Oolite Bulletins

The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham.

In Michael Swanwick's short story "Ginungagap", humanity is contacted by aliens via a small black hole located in the outer reaches of the solar system. They are - apparently - offering technology which would let human beings travel through the singularity.

The Black Cloud from Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud is, I think, larger than the Earth.

I for one welcome our malodorous, probably microbial and still very much theoretical overlords …

There are the Janitors, from the Alan Moore Future Shock "They Sweep the Spaceways" in 2000AD. They replace burnt-out suns, plaster over black holes, disinfect any planets they find infested with civilisation, etc.

And another MBP and the task of setting the next question goes to ffutures!

There's also the DS9 episode, "Waltz".

No, not Pullman … older than that (1960s, I think). A one-word title that's the name of a kind of dance. More generally, and to throw a hobbled pigeon amongst the ravenous Elite of cats, would Pullman's "Dustiverse" classify as SF or fantasy? Even though Pullman dabbles with alternate realities, and...

Venusians! http://astrobiology.com/2020/09/phosphine-detected-in-the-atmosphere-of-venus---an-indicator-of-possible-life.html Well … phosphine - a possible biosignature - detected in the upper atmosphere of Venus. So Venusians smell a bit garlicky/rotten fish-y. The ming of Mongo, if you will. The p...

A clue … there's an alternate-history novel, set in a 20th century where Europe is still dominated by the Catholic Church.

OK - The Entropy Tango by Michael Moorcock (1981) - the sixth book of the Jerry Cornelius series That's four, plus one shiny MBP to ffutures for naming a specific type of dance. It also takes Moorcock's The Winds of Limbo (geddit?) and his Dancers at the Ends of Time series off the table too. One m...

spud42 wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 11, 2020 11:27 am

The Dancer form Atlantis, Poul Anderson

That's three … two to go!

OK, I've given it a while so I may as well give another answer - Ballroom! Ballroom of the Skies by John D. MacDonald (1952); a nice cheerful story in which Earth is kept in a perpetual state of conflict and misery so that it can be the crucible that produces strong leaders for a utopian galactic c...

Well, let's go for an easy answer - Stardance by Spider and Jeanne Robinson That looks … chilly. But it definitely counts! One down, four to go. Quick question - if the name of a type of dance is used in a title but in another context is it acceptable? Yes - along the same lines of "Caught in the O...

OK, let's work our way through the Muses … five SF stories/films/episodes/etc. which refer to dance or dancing in their titles. Only one answer per SF universe - but names of dances, or indeed the words "dance", "dancing", etc. can be repeated. E.g. if Dances With Wolves was a scifi film, it would c...