"The Universe is big. Really big," Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy scribe Douglas Adams once explained. And while Adams waxed about life, the Universe and everything, his genre of scifi has tackled some far-out subjects as well -- everything from teleportation to time travel, and from radiation to ray guns. If you're looking for a primer on science fiction -- its influences, its themes and its most common devices -- look no further.

A Is for Android
B Is for Body Snatchers
C Is for Cyberpunk
D Is for Death Star
E Is for Enterprise
F Is for Foundation
G Is for Godzilla
H Is for Hyperspace
I Is for I, Robot
J Is for Jedi
K Is for Klaatu Barada Nikto
L Is for Lovebot
M Is for Mad Scientist

N Is for Neuromancer
O Is for Octopus Overlords
P Is for Power Armor
Q Is for Q
R Is for Radiation
S Is for Superman
T Is for Time Travel
U Is for UFO
V Is for Venusians
W Is for War of the Worlds
X Is for Xenomorph
Y Is for Yavin
Z Is for Zombie

Scifi cinema is -- without a doubt -- zombie-mad. But ask anyhow how flesh-eating monsters have to come to occupy such a central place in pop culture, and you're likely to get a blank stare. Though many theories abound, one film stands out as the driving force behind shaping how we view zombies today: George A. Romero's sixties classic, Night of the Living Dead.

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There are really only two truly iconic moments in the original Star Wars trilogy. The first is obvious: Luke clutching a lightsaber-cauterized hand stump, clinging to an escapement above a yawning chasm as Darth Vader reveals his parentage in The Empire Strikes Back. The other: A laser-spitting moon hovering above a forest, space ships racing towards it before it can obliterate an entire planet -- the climatic scene of Star Wars.

In the Star Wars universe, Yavin is a giant gas planet, utterly uninhabitable, but circling around it are three habitable moons, the jewel of which is Yavin 4. Covered in jungle-like flora and redolent with the cries of whisperbirds, Yavin 4 is both habitable and remote: The perfect, surreptitious staging ground for the Galactic Rebellion.

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In all of science fiction, no creature has been feared as much as the "foul tongue from Acheron." It preys on primal fears, as a killer and because everything about it -- from the phallic curve of its black head as an adult to the sucking of its pupal facehuggers -- is unwholesomely carnal. Which, of course, is just what it's creators, director Ridley Scott and Swiss nightmarist H.R. Giger, had always intended: A monster that comes slithering from the subconscious.

The Xenomorph (which means "alien form" in Greek) is not how most refer to Giger and Scott's monster. Usually, it takes its name from the movie in which it first appeared: 1979's Alien. But "alien" is so maddeningly imprecise, a vague genus shared by thousands of fictional extra-terrestrials, from E.T. to Marvin the Martian. The Xenomorph is one of a kind: An eyeless, acid-blooded insect, which reproduces by violently implanting its eggs into a foreign host to incubate before violently ripping through their chests.

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Invading Earth for our resources or our women, serving man, or serving him on a platter, enacting a glorious golden age of peace and love or simply enslaving us -- the idea and possible outcomes of an alien invasion is a pervasive and exciting theme in science fiction.

We start with the genre-defining alien invasion novel, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds proper. Published in 1898, Wells' story is so well known as to be almost a cliche in and of itself: After a series of Martian explosions, strange meteors crash land in London, disgorging cephalopod-like Martians and their massive Tripod war machines. Using a heat ray and a series of chemical and biological weapons, the Martians quickly subjugate Britain, only to be wiped out by common Earthen bacteria.

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The implausibility of life on Venus can't stop the imagination. The planet's relative closeness, its lurid astronomic beauty and its bizarre environmental conditions make it perfect fodder for both the creative and the mad.

It was Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs who first popularized the Venusian in science fiction. Scrambling for a pulp series as successful as his John Carter on Mars novels, Burroughs dreamed up a similar story set on Venus, which the local Venusians calls "Amtor," following the adventures of another displaced Earthling, Caron Napier. Far removed from astronomic reality, Burrough's Venus is a verdant, water-covered world, populated by human-like inhabitants. The races of Venusians on Amtor are diverse: The exiled Vepajans, the dirty pinko Thorists, the eugenicists of Havatoo, the hideous Cloud people and the slavering zombies of Kormor.

