This question stems from a commonly depicted mode of transportation, the ornithopter. It is the primary flight tool in the latest Dune movie as well as seen in Black Panther and in several books I've been reading. My question is where did the idea for this flying machine first stem from as it ...

I remember watching several videos on the Early Middle Ages on youtube by YaleCourses. This is one of the videos in the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzibwdsl_SI In one of the videos, I recall a book was mentioned. This book was written by a Christian who was sentenced to prison or deat...

I am looking for a sci-fi story that I read in the 80's. It was a story about the future and I am sorry but the only vivid detail I remember was that parents had actually gone to a store to purchase a gift (a bicycle I believe), and the person at the store thought it was strange to have people ac...

If you think about it the show didn't really talk much about the doctor who fought in the time war,so wouldn't matt Smith technically be the 12th doctor and Peter Capaldi be the 13th

In Wheel of Time (2021) S1E1 the heroes embark on their adventure because their hometown is destroyed during a festival. I assume the same happens in The Eye of the World but I don't know for certain. Were they the first adventurers to start that way, or did someone else do it first? Going on som...

I'm trying to look for this manga that has been haunting me for months it's about a kid (which I can't remember if he was reincarnated) was kicked out of his noble house by his father but later on he become a noble and his father come to visit him because his heir did something and he came to apo...

In Tolkein's Middle-earth, the region of Umbar is some distance almost due south of Gondor. It's inhabited by a fierce seagoing people, descendants of evil Numenoreans and Haradrim, feared for their depredations as raiders and pirates, known as the Corsairs of Umbar. If they don't live outright b...

In the 1998 film Dark City, how big was the city supposed to be? What's its approximate size?

Gaal Dornick being able to count big primes can be considered extraordinary academic ability, but she and her daughter were capable of being concious during hyperspace jump. How could their brain comprehend folding space and time without any augmentation? Other than that, Null Field (which could ...

I know the Enterprise-D carries all sorts of shuttlecraft. But - what's the fastest a vessel carried by the Enterprise - work-pod, probe, shuttle, Captain's yacht, whatever - which has a meaningful ability to scan astronomnical phenomena, and perhaps search the surface of a planet for life forms ...

I think I read this as a paperback somewhere in the early 2000s, pretty sure before 2010. It was a book set in the Aliens franchise. I'm not certain whether it was supposed to be in continuity with the films (I've only seen the first two films and the AvP film), or if so, where it would fit in. T...

Years ago, I read a short story in an anthology, (a collection of SF-shorts), which was about ice-racing. A dozen pilots went down a glacier/gletscher mountain, in, I assume, bobsled-like vehicles. They were dare devils, committed to racing, but since this was fairly dangerous, also all kind of c...

When Gaal Dornick was leaving Synnax, everyone knew that she was a mathematician who was going to Sterling University on Trantor (that's why they were avoiding her). Given, being a mathematician was heretical on Synnax and Seer Church was killing Mathematicians and Gaal Dornick was an acolyte (ev...

I haven't read the books, but I just started watching the Wheel of Time TV show on Amazon Prime, and I note that they have "Questioners", whose entire job, as far as I can tell, is to root out hidden Aes Sedai. But Aes Sedai are sworn never to lie. So it seems like rooting them out would be reall...

In the novel Babel-17 the protagonist Rydra Wong is both a space captain and a poet. I have seen it asserted that Wong's poems are to some extent based on those of Marilyn Hacker. Hacker was married to Samuel R. Delany when Delaney wrote Babel-17 and they edited Quark: A Quarterly of Speculative ...

In TNG Season 4 Episode 9, the Enterprise D is in the middle of handling a radiation hazard near Gamelan V, when it learns that a transport vessel carrying Captain Picard has not arrived on Pentarus V. Why could the Enterprise not send a class-8 probe (or two?) to the Pentarus system, to search f...

There two excellent parodies contain either the phrase "Klingons on the starboard bow" or "Klingons off the starboard bow". How many times, if ever, did this exact phrase occur in The Original Series? I can't help but wonder if, like "beam me up Scotty", it was zero.

From watching the Wheel of Time TV show, I got a pretty confused interpretation of who and what the children of the light/whitecloaks are and what they do (as you can see in this question). There's a scene in episode 2 where the heroes encounter a contingent of whitecloaks and Moraine Sedai hides...