Science Fiction Trivia

[RockDoctor]

OK, let's go for a nice straightforward one. Let's have five SF works (books, films, TV, whatever) where a major part of the plot concerns artificially enhanced animals. The enhancement could be intelligence or some other ability. The animals have to be from Earth and not supernatural, imaginary species, etc. The means of enhancement must be something other than just breeding for the desired characteristic - I'm looking for gene splicing, bionics, etc. etc.

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" - In the PKD short story original, where the Deckerd character was questioning his humanity (or androidicity) while dreaming of possessing an electric sheep, as some sort of cultural mea culpa for the near extermination of natural lifeforms by ... something that isn't made clear. The enhancement the sheep has is, of course, that it exists, unlike most animals. Even if it is electric.

[Disembodied]

In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, all the franchises of Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong are guarded by "Rat Things", also known as Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Units - cybernetically augmented, armoured, nuclear-powered pitbulls, capable of moving faster than the speed of sound (although they try not to, at least not in built-up areas). When not out hurting bad people, they spend their time in a black-and-white metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow from trees, and blood-drenched Frisbees sail through the air, waiting to be caught.

[ffutures]

Rick and Morty, Season 1, Episode 2 - LAWNMOWER DOG.

Not sure of the distribution of Rick and Morty around the world but check it out if you get the chance. Not every episode is great but some are darn funny as are quite a few of the humorous bits within each episode.

That's no. 3, and one I don't know at all - have an MBP for that.

Another simian, no rule against that?
Mr. Pogo from The Umbrella Academy is an accomplished and eloquent superchimp after getting some serum injection.

Another good one, and no. 4 - have a virtual cookie so that Mr. Pogo can have one!

Does "artificial" require "deliberate"? IF you dredge out James Herbert's "Rats" series, ISTR that the original rats were unintended mutants from some radiation leakage from ... I'd have to research it. Which I just did :

investigating possible clues as to the rats' origins and comes to the conclusion that they were illegally smuggled into the country by a zoologist named William Bartlett Schiller from an island near New Guinea which had been near some nuclear tests

It's a very open question if you class this as crap SF, or crap horror, or somewhere in between. Clearly the author was trying to apply a veneer of SF onto a horror story, to try to pick up some more readers.

Yes, that's OK, and number 5 - have an MBP for the first radioactive mutant, and the poisoned chalice!

Androids... and Snow Crash... don't make it because we already have five, and Rockdoctor gets a virtual "bad robot" smack with a rolled up newspaper for posting two entries only 15 minutes or so apart... Fortunately Rats was first, if it had been second I would have disqualified it!

[RockDoctor]

Oh dear. Thinking of something to put into the chalice.

[RockDoctor]

Oh dear. Thinking of something to put into the chalice.

Right. Here's one for you. Someone mentioned Rick'n'Morty recently, which recently had an episode where Morty "disappears" an enemy by .. well essentially making him disappear up his own jacksie using two portals linking parts of the enemy's own body. Schlurp, straight down the rabbit hole of infinite regression.
In a different universe - mixing magic and SF, Mathematics & Psychology student Larry Niven had a demon condemned to return to collect the protagonist's soul inside a pentagram ... which the protagonist had drawn on the demons paunch. Demon reappears inside pentagram, which re-draws onto the demons now-smaller paunch ; demon reappears inside the pentagram drawn on his paunch, which re-draws on the demon's smaller paunch ...

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum

So, can we get five examples of infinite regression as a plot point, in something vaguely SF. Infinite regression towards (but never getting to) zero, infinite regression towards a finite non-zero value (MBPs for telling us what the convergent point is and why it's a plot point). Going to infinity is probably too easy - start walking and don't stop - but if you want to go there ...
I'll give a third example (and take it off the table) : in Poul Anderson's Tau-Zero, the spacecraft can't stop accelerating so it's velocity tends towards (but never gets to) c, and it's relativistic time scaling factor tends towards (but never gets to) zero. That's only "Tau-Zero" off the table ; probably Poul Anderson has other relevant stories, and tending towards c is too popular a problem to take off the table, so I'll leave that available.

I don't know the Star Trek universe well enough, but I bet their screenwriters have abused the idea badly on more than a few occasions; go there and you'll need to provide a coherent explanation of why the plot depends on the infinite regression.

[ffutures]

Not sure if this counts - One of Brian Aldiss' novels, Report on Probability A, contains an apparently infinite loop of parallel worlds whose inhabitants are observing one world and being observed by another. They're all trying to work out what's happening in the world they're observing, but will never quite get there because the occupants of the world they're watching are similarly obsessed with the world they're observing and the next world of the loop can't see it.

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

[RockDoctor]

Not sure if this counts - One of Brian Aldiss' novels, Report on Probability A, contains an apparently infinite loop of parallel worlds whose inhabitants are observing one world and being observed by another. They're all trying to work out what's happening in the world they're observing, but will never quite get there because the occupants of the world they're watching are similarly obsessed with the world they're observing and the next world of the loop can't see it.

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

Hmmm, that's a direction I hadn't expected, but... chasing down multiple (parallel-ish) universes I can go for. But I'll take the rest of that genre (Ummm, several Terry Pratchett (& Stephen Baxter) books- the Long Earth series, at least one Pouls Anderson story,, the "Quantum Leap" TV series, and a universe of others) off the table.

