ANDREW FOX: The Absence of 9/11 From Science Fiction. “Do the modern day ‘taboos of science fiction’ include an extrapolation of the potential danger of radical Islamicism? Several anecdotes suggest this is so.” A lot of the science fiction world has become sadly PC and, as a consequence, uninteresting. Not all of it, happily. But tired Christian fundamentalist dystopias are far more likely to be published than Islamist dystopias, I suspect. Perhaps it’s just a function of who editors and reviewers genuinely hate and fear: Baptists, mostly.

UPDATE: Robert Ferrigno emails to say, essentially, What am I, a potted plant?

And reader Erik Fortune writes:

“When Gravity Fails” by George Alec Effinger and sequels are a series of cyberpunk novels set it a future middle-eastern setting. They’re from 1986 so they predate 9/11 by a long shot, but the setting could have come straight from Mark Steyn.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Wyman Cooke suggests John Ringo’s The Last Centurion.

And many, many readers point up Tom Kratman’s Caliphate.