So I bought some science fiction magazines—fantasy and science fiction magazines and stuff— and read all of the short stories in them and went, 'OK, I just need to write something better than any these things.' I sat down and started banging away and eventually what I got was "Pocketful of Dharma.""

— Paolo Bacigalupi, interviewed by PBS' Wired Science Blog. via Free SF Reader, via William Gibson on Twitter.

Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

Kahn wrote on his Twitter feed:

Epiphany. I finally figured out how to end the movie.

To which Gibson responded:

Scroll, or voiceover?

Kahn responded:

LOL. Freeze frame.

So that probably doesn't really give any insight into how Kahn will end the movie — unless he really does plan to end it with a freeze frame, possibly complete with cheesy grins and 1970s "Starsky And Hutch" style music.

How exactly does Case manage to last six hours? The program says it goes from noon to six on Sunday Nov. 22 at the New Museum — and Grey mentioned those times as well. I'm guessing there's some repetition in there, but will Grey and the other performers be there the whole time? Possibly the "faux virtual reality" sequences involving sculptures and Gamelan music will occupy five of the six hours?

Update: creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, "The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece. A mention of that might clear up any confusion. Viewers can come and go as they wish throughout the day.

Update #2: Gibson tweeted about this event:

Gol' dang! It's news to me!

Sasha Grey feels more like a character from Virtual Light, to me, but then she feels so *exactly* like that. Heh.

In any case, here's the official description:

An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson's1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux "virtual reality" scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.

The event at the New Museum is the premiere of Case, which will also be performed at a small outdoor community theater in rural Missouri in summer 2010. The New York production of Case will feature many of the ten cast members from the upcoming Midwest event, such as political activist (and notorious local hell-raiser) Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, who stars as the main character Henry Dorsett Case, a drug addict and computer hacker hired to execute an impossible cyber crime. Case will also feature Brooklyn-based performance artist Sto as Lupus Yonderboy, leader of the techno-anarchist gang the Panther Moderns, and the actress Sasha Grey as the street samurai Molly. The script has been prepared by the writer Brandon Stosuy, with sound design by Peter Segerstrom, and graphic props by Breanne Trammell.

Be glad that when you were a teenager, you didn't have an aunt like the person who wrote to the Journal's "Book Lover" column to ask this question:

My 13-year-old nephew is a voracious reader, but he tends to limit his reading to science fiction. He recently read "Brave New World," because he thought it was sci-fi. Any suggestions on how to expand his horizons to include other genres?

Anyone with half a lick of sense will know that a 13-year-old who's voluntarily reading Huxley is doing just fine and does not require an intervention. But the WSJ's book columnist, Cynthia Crossen, is a nicer person than I am, since she refrains from telling the aunt what an idiot she was being.

Instead, Crossen gives auntie a smart (if slightly muddled) lecture on the wrongness of misplaced snobbery, and admits that not all SF is equally great. Then she recommends that instead of stopping the allegedly trash-loving nephew from reading SF, the aunt should steer him towards the good stuff:

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.

So why are these cities so overwhelmingly large? And where do they come from? Here's a list, by region:

North America:

The city of North Am (in Magnus Robot Fighter) does just what it sounds like — it covers almost the entirety of North America, giving you lots and lots of space in which to (what else?) fight robots.

The Maze is a huge network of underground parking garages that stretches all the way from New York to Los Angeles, in the movie Circuitry Man.

Lots and lots of SF stories predict a huge swathe of city stretching along the East Coast of the United States. One of the most famous is Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, which eventually stretches all the way down to Florida.

In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson, a mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or The Sprawl.

In He, She And It by Marge Piercy, the urban megalopolis that stretches from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop.

And similarly, in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins, a huge sprawling "Conglomerate City" occupies most of the East Coast of the United States.

There's also BosWash, the city that stretches from Manchester, NH to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was first predicted in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman.

The City in Transmetropolitan is commonly believed to be a megacity including New York and stretching as far West as the Great Lakes, which are referred to as its Western lakes.

