China Mieville tries to get ahead of upcoming trends in SF. Via 3 Quarks Daily.

ii) Post-Elegiasm

The end of the world, whether wrought by Peak Oil, rising sea levels, the rage of nature, war, warlordism, nuclear conflagration or--D'oh!--tailored virus will not be achingly beautiful, nor morality tale. So will insist the Post-Elegiasts. This grumpy group of literary dissidents will be infuriated by the lightly disguised End-Times pornography of all the countless supposedly 'bleak' and 'dystopian' (right...) apocalypse fictions and culture. Visions of startlingly gorgeous ice floes under the Chrysler building, lugubrious lip-smacking depictions of ash landscapes, the lumpen bucolicism of all those overgrown cities, will not be for them.

Post-Elegiasts are to be united in scorn for what they will perceive as this cowardly surrender, and will term 'High Tea among the Ruins'. This will manifest in one of two very contrasting ways: the 'High' Post-Elegiasts will depict the not-end of the world, endless accelerating advances, perhaps including singularities, perhaps asymptotic improvements, never one-sided but doggedly progressive. The 'Low' or 'Punk' wing will revel instead in depictions of Ragnaroks of various kinds that are genuinely horrible, ends-of-the-world unrecuperable by sanctimonious aesthetics, ugly, base and totally depressing. These are to be considered the more daring artists, but will sell in very low numbers.

The influences of the High Post-Elegiasts will include Golden-Age Science Fiction, Extropianism, Futurology and Fabianism, as well as self-help manuals and Paolo Coelho. The Low will focus instead on splatterpunk, Pierre Guyotat and D. Keith Mano's The Bridge. Both wings will be united in their disdain for Alan Weisman, Richard Jefferies and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

What to say: 'Fiction of justice beyond an eschatological horizon is exoneration.'

What not to say: 'Will Smith sucked but overgrown New York looked kewl.'

io9's playing with great opening sentences from science fiction. (More at MeFi.) Contrary to the aesthetics of io9's list, it seems to me that the best are those which refuse to immediately announce themselves as science fiction. Here are just a few from favorite s.f. novels that I haven't seen anywhere else (all links go to Amazon):

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

"Mars was empty before we came."
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

"On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back."
—Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

"What's it going to be then, eh?"
—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Though what can match the quiet elegance of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed? "There was a wall."

Unless of course it's Octavia Butler in Dawn: "Alive!"

QUICK UPDATE: I realized too late that I'd omitted a book that should be on any list of this sort, Olaf Staledon's Star Maker:

One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.

At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek wonders if I Am Legend might not be the most meditative action movie ever. This is music to my ears: the movie might actually be good.

Some good links from SF Signal this morning, including a promising trailer for the infinitely prolonged I Am Legend and a fantastic 1979 essay from Stanislaw Lem on the nature of sci-fi that declares Philip K. Dick "a visionary among the charlatans":

The peculiarities of Dick's worlds arise especially from the fact that in them it is waking reality which undergoes profound dissociation and duplication. Sometimes the dissociating agency consists in chemical substances (of the hallucinogenic type—thus in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch); sometimes in "cold-sleep technique" (as precisely in Ubik); sometimes (as in Now Wait for Last Year) in a combination of narcotics and "parallel worlds." The end-effect is always the same: distinguishing between waking reality and visions proves to be impossible. The technical aspect of this phenomenon is fairly inessential—it does not matter whether the splitting of reality is brought about by a new technology of chemical manipulation of the mind or, as in Ubik, by one of surgical operations. The essential point is that a world equipped with the means of splitting perceived reality into indistinguishable likenesses of itself creates practical dilemmas that are known only to the theoretical speculations of philosophy. This is a world in which, so to speak, this philosophy goes out into the street and becomes for every ordinary mortal no less of a burning question than is for us the threatened destruction of the biosphere.

There's also a link to what is probably the best indexed ever, as well as the only worthwhile comment on the whole "Dumbledore is gay!!!" fiasco that I've seen: