"It's actually harder to write science fiction, because you have to know more. I've never been a hard science fiction writer, but even writing a non-hard science fiction story you have to know a lot more about science and the world and how things work than you do to write a fantasy." — Veteran SF editor Gardner Dozois, interviewed in Locus.

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.

At the heart of Wall’s argument is that public fears about Internet-based crime are overblown, with individuals and the media mythologizing the idea of all-powerful hackers who possess almost mystical abilities to screw up our lives. He claims that the very notion of cybercrime originated in cyberpunk, with the genre creating a universe in which the proliferation of technology is inextricably linked to criminal activity:

The actual point of origin of the term ‘cybercrime’ is unclear, but it seems to have emerged in the late 1980s or even early 1990s in the later cyberpunk print and audiovisual media. However, the linkage between cyberspace and crime was implicit in the early cyberpunk short stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Bruce Bethke and so many others. The concept was subsequently taken to a wider audience in popular contemporary novels such as Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) and Stephenson’s Snowcrash (1992). Cyberpunk effectively defined cybercrime as a harmful activity that takes place in virtual environments and made the ‘hi-tech low-life’ hacker narrative a norm in the entertainment industry. It is interesting to note at this point, that whilst social theorists were adopting the Barlovian model of cyberspace, it was the Gibsonian model that shaped the public imagination through the visual media.

Wall doesn’t believe that a computer-fearing populace is picking up William Gibson and immediately threatening to go luddite. Rather, he claims that the problem lies in the sort of films these stories inspire: so-called latter-day “haxploitation” flicks in which the Internet enables disaffected genius outsiders to engage in novel and devastating forms of crime:

The ‘factional’ images described above, skilfully combine fact with fiction, and have crystallized the ‘super-hacker’ offender stereotype as the archetypal ‘cybercriminal’ (Wall 2007, p. 16). Moreover, the combination of independent ‘outsider’ and the potential power they can yield also sets up the hacker as a potential folk devil, which is precisely what the hacker became (Nissenbaum 2004).

According to Wall, cyberpunk has led to the portrayal of technologically-engendered criminal actions as “dramatic, futuristic and dystopic” and cyberspace as “pathologically unsafe and criminogenic.” And he claims that this image of online crime, as well as the notion of the “omnipotent hacker” has bled into even government perceptions of the problem. He cites a 2007 House of Lords report in which cybercriminals are described as highly organized, highly skilled bogeymen who have wreak untold havoc on the less technologically apt.

But Wall never draws a clear line between fictional portrayals of cybercrime and public misconceptions as to its nature. And eventually his paper turns to several more likely sources of trouble, including misreporting of incidents and media exaggeration of cybercrime:

News reporting tends to simultaneously feed the public’s lust for ‘shocking’ information, but also feeds off it - the relationship is dynamic rather than causal. This endless demand for sensationalism sustains the confusion of rhetoric with reality to create, what Baudrillard described as “le vertige de la realité” or “dizzying whirl of reality” (1998, p. 34). By blurring predictions about ‘what could happen’ with ‘what is actually happening’ the message is given by various media that novel events are far more prevalent than they really are. Once a ‘signal event’, such as a novel form of cybercrime, captures media attention and heightens existing public anxiety then other news sources will feed off the original news story and it will spread virally across cyberspace. In such manner, relatively minor events can have significant impacts upon public beliefs compared with their actual consequences, especially when they result in panics and moral panics (Cohen, 2002; Garland, 2008).

And the lack of public understanding regarding actual instances of hacking:

For many years the face of the super-hacker was Kevin Mitnick until he was eventually caught and jailed. His own account (Mitnick and Simon 2002) usefully deconstructs his own myth. His account reminds us that at the height of hacker mystique in the 1980s and 1990s overall levels of security were much lower than today. It was not uncommon at the time, for example, to find systems with a default user identity of ‘Admin’ being accompanied by the password ‘Admin’. Where security was tighter, the majority of deep level penetration was and still is the result of ‘social engineering’ - persuading those in low level occupations within an organisation to reveal their access codes (Mitnick and Simon 2002).

It seems that cyberpunk’s greatest crime is that it may have inspired a handful of thrillers that are technically science fiction but fail to identify as such. And while those thrillers may make the cybercrime bulletins passed around via email or reports of cybercriminals targeting foreign governments more plausible, so too does a media intent on sexing up its crime reporting. It seems the real culprit behind disproportionate public fears about cybercrime is not the invention of a few technologically advanced dystopias, but a lack of technological understanding. And hunger for that sort of technological understanding is exactly what cyberpunk inspires.

Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear [Social Science Research Network] (Via SF Signal)

In novels, movies, radio shows, and comic books throughout the 20th century, Fu Manchu is portrayed as a cunning genius who uses arcane methods and secret societies armed with knives to plot evil murders of white people and the preservation of Chinese power. Fu Manchu quickly came to personify the yellow peril, and has served as an inspiration to many other racist depictions of Asian villains like Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon and Dr. No in James Bond.

Long before Westerners feared terrorists and sentient supercomputers, there was the yellow peril. "Pulp magazines in the 30s had a lot of yellow peril characters loosely based on Fu Manchu," says William F. Wu, a pioneer in Asian science fiction writing in the U.S. "Most were of Chinese descent, but because of the geopolitics at the time, a growing number of people were seeing Japan as a threat, too."

In his 1982 book The Yellow Peril, Wu theorizes that the fear of Asians dates back to mongol invasion in the Middle Ages. "The Europeans believed that Mongols were invading in mass, but actually, they were just on horseback and riding really fast," he writes. Most Europeans had never seen an Asian before, and the harsh contrast in language and physical appearance probably caused more skepticism than transcontinental immigrants did. "I think the way they looked had a lot to do with the paranoia," Wu says.

The numbers issue is also a recurring theme in yellow peril science fiction: Westerners fear the idea of Asians taking over. In 1927, Lovecraft wrote about "squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door" in The Horror at Red Hook; that same year, in a novella called The Invading Horde, Arthur Burks predicts that Asians "breed like flies, and must eventually find some place for their expanding population or perish."

To be fair, Asians weren't always depicted as purely evil. Another well-known character from pre-World War II America was Mr. Moto, the super-polite, clean-cut Imperial Agent of Japan created by novelist John P. Marquand. For the most part, Mr. Moto was just a superb guy—fluent in many languages, a judo master, and the world's best private investigator. But in later films, especially after the war broke out, Mr. Moto also ended up taking on an evil persona.

Asians were to the 1920 and 30s what aliens, robots, and sentient computers are to present day science fiction: real or perceived threats to social order. "Science fiction is always really about its own time," Wu says. "It's what many authors call a shotgun approach to the future. Wherever people are in time, the current sociopolitical and scientific questions of that time are what you write about."

About a half decade after the yellow peril years, Asian influences reappeared in popular science fiction, but with a slightly different tone. William Gibson's Neuromancer and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner are just a couple of famous examples. "Asian cultural markers are often used as shorthand for the future," says Claire Light, an Asian-American science fiction writer. Light sees a link between this trend in entertainment and the sudden success of the Japanese economy in the 70s and 80s: "At the time, most Americans just thought of Asians as the technological power of the future," she says.

The speculation that China will dominate the world is still prominent in science fiction, yet strangely enough, today's science fiction about China still isn't necessarily about Asians. Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity notoriously don't have any Asian characters in them despite the premise of a dominant Chinese culture. "He's a smart guy who turned navel gazing into high art, but he's not really a great world builder," Light says, noting that she only saw a handful of Asian extras—including one in a conical hat!—in Serenity.

"All of the older yellow peril stuff is really goofy. It's extreme to the point of being humorous, and anyway, it's too old to worry about." Wu laughs. "It's the newer stuff that concerns me."

Wu's 1989 cyborg comedy, Hong on the Range, is still one of the only sci-fi novels with a non-perilous Asian protagonist. But this may change soon. Light, who is also a board member of the Carl Brandon Society, a non-profit for minority authors of speculative fiction, points out that the number of Asian science fiction writers has doubled in the past decade. Other minorities are filling out the ranks of science fiction authors too.

If you ask me, an ethnically-diverse group of scifi writers will make the very best future. You know, one without all the peril.

Gotham City cannot be saved — or gentrified

The biggest movie of the year, The Dark Knight, is about the impossibility of saving cities. Heath Ledger's Joker aims to prove that all of the upright well-behaved citizens of Gotham are maniacs waiting to happen. As he says at one point, they'll eat each other the moment the chips are down. But really, they're only a ready-made mob because they're in such close quarters. When they're not jammed into trains, hospitals, crumbling buildings and public squares, they're crammed into barges trying to evacuate. So much for sustainable development.

