An unusual detour into contemporary SF, this episode is a look at the thoroughly strange The Book of Elsewhere (2024), a collaboration between Hollywood icon Keanu Reeves and British flag-bearer for the New Weird, China Miéville. The novel is a spinoff from Reeves' comic book series BRSRKR, about an immortal warrior with 80,000 years of bloodshed behind him.

For his part, Miéville called the novel "a story of ancient powers, modern war, and one person’s quest to find mortality and purpose."

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The Count of Monte Cristo make not seem like the likeliest template for an SF novel, but Alfred Bester was able to take this 19th century French classic and turn it into the basis for his 1956 book The Stars My Destination. This frenetic, fast-paced adventure also begins with a kind of parody of the opening to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. It's a hectic, baroque tale of revenge, and one of the most praised SF novels of the 1950s.

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Connie Willis is known for her stocked awards cabinet and for her lengthy novels in the "Oxford Time Travel" series. But this major figure of US SF has not always been concerned with exploring the past, or with doorstop-sized tomes. Remake (1995) is one of her less discussed novels, short enough to sometimes be categorised instead as a novella.

This is story set in what was then the near future, and is now the recent past - potentially the year 2018. This is a story about the movie business, about a Hollywood system completely devoid of creativity and trapped in a grim cycle of reinventing and remixing old successes instead of doing anything new. It is also a story about computer-generated slop, made up of ground-up fragments of older works, and passed off as something new. It's fair to say that Remake has some eerie connections with the way the 21st century is actually going.

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