The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone: In Halo, the former city of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana. And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city-state consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations.

In real life, some urban planners talk about an area called ChiPitts, which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh, and everything in between.

Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz, appears to cover a huge chunk of the former Texas and Arkansas, and becomes the capitol of an empire that rules the Western Hemisphere — and eventually wipes out its main rival, New Rome. (Map from Wikipedia page.)

Texas City, in the Judge Dredd comic, covers a huge area of the former Southwest — including Texas, of course.

Bay City is a massive conurbation covering San Francisco as well as its outlying areas, in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

San Angeles appears in many different works of fiction, and it usually encompasses Los Angeles, San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara. It's the setting for Demolition Man.

Mega-City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did, until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comic.

South America:

Sao Paulo/Rio: In Ben Bova's Mars, the rural poor stream into the cities of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such huge numbers, the two cities grow into "a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide, that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all."

Ciudad Baranquilla, aka Banana City, is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics.

Europe:

Greater London — in Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, London has grown outwards massively, swallowing up tons of villages and formerly independent towns. Clarke and Baxter describe London as spreading out, "kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories... the scattered, helpless city that lay helpless below" a passing airplane.

Edinburgh/Glasgow — it's not strictly speaking science fiction, but there's a lot of talk about these two Scottish cities combining into one megalopolis in the coming century. The two cities could soon be linked by a high-speed maglev train. But it doesn't appear that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet.

Metropia, in the animated film of the same name, is a massive network of subway systems and "undergrounds" linking all the cities in continental Europe. The world is running out of oil, so the leaders come up with the plan to link all of the subway systems into one huge network — which appears to be haunted.

City Europe, in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, covers an enormous area of continental Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The city is made up of a series of "stacks" with the richest people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the wastelands below.

The south of England is occupied by Brit-Cit in Judge Dredd. Plus East Meg One is another mega-city in the Judge Dredd universe, which covers a big chunk of the former Soviet Union, including Moscow.

And of course, there's East-Meg One, the Soviet mega-city in Judge Dredd, which sprawls around the remains of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega-City One.

Africa:

Pan-Africa is a continent-wide quasi-state comprising several mega-cities in the Judge Dredd universe: they include Umar (the former Libya), Simba City (Cameroon), Luxor (Egypt), New Jerusalem (the northeast of Ethiopia), and Casablanca.

Gauteng is another one that doesn't appear to have popped up in science fiction very much, but it's talked about a lot in real life. In a nutshell, Johannesburg (a city already growing way past its capacity) joins up with Pretoria/Tshwane and a number of other municipalities, to form a single megacity. There are already plans to join them via a high-speed "Gautrain."

Asia:

Mega-Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis. An earthquake splits Tokyo in two, and as the city rebuilds, it gets even larger and much more sprawling, coming to be known as Mega Tokyo. Here's a map of Mega Tokyo, from B-Club Special (via Igarashi) Likewise, Akira takes place in Neo Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis of steel and neon. And the anime Cyber-City Oedo 808 takes place in a fictional future "Edo," or Tokyo, which is apparently much larger than the existing city.

And real-life urban planners talk about the Taiheiyo Belt, which will cover the Pacific coast of Japan including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

A single continuous robotic structure known as The Host covers almost all the islands of Japan, and 50 million people live inside it, in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai.

And of course, Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City covers most of Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama.

Australia:

Greater Sydney is predicted to encompass a region spanning from Melbourne, all the way up to Queensland along the coast. But as with Edinburgh/Glasgow and Gauteng, it doesn't appear that anybody's written science fiction about this megalopolis yet.

The South Pole:

A continent-wide city called Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic, in Magnus, Robot Fighter. Because robot-fighting is best served... cold.

And of course, the city of Holy Terra, or just Terra, occupies almost the entire planet's surface in Warhammer 40,000.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Map layout by Stephanie Fox.

