Unless you’re a die-hard NASA junkie, you might not know about the space agency’s tradition of getting a bit silly when it comes to the posters for their missions to the International Space Station. After all, astronauts are real-life heroes, so why not put that in perspective by letting them stand in for some fictional versions? So what movie would get the nod for ISS Expedition 42? Don’t panic — they’ve already got the perfect idea.

The Maze Runner hit theaters this past week, and it turned out to be the rare YA adaptation that actually held our interest. But when we tried to come up with some clever feature to tie in with its release, we drew a blank. The more we thought about it, the more frustrated we became, and the more frustrated we became, the closer we inched to just throwing up our hands and exclaiming, “$#@%!”

Say, wait a minute…

See, The Maze Runner follows in a fine, upstanding tradition of many a creative universe to come before: making its own profanity. Because while science fiction teaches us that there may be no limits to how wondrous or strange our future may be, George Carlin teaches us that there are some things you just can’t say on television, or in polite company. Sci-fi creators have been skirting this issue for decades by conjuring up their own off-color vocabularies for the worlds of their imagination. Here at GFR, we think Deadwood is about as quotable as it gets, so in a spirit of shucking solidarity, we decided to embrace our inner ten-year-olds and look back at some of our favorite sci-fi swear words. First up, the movie that inspired the whole frelling article…

When creative people die at a relatively young age, the longing will always be there for the projects that might have been had they lived longer. One need only buy all 17,000 posthumous Jimi Hendrix albums to know what that’s about. One of GFR’s favorite authors, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s Douglas Adams, is definitely one of those people, and we are swirling our towels around in a frenzy at the news that an upcoming biography will feature sections of Adams’ work that has never been seen before by the public. And this isn’t just letters to mum or anything — it’s a gold mine.

Biographer Jem Roberts has put together The Frood, an Adams term for an amazingly together guy, which will be a fresh take on Adams’ life and will stand apart from previous biographies. The holy grail here is a collection of Adams’ papers stored in his Cambridge archive at St. John’s College, to which Roberts was given access by the Adams estate. An amazing opportunity, but a massive undertaking, as Roberts said (via The Guardian) that there are “boxes and boxes of notebooks, lots of typescript stuff, paper printed from the computer…it was just an enormous job.”

Douglas Adams is one of our very favorite people here at GFR, and his Hitchhiker’s Guide books are some of our very favorite things. Although it’s been through many incarnations over the years, from novels to TV series to movies to games, die-hard HHGG fans will recall that we were first introduced to Adams’ deliciously goofy universe in the form of a BBC radio play first broadcast in 1978. That led to Adams’ releasing the first novel in 1979, the BBC TV series in 1981, and so on. Well, the BBC recently returned the Hitchhiker’s Guide to its roots, reuniting the original radio cast for a live stage performance at London’s BBC Radio Theatre. But don’t panic just because you missed the show: you can listen to the entire performance online, courtesy of BBC Radio 4.

The late Douglas Adams was born on this day in 1952. He would have turned 62 today, and it’s still a damn shame that we lost him at the criminally young age of only 49. (From a heart attack, after working out — a cruel twist that, I have to think, he would have seen the dark humor in.) Still, his legacy lives on, and will as long as people keep reading his inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy,” not to mention all his other works. One of the things we love most about the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories is Adams’ bountiful imagination when it comes to conjuring up crazy ideas for the beleaguered Arthur Dent to run across during his tours of the galaxy. In honor of Adams’ birthday — and of all the joy his stories have given us over the years — we decided to highlight some of our favorite Adams inventions. Thanks to smart phones, tablets, and the Internet, most of us are effectively walking around with a copy of the Guide in our pockets or purses, even if most of them don’t have that comforting phrase “DON’T PANIC” emblazoned on them But here are some other Adams inventions that, if there were any justice in the world, would be totally real.

The old adage warns against judging a book by a cover, but sometimes book covers can be pretty awesome in and of themselves, even when divorced from the actual book. There’s another adage about a picture being worth a thousand words, and there’s definitely an art to creating a single image that evokes the themes, characters, or story contained within those covers. And let’s face it: a lot of time the actual, official art that gets slapped on a book release isn’t nearly as creative or interesting as it could be. So while the images in this post might not actually adorn the covers of any of these science fiction classics, let’s imagine an alternate dimension where they do, because that alternate dimension would be nifty.

These designs were created by various artists from all over the Interwebs, brought together by the delightfully titled Artsy Musings of a Bibliophile blog. (We would like to give that blog a hug, but virtual reality technology hasn’t advanced far enough yet.) First up, the lovely mock Penguin Books cover for George Orwell’s 1984, designed by Luke James. The security camera speaks for itself, but it’s a really nice touch to have its beam illuminating a line from the novel. Sometimes simple is best.