Before The Dark Knight came out, Warner Bros. issued a direct-to-DVD animated prequel called Gotham Knight, which included one story about a man who wants to clean up the slummiest slum in Gotham, the East End, and he starts by putting in a golf course. You can see the crumbling tenements in the background as Bruce and the other rich dudes play golf. But we learn that this would-be "urban renewer" has a shady reputation, and he's involved in organized crime.

Batman is almost always ambivalent about gentrification in the comics. Gotham City is always getting destroyed and reduced to Dresden-esque rubble, and Bruce Wayne rebuilds it again and again, just as miserable as before. (Most notably in 2000's massive "No Man's Land" storyline.) In "Watchtower," a future-Gotham story by regular Bat-writer Chuck Dixon (and drawn by Judge Dredd artist Mike McMahon) a corporation turns a whole section of Gotham into its own super-safe gated community, complete with private cops in super-armor, and Batman ends up deciding the whole thing is corrupt and bringing it down.

In the miniseries "Run Riddler Run" by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger, someone wants to tear down the slums and put up fancy condos. Bruce Wayne almost invests in this scheme, because he's in favor of anything that makes Gotham safer. But as Batman he sympathizes with the downtrodden. He's torn, but never actually has to make a choice, because the people behind the real estate deal turn out to be bad guys and he has to break them into little pieces, dooming their real estate venture in the process. I asked Jones why Batman would be anti-gentrification, and he says:

Mark Badger and I always saw Batman as not just an opponent of street crime but also as sympathetic to the little people who are exploited by the big people. Like poor people being displaced by rich people. I never liked the one-note obsessive take on Batman's personality, wanting to see him as a real human being who had a fierce preoccupation with street crime but could consider other issues too... Most writers at the time were interested in nuancing Batman terms of personal psychology, but I was getting really bored with that. His mission to fight criminals was a political and communal act too — So who is this Bruce/Batman as a social being?

In Peter Milligan's story "Dark Knight, Dark City," we actually learn that Gotham itself is built on the site of a demonic ritual by apostate Puritans. As a result, the city's very foundations are cursed, and no matter what you do, Gotham will always be horrendous. The city is a character in many Batman stories, but it's not a friendly one — it's more like a member of Batman's rogue's gallery.

Living in a world Frank Miller made.

You can't really talk about the vision of Gotham City as a brutal, cursed monster without paying tribute to Frank Miller's role in reshaping Batman's surroundings in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, much as he made Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen slum much more hellish. Those superhero works were training wheels compared to Sin City, where everybody's corrupt and violence really is the answer to every situation (except for those rare occasions where the answer is sex instead.) There aren't good guys and bad guys, there are just assholes and monsters. Miller has justly earned a reputation as the master of ultraviolent comic-booky noir.

Even though The Spirit is based on a Will Eisner comic that doesn't feature an especially scary cityscape, it looks as though Miller's film will be just as pulpy and noir as Sin City, with a bit more of a science fiction twist, judging from the first trailer and other early publicity. As the first teaser says, the city screams, and she's female. She's the Spirit's mother and his lover, but that incestuous double-bind probably is not the real reason she's screaming. I'm guessing it has more to do with the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson's fur coat-wearing supervillain, and various other scumbags.

In the world of noir, buildings are old and crumbling, and close together. Noir cities are full of alleyways and dark corners, crumbling docks and destroyed warehouses.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station.) And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag. (I won't even go into the vogue of post-apocalyptic New York movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield, which we've discussed at great length elsewhere.)

Miller's noir imagery has become so much a part of the fabric of genre entertainment that people reach for it as a shorthand when they want to seem edgy or dark. A new web series called Dead End City is using Sin City-esque visuals (via greenscreen) to try and lend some credibility to a silly storyline about zombies. And Sin City's Rosario Dawson is starring in a new NBC.com webseries, Gemini Division, which takes place in a Blade Runner-inspired dark future city where a conspiracy is creating genetically engineered terrorists. Even the usually cheery Star Wars is gearing up to go noir. We've seen a few ugly urban areas in the prequel trilogy, including the underbelly of the Jedi city of Coruscant. Apparently the new live-action Wars show way more of the seedy, dirty world in that faraway galaxy from our distant past.

Noir is the enemy of urban planners.

So what does it mean that we're being bombarded with visions of screaming cities on the verge of an election pitting an African American from Chicago against a Caucasian from Arizona?

It would be tempting to say the persistence of noir imagery benefits conservatives, who tend to identify themselves more with rural areas and suburbs and paint the cities as the source of social decay, welfare spending and crime. But the truth is more complicated than that. After all, the noir city is a place of blatant social inequality, where the strong prey on the weak, and the rich exploit the poor. It's not just full of criminals, it's jam-packed with victims as well. In fact, the old-school noir storyline has much to offer both progressives and conservatives.

The real downside to the vision of the monster city is that as oil becomes more expensive, exurban sprawl gets less and less sustainable. With the huge numbers of people living in greater urban areas in the U.S. now, it makes more sense to build more densely. But the persistence of Miller-esque dystopias makes more tightly packed city living seem a less attractive proposition. Move into a mixed-use retail/residential zone, with pedestrian access and electric trolleys, and you'll be gutted by a scar-faced maniac who smells like baby poo. It doesn't quite work as a brochure.

And meanwhile, the reality is that crime in the U.S., including urban crime, has declined steadily over the past decade and a half. The inspiration for Gotham City, New York, has had such a sharp decline in its crime rate that New York Magazine ran a package in January called "Post-Crime New York." (The magazine concluded we're not quite there yet.)

It would take a whole separate blog post to discuss the reasons for the declining urban crime rate, but let's just say cleaner, safer, more affluent cities make for less interesting backdrops for super-violent crime and monster stories. (Shockingly.) At their root, these are escapist stories, after all, and it's more fun to identify with a hero who jumps off a dark rooftop into an ocean of blight than one who roams a happy well-lit sidewalk.

What would a narrative about superheroes look like if it took place in a relatively safe, friendly urban environment? Or bounced between a safe urban environment and various suburban and rural areas?

One word: Heroes. With the possible exception of a few sequences in New Orleans, the NBC super-mutant show has never shown cities as dangerous or gritty places. We spend lots of time in New York in the first two seasons of the show, and it's always a perfectly nice place to hang out, no more dangerous or disturbing than Odessa, Texas or the other small towns we spend time in. The threats, in Heroes, come from shadowy conspiracies. And the danger is that the city will be destroyed, not that it will destroy anyone.

But it's hard to imagine the Heroes version of urban heroism becoming as influential as Miller's. Even though it's definitely a major escapist thrill to imagine living in lofts and townhouses as nice as most of the Heroes cast seem to inhabit.

Having looked through a few thousand opening sentences at the bookstore and online — no exaggeration — I can generalize a bit. There are a lot of opening sentences that announce the start of a rollicking yarn, with an action sentence. Like this, from Dan Brown's Angels & Demons: "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own." Boom! A guy's flesh is burning. It's exciting! A slight variation is the juxtaposition of the mundane activity with the exciting thing that interrupts it, sort of like, "I was hanging some kitchen shelves when the cyber-rhinoceros burst through my floor, tusks exploding with brilliant fire."

And then there are tons of opening sentences that are just quirky, or rambling, letting you know the author is settling in to tell a long, rumbly bulldozer of a story. And honestly, most of the opening sentences I looked at were either very business-like, or not very interesting. Or both.

Here are the ones which actually stuck with me and lodged in my brain a bit:

"'I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.'" — Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Starting a story, let alone a novel, with a piece of dialog is a bold choice, and most of the time it's super cheesy. I really like this line, though, because it's so intriguing and it drops in a lot of info. How have they been watching through his eyes? Listening through his ears, and what's "the one"?

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." — William Gibson, Neuromancer. People always cite this as a great opening line, and it's easy to see why. It's such a vivid image.

"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair." — Count Zero by William Gibson. Okay, come on. This is just so fun. It's got the wacky jargon: "slamhound," "slotted," and the idea that it can be tied to random things like hair color and pheromones. And it's crackling with energy!

"The morning after he killed Eugene Shapiro, Andre Deschenes woke early." — Undertow by Elizabeth Bear. This is almost the mundane/exciting juxtaposition, but it's more than that, because the mundane comes after the exciting. And it makes you curious about Andre Deschenes and how he can sleep after killing a guy. And who Eugene Shapiro is. I was reading Undertow a while back, and this sentence sucked me in.

"Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets." — Rudy Rucker, The Hacker And The Ants, Version 2.0. Surreal — transreal, even — and garish and weird. And the fact that there are 21 real estate agents just makes it that much better.

"I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work." — Cory Doctorow, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. I like a nice brisk opening. Again, the wacky jargon (the "Bitchun Society") and the weird longevity, and then the personal suddenly gives way to the larger picture, with the death of the workplace.

"He woke, and remembered dying." — Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal. I don't really think I need to explain why this is a great opening. It's spare and intriguing. And no adjectives or adverbs. Yay!

"The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries." — Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky. This is pretty close to being your standard brisk, action-packed opening. Except for the huge scope of it, coupled with the precision.

"Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant colony." — Samuel R. Delany, The Star Pit. It's almost a poem, and it zooms outwards in a lovely way, from the dirt tunnels to the ant colony. For a moment, you think it could be an alien zoo or something.

"The five small craft passed from shadow, emerging with the suddenness of coins thrown into sunlight." — Scott Westerfield, The Risen Empire. This one, I was on the fence about. It's a little adjective-heavy, and it has the passive construction at the end. But I really liked the coins thrown into sunlight, it's a lovely image and it's about the last thing that comes to mind when you think about spaceships emerging from somewhere.

"At the end, the bottom, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell's flamewinged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself." — Theodore Sturgeon, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. Again, it's got great energy, and even though it has my pet peeve — the random "it" occupying the space where a real world should be — it's got the Blakeian imagery, and then you absolutely have to know why Lee Crane blames himself.

"In the summer of his twelfth year — the summer the stars began to fall from the sky — the boy Isaac discovered that he could tell East from West with his eyes closed." — Axis, Robert Charles Wilson. It's got so much going on, what with the coming-of-age thing and the stars falling. But then you get that human-compass thing, which is intriguing and fascinating. And this is a nice, spare sentence, with no excess clutter. It's snappy!

"Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it." — Saturn's Children, Charles Stross. It's like the start of a romance novel, except for the mention of 200 years and the word "extinction." They stick out like jagged little spurs, amidst the shmoopy "One True Love" jargon.

Oh, and I came across one opening sentence that stuck in my mind afterwards, but then I couldn't find it again. It was something like, "He did not often think about kidnapping his daughter and stealing the spaceship." But there was more to it than that. What am I thinking of?

Hyperion:
Space-war novelist Dan Simmons has been hoping for a Hyperion movie for ages. Speculation has run rampant on the internet with both Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio supposedly attached to the project. Simmons himself has said that, "yes there is a Hyperion movie in the works. It has been optioned by a top-notch studio, is slated to be directed by a top-name director, and already has the involvement of a top-flight movie star. Screenwriters have been attached to the project and a first draft screenplay is expected soon." The top notch production company was announced to be Warner Brothers with Graham King producing and the release date is set for 2010. Hopefully this will be the last we see of Hyperion on Development Purgatory, and we'll be watching tree-impaling Shrike in no time.

Count Zero, or Zen Differential:
The sequel to William Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero was optioned during the height of the Matrix craze. The movie Zen Differential was supposed to be based on CZ and made by Michael Mann. Alas this movie's script never even got a draft.

Logan's Run:
This movie's never ending saga has truly earned its place in purgatory. There was talk of remaking it (supposedly closer to the book) as early as 1994. That faded in and out of possibility until 2004, when Bryan Singer was brought on, and everything seemed good to go. Some pre-production work was done and a draft was written, but then Singer decided to "take a vacation" from film making after Superman Returns, and dropped the project cold. Joel Silver and WB stayed hopeful, and a low-budget proposal by rookie director Joseph Korinski caught their eye. Some are hopeful we'll see Logan's Run as early as 2010, written by Children of Men scriptwriter Tim Sexton with Korinski directing, supposedly under the watchful eye of David Fincher. All I can say is: we'll see.

The Forever War
Alas the Chicago public TV miniseries adaptation adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War never saw the light of day, neither did the Sci-Fi channel movie (truth be told, I'd rather see the PBS version). Get crackin' people — we want to see the epic battle of humanity versus Tauran aliens. So does Haldeman, apparently, Sci Fi bought the rights to his novel and then never called him back.

