Science Fiction Trivia

[RockDoctor]

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

Usual rules: no two from the same author / set in the same fictional universe / using exactly the same form of sight.

And continuing to pull on the telepathy thread : Star Wars, Force. It's a sort of telepathy, but the only one I ever heard of that lets you sense inanimate computerised laser-firing balls.
Obscure enough to need references?

[Disembodied]

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

The mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, star of the 2000AD's Strontium Dog strip, has a slightly vaguely described vision involving "alpha rays", which can let him see through walls and sometimes into people's minds.

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

[RockDoctor]

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

Usual rules: no two from the same author / set in the same fictional universe / using exactly the same form of sight.

I'm going to try to take another universe off the table (why do I feel like a cat on a china-filled mantlepiece?), then let someone else find something more obscure for the Chalice of Doom.
Several efforts in the Trekkiverse haven't given me anything really like a "sense".
{thinks heavily}.
In one mighty bound I go from McCaffrey's dragons to "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel" - Robert Forward's "Dragon's Egg". Here the cheela, inhabiting a neutron star (responsible indirectly for the divergence of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans from their Homo erectus stem stock) can only really see well in the far UV and soft X-ray spectra. Now, there is a part of the spectrum that organisms relying on electrons as a basis for their chemistry are going to find challenging to focus and sense without the photons ripping the sensors apart. So I suspect in the metaverse of SF universes, the cheela are going to have that band of the spectrum to themselves.

[RockDoctor]

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

Usual rules: no two from the same author / set in the same fictional universe / using exactly the same form of sight.

OK, now I've got to go for automatic failures.
A significant number of species on Earth, and Wossname McKay's discredited Martian bugs in meteorite ALH-84001 seem to sense magnetic fields as part of their gamut of navigation techniques for long-distance navigation. (McKay found well-formed microscopic octahedral grains of magnetite in the meteorite, and posited that they were biogenic, since they resembled grains found in magnetotactic bacteria on Earth. Which hangs together, logically, but most people weren't convinced by it.)
Of course, that's no more alien than dolphins using echo location while squeaking at each other in a manner incomprehensible to anyone but the lab mice.

[spud42]

going for the low hanging fruit... Jordy LaForge.... his visor lets him see a huge part of the electromagnetic spectrum way beyond mere mortal humans.. ST-TNG.....

[ffutures]

I'm going to try to take another universe off the table (why do I feel like a cat on a china-filled mantlepiece?), then let someone else find something more obscure for the Chalice of Doom.
Several efforts in the Trekkiverse haven't given me anything really like a "sense".
{thinks heavily}.
In one mighty bound I go from McCaffrey's dragons to "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel" - Robert Forward's "Dragon's Egg". Here the cheela, inhabiting a neutron star (responsible indirectly for the divergence of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans from their Homo erectus stem stock) can only really see well in the far UV and soft X-ray spectra. Now, there is a part of the spectrum that organisms relying on electrons as a basis for their chemistry are going to find challenging to focus and sense without the photons ripping the sensors apart. So I suspect in the metaverse of SF universes, the cheela are going to have that band of the spectrum to themselves.

That's one.

OK, now I've got to go for automatic failures.
A significant number of species on Earth, and Wossname McKay's discredited Martian bugs in meteorite ALH-84001 seem to sense magnetic fields as part of their gamut of navigation techniques for long-distance navigation. (McKay found well-formed microscopic octahedral grains of magnetite in the meteorite, and posited that they were biogenic, since they resembled grains found in magnetotactic bacteria on Earth. Which hangs together, logically, but most people weren't convinced by it.)
Of course, that's no more alien than dolphins using echo location while squeaking at each other in a manner incomprehensible to anyone but the lab mice.

"Seeing" magnetic fields works for me. That's two.

going for the low hanging fruit... Jordy LaForge.... his visor lets him see a huge part of the electromagnetic spectrum way beyond mere mortal humans.. ST-TNG.....

And that's three. It seemed to work as perceiving slight slightly differently as well as a wider spectrum.

Two to go!

[Disembodied]

Two to go!

*coughcough*

The mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, star of the 2000AD's Strontium Dog strip, has a slightly vaguely described vision involving "alpha rays", which can let him see through walls and sometimes into people's minds.