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 genre: Military science fiction
The book: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.
Actually, Wikipedia and Fandomania credit the earliest beginnings of military SF to George T. Chesney's 1871 Germany-invades-England tale "The Battle Of Dorking" and George T. Griffith's serialized "The Angel Of Revolution," plus the works of H.G. Wells. But the book that everybody refers to as the touchstone of military SF, the book which really launched the themes of futuristic interplanetary warfare and examining the military as a social entity, was Heinlein's Starship Troopers. As Fandomania's survey puts it, this 1959 book "put Military Science Fiction on the radar."

The genre: Cyberpunk
The book: Neuromancer by William Gibson.
There's some debate about who really "invented" Cyberpunk as a genre. As this cranky essay (PDF) notes, Asimov was the first writer to consider the ramifications of artificial intelligence seriously. Bruce Sterling helped shape the genre with his 1986 anthology Mirrorshades. Bruce Bethke invented the term "cyberpunk" with his 1980 short story called "Cyberpunk." But even Bethke admits:

I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Mike Swanwick argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.)

Gibson's Neuromancer gives us the fusion of noir with brain-computer interfaces and dystopian paranoia, which spawned so many imitators.

The genre: Gothic science fiction
The book: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Commonly acclaimed as the first science fiction novel in general, Frankenstein was the first novel to meld the burgeoning gothic lit genre with the themes of abuse of science. Brian Aldiss, in his seminal work of SF criticism The Billion-Year Spree, claims that SF was "born out of the gothic mode" with Frankenstein. As CUNY professor Lilia Melani puts it:

In 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus introduced the theme of the dangers of science and created the obsessed scientist, who was to develop into the mad scientist, and the archetypal Monster. Frankenstein has been called the first science fiction novel; she of course thought she was writing a novel of terror.

Gothic science fiction has come to mean any science-fictional story with terrifying elements, a horrendous monster or some kind of science-fictional explanation for a horror trope, like vampires created by a bio-engineered plague.

The genre: First contact with an alien race
The book: Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. This was a tough one - even if you only define "first contact" as being a scenario where human society, as a whole, comes into contact with an alien species (and not just one solitary human explorer) you still have tons of early stories about aliens showing up. Some would say the earliest notable "first contact" novel is H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds. But let's say that a crucial component of the "first contact" story is that the aliens are friendly - or at least reasonably well-intentioned. Otherwise, you just have an invasion or war story. In that case, Childhood's End, with its super-advanced Overlords showing up and guiding humanity to a higher plane of existence and merger with the Overmind, although somewhat disturbing, is still a more benign story than Wells'. And thus a more proper precursor to books like Carl Sagan's Contact and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis saga.

The genre: Utopian science fiction
The book: Stories of utopian futures are enjoying a bit of a resurgence, with the upcoming Shine Anthology pushing for a more optimistic futurism. But the first future utopian novel (as distinguished from, say, More's Utopia, which is the account of a fictional realm) is The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane C. Loudon. In this happy future, everyone wears neon hats:

The ladies were all arrayed in loose trowsers, over which hung drapery in graceful folds; and most of them caried on their heads, streams of lighted gas forced by capillary tubes, into plumes, fleurs-de-lis, or in short any form the wearer pleased; which jets de feu had an uncommonly chaste and elegant effect.

Other wonders include "the steam-powered automaton surgeons and lawyers (who speak briefs fed into tubes in their bodies) and the delivery of letters by cannon-balls, which are shot into large nets erected in each village." She even predicts a sort of Internet. Everyone travels around in giant blimps, and it's a happy, egalitarian society. There's also Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, in which a young man goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the Socialist utopia of the year 2000 - Bellamy's book may have been more influential, along with H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia. (Thanks to Liz Henry for the suggestions.)

The genre: Apocalyptic fiction
The book: The earliest apocalyptic novel is probably Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man. But the first really popular novel of global devastation, and the one which helped to spawn a ton of imitators, is Nevil Schute's 1957 novel On The Beach. As you'd expect from that date, it's all about nuclear holocaust, which devastates the Northern Hemisphere and leaves the last survivors in Australia and New Zealand, drinking way too much wine while awaiting the end of everything. It became a film and also helped shape our atomic anxiety into a rich seam of fiction that endures today in novels like The Road.

The genre: Steampunk
The book: Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy by K.W. Jeter. Jeter not only invented the term steampunk, in an interview around the time this 1987 novel came out. A weird comic twist on the Victorian adventure novel, Infernal Devices stars George, a young watchmaker who discovers that his father was the greatest inventor of all time - even creating a clockwork automaton version of George. The clockwork duplicate of George plays the violin better than Paganini and has greater sexual prowess than George himself, leading to all sorts of wacky adventures as people mistake George for his automaton twin. Other books that could claim to be steampunk pioneers include Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (1983) and Homunculus (1986) by James Blaylock. But to be fair, the book that really popularized the steampunk genre was 1990's The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

The genre: Time travel
The book: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This is sort of a gimme, I guess. The best-known early time-travel saga, and still one of the best, Wells' story launched a whole flotilla of time vessels into the distant future as well as the past. Like War Of The Worlds, it has been adapted into movies and various other formats, and the Eloi/Morlock dichotomy has become a sort of shorthand for a type of future dystopia rife with exaggerated social division.

The genre: Alternate history
The book: Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon And The Conquest Of The World.) Screw those "Hitler wins World War II" books. How about this popular "Napoleon won the Napoleonic wars" book, published back when Napoleon was still a living memory? Louis Geoffroy imagines Napoleon's First French Empire defeating Russia and then going on to invade England in 1814. Result: Game over. Napoleon rules the world.

The genre: Posthuman space opera
The book: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I have no idea what book launched the "space opera" genre originally - that might be a question for another day. And there's some debate over which book inspired the resurgence of space-opera books loosely called "the new space opera." But to me, it's probably more accurate to call this genre "posthuman space-opera," since it so frequently deals with artificial intelligences, augmented humans, beings who live for millions of years, and generally a set of characters who far exceed the capabilities of a regular human. And for my money, the first really influential star-spanning novel about a civilization of A.I.s (the Minds) and superhumans whose concerns are much farther reaching than our pathetic horizons was 1987's Consider Phlebas. I freely admit this may be a bit of personal bias showing through, since Phlebas was the first novel I read which really knocked my head off and made me see the awesome potential for this type of story.

So what are you waiting for? Go out there and create some more new genres!

Top image from Consider Phelbas cover.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

There's a pervasive urban legend online that William Gibson went to see Blade Runner when he was working on his seminal Japanophile cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. And Gibson ran out of the theater a few minutes into the movie (or in some versions, just walked out) because he was so shocked by the similarites between that movie's vision of the future and the one depicted in his novel. (In some versions, Gibson is scared that Ridley Scott and co. are actually in his head.)

Gibson is quoted as saying:

Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns - all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information - said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.' And it was. It so evidently was.

Back in the early 1980s, Japan's ascendance seemed assured — there were a host of business books claiming that Japan had lost World War II, but won the peace through superior economic policies. Books like The Enigma Of Japanese Power by Karel Van Wolferen became unlikely bestsellers. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians like Ishihara Shintaro started flexing their muscles — Ishihara made waves with a book called No To Ieru Nihon, or The Japan That Can Say No (to the United States.)

But also, Japanese technology was clearly better, and Japanese pop culture looked cool. In the early 1980s, U.S. television started being flooded with anime programs like Robotech and Star Blazers0, and U.S. comics fans started discovering Manga. But the one-two punch of Blade Runner and Neuromancer was what settled it: for the next decade or so, Japan was how we viewed the future.

And given that the 1980s was a very neon-happy time in general, and the U.S. viewed Japanese cities as being splashy and full of neon lights, it made sense that Japanese influences crept into everything. Total Recall, for example, features Arnold Schwarzenegger running around a neon-drenched future cityscape, especially once he goes to Mars. It's not specifically Japanese, but it feels Japan-influenced.

