Science Fiction Trivia

[Cholmondely]

Clym is perfectly British!

[Wildeblood]

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

Cholmzberger gave the first answer, too. That makes 4, not 3.

[spud42]

i sit corrected... 4 down the nest sucker gets the chalice... poison optional.

[spud42]

lets speed this up a bit..
a couple of clues and there are many clues available
British author PFH
STNG enemy "species

[ffutures]

My guess would be Peter F Hamilton - the trouble is that I more or less gave up on him when his books began to be longer than Tom Clancy's. At a guess, Misspent Youth, which is a stand-alone novel about a rejuvenation process. Or it might be something in one of his space opera series, but I have no idea which one.

[RockDoctor]

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....

I'm trying to remember if Darwin experienced a cyclone? (Darwin as in "Beagle", not Darwin as in "people complain about the mayor.") IIRC, they got through the Magellan Straits (var : "Beagle Channel") without undue horrors. Not that you'd try going through in a sail boat if the weather looked dodgy. Awfy hard rocks for wooden hulls. And I can't remember reports of any other significant weather. Not that Darwin would have kept contact with his lunch on a summer afternoon mill pond - notoriously not endowed with sea legs.

[RockDoctor]

lets speed this up a bit..
a couple of clues and there are many clues available
British author PFH
STNG enemy "species

Taking "PFH" as an understandable misspelling for Iain M Banks, in Excession the ImprobablyNamed GSV, after hearing about the eponymous Excession, dumps most of it's passengers and sets about haring across the galaxy while rebuilding itself using nanobots into a TOTAL SPOILER of a SPOILED SPOILER.
The Culture in general makes a fair amount of use of nanobots, but there's also a lot of "genofixing" for hero-self-repair. Which is really, nanotech downgraded to actual molecules.

When (not if) diabetic glucose monitoring implants are re-engineered to release a psychotropic drug on demand, how will the police detect people carrying drug paraphernalia? Yeah - I know : you have to prove yourself innocent, not "they" have to prove you guilty. As expected.



I note the originator is in Northern Territories, and remember a neighbouring (U.Queensland) researcher who coined "nanobes" for a peculiar lifeform she discovered in oilwell samples, instead of the alternative "nanites" (I think in use at the time) and "nannobacteria" (who allowed that mis-spelling through peer review?) If you follow up on it, you'll see why I remember her as a student.
I've no idea what, if anything, happened to the "nanobes." From the silence, I guess they turned out to be a known - if obscure - fungal life form. Though how they got DNA/ RNA along such fine filaments remains a question.


STNG : aren't the Borg stuffed to the gills (or gill arches - cheekbones, jaws, larynx, etc) with nannites ? (To add to the aplhabet soup of alternatives.)

[spud42]

i think i will giv it to ffutures.
that was not the book i was thinking off but a 15 minute googling does shoe its the start of the commonwealth books.
PFH doesnt say the rejuvination tech is nano but its hard to see it as not being nano.
I was thinking more of the void trilogy where humans not only have rejuvination but also defensive and offensive capabilities.. ie Aaron and The Courier.. and to the extreme Gore . so ffutures gets the chalice of malice..

not sure about rockdocs IMB references but too late anyway..lol
but yes the other clue was The Borg. they assimilate by injecting the victim with nanites...

[ffutures]

Oh joy.... OK, we've done straightforward time travel, let's go for something simple - five stories / films / TV series or episodes / comics / whatever that are built around the idea of parallel worlds, preferably involving some contact or conflict between the parallel worlds, MBPs for unusual and particularly good examples. No two from the same fictional universe.

To make it just slightly harder, the Marvel and DC universes, which have dozens of slightly different timelines, are specifically excluded. And no two from the same fictional universe or author etc.

[Cholmondely]

H Beam Piper: Paratime Series (eg.: Gunpowder God, Down Styphon...). Zillllions of parallllel whatnoteries but action starts in ours before moving on to the main one.

[ffutures]

H Beam Piper: Paratime Series (eg.: Gunpowder God, Down Styphon...). Zillllions of parallllel whatnoteries but action starts in ours before moving on to the main one.

Definitely - low-hanging fruit but well worth plucking. Have a MBP for being the first to answer.

[Wildeblood]

... the idea of parallel worlds, preferably involving some contact or conflict between the parallel worlds...

WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THAT BLOODY TV SHOW I'M TRYING TO REMEMBER!? Not Sliders, the other one. You can tell I didn't actually watch it. Well, I did watch a half an episode during a series re-run.

Anyway, in the meantime, any recent Star Trek, wherein the producers became infatuated with the alternative universe where the United Federation of Planets is culturally transposed with the Klingon Empire, and called the Terran Empire if I recall correctly. (Recent attempts at Star Trek are also things I don't like.)

[Wildeblood]

Fringe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_(TV_series)

(There's an hour I'll never get back. )

[ffutures]

... the idea of parallel worlds, preferably involving some contact or conflict between the parallel worlds...

WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THAT BLOODY TV SHOW I'M TRYING TO REMEMBER!? Not Sliders, the other one. You can tell I didn't actually watch it. Well, I did watch a half an episode during a series re-run.

Anyway, in the meantime, any recent Star Trek, wherein the producers became infatuated with the alternative universe where the United Federation of Planets is culturally transposed with the Klingon Empire, and called the Terran Empire if I recall correctly. (Recent attempts at Star Trek are also things I don't like.)

Definitely - lots of alternate universes in Star Trek, most notably the Mirrorverse that was called the Terran Empire. More low-hanging fruit, of course, but nothing wrong with that. Three to go...

Fringe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_(TV_series)

(There's an hour I'll never get back. )

From what I can recall of Fringe e.g. not much there's definitely a parallel worlds element in there, so have a MBP for picking one that isn't quite so obvious.

Two to go!

[Wildeblood]

Two to go!

What, I don't get credit for Sliders?

Okay. In that case, Schrödinger's Cat: The Universe Next Door.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B ... at_Trilogy