Oolite Bulletins

If you run into any other problems please let me know! Not a real problem but I want to let you know nevertheless: I downloaded your archive and burned it onto a CD without issues. So I got curious and saw there is some new technology called DVD. It looks like a CD, it behaves like a CD but it has ...

OK, I'll go with John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968), his overpopulation novel. About the first near-future SF book I read that really got on board with the idea that the future will be complicated, have multiple problems that will NOT neatly solve each other, needs to be told with multiple view...

Apologies for the long absence, I've been fairly busy with other things. Including this: For some time now my web site has experienced frequent outages due to excessive traffic. As an experiment I've taken the Forgotten Futures CD-ROM zip file off the site. It was by far the biggest file on the site...

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Sun May 04, 2025 11:56 pm

ffutures wrote: ↑
Jayne Cobb's "cunning hat" from Firefly

Only a truly "hard" man could get away with wearing a hat like that in public. Duckie.

He is something of a folk hero (for some definitions of hero)

https://youtu.be/pI-fiGUjAPY?feature=shared

Jayne Cobb's "cunning hat" from Firefly - not hugely important to the plot, but caused repeated legal arguments because people made their own and tried to sell them using the Firefly and Cobb names - they would have been fine if they'd worded the adverts to avoid the trademarks. https://wh...

That definitely qualifies. One to go! The topic being "parallel universes", preferably with interaction between universes. Charlie Stross 's " Merchant Princes " series, which starts with an uncertain number of parallel universes, in one of which a family discover they have a re...

What, I don't get credit for Sliders ? Okay. In that case, Schrödinger's Cat: The Universe Next Door . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_Cat_Trilogy Ahoy there! Cheat!! One at a time, old boy!!! Give others a chance to get their oar in!!!! Good point - I hadn't quite noticed that i...

Sorry, I forgot to say what the other offers are: The Imperium tour, a collection of material from GDW for classic Traveller https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Imperium2025 Gamelords Traveller - PDF ebooks of 1980s Classic Traveller tabletop roleplaying supplements from two of Traveller's earliest...

... the idea of parallel worlds, preferably involving some contact or conflict between the parallel worlds... WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THAT BLOODY TV SHOW I'M TRYING TO REMEMBER!? Not Sliders , the other one. You can tell I didn't actually watch it. Well, I did watch a half an episode during a series r...

Cholmondely wrote: ↑Mon Apr 28, 2025 9:25 pm

H Beam Piper: Paratime Series (eg.: Gunpowder God, Down Styphon...). Zillllions of parallllel whatnoteries but action starts in ours before moving on to the main one.

Definitely - low-hanging fruit but well worth plucking. Have a MBP for being the first to answer.

Oolite draws a lot of inspiration from Elite, which was inspired by various sources including the RPG Traveller. There is a one-week cut-price offer of the book This is Free Trader Beowulf by Shannon Appelcline, a history of the Traveller RPG, to celebrate the game's 47th anniversary. There will be ...

Oh joy.... OK, we've done straightforward time travel, let's go for something simple - five stories / films / TV series or episodes / comics / whatever that are built around the idea of parallel worlds, preferably involving some contact or conflict between the parallel worlds, MBPs for unusual and p...

My guess would be Peter F Hamilton - the trouble is that I more or less gave up on him when his books began to be longer than Tom Clancy's. At a guess, Misspent Youth , which is a stand-alone novel about a rejuvenation process. Or it might be something in one of his space opera series, but I have no...

I thought I remembered something from the Stargate universe - it turns out that there are healing nanites in one of the computer games but not in the actual series: The Nanotech Universal Recovery System, a little robot that sprays injured people with nanites that help them heal. I don't think it ad...

And yet another one... https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54397522484_81866e6a95_c_d.jpg It's a four-coloured ball-point pen about 30cm long and 3.5cm wide, and possibly the most cumbersome pen I've ever seen. Each of the fins pushes out one of the colours, which is why they are coloured differentl...