Science Fiction Trivia

[ffutures]

Brockian Ultra-Cricket

"Brockian Ultra-Cricket is a curious game which involves suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away. "Let's be blunt, it's a nasty game," says The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Mice love this game."

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bro ... ra-Cricket

[Malacandra]

Hadaul. Played on Dar Sai, The Face by Jack Vance. Kind of a king-of-the-ring brawl on a field made of concentric circles, with temporary alliances with other players, duplicity, and as much dirty unarmed combat as you like even if actually killing opponents is frowned upon.

[spud42]

Brockian Ultra-Cricket makes 4 and

Hadaul makes 5
take it away Malacandra.

[spud42]

anyone hear crickets??

speaking of cricket as number 4 answer Brockian Ultra-Cricketwould you like to pose the next question ffutures ?

malacandra seems to be AWOL and i tried to PM him/her.....

[Cody]

Cricket? Is that any way to win a World Cup? Roll on the Ashes - proper cricket!

[spud42]

yes, well a second over would have been better than a countback.. but the rules are there from the beginning so you have to play to the refs whistle ( to mix metaphors..lol)

[ffutures]

Sorry, only just saw this. Let's see...

Let's have five SF works (all media types) about the end of the world - by which I mean its complete destruction by one means or another, no half-measures, or at a minimum the complete eradication of life. All must be from different fandoms (e.g. no giving the same thing as a book and TV series, no giving different episodes of the same TV show or whatever) and let's have all of the ends different, e.g. if one example has the world eaten by space piranha, no other space piranha stories may be used, even if they come from a different fandom.

[Cody]

The Forge of God by Greg Bear.

[Disembodied]

It's not really what the book is about, so I don't know if it counts, but The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy begins with the Earth being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

[spud42]

seeing as disembodied stole my line..lol
here is a curve ball for you

WALL-E earth destroyed by over consumption and waste piling up. 700 years later they return after the last robot on earth still trying to clean up the mess, finds a plant and shows EVA the probe sent to check the planet.

[CaptSolo]

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). Destruction by nuclear holocaust.
"In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneath_t ... f_the_Apes

[RockDoctor]

Let's have five SF works (all media types) about the end of the world - by which I mean its complete destruction by one means or another, no half-measures, or at a minimum the complete eradication of life.

OK, try this. The particular world destroyed isn't specified, so I'll take Charlie Stross's "Iron Sunrise", which starts with somebody dropping a bomb of unspecified mechanism into the star, causing it to spontaneously convert from hydrogen/ helium to iron-56. The consequences for the planet orbiting it and the civilisation on it are not good. If not total destruction, then eroding down to the mantle. Which is, in the First Aid manual's words, "incompatible with life"

[ffutures]

Wow - that was fast.

The Forge of God by Greg Bear. - definitely, since the destruction of the Earth drives the plot.
Hitch-Hiker's Guide - yes again, you can't get much more destroyed than total obliteration to make way for a hyperspace bypass (even if later books bottled out and restored the status quo), plus it was thinking about Ultra-Cricket that gave me the idea for this question.
Wall-E - definitely, no life surviving except occasional plants works for me.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes - yes, total annihilation of man and ape (and everything else) certainly counts
Iron Sunrise - well, I could be pedantic about this one but I didn't specifically say OUR world so I think it deserves to be counted.

OK, we have five answers, all of which are fine by me, so Rockdoctor wins the chance to rack his or her brains and come up with the next round...

[RockDoctor]

OK, we have five answers, all of which are fine by me, so Rockdoctor wins the chance to rack his or her brains and come up with the next round...

I'll try to think of something while I'm making my tea.

[RockDoctor]

OK, we have five answers, all of which are fine by me, so Rockdoctor wins the chance to rack his or her brains and come up with the next round...

OK, I'm going to be a bit creative, because I'm out of ideas.
Many SF writers enter into collaborations (I saw that I'd left Greg Benford and Larry Niven's "Shipstar" on Dad's bookshelf when I visited recently ; it's still there, I wasn't impressed). What's the largest collaboration anyone can think of?

I'll rule out things like the the football teams of scriptwriters that work on a series of Star Trek. That's more like a common universe with lots of books with one to three collaborators. We can be fairly loose on the meaning of "SF", since after the first couple of rounds, the field is going to get pretty thin.

I think we can play this with a ratchet - I'll start the ball rolling with a trio, then someone else needs to find a foursome, the next a quintet ... until it stalls. Obviously, if someone has an octet, we can leap straight up to that one. As clear as obsidian?

So, the ball starts rolling with a trio - the excellently dark novella "The Children's Hour: A Novel of the Man-Kzin Wars" (1991) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling.

Totally unconnected - how on earth did I end up at this, from checking that?