Trivia Thursday


  1. We never learn the Mule’s name, but he took this title during his reign.
  2. What is a falan?
  3. Ripaway-bra queen Sybil Danning starred in this sci-fi remake of The Magnificent Seven.
  4. What is the name of The Star Beast in Robert A. Heinlein’s young adult novel of the same name?
  5. One of the most-parodied lines in Star Trek, in which episode did Dr. “I’m a doctor not a casserole” McCoy first utter the phrase, “He’s dead, Jim?”
  6. In this story the South has won the Civil War, and Ward Moore’s fine historical sense led him to describe some perhaps unexpected consequences: In a backlash against the prewar antislavery movement the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, becomes a terrorist outfit like the Klan. Name the novel.
  7. This U.S. comic strip character was first conceived by John Flint Dille for the National Newspaper Syndicate, Inc., and was written by Philip Francis Nowlan, based on his novel Armageddon 2419 AD. Who is he?
  8. For how long each day could “The Gemini Man” stay invisible?
  9. The rulers of this planet (which is also the title of the novel) have a monopoly on the creation of Azi, the artificial human beings who have featured so prominently in such earlier Cherryh novels as Downbelow Station and Forty Thousand In Gehenna and they also have the rarely used ability to clone human beings. Name the novel!
  10. Which Twilight Zone episode was a winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962?

(Answers below the fold)

  1. First Citizen (Second Foundation)
  2. 10 rotations, 75 days, of the Ringworld.
  3. Battle Beyond the Stars. Of course, Magnificent Seven was also a remake–of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
  4. Lummox
  5. “The Enemy Within”
  6. Bring the Jubilee (1953)
  7. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
  8. 15 minutes per day (from the old ’70s SF show starring Ben Murphy)
  9. Cyteen
  10. “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” based on the short story of the same name by Ambrose Bierce.