In Back To The Future 2, Future Biff works for a mysterious Japanese businessman known as Mr. Fujitsu, and it's hinted that by 2015, Japan dominates the world's economy. (The film-makers pretty much come out and say this on the DVD commentary.)

In the Max Headroom TV series, the world is dominated by the ZikZak Corporation, which despite its non-Japanese-sounding name, is actually a Japanese company. And the dystopian cityscape (around a minute in) looks very Blade Runner inspired:

In the early 1990s, Marvel launched its futuristic "2099" titles, with Rampage 2099 and Spider-Man 2099 among others. And one of the things that was futuristic and different about the world of 2099 was the fact that Tony Stark's company, Stark Industries, had turned Japanese, and was now known as Stark-Fujikawa.

And the U.S. got its own home-grown anime program with 1991's Aeon Flux, airing on MTV:


Around that same time, we started to see a lot more Asian influences in animation, including shows like Batman: The Animated Series.

To some extent, any movie with "virtual reality" or "cyberpunk" influences kept bringing back a Japanophile vibe, like 1995's Virtuosity, which had one of its crucial scenes between Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe's virtual killer take place in a sushi bar:

And the politically correct, scrubbed San Angeles of 1995's Demolition Man was a blend of L.A. and Tokyo, in both its buildings and its fashions:

Famously, the cyberpunk trainwreck Johnny Mnemonic featured a whole slew of scenes and subplots that took place in Japan, revolving around the character of Mr. Takahashi, played by popular actor Takeshi Kitano. These scenes are still only available on the Japanese DVD:

Sadly, Japan's economic hegemony ran out of juice in the early 1990s, when their real-estate bubble burst (sound familiar?) and the country spent an entire "lost decade" mired in stagnation. The vision of Japan as future economic uberpower was replaced by a creeping irrelevance — but Japanese pop culture remained as influential as ever, maybe even more than during the powerhouse days.

And because nothing in science fiction ever really goes away, there are still plenty of examples of Japanophile influences in recent SF. Take Steven Spielberg's A.I., whose future city looks a lot like Tokyo. (Skip to 4:45 in this video):

The shiny metropolis of Coruscant has a very Neo Tokyo vibe, in Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones (go to around 2:40 in this video):

When we visit a future Batman, who's trained by an aging Bruce Wayne to wear a Bat-exoskeleton, in Batman Beyond, the future Gotham is covered with Japanese kanji:

Joss Whedon made waves with his show Firefly and the sequel movie Serenity, which take place in a sort of vaguely pan-Asian future where everybody peppers his/her speech with a kind of pidgin Chinese. (Although there are no actual Asian people around.) And this Fruity Oaty Bars commercial has a pronounced anime vibe:

And of course, Aeon Flux got its own live-action movie a few years ago:

Top image: Amazing Neon vista from Osaka, by PFC on Flickr.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

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.

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.

"Cyberpunk literature toyed with this - but, I feel, never very successfully. It's like in Gibson's work. In some sort of grand theoretical sense the protagonists were "from the street", but their interaction with the system was essential one of equals. That is, I believe, an attitude that is quite natural for white men to take - that the system, even if stupid and corrupt, nevertheless recognizes them as human and acknowledges their ability to challenge or destroy that system. It is my experience, so far, that in afro-futurist works that assumption is not there. The system often does not recognize the legitimacy of the humanity of the protagonists. I feel that even in science fiction where humans are regarded as backwards, and I am reminded of David Brin's Uplift novels, the author tries very hard to assure the readers of the inherent specialness of humans (generally, we are either stronger of will or more adaptable than the aliens - it's pretty predictable), and afro-futurism doesn't seem to deal much with aliens, but the evils that people do to each other. There is no confidence that the specialness of the protagonists will win out (and, indeed, in several of the stories that is not the case)." [Christopher Bradley]

"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.