The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

PZ Myers has created a new blog-meme thing, and he's tagged me as part of his initial attempt to turn Blogistan into his own personal petri dish. How appalling!!!

Oh well, here are the rules:

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.

OK then. PZ gives his own set of questions to start with:

1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is...

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers.

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

Cold Mountain.

3. The best sexy song in rock is...

Gloria, by Patti Smith.

OK, time for my modifications, with my own answers:

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. [deleted original] The best opera recording in classical music is...

Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Sir Georg Solti/VPO.

OK, I hope I did that right. Now, to do this right, some tags: Tosy and Cosh, Samurai Frog, TeflonJedi, Lynn Sislo, and -- in an further experiment with plugging memes into collectives -- the crowd at No Fear of the Future.