Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Convoluted Meme

From Jaq, I belatedly respond to this tagging:

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.

That's a lot of verbiage. Here are the questions as evolved by Jaq:

1. The best near-future novel in SF/Fantasy is
Firestar, by Michael Flynn.

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

3. The best opera recording in classical music is
Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Sir Georg Solti/VPO.

And here is my mutation of the same:

1. The best near-future novel in SF/Fantasy is
Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

2. The best romantic movie of the 2000s is
Love, Actually

3. The best novel of the 2000s is
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

No tags, but feel free to mutate away.

Until Whenever

No comments: