Oolite Bulletins

Disembodied wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 15, 2020 9:39 am

Would that be "Assignment 4" of Sapphire and Steel, involving the faceless entity that lives inside photographs, and can trap people within them too?

It would indeed - and you win the virtual coconut. Tag, you're it!

Nobody?

Small hint - a British TV series of the late 70s-early 80s had one story which revolved around photography.

I haven't seen this one, but it seems very on-point: https://www.timelapse-themovie.com/ (also a respin on https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734543/) Definitely qualifies - though you have to wonder how they can afford all that polaroid film, it's incredibly expensive now! In William Gibson's short sto...

Well, a bit of a giveaway in your question, but there's Charles Stross's Laundry novella "The Concrete Jungle", where part of the SCORPION STARE network goes live in Milton Keynes. That's a slightly tricky one because the Milton Keynes example uses video cameras, but it's established in other stori...

OK, let's try a change of pace. Let's have five SF works (books, comics, movies, TV, whatever) where photography is important to the plot. I'm looking for characters working as photographers, stories where a photograph is vital evidence, etc. etc. By photography I specifically mean still images, not...

OK, yet another from James White's Sector General series; one of the series regular characters is Major O'Mara, the hospital's chief psychologist. He got involved in the project at the very beginning, as a construction worker building the hospital station, and ended up becoming a psychologist more o...

The Mumby family, though that goes back a LONG way in time.

Larklight, home of the Mumby family; a house orbiting the moon in Philip Reeve's Larklight, or the Revenge of the White Spiders! or to Saturn's Rings and Back! . Basically a moderately sized Victorian house in space, in an alternate Victorian world with interplanetary travel, aliens, etc. https://en...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/24/16484222/urahara-review-crunchyroll-anime-magical-girls-harajuku-fashion ? OK, I think that sort of qualifies because you have a living bit of clothing that's important to the plot, and it's the fifth answer so the ball is in your court. Regarding my hints (and t...

Does the Wallace and Gromit adventure The Wrong Trousers count? Are Techno-Trousers® sufficiently SF? Definitely a yes, I think - it's all about weird tech, and the trousers are the main part of that. One to go. This is skirting(!) the definition, but clothes are definitely a key element of the tal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_in_the_Dune_universe#Stillsuit Well, the stillsuit does have some plot implications ("he will know your ways as if he were born amongst you", or some such prophecy concerning the Muad'dib), but is it "central"? Sorry, I missed the stillsuit link prev...

Here's an obscure superhero: Paradax ! The handful of strips were originally published in the downright psychedelic Strange Days back in the 1980s. Al Cooper was a taxi driver who found a weird skintight suit in his taxi, which enabled him to pass through solid matter. He was mistaken for a wanderi...

Booze is reliably much more profitable than furs, 150% profit if you buy at 20 and sell at 35, the maximum for furs is somewhere around 90% profit and there aren't nearly as many markets at that price. You have to move a lot more booze, of course, but 5 tons cost as much as 2 tons of furs and make a...

Launching straight out onto the thin ice, wearing clodhoppers, twelve-point crampons and using a pogo stick, I'll propose the Invisibility cloak/ Hallow in Potterverse. If you'll accept Potterverse as SF - a stretch, I'll grant. Prodding around in Poul Anderson's "Incarnations of Immortality" serie...

Okay... we've had food and drink, we've had booze. Let's try another necessity of life - clothing. Five SF stories about clothing. Films, TV, Comics, books, whatever, no two from the same source, author, or universe, but clothing and/or clothing-related fashion must be the main focus of the story. A...