Science Fiction Trivia

[Wildeblood]

oi!! what did i do to be penalised with a point??? lol

Looks like the chalice might be yours soon. Unless you can claim the immunity card.

[spud42]

well i got a cyclone due to cross my front lawn tomorrow morning so what the heck? i might as well answer.
George Orwell. 1984.

[Wildeblood]

I would have accepted films like Idiocracy, Colossus, Terminator, Slaughterbots as point-scoring answers.

It was supposed to be an instruction manual, not a warning:

The anti-example was, of course, Edward Luttwak's 1968 classic, Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook.

Over to you.

well i got a cyclone due to cross my front lawn tomorrow morning...

Batten down the hatches, thoughts and prayers, etc. Let us know you're okay as soon as you can, please.

[spud42]

not my first rodeo... i survived cyclonr tracey darwin christmas 1974.... we just had the 50 year anniversary and lets just say the cyclone monument? memorial? display? whatever it is was an insult. looked like it had nothing to do with darwin or the cyclone... it looks like a tree fro "The Lorax"

ok give me a bit and i will dredge up a question....

[spud42]

damp but alive. cyclone turned into an anticlimax for me but still dod a lot of damage elsewhere and a lot of flooding over a wide area.

no idea if this has been done before or if how long ago so the only thing i can think of to restart the trivia is.......

lets try for the usual 5 instances of nano technology being used biologically to enhance a beings ( doesent have to be human ) health or possibly offensive capabilities...

I remember reading something recently but i lisented to several hundred books in the last year while driving to and between jobs...

the usual rules only one per author etc... please provid proof as i will randomly check your homework....

[Cholmondely]

L.E. Modesitt: Octagonal Raven pp21-23 (describes a superhuman tennis game):

Someone on the other side of the hedge spoke-in a low voice, not meant for us.
...There go the modern gods...
...the best genetics and nanites creds can buy...
...They're people.
...No... they're not. They can bend iron bars bare-handed. Could you have raised your racket before one of their serves went by you?

This is a running theme in many of his Sci Fi novels - the combination of gene manipulation and nanite technology to make people super-human.

[spud42]

ok that is definitely 1. MBP for an author i havent read, yet...

[Wildeblood]

... instances of nano technology being used biologically to enhance a beings ( doesn't have to be human ) health or possibly offensive capabilities...

I might suggest, fully acknowledging it's a borderline example, Neal Stephenson's highly anticipated follow-up to Snow Crash, The Diamond Age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamo ... Characters

Bud – A petty criminal and "thete", or tribeless individual, Bud is Tequila's boyfriend and Nell and Harv's father. He is obsessed with his muscular body, and possesses a cranial weapon implant (known as a "skull gun"), which he uses to mug people. When he robs a couple who are members of the powerful Ashanti phyle, he is executed for this crime early in the novel.

Bud's manner of execution is thus: he is injected with nanites, each comprising a diamond sphere of hard vacuum, and left to wait for the verdict of his trial at the end of a pier; when he is convicted, a radio signal is sent and all of the nanites self-destruct, releasing their deadly payload of nothingness to disrupt Bud's normal blood-flow; Bud falls, dead, off the pier and is washed down river, his corpse to become someone else, somewhere else's problem.

It's ridiculous. And, it sets the tone for the ridiculous, pointless, and excessively long novel that follows. I bailed out on page 328; the first novel I ever gave up on without finishing.

[spud42]

is that the only use of nano?

[Wildeblood]

is that the only use of nano?

No, it was published in 1995, so has all the ideas about how nanotech could develop that were current at that time, liquid metal etc. (And, it's been more than 25 years since I read it, so I don't recall details.) The problem is that it's a stupidly unfocused and long book, every idea gets mentioned in passing, but none get developed in detail. So e.g. one reader might remember the robot horse and another might not, then if you ask for a story about robot animals a disagreement could ensue.

As mentioned in the wikipedia article, there's a tribe of people called Drummers, who have a hive mind enabled by bio-nano-tech, but the specifics aren't discussed. One character goes off to investigate them, leaves his robot horse outside their cave, joins in their weird, mind-meld orgy, emerges five years later to have his horse still standing where he left it (the battery hasn't even gone flat, because it's the Future), and goes home to his wife. And as a reader, I was just wondering, "Okay, what was that chapter in aid of?"

An absolutely worthless book; a product of the era when authors were being paid per word, and allowed too much say in the (lack of) editing of their work.

[ffutures]

Doctor Who had alien medical nanites (called Nanogenes) used to "cure" humans in The Empty Child and sequel The Doctor Dances (2005), unfortunately the programming is a bit wrong which is why the patients end up growing gasmask faces and wandering around saying "Are you my mummy?" Eventually they're cured.

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Nanogene

Doctor Who also has Dalek puppets, which is basically nanogenes again, used to rebuild people as Daleks from the inside out. This makes them stronger with built-in death rays so I suppose is in some ways an improvement.

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Dalek_puppet

[spud42]

ok i will accept both of these, neither of these is what i was thinking of.

so 2 down 3 to go...

[ffutures]

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 adds any strength etc. over their normal health, so I'm not sure if it counts.

https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Nanote ... ery_System

[Cholmondely]

Wolf
Mima had grown accustomed to the taste of acid in her mouth. At first bitter, it now mingled inexorably with the sweet taste of potential freedom. Her body had put the extra rations and supplements supplied by her captors to good use: repairing damaged tissues, mending broken bone, improving her senses and slowly granting her some quite extraordinary physical abilities.
It had started quite slowly at first. Answering some distant call buried deep in her quadruple-helix DNA, her body began growing what would have appeared to the untrained eye as pea-sized cancerous buboes around her spleen. This was admittedly quite painful until, dutifully, Mima's hypothalamus released just the right amount of endorphins into her bloodstream.
Within a week, these growths had started producing their first crude nanites. This initial wave bolstered her immune and regenerative systems, increasing muscle and bone density and, most importantly, rebuilding and augmenting the buboes so they could create better nanites. That was when the real pain started.
The next few nights were hell as these new improved nanites began re-engineering her from the ground up. During this time, she started noticing small lumps growing in her mouth. Long channels along the sides of her upper gum line slowly expanded and hardened.
She soon discovered, to her cost, that pulling her mouth up in a wry smile would propel a fine stream of a strong acid from the front end of those glands. She burned herself really rather badly the first time she realised this, and she spent an uncomfortable few hours nursing second-degree burns before the nanites could start repairing the damage.
With some practice, Mima became quite proficient at producing a burst of acid aerosol once, sometimes twice a day. It was then she began to work on the door hinges and lock. Since hurting the doctor, the guards and especially that fat bastard vor Cheem had tried to avoid being anywhere near her.
So there she sat, slowly but happily eating her way out of confinement.

Rise Of The Kirin - An Oolite Novella By Commander Wyvern & ClymAngus

[spud42]

the stargate one seems a bit tenuous.
Cholmondely hit the nail on the head. so that makes 3.

still not the one i was mainly thinking about... A british author....