I been Norman Mailered ...

... Maxwell Taylored, and tagged with the Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme! And because this time there isn't a fire-breathing dissertation threatening to burninate the village, I'm going to join in. (Besides, mutation is always on topic if you're interested in stuff like what happens to messages between the source and the receiver.) The rules, as onpassed by The Ridger:

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.

So the ancestry of this post is:
Great-great-great-grandparent, Flying Trilobite
Great-great-grandparent, A Blog Around the Clock
Great-grandparent, The Primate Diaries
Grandparent, Laelaps
Parent, The Greenbelt

And the questions:

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:
"Ranks of Bronze," David Drake

The best scary movie in the monster genre is:
"Aliens"

The best novel in non-U.S. noir thrillers is:
"Because of the Cats," Nicolas Freeling

The best romantic song in musical theater is:
"A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," from "Swingtime Canteen"*

The best instrumental album in bluegrass is:
"Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe"

And I tag:
Common Sense Journalism
You Don't Say
The Editor's Desk
Old Word Wolf
Language Czarina

The rest of you will all be gotten sooner or later, no doubt.


* I know it's not original to "Swingtime." Nothing is original to "Swingtime." But it's all good, except that damn "Rocking Horse" song.