vision of his life continuing in cyberspace after his body dies.

Reno in Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. This uber-hacker dies in the "real" world, but his consciousness lives on in cyberspace, and even manages to ambush the bad guys electronically at the end of the novel.

Pulse (movie). A haxx0r named Josh steals and distributes (why?) a computer virus that opens a portal to the world of the dead. And then he commits suicide, but he keeps popping up on the computer, sending people messages and videos and mortgage-refi spam. (It was 2006.) And later in the movie, you can see spooky dead children trapped inside the computer, and the implication is that the computer is trapping their dead spirits. The only way to escape is to get out of cellphone coverage, because the cellphones have it too. Veronica Mars, why don't you just use your awesome sleuthing skills to solve this one?

River Song and friends in Doctor Who, "Forest Of The Dead". River Song does the time-honored thing of knocking the Doctor out so she can take his place in the brain-frying machine and get cooked to a sizzle. But luckily, FutureDoctor has left a handy escape clause that PresentDoctor can use to bring her back from the dead: her fancy sonic screwdriver retains a copy of her consciousness, and he's able to upload her into the planet-sized library's computer system, where she's stuck taking care of a couple of snot-nosed virtual kids forever. Way better than being dead, right? Right?

Eva Friedel in Memories: Magnetic Rose. This famous opera singer retires to a space station, but when she dies, she leaves behind an A.I. imprint of her personality. Unfortunately, it's damaged and incomplete.

The Mailman and Ery in "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. The Mailman backs up his brain into the system, but his consciousness runs so slow, he only manages to experience fifteen or twenty hours of human awareness in the several years he's running online. Ery plans to do the same thing, only better:

She was grinning now, an open though conspiratorial grin that was very familiar. "When Bertrand Russell was very old, and probably as dotty as I am now, he talked of spreading his interests and attention out to the greater world and away from his own body, so that when that body died he would scarcely notice it, his whole consciousness would be so diluted through the outside world.

"For him, it was wishful thinking, of course. But not for me. My kernel is out there in the System Every time I'm there I transfer a little more of myself The kernel is growing into a true Erythrina, who is also truly me. When this body dies," she squeezed his hand with hers, "when this body dies, I will still be, and you can still talk to me."

The story's hero, Mr. Slippery, thinks about stopping her, but realizes this is an inevitable end-point of human evolution.

Dr. Londes and his cult in Cowboy Bebop, "Brain Scratch." The imaginary Dr. Londes starts a cult that believes in achieving immortality by digitizing your brain and zapping it up to the network. But it turns out Dr. Londes doesn't exist at all, he's just a construct.

Alex McCandless in Freejack. In this movie, which is almost more awesomeness than two hours can contain, Emilio Estevez is a racecar driver who is about to die in a spectacular crash, but his body is whisked forward in time to the dystopian future of 2009. He's held prisoner by Mick Jagger, and it turns out that Anthony Hopkins wants his body. Because Hopkins died in an accident while on a business trip, and his mind is preserved in cyberspace, where he and Estevez face off in a virtual world. Can Estevez keep Hopkins from downloading himself into his body?

Moloch in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, "I, Robot... You, Jane." Somehow scanning a demonic spellbook causes the trapped demon to get scanned into the interweb, and it starts having steamy chats with Willow. Ah, cyberlove.

Kenshiro "Zero" Cochrane in Ghost Rider 2099. Zero is a hacker in the futuristic world of Marvel's 2099 universe. He gets hit with a poisoned flechette in Transverse City, but as his body dies, he jacks his consciousness up to the cyberverse. A group of A.I.s living in Cyberspace — in an area known as the Ghostworks — retrieve Zero's concsiousness and download it into a fancy new robot body, to become Ghost Rider 2099, the cyber-spirit of cyber-vengeance. It's cyber!

Almost everyone in "Sweats" by Keith Brooke, in the anthology We Think Therefore We Are. In this story, everybody (or at least everybody rich) gets to go to a virtual afterlife after dying, which also allows a murder victim to prosecute (and persecute) his murderer after death. Even up to the point of stealing his murderer's body and downloading himself into it.

