Oolite Bulletins

Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang series has brain ships, which are essentially prosthetic bodies for the pilots. Essentially the brain thinks of itself as the ship, even though it's actually a body and brain in a life support bottle somewhere in the ship. Does that count?

The Subways of Tazoo by Colin Kapp, one of the Unorthodox Engineers series. Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga series has interstellar travel by gate, with railways the most common form of travel since you have to use a LOT of gates to get from one desirable location to the next. I'm pretty sure...

I can't think of any more FTL solar sails, but a laser-pumped one is used in Robert Forward's Rocheworld , AKA The Flight of the Dragonfly . And that's #5 - over to you The one I was hinting at was the weird version seen in A. Bertram Chandler's Commander Grimes novels, which gets up very close to ...

Hint #2 - There is a fairly drastic side-effect to this way of achieving FTL via sunjammer, but it's more or less predictable and lets you go places that would otherwise kill you instantly. Unlike the other means of achieving FTL travel in this universe which only rarely do things like strand you an...

Can anyone confirm this? Had to do some digging... The next appearance of a solar sail in science fiction was in Pierre Boulle’s novel Planet of the Apes in 1963. To quote from the novel: “In those times, interplanetary travel was commonplace, though interstellar ventures were still an exception. R...

I think <grins> Planet of the Apes (the original novel) has some solar sailing going on. Can anyone confirm this? I read a translation in the early 70s and can't recall much about it. Star Trek Deep Space 9 , season 3 episode 22 -- Explorers -- captain Sisko and his son re-enact a solar sail trip. ...

OK, since I mentioned solar sails - let's have five works (of any sort) with interstellar travel by solar sail. Since I just mentioned The Fourth Profession we'll omit that one, and anything else by Larry Niven (and yes, I know that includes The Mote In God's Eye and several other stories, I don't w...

Larry Niven's The Fourth Profession has Earth visited by aliens (travelling via solar sail starships) who want us to build a laser cannon on Mercury to propel them to their next destination. What they don't mention is that if we don't they'll leave anyway but blow up our sun once they're on their wa...

Stargate SG1 - in one of the episodes they lure the Go'auld into an unihabited solar system then drop a spare Stargate into the sun to trigger a supernova (I think). You sort of hope that they checked that there weren't any occupied worlds within say 50 light years or so... later - yep, a supernova...

I'm pretty sure that the aliens in Independence Day used some sort of shuttle inside the big saucers, but they also carried fleets of attack ships so I may have mistaken them for an internal transport system - I'm really not going to watch the bloody thing again to check! And the big ship in Wall-E ...

Commander_X wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 05, 2020 4:59 am

Star Trek series also had such examples. I'd still come with a movie out of the series, Star Trek First Contact.

Definitely - that one, The City on the Edge of Forever, and The Voyage Home among many others.

The metaphorical ball is in your proverbial court!

Disembodied wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 03, 2020 1:10 pm

Doctor Who, of course.
Timelike Infinity, by Stephen Baxter.

Both good.

Commander_X wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 03, 2020 4:27 pm

Stargate SG-1 had some episodes. The last event in the SG-1 franchise, Stargate Continuum (2008) was mainly a time traveling story.

Also good. One to go.

Cody wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 02, 2020 10:59 pm

The Saga of the Exiles by Julian May?

One down, four to go.

OK, let's have five works from any source that have aliens AND time travel in the same source material. I think that this one had also better omit comics and comics-derived sources since they all seem to do this. And only one example from any given source / author, e.g. if Harry Harrison's "The Tech...

Jack Barron, TV show presenter and investigative reporter in Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron.