Oolite Bulletins

That's one of Douglas Adams's.

I've greatly enjoyed George Macdonald Fraser's army stories and they make regular use of Glasgow expressions. One phrase that's remained with me is "Darkie's got a rare hatchet on" meaning "Darkie is in a really bad mood today". It was some time before the narrator found out who ...

Malacandra wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2017 3:39 pm

UK_Eliter wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2017 8:40 am

Ah. Thanks for the information. Sounds more like cockney rhyming slang to me, though.

Possibly, but the only place I remember seeing it is in a war story ("Commando" Picture Library or some such).

Seen it again in Gunner's Moon, a RAF autobiography - the writer is not a Londoner.

That would be the lost world of Thamber - once you've discovered the lines missing from the children's rhyme: Set a course from the old Dog Star A point to the north of Achernar; Sleight your ship to the verge extreme And dead ahead shines Thamber's gleam. From The Killing Machine , by Jack Vance. ...

Hmm... Okay, this one should be doable given some of the earlier answers in this thread, but I'll make it harder to Google. :P Your journey begins close to α Canis Majoris and you are setting your compass a point to the north of α Eridani . Where are you trying to find... with a piece of doggerel yo...

Two. One with gunfire and one by ramming. The ramming part was aided by the Thunder Child blowing up at the same time. This brought humanity's total to three since one had earlier been destroyed by artillery in a land engagement, after which the Martians never got within line of sight of a cannon ag...

Without checking, Ringworld Engineers? Speaker to Animals talking to Louis Wu? Close enough. You would get killed for calling him Speaker-to-Animals by then -- he had a name. The phrase above was, as you'll remember, Chmee's reaction to seeing the solar-flare-laser firing. A nice underpowered weapo...

Okay, who whispered "With such a weapon I could boil the Earth to vapour", and who (having understood the rather bestial language he was whispering in) curtly told him to "Shut up"? (This book was the first sequel to one of the all-time classics of space fiction, and dates from t...

Cody wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2017 2:08 pm

Thankee! A well-adapted bird, is the dipper - good at underwater stuff!

An easy one: in which trilogy would you find the cities Marinia and Krakatoa?

Frederick Pohl, Undersea?

Well, on the one hand, God bless Google, but on the other hand, I'll let someone who actually watched it have first dip at the answer.

I had half a mind to mention that my username was a clue, but given that the entire phrase could be highlighted and Googled and hit practically instantly, it seemed unnecessary.

Owing to an unfortunate kerning accident, it seems that the clipper has transformed itself into a dipper. Off you go!

So there you are minding your own business, a novice Jameson with a low-value cargo, and a bunch of bugs decide to ruin your day just because.

I think we've all been there.

Also not hard science fiction, which three-book series began with this note:

"The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr H G Wells's fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them."

Cody wrote: ↑Thu Feb 23, 2017 6:54 pm

In whose autobiography, set in a fully-colonised and exploited Solar System, is the Great Red Spot a parallel of present-day Mexico?

Hope Hubris. It's the Biography of a Space Tyrant series, Piers Anthony. Perhaps not the "hardest" science fiction ever to hit the shelves...

No, you're exactly right. The narrator wishes for the demon to stop time, and then repaints the summoning pentagram on the demon's belly - so that when time restarts, the demon is trapped trying to reform himself in a too-small pentagram that shrinks just as fast as he does. *hands over ziplocced ki...