In the Desolation of Smaug, when Smaug was talking to Bilbo, he made a reference to Thorin as "Thorin Oakenshield". How did he know to call Thorin "Oakenshield" since he only got the name Oakenshield when he tried to reclaim Moria when Smaug took the mountain?

Are Fairy Rings of Mushrooms mentioned anywhere? TVTropes on Geometric Magic says: [Fairies] can use [magic circles] as well, usually constructed from the famous "fairy ring" of mushrooms. ... I don't remember seeing any mention of "Fairy Ring" in the books... And Google isn't finding anything ...

The film 2001: A Space Odyssey is divided into several sections. The first, "The Dawn of Man", takes place in the distant past. This is followed by a sequence in which Hayward Floyd visits the monolith on the moon, and then after that we have the mission to Jupiter, which takes place 14 months la...

In the series A Discovery of Witches, the three main groups of supernatural creatures are demons, witches, and vampires. The protagonist and deuteragonist belong to the latter two groups, so they are described in some detail. Vampires are ageless with considerable strength, durability, speed, and...

Based on In Doctor McCoy's sickbay bed monitors on the Enterprise, what is "Cell Rate?", the answer here gives a list of what the gauges are for. However the units listed either don't make sense, or are not ones I recognise. The ones with non-standard units are reproduced below, from the linked a...

In S01E01 of the The Book of Boba Fett, "Stranger in a Strange Land", during a flashback scene Boba is tasked by a Tusken villager to dig for water pods with another captive. During this digging process the Rhodian captive uncovers a claw which is quickly revealed to be attached to a large 6 arme...

In our own language we have the term alien, which we also use in sci-fi settings. In Warhammer 40K humans use Xenos. Such a term can be used to describe a group of intelligent being that contain none of our own species. Are there such a terms that exists in fantasy settings? Example: A dwarf ente...

Very mild spoilers follow. In Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett falls into the Sarlac pit in ABY 4, just before the rebels attack the second Death Star The Mandalorian takes places five years later in ABY 9 In The Book of Boba Fett, episode 4, it is established that the episode takes place after th...

This question: Which part of 2001 takes place in 2001? Asks about when the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) happens, since the discovery of the monolith on the Moon happens 18 months before the events on the spaceship headed for Jupiter. Thus the monolith could be discovered in January to Dece...

In junior high we watched a short film for a science fiction class. This would have been around 1985, but the film was likely older. I remember it being in color. Could be any time from the sixties to the eighties. Being something we watched in school, it was likely an adaptation of a short story...

Luke Skywalker was wielding his father's lightsaber, whose light played across the ceiling of Obi-Wan Kenobi's hut, when the old hermit said: “An elegant weapon for a more civilized time” Was Obi-Wan referring to a particular time in the history of the Galaxy that he was visioning or that he ha...

I read these books around 10-20 years ago via the library, but I suspect they're older than that. I don't remember enough details to google them on my own, but some key points: It's a series of novels where the protagonist is a psychic / space wizard who travels via ship between various worlds,...

There's this paragraph in the book: “One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You are very tall or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot we...