King Of Elves:
This movie has been promised to the scifi masses for ages. Disney vows to have this Phillip K. Dick adaptation out in 2012 as their 50th computer animated feature. It's at the end of a very long Disney to-do list, so there's no telling how many times the green-leafy elves will be pushed to the back burner. That being said we are hopefully optimistic about this feature — it seems to be moving forward, but very, very slowly. Also apparently Disney decided to move the elves' location from Colorado to the Mississippi Delta.

Vurt:
Author Jeff Noon wrote a draft of a screenplay for his novel around 2002. It got optioned by Pathe films, with K-Pax director Iain Softley attached. Noon wrote a second draft of the screenplay, but by the time he finished in 2004, the option ran out and got dropped by Pathe, though Softley promised to look for a new producer. The last that was heard about the movie was in 2005 when Noon told readers of his website "don't hold your breath." No! We need our hallucinogenic feathers and our alternate reality ASAP!

With additional writing and reporting by Andrew Hudson.

Methods: We compiled a complete list of cyberpunk novels and movies, by date, from a variety of sources including Wikipedia, the Cyberpunk Review, Amazon.com's cyberpunk lists and various other sites. Then we tallied the number of novels (red line) and movies (blue line) per year. We were hoping for a nice smooth curve, but it didn't happen. We're sorry the chart turned out so zig-zag, we were as surprised as anybody.

Results: Cyberpunk has gone in waves, judging from our data. Novels in the genre have had a few high points. The biggest peaks for novels were the late 80s (eight novels in 1988), and then the mid-90s (an average of 6 novels per year from 1993-1996). Cyberpunk films had a peak in the late 80s-early 90s, followed by a brief lull. There were ten cyberpunk movies each in 1993 and 1995, and then another lull. The genre had a resurgence at the movies from 2002-2004, and then quieted down again.

How do we define cyberpunk? We tried not to. We pulled our list from as many reliable-looking sources as possible, and only left out things that seemed like obvious outliers. (On the Cyberpunk Review site, some of the movies on the cyberpunk list were listed as having a "low" level of cyberpunk themes, and seemed to be obviously reaching. So we left those movies out.)

So what does this tell us? Maybe cyberpunk is less of a fad than it used to be. Or maybe because we're now living in a cyberpunk era with virtual worlds, nonstop cybersex and evil corporations, we no longer view those things as elements of science fiction. What do you think?

