Monday, October 29, 2007

Mutating Media Meme

The mysterious and mighty PZ hath disseminated from his Cephalopod Throne, the following memetic virus to infest the blogosphere:

There is a set of questions all in 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.

My great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Pharyngula

My great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club

My great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Flying Trilobite

My great-great-great-great grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock

My great-great-great-grandparent is The Primate Diaries

My great-great-grandparent is Conspiracy Factory

My great-grandparent is The Skeptical Alchemist

My grandparent is Evolving Thoughts

My parent is Thoughts in a Haystack

The following are my questions and answers:

The best historical novel in SF/fantasy is:
The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson

The best page-turner book in technopunk fiction is:
The Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

The best series in television documentaries about science is:
Walking With Dinosaurs (but only the original BBC script!)

I hereby propagate this meme to:

1) The Accidental Weblog

2) Monkey Trials

3) Recursivity

4) Point of Discontinuity