Science Fiction Trivia

[ffutures]

OK, vague memory stirred and I took a look at the Stargate wiki and found the Sangraal, an anti-Ori weapon associated with the Holy Grail

https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Sangraal

Doesn't actually look much like a chalice but it's definitely associated with the Holy Grail.

[Commander_X]

Babylon 5, season 1, episode 15, titled "Grail".

Aldous Gajic, states his mission is to search for "a sacred vessel of regeneration, known also as The Cup of the Godess, or, by its more common name, The Holly Grail"

[RockDoctor]

nah , you dont get out of it that easily! its yours till the end of time, unless you ask an easy enough question.

i am wracking my memories for a chalise in sci fi. remembered a few from fantasy but that does not count...

Same here. There are grailstones in the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer, do they count?

Hmm, PJF's "grailsrones" have some very interesting properties, but thery're not "chalices".
I think I'll call this a "scrub" and go back into the pile ...

OK, let's try this (inspired by "Cody") : an orrery was mentioned.
Three SF "orreries" - devices designed to give directional data to "Capt.A.N.Other" on their flight/ pursuit/ escape across the Galaxy. The device should give some (3-ish)-dimensional information about the target location, compared to the current velocity vector.
An example (and therefore off the table) : in Asimov's Foundation, the flight of [Irritating teenager], [pilot + wife], token academic, and the Mule is guided by a Galactic map. Later "Bail Channis" uses the same in "2nd Foundation/".
That sort of map. Either ignoring relativity (given time-free "hyper space", or something ekse that does terrible violations of Einsteinina geometry. "Bail Channis" used it for his argument about "Stars End" = Tazende", as seen from Trantor.

That sort of thing. Non-relativistic Galactic-scale maps.
Round two?

[Cholmondely]

<Red Herring>
Speaking of Orreries, I've a chum who just bought a (Ptolemaic) Armillary Sphere. - Just out of interest, any mentions of them in Sci Fi?

Oh! And does anybody know what the Sphera Obliqua is in Ptolemaic Astronomy. Trying to work out his proof of the earth being in the middle of the sphere of the heavens (Almagest Book 1, Chapter 5).

If we imagined [the earth] removed towards the zenith or the nadir of some observer, then, if he were at sphaera recta, he would never experience equinox, since the horizon would always divide the heavens into two unequal parts, one above and one below the earth; if he were at sphaera obliqua, either, again, equinox would never occur at all, or, [if it did occur,] it would not be at a position halfway between summer and winter solstices, since these intervals would necessarily be unequal, because the equator, which is the greatest of all parallel circles drawn about the poles of the [daily] motion, would no longer be bisected by the horizon; instead [the horizon would bisect] one of the circles parallel to the equator, either to the north or to the south of it.

</Red Herring>

Orrery:


Ptolemy with an Armillary Sphere:

[RockDoctor]

<Red Herring>
Speaking of Orreries, I've a chum who just bought a (Ptolemaic) Armillary Sphere. - Just out of interest, any mentions of them in Sci Fi?
Frankly, Asimov was writing for a pre-computer society (does Foundation actually use a slide rule somewhere? I don't think so, but I'm pretty sure they're in the "Robot" stories at various points. Anybody writing since the 1960s would have looked at the problem as that of managing (including updating) a database, and displaying a sub-set of the data.
I "get" alidades and astrolabes, (hell, I've even tried surveying sites with a plane table and alidade - a chain survey is quicker when there's only one of you), but I've never really "got" armiliary spheres. I suspect they're basically a tool for getting your sense of adding (or subtracting) hour angles for various objects at various locations. And probably wrapping around at 360/0 degrees too. Which I grant is headache-inducing, but once you've got past the headache it's not too bad. Been there, done that, got that tee-shirt, wrote tools and steered those wells to their target locations. I wrote the tools specifically to avoid having to do the maths in my head at 03:00 after a 20 hour shift.

But, outside Asimov, do you have any SF orreries?

[Disembodied]

They stood in a vast circular space with a floor of gleaming gold, a velvet-black ceiling and what appeared to be a single all-round window looking out onto a whitely shining surface and a purple-black sky where stars shone steadily. Above them, suspended as though on nothing, hung a massive orrery; a model of the solar system with a brilliant yellow-white ball of light in the middle and the various planets shown as glassy globes of the appropriate appearance all fixed by slender poles and shafts to thin hoops of blackly shining metal like wet jet.

—Iain M. Banks, Feersum Endjinn

[ffutures]

OK, let's try this (inspired by "Cody") : an orrery was mentioned.
Three SF "orreries" - devices designed to give directional data to "Capt.A.N.Other" on their flight/ pursuit/ escape across the Galaxy. The device should give some (3-ish)-dimensional information about the target location, compared to the current velocity vector.
An example (and therefore off the table) : in Asimov's Foundation, the flight of [Irritating teenager], [pilot + wife], token academic, and the Mule is guided by a Galactic map. Later "Bail Channis" uses the same in "2nd Foundation/".
That sort of map. Either ignoring relativity (given time-free "hyper space", or something ekse that does terrible violations of Einsteinina geometry. "Bail Channis" used it for his argument about "Stars End" = Tazende", as seen from Trantor.