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

[ffutures]

Well I'll dive straight in with an example that appeared a couple of questions ago, under "Sculpture". In Niven's "Known Space", the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdatlyno">Kdatlyno</a> are a (former) Kzin slave-species of imposing (even to a Kzintosh!) size and strength, but without a sense of vision - at least, not one involving the electromagnetic spectrum. Instead they "see" using a form of sonic echo location ; as a consequence, their described cultural achievement of "touch sculpture" is the bane of museum curators - an artwork intended to be touched by the visitors.

So, that should be all three of Known Space, Niven and "echo location" off the table. There is at least one mention in a "Man-Kzin Wars sub-Universe" story where non-human terrestrial aliens with echo location and innate "3d-thinking" - the dolphins - are used as tactical assistants in a space battle, so that would take echo location further off the table. Do we count dolphins as "aliens". They're definitely not from another planet (unless someone has been planting fossils again), they're definitely intelligent (and a challenge for how to measure "intelligence"), and they're definitely not human - but are they alien? Now there's a question to debate with your local lobster species.

I'll accept that - it works like sight for nearly all purposes.

Having just taken Niven and Know Space off the table, how can I bring in the sort of "telepathic prey-predator link" that the Kzin have, which is suggested to have became their "telepath" abilities when hypertrophied and drug-enhanced?
Answer : same sense (more or less), different universe.
McCaffrey and her Pernese dragons (and fire lizards, and I think the watchwhers too) have a strong impressionistic-to-verbalised telepathy. Would you call that a "sense", or a communication method? I think a "sense" - because it also seems involved in their navigation through between to destination coordinates in 4d space.

OK, since I seem to be using a very vague definition of sight (and one of the answers I had in mind was vaguely similar) I'll accept this one

And continuing to pull on the telepathy thread : Star Wars, Force. It's a sort of telepathy, but the only one I ever heard of that lets you sense inanimate computerised laser-firing balls.
Obscure enough to need references?

I think I'm going to say no to this one, because you only posted it four minutes after the previous one which didn't really give anyone else a chance.

The mutant bounty hunter Johnny Alpha, star of the 2000AD's Strontium Dog strip, has a slightly vaguely described vision involving "alpha rays", which can let him see through walls and sometimes into people's minds.

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

That's definitely one. Sounds a bit like Blondot's "N-Rays" which were a fad in the 1890s but turned out to be wishful thinking

Which means we have seven answers rather than five, but I somehow failed to see the first few - I've had this happen a couple of times before, it's my own fault rather than a problem with the site.

In order the answers were posted by
Rockdoctor - Kdatyno sonar
Rockdoctor - multispacial "sensing"
Rockdoctor - the force (disallowed)
Disembodied - Johnny Alpha's alpha sense
Rockdoctor - Far UV and soft X-ray from Dragon's Egg
Rockdoctor - magnetic sense
Spud42 - Gordy's visor

Since Spud42 posted the last answer I'm going to give them the poisoned chalice, because I'm evil that way...

[spud42]

its starting to get hard to remember if a question idea has already been covered recently......

name 5 "named" computers. by this i mean are known by this name and not a brand name HAL from 2001 was known by that name and responded to the name even though it was a HAL9000 computer...

usual rules 1 per person
1 per universe/ Author
give a couple of days between guesses if you have another answer to give time for others to have a go... someone pinch RockDocktor's coffee, he seems to have O.D. recently...lol

MBP for obscure references will be meted out on an ad hoc basis as the muse dictates....

[Disembodied]

Swoops in early with Orac, from Blake's 7 (which also rules out two others from the same series, Zen and Slave).

[Nite Owl]

HOLLY from Red Dwarf, either sex.

[spud42]

Disembodied has the first and 10 MBP for the one i was hoping someone would use...

NiteOwl swoops in ( pun intended) with Holly/Hilly also Queeg

2 down 3 to go.

[Cholmondely]

Does Multivac from Isaac Asimov count?

An acronym, yes, but not quite a brand-name.

[Commander_X]

Caravaggio in the Starhunter TV series.

[RockDoctor]

OK, let's try a nice simple one. I'm looking for FIVE SF works of any type in which characters have a form of sight which is different from our own. This might include seeing things that others can't, different forms of radiation, etc. etc. Please give a link to information about your source, especially if it's obscure!

In one of those serendipities that happens, today's serving of "The Life Scientific" on Radio 4 is about one Prof David Eagleman and his research into "the nature of perception" and "whether we can create new senses.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zlqc