Oolite Bulletins

OK, another one. Early versions of the rocket used to send baby Kal-El (aka Superman) to Earth. The final version at the bottom right of this page (from a 1961 comic but fairly typical) seems to be about 2.5 x the length of a baby, even if he's a big baby that's probably less than 2.5 metres.

ffutures wrote: ↑Wed Jul 29, 2020 11:18 pm

OK, another one. Early versions of the rocket used to send baby Kal-El (aka Superman) to Earth.

OK, that's canonical, I think … that makes five. ffutures has the fish!

A couple of other tiny ships from cartoons and comics: the Nibblonian spaceship from Futurama:



and Spaceman Spiff's craft, from Calvin and Hobbes:



Some slightly more literary ones could include the spaceship from John Wyndham's short story "Meteor", or the starwisp Field Circus, a Coke-can-sized lump of computronium containing a number of uploaded intelligences, from Charles Stross's Accelerando.

OK... looking out of the window I can see that it's a nice evening, which made me think about the weather. So let's have five SF stories / films / whatever in which weather is important in some way. It could be that something going wrong with the weather drives the plot, it could be that weather control is important to the plot, etc. etc.

What I don't want is things where weather is simply there for scene setting - "it was a dark and stormy night" and variations thereof. Weather must be an important plot element, and preferably not something that just comes up once in a while - for example, 2000 AD had a Judge Dredd story about Megacity One's weather control going wrong, but it wasn't a regular theme of the stories.

Usual rules about only one answer per source / author / etc., and we'll stick with only one answer per post (I've been as guilty as everyone else in that respect) I think it will help to keep people more interested.

movie 2012 ( weather influenced by solar flare )

cbr wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2020 10:02 pm

movie 2012 ( weather influenced by solar flare )

Definitely - it was one of the ones I was thinking of for this question. Four to go.

Bruce Sterling's novel Heavy Weather, about a group of storm-chasers in a near future where environmental collapse is causing increasingly destructive storms.

Disembodied wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 9:05 am

Bruce Sterling's novel Heavy Weather, about a group of storm-chasers in a near future where environmental collapse is causing increasingly destructive storms.

Definitely - that's two.

Ray Bradbury's short story "The Long Rain", set on a good old-fashioned wet-jungle Venus.

Disembodied wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 5:39 pm

Ray Bradbury's short story "The Long Rain", set on a good old-fashioned wet-jungle Venus.

Another good one - two to go.

OK... it's gone strangely quiet.

Some suggestions

A British author wrote at least several weather-related apocalypses in the 1960s. One of his later works became a David Cronenberg film.

A British film from the same era, filmed mostly in London, showed a weather related disaster triggered by nuclear testing.

Mentioned a few questions ago, a 1960s story about governments and weather control

And (much more recently) a series of TV movies which uniquely combine meteorology and Ichthyology.

ffutures wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 6:30 pm

Mentioned a few questions ago, a 1960s story about governments and weather control

Ben Bova's The Weathermakers, perhaps?

Disembodied wrote: ↑Tue Aug 04, 2020 4:24 pm

ffutures wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 6:30 pm

Mentioned a few questions ago, a 1960s story about governments and weather control

Ben Bova's The Weathermakers, perhaps?

Actually no, but that's a good answer - one to go!

this might be a longshot but ... Dune

the hot dry weather on the planet iscentral to the story. The worms need dry sand to live in , they make the spice.. the Fremen and their stillsuits to survive in the hostile climate .

worth a shot.....

spud42 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 05, 2020 2:05 pm

this might be a longshot but ... Dune

the hot dry weather on the planet iscentral to the story. The worms need dry sand to live in , they make the spice.. the Fremen and their stillsuits to survive in the hostile climate .

worth a shot.....

Well, the climate is a big part of the story, and of the Fremen culture, so I think that's a yes - it's a steady thing, but so is the rain on Venus in the Bradbury story. And that makes number 5, and puts Spud42 into the hot seat!

The clues I gave:
A British author wrote at least several weather-related apocalypses in the 1960s. One of his later works became a David Cronenberg film.
- J.G. Ballard; The Drought, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, possibly others; the Cronenberg film was Crash. That should have been "at least three", not "at least several," of course.

A British film from the same era, filmed mostly in London, showed a weather related disaster triggered by nuclear testing.
- The Day The Earth Caught Fire, filmed largely in the offices of the Daily Express and the surrounding area.

Mentioned a few questions ago, a 1960s story about governments and weather control
- The Weather Man by Theodore L. Thomas

And (much more recently) a series of TV movies which uniquely combine meteorology and Ichthyology.
Sharknado and sequels, of course!

Over to Spud!

I'm kicking myself for several of those now. But here's one more that just came to mind: The Matrix.