The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

I love blog memes, and Bruce Everitt over at The Thinkers' Podium just tagged me with a good one: the Pharyngula mutating genre meme. The rules are as follows:

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.

Okay, so here are my contributions:

1. The best time travel novel in magic realism is…

Armageddon: The Musical by Robert Rankin. Barry the Talking Sprout is the best time machine in fiction, and he constantly steals scenes with his buddy Elvis. By the by, I recently read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, and found it sorely lacking. It followed much the same formula as Rankin's oeuvre - magic realism, quirky loser characters, decidedly British backdrop, time travel - but contained very little humour. I could not help thinking by about page 20 that if The Eyre Affair had been a Rankin book there would have been half a dozen genuinely funny running gags by now, whereas all Fforde could inject was some boring literary allusions.

2. The best Continental-European movie in historical fiction is…

Astérix et Obélix contre César. I watched this movie in a theatre in Singapore in 1999 and highly enjoyed myself. Gerard Depardieu as Obelix, Roberto Benigni as a legionary, Laetitia Casta as eye candy, and a special effects budget large enough to do justice to the vision of Goscinny & Uderzo... what more do you want? Then again, I am one of the more hardcore Asterix fans you'll ever meet.

3. The best sexy song in industrial rock is…

She Wants Animals - Nine Inch Nails vs Ace Of Base as mashed up by DJ Tripp. A little naughty of me here, considering that NIN got mentioned two steps up the memechain, but I have liked this song a lot ever since I heard it as track 3 on Bootmixed, arguably the best mash-up compilation album ever. Tripp takes two songs with seemingly incompatible musical styles and makes them work, not least because he manages to combine the lyrics to form a very funny reversal to the intensity of Trent Reznor's intended effect. Instead of the song being about the uncontrollable urge of a manly man to copulate with his partner, it is transformed via the addition of the Ace of Base lyrics into a tale of a liberated woman who manipulates the neanderthal male into becoming an unwitting sperm donor.

I pass on the memetic seed to:

Bronwen Clune at Norg Media
Simon Sharwood at Stay Cool Dad
Phillip Malone at Mollyzine
Duncan Riley at duncanriley.com
John Johnston at jjprojects
Cait at scientaestubique
Phil Sim at Squash
Jeremy Johnsen at Johnsenclan
Leslie Nassar at mojourno
Karel Donk at Miraesoft
Marsh Davies at Verbal Chilli
Ray Frenden at frenden.com
Caryn Law at Hellchick
Barbara Kerr at Martin Scorsese Is Quite A Jovial Fellow

What can I say, I spread my seed far and wide. ;)