[Nite Owl]

Not sure if this will meet your definition of "Regression" but here goes. The Krell civilization from the movie FORBIDDEN PLANET.

They built the machinery and a power source to be able to create anything they desired from nothing simply by thinking about it. Unfortunately they did not take the entirety of an individual's personality into account. They forgot about the sublimated, unconscious, and very angry part of one's personality that Freud called the Id. They thought that they had advanced beyond such thoughts and had mastered their own baser instincts. The entirety of the Krell's Ids were unleashed into living reality as they slept on that first night after the activation of the machinery and power source. The result being that this incredibly advanced civilization was completely killed off by each other's now released Ids in that single night. They themselves created the mechanism of their destruction by their own subconsciously buried thoughts and desires.

[ffutures]

OK - another one, it isn't explicitly stated to be infinite but it pretty much has to be - the end of the first Men in Black film. After establishing that there is an entire galaxy inside a small gem, and saving the day, the camera pulls back and up until it shows the earth, then the solar system, and eventually our galaxy, all of which turn out to be inside a small ball which aliens are using for a game that looks like marbles. So... presumably wherever those creatures are will turn out to a galaxy inside another bubble, and so forth.

https://meninblack.fandom.com/wiki/Arquilian_Galaxy

https://youtu.be/OKnpPCQyUec

[RockDoctor]

OK - another one, it isn't explicitly stated to be infinite but it pretty much has to be - the end of the first Men in Black film. After establishing that there is an entire galaxy inside a small gem, and saving the day, the camera pulls back and up until it shows the earth, then the solar system, and eventually our galaxy, all of which turn out to be inside a small ball which aliens are using for a game that looks like marbles. So... presumably wherever those creatures are will turn out to a galaxy inside another bubble, and so forth.

https://meninblack.fandom.com/wiki/Arquilian_Galaxy

That's good. Who hasn't had thoughts like that, particularly on being introduced to the (fairly inaccurate, seriously non-QM) "solar system" model of the electrons circling the nucleus of an atom. Very ... I almost quoted a famously unreadable geologist, but I'm not going to! That one is still on the table, if someone can find an SF context it was used in.

Not sure if this will meet your definition of "Regression" but here goes. The Krell civilization from the movie FORBIDDEN PLANET. (Then the Krells killing themselves off through their darkest Ideations.)

No, I don't think so, really. It only goes one step down, from "people's" conscious minds to their unconscious. There's no real requirement for it to go to another cycle. Sorry.

The current runners and riders are :

1. - ffutures with Report on Probability A,
2. - ffutures again with the MIB "universes within atoms within universes within ... " situation.
3. -
4. -
5. -

[ffutures]

Not sure which geologist you're talking about, but geology does remind me of another possibility. In Terry Pratchett's SF novel Strata (1981) the heroine works for a company that terraforms worlds for colonization. As part of this they give each world an authentic-looking fossil record, with very strict quality control to prevent the inevitable jokes such as dinosaurs wearing watches and carrying "End nuclear testing" signs, continents carved with pornographic geographical features, etc. to avoid blowing the minds of the colonists' descendents.

"Humanity appears to be merely the latest of a long series of intelligent species who have evolved, altered the universe to better suit themselves, and then died out before the next species arose and started the cycle all over again. Before humans, there were the Great Spindle Kings, a race of acutely claustrophobic telepaths, who could live only a few hundred per planet and therefore built entire worlds from scratch to accommodate their population. Before them were the Wheelers, who were themselves preceded by increasingly alien races extending all the way back to the Big Bang."

It eventually turns out that all of the evidence for this is another fabrication - possibly humanity created it in its own back-story, or someone else created it to make humans feel more at home, it isn't clear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)

DON'T READ THE ENTRY IF YOU DISLIKE SPOILERS!

[ffutures]

Just realised which geologist you mean (I think) - if I'm right the Pratchett book definitely dips from that well!

[Disembodied]

It's not explicitly infinite, although the possibility is implied: Rick Sanchez's microverse battery in the Rick & Morty episode "The Ricks Must Be Crazy". Rick has created a "microverse" containing intelligent life and, in the guise of a benevolent alien, gives the inhabitants treadmills to generate electricity to power their civilisation - although unbeknownst to them Rick siphons off about 2/3 of the power to power his car. When the microverse battery malfunctions, Rick and Morty go inside the battery and discover that one of the microverse inhabitants has come up with a better method of powering their civilisation: a "miniverse", whose inhabitants work on similar treadmills and unwittingly provide power for the microverse. And then a miniverse scientist creates a "teenyverse", whose inhabitants … etc.

[RockDoctor]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strata_(novel)

Well, the Big Bang was a moderately long time ago, but nowhere near infinitely long ago. Plus, of course, there was a need for a generation or several of stars to generate the "metals" needed to build planets. Much though I like Pterry, I don't think so on this one.

(And it's at the relatively SF end of Pterry's spectrum.)

[RockDoctor]

Just realised which geologist you mean (I think) - if I'm right the Pratchett book definitely dips from that well!

I'm pretty sure Pterry has read of the geologist in question. If there was a dent in the wall of his workshop/ office, he might even have tried reading the original itself - I could only manage a page or so before moving onto the digested version.