• Minority Report and Other Stories, by Phillip K. Dick: Keir Dullea (who played Dave in 2001) reads these short stories from Dick's library. "Minority Report" is, of course, a lot better (and different) than the movie was, but the standout here is "Second Variety," which details artificially intelligent robots that have learned how to disguise themselves as humans in order to be more deadly. This came out years before Terminator and Battlestar Galactica, and is worth the price alone. Collection also includes "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" which became Total Recall, and "Paycheck," which became a terrible Ben Affleck movie of the same name.
• The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King: King's science fiction meets sorcery Dark Tower series has been coming out in dribbles for decades, and the last volume finally came out in 2004. I found that the best way to catch up with these was by chucking them onto my iPod while I was stuck in the car in Los Angeles all morning and evening. Some of the seven books in the series are expertly read by Frank Muller, who has narrated a huge share of King's novels. Tragically, he had a motorcycle accident several years ago, and has been unable to resume his narration work as a result. George Guidall picked up the reins and does an equally impressive job.
• Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card: In 2002 a 20th anniversary edition of Card's novel about the extensive training of young boy by the military to be the savior of all mankind was issued with a full cast production reading the story, and a bonus epilogue tacked on by Card. The project was extremely successful, and they also released the sequel Ender's Shadow with the same cast members. If you've never picked this book up, this is a great way to get into it.
• Neuromancer, by William Gibson: Gibson himself reads this audiobook version of his classic novel, and U2 provided a track for the book, with the group Black Rain contributing music and sound effects throughout the reading. It's moody and atmospheric, great for listening to while the rain is hammering down outside. Sometimes it can (oddly) be a mixed bag when the author reads their own work, but Gibson does a fantastic job.
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson: Jennifer Wiltsie not only reads both the abridged and unabridged versions of this book about a nanotechnology-built learning "illustrated primer," but she also provides different voices and accents for all the characters. Not many readers can pull this off without being distracting, and she does a great job with this, particularly with the Primer and the young Nell character.
• Idlewild, by Nick Sagan: This book by Nick Sagan, the son of Carl, is read by a cast of characters and features a superb robotic female monotone as the voice of one of the A.I. taskmaster programs in this story about a virtual reality school for rich kids. It owes a lot to The Matrix, but the ending opens up a whole new world where the sequel Edenborn takes place. Immersive narration takes you deep inside the VR world in the novel.
• A Scanner Darkly, by Phillip K. Dick: Paul Giamatti does an excellent job of reading this novel and capturing the frenetic apathy that the world of Substance D brings on. I listened to this not long before the animated film came out, and I vastly prefer the audiobook version. Giamatti's range as an actor shows off even when you can't see his face.
• Transmission, by Hari Kunzru: Kunzru reads his own novel about a hacker from India who thinks he's found paradise in the United States, until he realizes he'll never escape his slave labor job as a database engineer for a temp firm. He unleashes a powerful computer virus that infects your computer with a dancing video of a Bollywood starlet so he can appear to step in and save the day with a "cure," but it doesn't go as planned. A great listen, and a wonderful read.
• Dune, by Frank Herbert: Clocking in at 21 hours long, this unabridged version of Herbert's classic novel about desert planets and space-folding spice drugs is read by a full cast and will require a serious time commitment. However, you'll get more satisfaction out of listening to this than you will watching the movie or the miniseries again. Perfect if you decide to drive across the continent, or through a desert somewhere.
• Idoru, by William Gibson: I didn't want to have two Gibson novels on this list, but Idoru was the first science fiction book I ever listened to, and it got me through my first year in Los Angeles. I have probably listened to this thing at least ten times, and it never gets old. Actor Jay O. Sanders does a superb reading job, providing different voices for all of the characters, and captures this book perfectly. Plus, it's a great starting point for Gibson if you missed out on the whole Neuromancer cycle.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams: This series has appeared in multiple formats: read by the author, read by the full cast, read by Simon Jones (who played Arthur in the TV and radio versions), read by Martin Freeman (who played Arthur in the movie version), the BBC Radio versions, and even a Live in Concert version, featuring Douglas Adams giving live readings from his works in front of an audience. With multiple readers and multiple books, there is a ton to choose from here. In my opinion, the Douglas Adams and Simon Jones (and full cast version, including Simon Jones) editions are the best. Sorry, Martin. Technically, this gives this list a lot more than 11 books, but who's counting?

We weren't really sure what to expect going into this movie, because every 3D experience we've been promised has been fairly "meh" in quality. The recent Beowulf CGI meets 3D experience wasn't bad, but the promised third dimension still felt like all the 3D films we'd been seeing for years. Namely, a few things loom out of the screen, but it feels like a gimmick instead of something organic.

Enter the U23D concert film. We've seen concert films before, but never like this one. From the first shot of a packed arena that opens up like a pop-up book, to the long zooms from the audience right up into Larry Mullen's drumface, or the Edge's guitar, it feels like an otherworldly experience. You're literally right there with the band, experiencing something 1,000 times better than the view you'd get from a front row seat. You can see Bono's setlist tossed down on the edge of the drum platform, a couple of cups of coffee next to water bottles, the stitching detail in their clothing and so on. It looks so realistic that at times it feels fake, like you're looking at a VR concert, or action figures in a plexiglass block. Extremely surreal.

In Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, there's a group of ad-hoc theme park workers bringing a new technology to Disneyworld called "flashbaking". They use it in the Hall of Presidents to bring "Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln" to new life by cramming the experience, smells of gunpowder, sounds of his era, photos, etc, into your cerebral cortex. It makes you feel like you're right there with a living, breathing Lincoln and a stretch of time within minutes. This film is as close to approximating that (albeit without the smells, the added into, and without any baking of our grey matter).

Some people will decry that it's not a true concert experience, since you aren't being battered around by sweaty people, crammed towards the stage like sardines, straining to see over the heads of those in front of you, and being charged astronomical ticket prices. But, we won't miss most of that. True, there's a lot to be said for the human experience during a concert, but we're excited about the possibilities this technology brings. Virtual concerts for the masses, priced for you wholesale.

