Science

PZ's Mutating Genre Meme, pt. 2

Yesterday I put up v. 1 of PZ’s patented Mutating Genre Meme that had been passed on from The Primate Diaries, but today I’ll be passing on The Anterior Commissure version. In case anyone hasn’t seen them, here are the rules again;

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 ancestry for this version is;

My great-great-great-grandparent isPharyngula. My great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club. My great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite My grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock My parent is The Anterior Commissure

And now my 2nd contribution to the meme pool;

The best time travel novel in historical romance is: I deleted this question as I could not think of a way in which I could mutate it to deliver an answer, so I guess it would have been the equivalent of a “lethal mutation” for me.

The best scary movie in sociopolitical dystopias is: Children of Men

The best sexy song in ska is: “The Setup” by Reel Big Fish.

The best scary story in horror novellas is: Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The best B-movie in 1980’s horror films is: Alligator

Those are my picks, and I’ll pass the buck along to;

Self Designed Student Catalogue of Organisms The Dispersal of Darwin Interrogating Nature Quintessence of Dust

That’s it then. So far this meme has appeared to be somewhat conservative, Children of Men hanging on strong, but who knows what new forms it might take.