David and Invisigoth in The X-Files, "Kill Switch." A hacker named David develops a way to upload his brain to the net in this episode written by Gibson. And that turns out to come in handy, since later on David's dead body is found, with a cyber-helmet attached to his head. The A.I. that used to be David takes Mulder prisoner because he wants a copy of a killer virus called "Kill Switch" that Mulder has. In the end, both David and his girlfriend, Esther aka Invisigoth, manage to escape into the internet together. In another Chris Carter creation, the short-lived TV series Harsh Realm, Thomas Hobbes is declared dead after his brain is uploaded to a virtual apocalpytic war scenario called "Harsh Realm."

Magi in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The supercomputer "Magi" is created from the mind of Ristsuko Akagi's dead mother. It has "the mother, the scientist and the woman" balancing out its brain. Also, two of the "Evas" are made from the souls of two characters' dead moms.

Graves in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Schizoid Man." This pompous scientist is dying, but he has a plan to transfer his brain into a computer network. Instead, though, he downloads his consciousness into the android Data, whereupon he starts reciting crappy poetry about himself, feuding with Picard and whistling showtunes from Wizard Of Oz. Some people just don't deserve cyber-immortality.

Juliana Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Inheritance." Juliana Soong dies, but her husband Noonien saves her by transferring her into an android body so realistic, she can't even tell she's not the original Juliana. And later on, Noonien achieves a kind of immortality after his own death, by leaving a subroutine in Data's brain that makes Data dream of him.

Roushana Maitland in Song Of Time by Ian R. MacLeod. The protagonist of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel is a concert violinist who's about to pass into a "virtual afterlife," when she discovers a half-drowned man on the Cornish coast.

Lawnmower Man (the movie). Jobe, the idiot turned cyber-savant, kicks Pierce Brosnan's ass — but then he gets caught in an explosion that destroys the building his body is in. Good thing Joby's found a "backdoor" to the mainframe his consciousness was trapped in. Now cyberspace is his oyster. His salty, slimy, cyber oyster. Full of slimy, salty bad cybersex.

Everyone, in Silicon Karma by Thomas A. Eaton. Someone invents a viable mindscanning technology, which means that everyone goes to cyberspace after he/she dies. And of course, naughty people learn how to hack the afterlife and mess up everyone's experience of Heaven.

Nono in FAQ:Frequently Asked Questions. The hero of this indie film runs away from a totalitarian government, and then at the end of the movie, he sees his dead girlfriend, Angelique, reincarnated inside an erotic broadcast online. He somehow leaves his body behind and goes inside the erotic internet to be with her. (Or does he? It's an art film, so who knows what actually happens?)

Jonathan Wilde, in The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod. Any novel that starts with the line, "He woke, and remembered dying" automatically earns inclusion on this list. In Stone Canal, the anarchist leader Jonathan Wilde lived on Earth 600 years ago, but a group of radicals retrieve his consciousness from online, and put him into a new body. The only trouble is, this new Wilde isn't quite the same person as the original.

A few people in Ghost In The Shell: S.A.C. This anime series features a few people who die but have their consciousnesses saved in virtual networks. For example, in Ghost In The Shell: SAC: Solid State Society, Koshiki gets permission to work from home via a cybernetic body. And then he dies due to illness, but it's two years before anyone notices, because his cybernetic body keeps going under his control, and his consciousness appears to be preserved.

Hellraiser: Hellworld. This direct-to-DVD sequel revolves around an evil MMO called Hellworld (at hellworld.com.) One of the players, Adam, commits suicide, and Pinhead tells Adam's father, "Your son was quite the prodigy. He opened the gateway to Hell. But you never believed yourself, did you?" The other teens who play Hellworld are invited to a special Hellworld party at a spooky mansion, with sex and drugs and blood and guts. Reality blurs together with the MMO world, and the hapless teens realize they're partying... in cyberhell. Or something.

Frankie in "Xanadu" by Thomas M. Disch. Frankie dies and finds his consciousness uploaded to a virtual world. It's all sunshine and puppies at first, until the company that runs this afterlife falls on hard times and needs to raise some more capital. Suddenly, all of the people in cyber-Heaven have to work for a living again — and due to a clerical error, his consciousness is downloaded into a woman's body and he has to work as a prostitute. Probably not the eternal reward he had in mind.

Caprica (TV Series). Long before the Cylons had a plan — or a sexy red dress for that matter — a monotheistic cult-member blows up a monorail in Caprica, killing everyone on board including Zoe Graystone, daughter of computer genius Daniel Graystone. Luckily, she's a computer genius too, and she's already uploaded her consciousness to the 'net, creating a cyber-avatar called Zoe-A that lives on in the virtual orgyspace. (Becuase, of course, the human brain only takes up 300 megabytes of storage space.)

Mr. Hormel in "New Hope For The Dead" by David Langford. In a similar vein, Mr. Hormel is a fully paid-up resident of the digital afterlife, with a trust fund in place to guarantee his eternal rest. Unfortunately, the global economy takes a nosedive, and he's faced with three choices: going into storage as a .zip file until the economy improves, having his clock/processor speed slowed down so that a century passes in a few weeks for him, or working for a living. And the third choice isn't even as fun as it sounds. (You can read the whole thing here.)

Everyone in The Accord by Keith Brooke. The Accord is a virtual realm, where you can upload your consciousness, so it'll live on after you die. (As someone in the novel says, "If you want to enter Heaven, first you must be saved." Ha ha.) Noah has an affair with Priscilla inside the Accord, but her husband finds out and murders her. Noah kills himself so he can be with her in the Accord — but there's a catch. The version of you in the Accord isn't who you were at the moment of death, but who you were the last time you uploaded. The Priscilla who lives on inside the Accord is younger and doesn't remember loving Noah at all. This novel takes place in the same universe as "Sweats," mentioned above.

Vance in Batman Beyond, "Lost Soul." Vance died many years ago, when he was an old man. But his consciousness was digitized and became an A.I. After his son dies of a heart attack, his grandson Bobby reactivates him, so he can help run the family business. But instead, Vance tricks Bobby into putting him online, so he can take over all of Gotham City's computers. And then he takes over the cybernetic Batsuit! Oh noes!

The alien entity in Stargate: SG1, "Entity". This disembodied consciousness, which apparently was originally a living being, travels through a wormhole and downloads itself into the mainframe. Eventually it escapes and downloads itself into Sam Carter's body.

Eiri Masami in Serial Experiments Lain. (Thanks to SumatiAmphimonous for suggesting this one.) The project director of Protocol 7 is in charge of advancing the Wired, the sum total of human computing power, but he also aims to copy his brain into the Wired so he can live forever. A few days after he succeds in doing this, he dies in the "real" world. He aims to convince Lain, a 14 year old girl, to follow in his footsteps.

Paul Durham and others, in Permutation City by Greg Egan. (Thanks to WRyan for suggesting this one.) In the future of 2045, rich people are backing up their brainwaves into complete duplicates, known as Copies, and the Copies have started agitating for full personhood and civil rights. Along comes huckster Paul Durham, who proposes to create a virtual-reality city for the wealthy to live in. Durham disembowels himself in the bathtub, but thousands of years later he's still bopping around Permutation City.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Thanks also to Zack Stentz, Rus McLaughlin, Jack Random, Tim Chevalier and @NoMentionOfKev, @anewthought, @Lazybastid and @cartoonmoney on Twitter.

With so many science fiction writers working on Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) nowadays, it's not surprising that Walter Jon Williams has written an ARG novel. (In the acknowledgements, he mentions something about playing poker with some of the most prominent SF writers who also create ARGs, including Maureen McHugh and Sean Stewart. (ARGs are sort of like role-playing games which take place in the "real" world, and involve websites to a large extent. Most big SF movies and TV shows now seem to have ARGs, involving made-up companies and fabricated conspiracies.)

In Not A Game, we follow Dagmar, who is a "puppetmaster" for a series of super-popular ARGs, which serve to promote various virtual worlds or other products. Dagmar is very good at manipulating thousands, or even millions, of players into buying into her made-up worlds, sympathizing with her fictional protagonists and jumping through tons of hoops.

At the start of the novel, Dagmar is traveling in Asia and she gets trapped in Jakarta as the Indonesian government basically falls apart. The city is being looted, the cops desert their posts, and the army lets it happen. Thugs and gangs take over the city, and nobody is safe. Some foreign nationals are evacuated, but not Americans, because the U.S. government is too tied up in the Persian Gulf to do anything. So Dagmar is trapped in her hotel and waiting until the looters reach her.

