We're ready to come clean about the fact that we went a little Cloverfield-crazy last week. We explained that the movie is about 9/11 as much as it is about monsters; and then we talked to Cloverfield director Matt Reeves about Gojira and the strange whispers at the end of his movie. We also gave you a definitive list of the ten best New York monsters (OK, one is from New Jersey), and showed you a clip from North Korea's greatest monster movie.
Everybody got their knickers in a bunch when io9 columnist Geoff Manaugh talked about how to make a monster movie for the Red States. We also discussed whether autonomous combat robots would be held accountable for war crimes in the future. Then we really got people riled up when we suggested that Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" sucks as a narrative device, and gave you a chart showing how many scifi stories are enslaved to Campbellian cliches.
But we soothed you by offering some suggestions for 10 scifi songs you can take to a barren asteroid, and telling you about the 10 hottest sex robots in scifi.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles may have impressed us a bit too much. We interviewed Summer Glau, who plays the new Terminator cyborg, and then we told you the show is way, way better than Bionic Woman ever was, but we also criticized it for wimpifying Sarah Connor (we've got clips from the unaired pilot that show definitively that her character was softened up). And we suggested that the show make itself more like the Sopranos.
We showed you pictures of a train-sized drill munching its way through a massive wall of concrete to build a subway tunnel; images of a future where nature is so unnatural that it has become an amusement park; concept art from upcoming dimensions-collide MMO "The Day" where giant robots repair the Arc de Triomphe in a kind of impressionistpunk moment; let you glimpse a beautiful silvery alien preparing for her wedding night; and passed along some snapshots of strange, spaceship-grade aluminum houses in Canada.
We talked to science fiction writer and nanopunk pioneer Kathleen Ann Goonan, author of the Nanotech Quartet, about the difference between "hard" and "soft" nanotech futures. We also gave you a sneak peek at the prologue of Iain M. Banks' new novel Matter (coming out in February!), and told you to read his unsung Culture novel Inversions while you wait impatiently for his new book.
We also told you where to find seven great scifi comic books to read for free online, and recommended a book about all the Superman movies that never were.
You may love cyberpunk, but our chart showing a decline in cyberpunk movies and books over the past decade is hard to refute. And it's also hard to argue that cyber is "punk," when we found so many commercials with cyberpunk themes.
In science, we told you about a new government study of Morgellons, the bizarre disease where brightly-colored wires grow in your skin; a new scientific breakthrough that could allow humans to live for 800 years with a little gene-tinkering and caloric restriction; how genetic engineers stuck bat genes into mice and made mice with proto-wings; and we warned you that a form of sexually-transmitted, flesh-eating bacteria is bubbling up in San Francisco and Boston.
We enticed you with a forgotten clip displaying the silly outfits in SciFi Channel's Dune miniseries; showed off the coolness of upcoming zombie-outsourcing dystopia movie Sleep Dealer; gave you a taste of the new season of Torchwood with its kissy-fighty feeling; and we hooked you up with a clip of Will Smith doing his "drunk Superman" impersonation in the upcoming super-anti-hero movie Hancock.
We celebrated MacWorld in our own special way by giving you a brief history of reality distortion fields (RDF) in science fiction, acknowledging that Steve Jobs is the first non-science fiction character to possess an RDF. We also got your feedback on how io9 should deal with spoilers in posts, and will announce the outcome and our policy next week.