The film was shot during their "Vertigo" tour throughout South America over several dates, but it's been assembled into a seamless experience. Shot with over 18 cameras and using the 3ality 3D technology, this is the first time zoom lenses have been used in 3D, and the first time they've done layered visual effects in 3D. The movie premieres at the Sundance Film Festival next week, but you'll be able to see it starting January 23rd at theaters all over.

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• Geordi LaForge's visor: When Star Trek launched The Next Generation in XXX, one of the most striking visuals was Levar Burton wearing what looked like a car air filter over his eyes. The visor allowed his character, who was born blind, to see in the infrared spectrum, at the microscopic level, and to detect energy levels. He could even detect vital signs and tell if someone was lying, making him handy to have around. However, he must have been happy when the First Contact film came around, because he didn't have to wear that wacky visor anymore.
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• Predator-Vision: In the Predator films, the titular aliens have evolved to the point where they have developed their own infrared vision. However, they've invented helmets with enhancements that take the vision even further, letting them see with X-Ray vision, to detect radioactive sources, auto-target, and even (in the Aliens Vs. Predator films) to see with sort kind of electro-magnetic vision that allows them to track Aliens, who don't show up on infrared scanners. While those helmets looked sleek and cool with awesome functions, they still resembled fugly crab-aliens underneath.
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• Luke Skywalker's binoculars: When Luke was trapped on Tatooine as a teenager, he had loads of time to daydream and imagine what life was like on other worlds. So he'd frequently scan the sky and the horizon with his binoculars, hoping to find some sort of excitement. Plus, they came in handy when R2D2 and C3P0 went missing. No idea what all the different numbers and gauges mean, besides distance (maybe Luke had ganked his Uncle's golf binocs) but the view through them was 1977 gee-whiz tech.
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• Cyclop's visor from The X-Men: This special visor which was outfitted with ruby quartz lenses that have the ability to block his optic blasts. So, it might not allow him to see things closer or at the molecular level, but it does keep him from blowing the hell out of everyone and everything he looks at. If you ask us, that's not a bad enhancement. Later he was able to sport some ruby quartz sunglasses, although that sort of makes his "Cyclops" name a bit useless.
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• The glasses in William Gibson's Virtual Light: In this novel, the characters are trying to track down a pair of glasses that you can't see through. Instead, they use EMP drivers to send signals directly to your optic nerve. As a result, they allow you to see without having photos hit your retinas, and they can also pump more information into the signal. For instance, one of the characters describes that the glasses cost about the same as a "small Japanese car", and that when you look at things through them, "Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that." One pair to go, please.
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• Nanotech eyes in Deus Ex: In Warren Spector's dystopian future video game, you play a "nanotech operative" who has the ability to upgrade and enhance his body in the field, which you'll have to do in order to complete the game. One of the coolest modifications was upgrading your eyes so you could see in the dark and through walls. This usually comes in handy when people are trying to kill you, as you can imagine.
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• The HUD in Down and Out in the Magic Kindom: In Cory Doctorow's future, people live with onboard computers in their brains that allow them to make phone calls, record their daily lives through sight and sound, and provide heads-up displays in their eyes where they can check the time, read files, surf the web, and check other people's "whuffie" scores. Whuffie basically tells you "how cool is this person?" and becomes the currency of the day. As interesting as that is, we're most exciting by surfing the net on our eyeballs.
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• The sunglasses in They Live: In John Carpenter's "I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" humans vs. aliens film, former pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper finds a pair of very special sunglasses. They let him see the world as it actually is with fugly aliens controlling the human race, subliminal messages they keep them sedate and to "Obey." Of course, Roddy isn't too happy with this, and goes on a killing spree.
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• The Bionic Eye: In both the Six Million Dollar Man and the newly rebooted The Bionic Woman (sorry old Bionic woman, you got stuck with a Bionic ear), the main characters are both outfitted with bionic eyes that give them the ability to zoom in on subjects and see into the infrared. Not one was this one of the coolest Bionic upgrades in my opinion, but it also made for the best action figure I ever lost. Colonel Steve Austin's action figure had a big hole in his head that you could look through to "simulate" bionic vision. My parents probably thought I'd glued that thing to my head. Bionic eyes or bionic contact lenses, let's hope you get here soon.
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If Hubertus Bigend wanted to get into "science fiction" (whatever that means in 2008) it might look a lot like io9.