Science Fiction Trivia

[Commander_X]

Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson. […]

#4

[hiran]

Ok, 5 examples (you know the drill -- books, comics, games, movies or any presentation) where both robots _and_ AI are part of the story. Just one per author/series/worlds.

I, robot - by Arnold Schwarzenegger. No, the other one, the writer...

[Commander_X]

[...]
I, robot [...]

[although half an answer, due to the widely known reference, I dub this]

#5

[don't remember exactly the presence of AI in the written stories, but the movie with Will Smith definitely had it]

Hiran gets this turn.

[RockDoctor]

[don't remember exactly the presence of AI in the written stories, but the movie with Will Smith definitely had it]

I think "The Evitable Conflict" had Susan Calvin discussing the odd outcomes of the (unseen) "planetary management brains" with leaders of various districts of the Earth, then discussing the events with an anthropoid robot (closeted and acting as a politician) before coming to a conclusion whose nakedness I shall modestly cloak with "spoiler". The "Brains" and the "anthropoid robots" both use Asimov's Macguffin of a "positronic brain", clad in different wetware.
Hasn't that been ret-conned into the "Zero-th" law Asimovian "future history", 4 or 5 decades after being published?

[hiran]

Hiran gets this turn.

Hmmm, err, cough...
Ok, let me try...

Do we have recursive stories? Where things seem to repeat in a nested style at least two times? I'll give an example, which then obviously would not count:
In the movie inception a person is put to sleep so others can enter his mind and incept other thoughts or ideas. While they are there they find out they need to put the man to sleep in his dreams, and this happens 3 to five times during the plot.

What does not count is something like groundhog day. It iterates as the story does show repetition but no nesting.

So do we see similar stories?

[Commander_X]

[...]
I think "The Evitable Conflict" had Susan Calvin discussing the odd outcomes of the (unseen) "planetary management brains" [...]

You might be right, I noticed the "Brains" wording in one of the stories while shuffling for confirmation, but gave up (re-reading Culture now); the movie has them all. It's a (promoted) half answer, anyways.

[Commander_X]

[...] Do we have recursive stories? Where things seem to repeat in a nested style at least two times? [...]

Yours to decide (movies):
Source Code (2011)
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

[hiran]

[...] Do we have recursive stories? Where things seem to repeat in a nested style at least two times? [...]

Yours to decide (movies):
Source Code (2011)
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Both of them seem to be iterative, but I really enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow and also Source Code which I have not yet seen has the interesting part that the real nature of the main character is revealed throughout the story.

I'll give half a point for each of them.

So four still remaining?

[hiran]

Do we have recursive stories? Where things seem to repeat in a nested style at least two times? I'll give an example, which then obviously would not count:
In the movie inception a person is put to sleep so others can enter his mind and incept other thoughts or ideas. While they are there they find out they need to put the man to sleep in his dreams, and this happens 3 to five times during the plot.

When I wrote that question, I was actually thinking of Isaac Asimov's 'The last question'. It is iterative when this one last question is asked time and again.
Each time Multivac's answer is 'there is not enough data for a meaningful answer'. In the end, after the universe has stopped existing, Multivac finds an answer to the question but as there is noone to return the answer to it proves it by recreating our universe. With this Multivac reveals itself as the creator of the universe, which was itself (originally) created by mankind, which evolved in a Multivac-created universe...

There was another movie (I forgot the name) where one guy gets followed by someone so he searches for help in the neighbour's house. Over there he sees someone just escape by entering a box. As the guy following him is getting nearer, he also tries to escape using that box. When he exits the box the others are not there, so he walks back to his own house just to see someone walking away. He follows that guy straight into the neighbour's house... In the end that box reveals to be a time machine, and at some point this guy has three others of himself running around - he is fleeing of himself. While the story is linear but the way it is told the timeline is looped and touches itself it looks recursive. It was a trash movie but I liked the plot.

[Disembodied]

The Stargate SG-1 episode "The Gamekeeper" plays with simulations-within-simulations. The SG-1 team gets trapped in a simulation, but manage to escape. They return to Earth where they are ordered to return to the planet and re-enter the simulation. They realise that they are still inside the simulation …

[RockDoctor]

Do we have recursive stories? Where things seem to repeat in a nested style at least two times? I'll give an example, which then obviously would not count:

I'll try one from the "Golden Age".
In "And He Built A Crooked House", RAH had the protagonist looking out of the window of his crooked house (after it got crooked, naturally) to see the back of someone standing looking out of the opposite window of the other wing of the house. So he climbs out of the window to stalk the intruder. But the intruder has climbed out of his window and is stalking towards the window of the next wing. This continues several times, until the protagonist realises there is another intruder stalking him. So he turns around to chase that intruder.
There's a way of doing spoilers, but I can't remember if this site does it. [spoiler] tesseract [/spoiler]. Nope, that's not it. Whatever. The protragonist is chasing the protagonist chasing the protagonist chasing the protagonist chasing the protagonist chasing the protagonist chasing the protagonist chasing the protagonist and so on, ad nauseam.
Was it RAH? Yes, and it even gets it's own Wiki page, which is nearly as long as the story.

[ffutures]

James P Hogan, Thrice Upon a Time (1980) - it's a story about sending messages into the past to change the present, so it goes through events repeatedly, usually because the universe seems to throw another crisis in whenever one is solved, usually because of the butterfly effect. E.g. soon after they start sending messages they start to get interference because someone else's fusion experiment has begun to release micro-wormholes which will eventually destroy the earth if not stopped, the effort to solve that means that an ongoing epidemic goes more or less unnoticed, a random air current causes things to go very slightly different so that the hero doesn't meet his eventual fiance, and so forth. Eventually on the third (I think) go-round problems are more or less sorted, including boy meets girl, and there is now an official system for sending messages to the past with government oversight. The problems that THAT causes are still in the future when the story ends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrice_Upon_a_Time

If you don't like that and want something a bit simpler on the same lines, the TV series Seven Days involved sending people up to seven days into the past to change historical events. The first episode has them do this after a major terrorist attack, the result is that they catch one group of terrorists but another group are left free to carry out the attack in a different way, there won't be time to do it again if they fail because it's seven days from the origin of the time ship, not go back seven days then go back some more.

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

[hiran]

Stargate SG-1 episode "The Gamekeeper"

"And He Built A Crooked House"

Thrice Upon a Time (1980)

Seven Days

I did not know about any of them, but these truly seem entangled enough to meet my gist.
Somehow I also realize it is hard to describe them since the plot needs explanation.
So I will assign each of them one point, which means re reached five.

And if I understand the pattern, ffutures is next.

[RockDoctor]

Somehow I also realize it is hard to describe them since the plot needs explanation.

Every computing course that covers recursion has to spend at least half of the first lecture explaining recursion.
Factorials are a more concise introduction, for about 1/3 of the typical audience :

Code: Select all

n!=n*(n-1)! and 1!=1

[ffutures]

OK, let's have five examples of science fiction about, or featuring, cats (or VERY cat-like creatures). To make things just a little harder I want works in which the word "Cat" (or "Cats") DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE TITLE. The cats (or VERY cat-like creatures) must be a substantial part of the plot or at least important at some point in the plot.

For example, the film The Cat from Outer Space would not be accepted because the word "Cat" is in the title. The James Bond film "Diamonds are Forever" which is sort of borderline SF would be accepted because an important bit of the plot involves a cat. Except that I've now used is so you can't have it!

Usual rules - only one per author / created universe / whatever. Please don't enter more than one work per answer.