Tag Your It!

Not a fan of e-mail chains, but this one if kind of fun for dorks like me (you, us etc.)

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.

You can delete any one question

You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The initial statements/questions:

My parent is: NONE.

1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.
2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is…Cold Mountain.
3. The best sexy song in rock is…Gloria, by Patti Smith.

My parent is: Marc Bernardin. Here's his stuff.

1. The best epic song (over six minutes in length) in rock is...

"Layla," by Derek and the Dominos. (I almost went "Since I've Been Loving You," by Zeppelin, but I changed my mind. For no good reason.)

2. (the mutant) The best pure sci-fi TV show concept is...

The Six-Million Dollar Man. (Seriously. The ways that idea could be exploited is ridiculous...and it's ridiculous that Bionic Woman isn't a thousand times better, given the fertility of the idea.)

3. (the new one) The most formidable superheroine in comics is...

The X-Men's Storm. (Especially after Claremont stripped her of her powers, forcing her to learn hand-to-hand combat as well as battlefield strategy. And then she got her powers back. Positively bad-ass.)

Here are mine:

1. The best epic song (over six minutes in length) in rock is...

"Bohemian Rhapsody," by Queen. To me, along with "Stairway to Heaven" pretty much defines the genre. I chose it because it is simultaneously brilliant and absolutely ludicrous.



2. (My twist) The best time travel novel in the adventure genre is...

Time and Again by Jack Finney. My dad turned me on to this book years ago and it's one of my favorites. I am sucker for turn of the century New York so this book had me at hello.



3. (The new one) The best horror movie masquerading as another genre is...

Alien by Ridley Scott. Incorrectly labeled as science fiction. The future/spaceships etc is the setting, not the genre. In concept it is no different than any "one monster killing off the cast" horror film, except it is better. Stark, moody, brilliantly paced - one of my all time favorites.


Now, for the people I'm tagging:

David Anaxagoras, screenwriting blogger and fellow geek.
John Rogers, writer, director, producer and way too busy to fill this out.
Larry Young, AiT Publisher, writer and new dad.