Luckily, she still has internet access, which means she can contact the small army of hardcore gamers who take part in her ARGs. They're good at solving problems, and they have tons of social connections all over the world. The only problem is: will they think Dagmar's real-life situation is just make believe, part of yet another ARG?

The ARG gamers struggle with the boundary between fiction and real-life, while Dagmar's situation gets ever more perilous. A nearby hotel burns to a cinder, killing everyone inside, and then thugs get inside Dagmar's own hotel and start tearing it apart bit by bit.

The first 100 pages of Williams' book, dealing with Dagmar's Jakarta nightmare and the ways in which it intersects with a world of fabricated adventures, are breathtaking and thought-provoking. Even as Dagmar fights for her life, she can't stop thinking about how to turn her experiences into an actual ARG. We learn more about how ARGs work, and how people get drawn into caring about these elaborate fantasies. The ARG people get drawn into helping Dagmar, even as they're also creating fanfic about her plight:

FROM: Hanseatic

This game is amazing. How did Great Big Idea get the Indonesian government to cooperate with all this?

FROM: LadyDayFan

TINAG.

FROM: Hanseatic

Yah, right. My guess is the setup is something like this: we get 200 points for getting Dagmar out of Jakarta to someplace safer, 500 points if we get her out of Indonesia entirely, and 1000 points for Total World Domination.

FROM: LadyDayFan

You're joking, right?

FROM: Hippolyte

Hanseatic, this really isn't a game.

FROM: Hanseatic

Maybe yes, maybe no. But what difference does it make?

After the bravura first 100 pages, the novel takes some very sharp left turns and the storyline becomes much more muddled. There's a murder mystery, which is solved awfully quickly, and then we discover a deeper mystery behind that. Most of it works pretty well, but the middle section of the novel feels like a letdown after the strong opening.

Luckily, it picks up speed again in the final chapters, as we discover that Dagmar is not the only one who's a self-appointed "puppetmaster." Her boss, Charlie, keeps making more and more unreasonable demands on the ARG she's creating, and this forces her to keep rewriting the storyline. The ARG gets twistier and twistier, and real life starts intruding more and more, to the point where a fictional terrorist plot is intertwined with the activities of a real serial killer, and almost nobody can tell them apart. Meanwhile, Indonesia's collapse turns out to be connected, in an unexpected way, to the events in the rest of the book, and now the same thing threatens to happen to every other country, including the United States.

It turns out that the really, really great players of games have the capacity to win so big, they can destroy the whole fabric of capitalism and society. After all, money is just a convenient fiction that we all agree to believe in - just like the weird packages and shiny websites that make up most ARGs. Ditto for society, and culture. In the end, it's all just a game, albeit more longstanding than most ARGs, and with deeper backstory.

Where Williams' book really shines is in showing how the ARG community really does become a community, with its own rituals, its own rules and its own pariahs. (One guy in particular, known as "Joe Clever," tries to win ARGs by dumpster-diving and spying on the puppetmasters, and he becomes a major part of the book's plot.) The ARG world starts to feel cohesive, like a real society.

Bottom line: I'd say the first 100 pages of Game feel like one of the best novellas I've ever read. And then the rest of the book extends that storyline outwards, with mixed, but mostly great, results. Williams asks some tough questions about the boundary between games and reality, and shows how in the end, the only thing we can be sure is real is the communities we create, and the games we play together. [Amazon]

Note: I'm not suggesting that any of these things are actually planks on John McCain's campaign platform, any more than the "liberal dystopias" I posted a while back were Obama's positions. Neither candidate is running for president on a "dystopia now" slogan, as far as I know. As with the liberal dystopias, this is a collection of broad-brush conservative ideas taken to their furthest extreme. Okay? Then here we go:

Corporations will own your ass.

I couldn't really put this vision of the future better than The Onion:

Having read the futuristic accounts of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Philip K. Dick, the path our future shall take will be bleak, indeed — but in a much different way.

When the ongoing trend of corporate mergers reaches critical mass in 2030, the scant handful of corporations that remain will be too powerful to resist and will ultimately supplant all government. National borders will crumble, replaced by warring corporate armies who deploy vat-grown Yakuza assassins to take down enemy CEOs in the name of commerce.