That sort of thing. Non-relativistic Galactic-scale maps.
Round two?

They appear to exist in the Star Trek universe e.g.





Oh, and there's an orrery aboard a spaceship plan in my Forgotten Futures RPG, but I don't think it counts:

https://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff11/patrol.pdf - scroll down to the big version and look at the astrogator's table behind the pilot seats, it pays to magnify it a bit... Several other small jokes aboard that ship if you look carefully.

[RockDoctor]

Disembodied, with Fearsum Endjinn - which I read not that long ago.

And ffutures with some Star Trek-y examples. The first might just be wallpaper, but the second definitely looks like it's displaying some sort of navigational ... stuff. (I do my 3-d navigation with numbers and only draw pictures inside my head, but hey - that's probably why I passed Mineralogy and Crystallography, unlike some of my classmates.)


Next orrery gets the chalice! And you don't get to say that too often!

[ffutures]

Not sure if this counts:

The Rebellion war room for the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope looks like it has numerous tracking boards being updated Battle of Britain style, and given the distances they're presumably being updated by messages arriving faster than light.

Sorry, the only video I can find on line is this, which shows four versions of the battle from different edits of the film

https://youtu.be/JFGp4A9GlkM

The boards are passed by Princess Leia about five seconds into the scene, to the left during a cut to the control room at 2.50, and seen again at several points e.g. at 3.59 when someone is updating in the foreground.

There's also the radar thingy that shows the Death Star position, but I think that's a computer prediction rather than an exact track.

[Cholmondely]

I "get" alidades and astrolabes, (hell, I've even tried surveying sites with a plane table and alidade - a chain survey is quicker when there's only one of you), but I've never really "got" armiliary spheres. I suspect they're basically a tool for getting your sense of adding (or subtracting) hour angles for various objects at various locations. And probably wrapping around at 360/0 degrees too. Which I grant is headache-inducing, but once you've got past the headache it's not too bad. Been there, done that, got that tee-shirt, wrote tools and steered those wells to their target locations. I wrote the tools specifically to avoid having to do the maths in my head at 03:00 after a 20 hour shift.

Apparently they came in two sizes. The smaller was used for teaching, whilst the larger could have a telescope or whatever mounted in it and was used for making observations.

[ffutures]

And I just found another one by pure chance, in Independence Day: Resurgence, which I never knew existed - it's in an excerpt in this "What Culture" video glimpsed at 7:04 - I'm not actually sure it counts though, looks like it's a computer simulation rather than real time data.

10 Better Movies That Were Secretly Hidden In Films
https://youtu.be/2LgSZ3vVcZM

Forgot to say that I actually own a couple of orrerys - one of these (but very old and battered):

https://www.cochranes.co.uk/show_produc ... 0&catid=56

This was auctioned on eBay when I was an educational technician, I tried to persuade the school to buy it but they weren't interested so I bought it for myself for about £60, which even then was about a fifth of what it was worth.

and one of the bigger plastic ones with a lot of arms and not very scale model planets, which I took to RPG cons a couple of times when I was running my Weinbaum-based RPG setting.

[RockDoctor]

Not sure if this counts:

The Rebellion war room for the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: ad nauseam

Well that'll do for me. The chalice is yours.

[ffutures]

Sorry, been a busy week and I missed noticing my "victory"

Let's have five SF stories / films / whatever in which RUBBISH is an important part of the story. By rubbish I mean things like household waste, sewage, industrial grunge, broken hardware, etc. etc.

A good fantasy example, so not eligible, is Harry Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, in which the hero is an EPA investigator assigned to handle magical pollution from various industries such as potion and charms manufacture. You can use other works by Turtledove if relevant, can't actually think of any but he's a VERY prolific author so I could be wrong.

Usual rules - no two by the same author / creator or set in the same fictional universe. And please only post one answer at a time, and leave a few hours for other people to respond before posting again.

[Disembodied]

Iain M. Banks’s short story "Cleaning Up", published in The State of the Art. Alien "Gifts" start popping into existence on Earth - except they're mildly/wildly malfunctioning rejects being dumped by a passing factory ship. Contains the line "First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich" (the alien translation devices aren't very good, either).

[Nite Owl]

Star Wars - A New Hope (original film) there are two instances of Rubbish interaction. First: After the somewhat rescue of Princess Leia from a prison cell on the Deathstar the Heroes end up almost squished in a Rubbish compactor. Second: When the Heroes do actually make it off the Deathstar they do so by hiding the Millennium Falcon amongst the Rubbish dump that precedes a Hyperspace Jump. As we all know the entire escape was completely Rubbish as Vader allowed them escape in order to follow them to the Rebel Base. Oh so tricky that Vader can be.