The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

I confess, I like this blog meme. I studied how mutations happen in bacteria in graduate school, so anything even tangentially related to that has my interest. This blog meme was created by Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution and mutation in cyberspace:

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.

My great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula
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 Primate Diaries

The best time travel novel in SF/fantasy is:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is:

Alien

The best sexy song in electronica is:

"The Sea" by Morcheeba.

The best page-turner book in Nobel-prize-winning fiction is:

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago

I am propagating this meme on to:

ERV
Denialism
Bug Girl
White Coat Underground
Bronze Blog
Skeptical Alchemist

It'll be interesting to see how this experiment ends up. Don't let it go extinct!