I literally could not possibly list all of the corporate-dominated dystopias in science fiction. Think Blade Runner, Neuromancer, or Metropolis. This site argues passionately that a weakened state and the rise of super-powerful corporations which are practically states in themselves is a crucial component of cyberpunk. Walter Jon Williams' books Hardwired and Voice Of The Whirlwind are both about soldiers of fortune and fighters who live in worlds ruled by corporations.

Wikipedia's list of corporate-dominated dystopias in film includes the Alien films, Charlie Jade (TV), The Final Cut, Fortress, Hardware, The Island, Johnny Mnemonic, Max Headroom, One Point O, Parts: The Clonus Horror, Resident Evil, RoboCop, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Super Mario Bros., Tank Girl, Total Recall and The Truman Show.

Probably my favorite corporate-dominate dystopia is in Max Barry's Jennifer Government, where your job is the most important thing about you and your last name is the name of the company you work for. (This is also Superman's favorite book.) There's still a government, but it's weakened and has very little enforcement power over the big corporations, which have grown ever more immoral. To the point where they'll pay someone to organize a "gang-related" shooting at a Nike product launch to give the newest Nikes more cache. Anyway, Jennifer Government writer Max Barry has created an online game called NationStates, and one of the fictional nations includes The Corporate Dystopia Of Wu Corporation:

The Corporate Dystopia of Wu Corporation is a massive, economically powerful nation, renowned for its complete absence of social welfare. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical population of 6.219 billion are ruled with an iron fist by the corrupt, dictatorship government, which oppresses anyone who isn't on the board of a Fortune 500 company. Large corporations tend to be above the law, and use their financial clout to gain ever-increasing government benefits at the expense of the poor and unemployed.

Another favorite dystopia: The Company, in the Doctor Who story "The Sunmakers." Everybody works for The Company, which houses everyone on Pluto and supplies artificial suns and a habitable biosphere, and in return you have to work all the time. The Company levies extra taxes for everything including your death. (Yes, it's a satire of excessive taxation, but it's also a corporate-dominated world.) There's also the awesome dark alternate universe in Charlie Jade, where corporations control everything, chip implants are mandatory, and people are divided into castes. Really, I could be here all year listing corporate dystopias.

It's God's country, and you just live here (unless you blaspheme.)

Church and state are no longer separated, and the state becomes a golden throne for the church to look down on the huddled masses from. One of the classic theocratic dystopias is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, where a quasi-Christian theocracy overthrows the U.S. government and imposes sumptuary laws governing how woman can dress. Pre-marital sex is illegal, and sexual deviance is punishable with corporal — or capital — punishment.

There's also the newly published young adult novel Bad Faith by Gillian Philip, which her husband (I think) describes as "an eerily good picture of what I imagine the USA would be like if Sarah Palin was in charge." In the gloomy future, the One Church runs everything, and gangs of extremists run around beating up anyone who defies the One Church's authority. In the Robert Heinlein story "Revolt In 2100," a small band of Americans rises up against an evil future theocracy. Suzette Haden Elgin's Judas Rose series also includes an evil Christian theocracy that oppresses women.

Allen Steele's novel Coyote also starts out in an authoritarian right-wing theocratic version of the United States, known as the United Republic. (It later collapses in on itself.) Besides religious fanaticism, the other factor driving the rise of the Republic is the paranoid fear of terrorism. And then in Cave Of Stars by George Zebrowski, the Pope takes over the world! And it's bad.

And then there's the fantastic government of the Reverend Jimmy Joe II, who oppresses you in the name of the Lord. Lordy! His regime involves throwing people in prison, where they get beat up by dominatrixes, in the fantastic movie Storm Rebel. You can watch a couple of amazing clips from it here.

You support the troops (by letting them stomp all over you.)

In novels like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a militaristic future Earth is at war with alien bugs, and the military wields great power. (In Troopers, you can't exercise full citizenship, and vote, unless you've served in the military.) There's also the all-male militaristic society of A World Without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pyun.

And then there's Star Wars, especially episodes II and III. George Lucas wasn't exactly subtle in his depiction of a society that gets dragged into an endless war, and the state needs more and more power to pursue its enemies. Freedom dies, not in silence, but to thunderous applause, yadda yadda. And there's the anime movie Ellcia, where unscrupulous people dig up the remains of a super-advanced society and use its advanced technology to found a new militaristic dystopia called Megaronia. No, really — Megaronia.

