Science Fiction Trivia

[Malacandra]

Okay, your Allowed Burglar is called Drake Maijstral and the reason such a thing is allowed is that the Emperor was a thief and so burglary had to be declared legal.

[ffutures]

Okay, your Allowed Burglar is called Drake Maijstral and the reason such a thing is allowed is that the Emperor was a thief and so burglary had to be declared legal.

Absolutely right, and the author is Walter John Williams - well done!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Maijstral

I hurl my nipper in your general direction



And if anyone was wondering about the religion, there's a big cult of Elvis worshippers, especially common amongst the aliens that formerly ruled the Empire. Elvis impersonation is the main religious rite.

[Malacandra]

Okay, try this. There is an unlikely cosmic event that is common to both A World Out Of Time (Larry Niven) and "The Star", an H. G. Wells short. What's the event?

[Cody]

From my bookcase...

The Martian astronomers – for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men – were naturally profoundly interested by these things.

I'll not answer Malacandra's question though, as my question-fu has gone walkabout.

[Malacandra]

From my bookcase...

The Martian astronomers – for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men – were naturally profoundly interested by these things.

I'll not answer Malacandra's question though, as my question-fu has gone walkabout.

Well, half the answer will be in the place you sourced that quote from, and the other half can be found with a little digging. Incidentally "The Star" proves that Wells's grasp of orbital mechanics was lamentable.

[ffutures]

Since I've apparently succeeded in blotting A World Out Of Time from my memory I'll guess that both books have a star pass through or near the Solar System and cause huge climate changes to the Earth.

[Malacandra]

Close enough to give it. The celestial body in "The Star" is actually the product of a collision between Neptune and a foreign body that causes the resulting object to fall into the Sun, grazing Earth as it passes, while in "A World out of Time" the planet Uranus is deliberately caused to pass close to Earth in order to modify Earth's orbit. So "A giant planet passes close to Earth" was the answer I was after -- but both events certainly do cause drastic climate change, the one by accident and the other by design.

Over to you!

[Cody]

"The Star" proves that Wells's grasp of orbital mechanics was lamentable.

<grins> He could write a damn good tale though!

[ffutures]

Okaaaay...

One of the stories in Doyle's The Return of Sherlock Holmes mentions "Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow."

In which SF story sequence do the "singular contents" turn out to be a box of radioactive ingots lost by a time traveller?

[Malacandra]

"The Star" proves that Wells's grasp of orbital mechanics was lamentable.

<grins> He could write a damn good tale though!

Yes, I enjoyed a number of his shorts when I was a schoolboy and we studied a collection of them in English class. It's just that in story after story he displayed a remarkable ability to bang on and on about science without, by all the available evidence, understanding very much about it... thus anticipating internet atheists by about a hundred years.

[ffutures]

Hint; it's an American author and the series was published over a forty year span, with the story mentioning the barrow the first of the sequence.

[Disembodied]

I resorted to google, I confess - but it's Poul Anderson's Time Patrol.

Oddly, though, Google also threw up a modern Holmes story built on the throwaway reference to the Addleton barrow called "The Mystery of the Addleton Curse", which also uses radioactivity as the cause of the "tragedy" …

[ffutures]

I resorted to google, I confess - but it's Poul Anderson's Time Patrol.

Oddly, though, Google also threw up a modern Holmes story built on the throwaway reference to the Addleton barrow called "The Mystery of the Addleton Curse", which also uses radioactivity as the cause of the "tragedy" …

Time Patrol it is - the first story begins with the death of an archaeologist excavating the barrow - Holmes investigates, Watson mentions it in his casebooks, and the Time Patrol sends someone back to investigate. Causing a series of events that ends with the box left in the barrow to avoid a time paradox. Great fun!

The zipper is yours!

[Disembodied]

Thank you … I suspect some google-fu will be required for this! Name the authors that go with these spaceships (1 author per ship):

1. Alexei Leonov
2. Pure Big Mad Boat Man
3. Yggdrasil
4. Atalanta in Calydon
5. Hot Needle of Inquiry

[Malacandra]

Thank you … I suspect some google-fu will be required for this! Name the authors that go with these spaceships (1 author per ship):

1. Alexei Leonov
2. Pure Big Mad Boat Man
3. Yggdrasil
4. Atalanta in Calydon
5. Hot Needle of Inquiry

I could manage one of these without Google, and I had the nagging suspicion that I knew one of the others but had to look it up:

1. Arthur C Clarke
2. Ian M Banks
3. Dan Simmons
4. M John Harrison ?Suggested by what I've been able to find but not 100% certain
5. Larry Niven