Science Fiction Trivia

[spud42]

the main characters were referred to as "The Sleepers"

unleash you google fu .....

[spud42]

oops, i killed it again....

another clue... book 2 of a trilogy , daughters name is Zara

[Cody]

oops, i killed it again...

Nah... just the usual apathy/lack of traffic. These days, my problem is finding questions to ask, not answering them.

Anyway... Kato's War.



A procedural question: does Oolite fiction count as sci-fi?

[Malacandra]

A procedural question: does Oolite fiction count as sci-fi?

If it's really well written.

[Cody]

If it's really well written.

<chortles> That thins it out some!

[spud42]

well done Commander Cody... the kipper is all yours...

now we have a dilemma... define "well written" , what is the standard against which a piece is to be judged? what parameters are to be judged? style? grammar? story engagement?

[Cody]

Time for an anagram, methinks: shit fenestration (3,6,2,5)

[Smivs]

'The Sirens of Titan'
(Kurt Vonnegut)

[Cody]

Right on - the zipper is yours!

[Smivs]

OK, an open-ended question.

Name as many alien races as you can with an odd number of limbs.

Images welcome. The winner will not be the person who names the most though, but whoever comes up with the coolest odd-limbed alien, so this is pretty arbitrary as I get to decide
I'll announce the winner in a few days...

[Cody]

Qheuens - 'an amphibious crustacean-like species with five legs and a chitinous-shelled body, from which a retractable "cupola" rises in lieu of a head, with a ribbon-like "eye" that sees in all directions'. From the Uplift series, by David Brin. Also, Moties have three arms - 'on the gripping hand'.

[ffutures]

Ice-ants, from Stanley Weinbaum's Flight on Titan: "He could see the ice-ants, little three-legged ruddy balls that ran about with a galloping motion. They weren't ants at all, of course, nor even insects in the terrestrial sense; Young had named them ants because they lived in antlike colonies." An illo from my Weinbaum RPG setting, Planets of Peril, the things on top are eye stalks, not limbs:



The Lamvin, natives of the planet Sodde Lydfe, from L. Neil Smith's Their Majesties' Bucketeers - trilaterally symmetrical (three brains, three hearts, three eyes, and three sexes, plus three legs each of which divides into three arm/legs with three digits.

[Cody]

I've no idea what these two are called (possibly inspired by Tralfamadorians), but I think they've got three arm/hand-type things.

[Disembodied]

There are the Idirans, from Iain M. Banks's Culture novels (appearing most prominently in Consider Phlebas). They have three legs and two arms - although it's true that they do have a vestigial third arm, which has evolved into a chest-flap with which they can generate booming alarm signals. Although in Consider Phlebas they're on a religiously motivated crusade, conquering and subduing other, weaker races in the galaxy, they're not unsympathetic fanatics by any means: their species has its own distinct history; their motivations are complex, and they are not simply bent on conquest. Many people might feel that our own planet could benefit from being conquered by the Idirans - it would undoubtedly improve the lives of the vast majority of the population of the world, to say nothing of helping to ensure the long-term survival of the human species. The philosophical and political closeness of the Idirans to the Culture make the whole Idiran-Culture conflict very interesting.

[Malacandra]

Pierson's Puppeteers (from Niven's "Known Space" shorts and novels); they have two front legs and one rear. You could reasonably count their necks as limbs as well since they have an eye and a mouth at the end of each of their two necks, and their mouth does duty for a hand - very capably too since their lips are more sensitive than fingertips and their jaws have a stronger grip than human hands. So they're either three-limbed or five-limbed according to how you count it.