Science Fiction Trivia

[spud42]

ok so the mobile phone/ communicator it is. that rules out some other ideas from the original series that were 40 years ahead of their time.

this releases all of Hienleins ideas....

4 to go.

[Disembodied]

Arguably, the internet - the idea of a network capable of conveying all kinds of information, including audiovisual - was first suggested by E. M. Forster in his 1909 short story "The Machine Stops". It is certainly more like the actual contemporary internet than, say, William Gibson's concept of cyberspace (a term which he invented) as "a consensual hallucination", experienced by people through a direct neural-machine interface.

[spud42]

that makes 2, MBP for an old story i havent read....

3 to go, some obvious low hanging fruit around.

[Nite Owl]

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne in 1870 brought us the Electric Submarine.

[ffutures]

"Glass cockpit" command/control room aboard warship (bridge replaced by heavily armoured control room with TV screens etc. instead of windows)- The Struggle for Empire by Robert W. Cole, 1900 - and it's aboard a starship!

https://forgottenfutures.co.uk/struggle/struggle.pdf
https://forgottenfutures.co.uk/struggle/struggle.epub

[spud42]

well that brings us to 4 .

it seems this is the not obvious answer version.. lol

ok 1 to go, lets see how long this is avoided for..

[ffutures]

Sod it, if nobody else will do it...

Robot vacuum cleaners, from Heinlein's The Door Into Summer (1956), a predecessor of Roomba etc.

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

[spud42]

we have a winner!
you mentioned the communicator from star trek the most obvious for me was the pads they used and shared around i thought the connection with ipads and android tablets but not to be.
Another thecnology i have read in many 50's and 60's scifi is a form of eftpos. long before we had it , i dont mean credit cards. there are so many references to "coin chips"card scan/swipe for payment of goods. there must be hundreds of other "predictions"of fantastic out there ideas when written about but are common place today.

anyway the shiny object of desire and several MBP's for bravely answering the last question.

[ffutures]

OK - let's have five SF works - books / films / TV / whatever - featuring named characters capable of changing their form - not just disguise, but actual shape changing etc. Name the work and the character.

No two from the same author / fictional universe / etc., and please only give one answer at a time and leave some time for others to give an answer before posting another.

If we were allowing fantasy a good example would be Nymphadora Tonks for the Harry Potter franchise, but since we're sticking to SF my example here is Odo from the Star Trek franchise, which rules out the entire Star Trek universe which has a LOT of low-hanging fruit. But there are plenty of other examples out there...

[ffutures]

Nobody? For a trope this popular? VERY surprised!

[Disembodied]

There's Maya, from Space: 1999 …

[Cholmondely]

Sundry Arisians and Eddorians from E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series...

[ffutures]

There's Maya, from Space: 1999 …

Definitely - that's one, and have a Meaningless Bonus Point for being first.

Sundry Arisians and Eddorians from E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series...

And that's two - a good example, since they maintained their disguised identities for centuries in some cases. Have a MBP for a single source with two shape-changing races.

Three to go! And no more Gerry Anderson series or E.E. 'Doc'Smith.

[Nite Owl]

The T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

[spud42]

The Polymorph from Red Dwarf third season.