Once the kindle had been sparked, other authors started examining the indigenous life of Venus. Most agreed the savage environment of the planet would generate an equally savage for of life. In Charles R. Tenner's Tumithak of the Corridors, portrays Venusians as a hideous race of spider-like aliens called the Sheiks, who invade Earth and drive the remaining human population into underground catacombs.

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UFOs are nothing new... in fact, they are as old as mankind's ability to look into the sky and ask himself: "WTF?" In 240 B.C., Chinese astronomers were puzzled by a fast moving flaming object shrieking through the sky... an object we now know to be Halley's Comet. But there are more interesting historical UFOs. In 1290, a silver disc was reported shooting over Yorkshire. In 1561, multiple sources in Nuremberg spotted a cloud of floating discs and spheres emerging from large hovering cylinders. To date, neither of these haunting UFO appearances have been scientifically explained... although one should, perhaps, note that the peoples of this time also persistently witnessed witches, angels and demons.

Another school of thought tries to link UFOs with Christianity. The link comes from the seeming ubiquity of flying saucers within early Christian paintings. "The Baptism of Christ" by Aert de Gelder, features a saucer shooting a beam down from the heavens upon John the Baptist and a young Jesus. Art experts plausibly explain the appearance of as symbol of the presence of God, but UFOlogists often argue otherwise -- that early man mistook extra-terrestrial visitors for supernatural creatures, thus informing early religions in their iconography. Whether you believe that or not is up to you (I don't), but there's no doubt its certainly a fun little interpretation.

UFO sightings were not commonly linked with the existence of aliens (if ever) until the 1930's, when Amazing Stories began publishing luridly illustrated covers of Martians and moonmen zooming through space in iridescent, cylinder-like spacecraft. The editor of Amazing Stories marveled at the success of the imagery: He was amazed by how many letters he began receiving from readers who claimed to have seen objects just like on his cover.

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There are obvious benefits to time travel. There's the get-rich-quick scheme, of course: Zooming back to capitalize on a lusty stock, or buying the Mona Lisa for pennies. And the heroic: What red-blooded American wouldn't blow up Hitler with a bazooka in 1931? These are fantasies with universal appeal; who wouldn't want to correct past mistakes or capitalize on future knowledge?

Unfortunately, there is also no way to predict the domino effect that changing the past would have on the future. Messing with the stock market could mess with the larger economy. Destroying Hitler could inadvertently lead to an even worse dictator rising in his stead. Ultimately, time travel's safest use may be as a dramatic device in a story.

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The Man of Steel. The Blue Boy Scout. The Man of Tomorrow. Comics' most easily identified hero.

But ironically, Superman wasn't created a hero. Six years before his first appearance in Action Comics #1, Superman was created... not as a supreme being of galvanic might and a champion of the American way, but as a bald, bulbous-headed telepath, bent on world destruction. The short story was published in the third issue of Siegel's Science Fiction fanzine, taking a pessimistic and pulpy view of the ubermensche of Nietsche and George Bernard Shaw. The character was not met with much enthusiasm; indeed, it soon became clear that it was much harder to build a series of stories around a villain than a hero. Going back to the drawing board, Siegel and Shuster re-envisioned Superman as an extra-terrestrial champion of his adopted homeland... then, for good measure, decided he should have most of his adventures in his underpants.

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In the real world, radiation is a type of energy that we've come to associate with the destructive effects it has on organic material and the occasional cold plate against a broken body-part during the brief unpleasantness of an X-Ray. But in the hands of scifi authors and movie directors alike, radiation is the ultimate tool -- a (misunderstood) scientific concept that society at large understands as "the thing that makes big, scary monsters big and scary." What more could you ask for?

From Godzilla to the Golden Age of comics, the implausible effects of radiation in worlds where anything is possible has been crucial to some of scifi's biggest players. And why shouldn't it? It's not as if the fictional development of radiation should be constrained by the pesky strictures of science and fact. Oh no! A little dose of simple radiation will do the trick as countless classic monster movies show; altering the effects of specific types of radiation, or simply inventing whole new spectrums of radioactive energy can suit your fictional purposes works just as well.

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