Earth at the brink of an ecological catastrophe - polluted - ravaged by wars - was abandoned by the majority of its population who left in space ships. For generations their society relied on technologies and they developed a military style technocracy merging with the machines becoming almost cy...

One of the running gags throughout the film Spaceballs (1987) is a meta-commentary that the primary purpose of the film is to promote the sale of film-related merchandise. In fact, several of the characters are visibly seen using the film's own putative merch, prominently labeled "Spaceballs: The...

I played this somewhere in the early 90s, I think, downloaded off of a Bulletin Board System and played via a direct connection over the phone lines the twice I actually got to play. It might have been run on Windows 3.11, although that would have been the right timeframe for us to have moved on ...

Arya looks upon the Twins from afar before she and the Hound arrive there. The village near the bridge seems destroyed as if some battle has occurred there. Why? It's before the Freys begin to massacre Starks. Hound and Arya disguised as hog farmers arrives at the castle, only to be told the fea...

As with many of my questions, this American short story appeared in an anthology during the 1960s, a decade in which I devoured science fiction. All I can remember is that a group of Earthers (miners, I believe) have established a base on an extra-solar planet. A primitive local tribe demonstrate...

If some writer mentions atom-powered rocket and leaves it at that, this is far less interesting than explaining how it works. If someone suggested a nuke-powered Earth-based submarine, was anyone prescient enough to understand that they were basically steam ships?

In the old Superman movies with Christopher Reeve and in Superman Returns, Krypton is portrayed as an airless planet on whose surface the Kryptonians obviously live in the vacuum of space, and Superman often flies from Earth into space himself so there is no question the Kryptonians of the old mo...

Mild spoilers for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. As I don't have a copy to hand, nor intend to touch one again, I can't provide exact quotes. As I recall, one of the premises in Act 3 is as follows: How does this last point make sense? From what I understood of Deathly Hallows, Voldemort's r...

Is this mall section, in Brown Girl In The Ring, a 1999 book, more likely avoiding trademarks, or talking about knockoffs of "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and "Burger King"? I've never seen anyone avoiding trademarks in written works in our modern era, except in Japanese works, see TV Tropes: Bland Na...

Many, many years ago I remember reading sci fi story in which one of the characters was a sentient robot who, if I recall the story correctly, was originally some sort of textile robot in factory. It was designed with excellent pattern recognition skills due to the nature of the job, and eventual...

First I'll describe the story, then the book I think it was in. The story had a very simple structure. It was a description given by a man who was observing a vision of the history of humanity probably from the beginning, and certainly to its end. The history he observed took the form of a long p...

After Neil catches up to the masked person in the airport, he stops the protagonist from killing the inverted masked person. Then why did Neil see a need to stop him from killing the masked person?

I read this somewhere in the early 90s, from a paperback book, in English. I would have sworn that this was one of the stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Sinister Spies collection, as I remember it being in a Hitchcock collection and that's the only anthology I've found of spies, but none of the summa...

In Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" series, is it possible to detect anomalies related to the zones' boundaries from the Earth using contemporary astrophysics instruments?

In ST:DIS 3x13, Osyraa She knows that "the primary shield emitter is disguised as a secondary deflector array." How can she know that?

I read a manga a while back. From what I remember the main character always wears the same clothes (picture below, excuse the bad quality since I drew it myself). There was a joke that lasted a page or so that when the protag opened his wardrobe/closet there was a lot of pairs of the same clothes...

Let's say, in a completely hypothetical scenario, that Obi-Wan and Satine have a kid who they raise instead of some theories which include Satine and Obi-Wan's child being raised by someone else. What do you think they would be like as parents? For some reason I really can't see them as a mom and...