Editorial
The Good, the Bad and the Gift-Wrapped

The holidays are just around the corner, a time when those who didn't have the good sense to check out SCIFI.COM's Holiday Gift Guide will be trading inedible fruitcakes, grotesque ties and cheap perfume. So in the spirit of gifts both good and bad, we asked some sci-fi writers and actors:

"What was the best holiday present your ever gave or received? And what was the worst?"

Here's some of what they had to say:

Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire )
I'll sound like a real nerd for a moment. One of the best things I've ever been given is a massive Oxford English Dictionary, because language fascinates me. I love it, and I love reading. The Oxford English Dictionary is more than 20 volumes, but there's one that you can get that's condensed into one. It's got every word in there and where it first appeared in the language and its roots. I like that kind of stuff. It's great for settling arguments and for Scrabble, if you think a word exists or doesn't. The type is so small, it comes with a magnifying glass. The worst is school stuff—when I used to get pencils. We've got pencils in the house, why would I need them? Unless they're multicolored and have my name on it. That was pretty cool. That made me feel great. But generally pencils were a bad thing.

Rupert Grint (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire )
Best present: I got a quad bike. It's like a mountain bike with four wheels. Worst present: I once got a puzzle of the queen—it was only a couple of years ago. I never did it. It's in the box now.

Emma Watson (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire )
Best present: My best friend is really creative, and she bought me a pair of plain white shoes and then she decorated them. She put beads on them. I love things like that—that money can't buy. No one could recreate them. I just love them. I wear them all the time. Worst present: I was mortified, when I was 12 or 14, that a friend of my mum's bought me a doll.

Greg Grunberg (Heroes)
What was the best Christmas present that anyone has ever gotten me? Well, the best, the best one that I ever got was I got two gift cards, one to Bed and Bath and one to Home Depot. That, for me, is like, that's all you need to do. Like, I wanted to register at Home Depot for our wedding. That's who I am. The worst gift I ever got? Fake poop. My brother gave me fake poop, so I returned it for a fart machine. I wanted to keep it in the family. Keep it in the same area of gift. But I was like, "Fake poop? Dude, what?"

Joel Gretsch (The 4400)
Best gift was: Last Christmas my then 3-year-old daughter and wife gave me a Tiger Woods TAG Heuer watch. Weeks before Christmas, when they purchased it, my daughter came running in the house and said, "Daddy, it's a secret, but we got you a watch!" It's the watch I wore throughout season three on The 4400. Worst gift was: According to my wife, and as she describes it—a nubby woodcutter's button-down shirt (given to me by a friend). I've worn it every cold morning for the last 10 years!

Lori Petty (Tank Girl)
Best Gift: I loved my bike. I always had fun with that. Worst Gift: Barbies. They thought I'd love Barbies. I'd leave Barbies alone. It's not that much of a toy, after all. They made her measurements something like 82-7-8. It's kind of crazy, I guess, but look at what happened to me. It didn't happen.

Joan Cusack (Toy Story 2)
Best Gift: A rock-polishing tumbler. It just brought me lots of joy polishing the rocks. Worst Gift: The large Barbie head. Not the whole doll, but just the giant head where you could do her makeup and make her hair different ways.

Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica)
The best gift I've ever received ... have been the smiling faces of the children I have visited on Christmases' past at the children's hospital. If you want to really feel something incredible, visit a children's hospital or ward during Christmas morning, and just pop in and say merry Christmas. ... The smiles and joy given back to you makes one cry and rejoice in living. It's hard, but it's time so well spent it's incredible. Merry Christmas to all.

The write(r) stuff

Jack McDevitt (10-time Nebula award nominee, author of Odyssey)
The best is easy: Maureen, the gorgeous, brown-eyed young woman who signed up for a lifetime in late December 1967. The worst? When I was a teen, a friend gave me a deathbed kit that would, when the time came, speed up the process of applying the last rites.

Hal Duncan (World Fantasy Award nominee, author of Vellum)
The best holiday present I ever gave was to my parents. I was on a photography course at the time, so I took the negatives of their black-and-white honeymoon pictures, blew up the best and put together an album which I gave to my mum for Christmas. The worst was some whisky of dubious and less-than-legal origins which was supposed to be 12-year-old malt and which I bought for my dad one Christmas when I was broke. It seemed like a good idea right up until I went to give it to him.

Josh Conviser (screenwriter, executive consultant on the HBO series Rome, author of Echelon)
I have a couple that could be both best and worst. The first one is a bottle of Brut cologne that somehow showed in my house when I was a kid—probably out of the Eddie Murphy skit. It then became the running gift between my father and me. We must have traded it back and forth 20 times. And camouflaging of the present became more and more complex as time went on, as neither of us actually wanted the bottle. As far as a "thing" that really changed my life, I was given a pair of climbing shoes and a harness as a teenager. I'd done a lot of outdoor stuff before then—growing up in Aspen—but that gift sparked a passion. I continue to rock-climb as much as possible. And while I've gone through many sets of shoes and harnesses, I can't quite bring myself to let that first set go.

Elizabeth Bear (winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer)
The best holiday present I ever got was a signed copy of The Land of Froud, as I am a huge Brian Froud fan. And that book is very hard to find these days; it's very rare. The worst holiday present I ever got was one of those little folding plastic combs. This was like a round-robin gift thing in my Girl Scout troop. I was like, "Who buys a kid a folding plastic comb? What a lame present!" And I still remember that 25 years later. So obviously it was a deep childhood trauma.

Sherwood Smith (author of Inda)
The best present I ever got was the birthday my dad brought home a bunch of stuff from his stationery store: notebooks, pens, crayons, tablets. That was just heaven. For a kid who likes art and words, beautiful paper and pens are a sure-fire hit. Worst gift? A girdle with garter belt when I turned 12 years old—and I was so skinny I probably weighed 50 pounds, it that. But there was this super-tight rubbery thing that felt horrible, and had garters dangling down for itchy, nasty seamed nylon stockings that I was now expected to wear for dress-up occasions. I was told, "Yeah, it's awful, but you may as well start getting used to it, because you're going to be wearing one every day sooner than you think." I cried and cried in my room—I really believed that this was the symbol of a woman's future. Well, in 1963, it was!

Here's hoping that your bests will be even better and your worsts will be nonexistent.