The Pharyngula Mutating Meme.

My brother Mike (see link on blogroll) tagged me with the Pharyngula Mutating Meme - a series of questions that can change as they get passed from blogger to blogger according to a set of simple rules.

The original questions were:

1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is...

2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is...

3. The best sexy song in rock is...

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme:

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.

For the purpose of this intellectual exercise, my parent blog is The Questionable Authority. (He's traced the ancestry of the meme completely - click on his link if you so choose.)

These are the questions I got from my parent blog (really, they're categories and not questions, but it hardly seems fair to expect science geeks to, you know, use words properly).
The best time travel book in SF/fantasy is:
The best English novel in scientific dystopias is:
The best page-turner book in historical fiction is:
The best landscape painting in American art is:

That being said:
The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is: "Back To The Future"
The best English novel in scientific dystopias is: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
The best page-turner book in historical fiction is: "The Road To Wellville," TC Boyle
The best landscape painting in American art is: Thomas Cole's "The Oxbow"
The best power ballad in American rock is: "Faithfully," by Journey.


I am propagating this meme on thusly: because I don't have a sense of who reads this blog - if you feel so inclined, take this meme on in your blogging (and credit me as the "parent" blog). If not, meh. One thing I like about evolution is its unpredictability - let's see where this goes from here.