In Marge Piercy's feminist science fiction classic Woman On The Edge Of Time, our heroine travels to a happy shiny feminist utopia, where men breastfeed and everybody wears hemp underwear. But she also visits an alternate future, a horrendous dystopia where the military control everything.

There's also the whole swathe of narratives where the security state gets out of control, and everyone trades their freedom for security. People are under constant surveillance by a thuggish leadership, as exemplified by Alan Moore's graphic novel V For Vendetta.

We're all forced to go back to some horrendous idealized version of the 1950s.

Just think Pleasantville — a monstrous idealized version of the repressive, horrendous past, when people still thought Doo-wop was music. In this movie, Spider-Man gets a special remote control from a weird old guy, and it zaps him and his sister inside his favorite sitcom, which is an obvious Leave It To Beaver riff. At first, Spidey is overjoyed, but he eventually sees how repressive that B&W conformity really is, and he finally joins his sister in rebelling against the crushing sameness. Luckily, you can make a tree burst into flames just by masturbating.

We didn't sign the Kyoto Accord, and now the planet is trashed.

You could argue that the huge genre of eco-disaster SF represents a dystopia where conservatives have triumphed over nature, our greatest enemy of all. There are almost too many eco-disaster SF stories to list, from Wall-E to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series. I went to a reading by Kim Stanley Robinson a while back, where the theme was ecological destruction, and he said he'd written too many works on that topic to choose just one. So he read selections from seven different eco-catastrophes he'd written. There's no shortage of thrilltastic science fiction ecology disaster movies, including The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld.

It's in your toothpaste!! "Highly evolved nanostructures" such as Bucky balls are already being used in toothpaste and face cream, among other household products. What if your exfoliating, revitalizing beauty cream suddenly turned eeeevil? The possibilities are as infinite as the spaces between molecules. Maybe the nano-structures aren't just passive, but actually contain tiny nanites that start eating your face? You could have a rash (so to speak) of corpses with melty faces, and our heroes have to figure out why, before...

...the awful countdown. There has to be some horrendous clock ticking down to N-day, the day the rogue nanites bust out and consume everything. Maybe the melty-face people are just the first wave, or maybe some evil nanomachines got activated prematurely by mistake. (Or maybe it's just an excuse to have some smooshy faces, which who doesn't love?) But there's a monster computer that plans to release all of the nanites at the same time, which isn't just immediately for some reason. (Or the nanites just get released by accident — but an evil AI is more fun.) Our heroes have to rush to stop it, but... they're too late.

The gray goo is consuming everything. It expands exponentially, so the more it consumes, the faster it spreads. In Wil McCarthy's Bloom, it only takes a few hours for gray goo to swallow up Earth's ecosystem. Similarly, in Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, the "nants" manage to swallow up the entire Earth within about a day. So the gray goo starting to be released should probably be the "break" between the second and third acts of the movie or TV show. (At the same time, our heroes should have an important personal realization, and confront something or other about themselves, blah blah blah.)

The nano-ooze should have a catchphrase. Nobody is ever going to care about nano-gunk that doesn't have a swagger in its voice. Maybe the nan-ooze speaks through your computer speakers, or grows a giant mouth, which says something like, "You Are Our Raw Material." Or something catchier, like "Your Biosphere Will Be Disassembled." (We'll save the truly dumb catchphrase, like "The Goo Will Be You," for the movie poster.)

So there's a program that can deactivate the gray goo, or maybe a firewall that it can't pass for some reason. But in order to deploy this magic-bullet code, our main character has to face his/her greatest fear. Or confront a mistake he/she made long ago. Or maybe our heroes discover that another batch of nanomachines can neutralize the first batch by altering their function.

We see the face of god in the heart of the goo. Once our heroes come face to face with the wall of goo, there really ought to be some sort of 2001/Sunshine-y moment of confronting the vastness of the micro-world and maybe coming up against the divine in everything. Maybe the nano-machines teach us an important lesson about what it means to be human, or the soul, or something. Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, who always turn into spiritual guides when you least expect it. Everything gets all rhapsodic and we break out the wobbly lens so the gray goo can teach us some important lesson before it vanishes into a haze of mystification. That's your awesome gray goo movie right there. And they said it would never work.