External links
- http://www.coolbeat.biz/item/022/ker-plop.htm Archived 2010-10-12 at the Wayback Machine
 | This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1970s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
| "Ker-Plop" | |
|---|---|
| by Ted Reynolds | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction short story |
| Media type | Print (Newspaper, Magazine, Hardback & Paperback) |
| Publication date | 1979 |
"Ker-Plop" is a science fiction novella written in 1979 by Ted Reynolds.
Cotter Oren is a checker-pilot, an elite group tasked to 'meet and greet' travellers from deep space who arrive in the automatic net around the planet Randar. His job is to locate and remove the arriving ship's 'sealsafe', thus nullifying any possible hostile intent, and sending the passengers and crew to the surface for psychotherapy, which most require after their long journeys. But during one shift, he is ordered by Flynn Rose, his controller, to check a ship which is supposedly of five thousand kilometers radius - unimaginably large, and therefore considered to be potentially hostile.
On returning from this mission, he is debriefed under hypnosis by an official known as The Examiner. He tries to recall the events of his journey into the ship...
Oren approaches cautiously in his miniaturised checkership, lands and is able to enter via an airlock. A still-functioning security system directs him to remove and deposit his checker-suit and weapons (which render the user invulnerable to almost any attack) and he continues on his way to the ship's centre of gravity, where the sealsafe must be located.
Cotter meets various inhabitants, none of whom exhibit any curiosity and are apparently unaware that their planet is really a spaceship. He sees no evidence of any government or officials in charge. He realises that the ship is populated in three dimensions.
Reaching the ship's core, he meets a man, who identifies himself only as Basho and describes himself as a janitor. Basho explains that the planet, known as Golgaronok, has now returned from the Magellanic Clouds - a journey that started 300,000 years ago. It is a remnant of a former galactic confederation known as the Amalgamate. Basho forces Oren to mentally calculate the living space and possible population of the ship; Oren, with increasing panic, realises that the population could be many times greater than that of the galactic confederation of which Randar is a part.
Basho persuades Oren that, rather than Randar accepting the arrival of Golgaronok, the latter should in fact absorb Randar. Oren then realises that he has been hypnotised by Basho and that Basho is pumping him for information. The Examiner is actually Basho and he is still within the planet-ship.
Old Pond / Frog Jumps / Ker-Plop!
Matsuo Basho
"Ker-Plop", by Ted Reynolds. Published 1979
| | This article about a science fiction short story (or stories) published in the 1970s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Escape Velocity is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat video game series first introduced in 1996 by Ambrosia Software for the Apple Macintosh. Two other similar games based on the original, EV Override and EV Nova, followed in 1998 and 2002 respectively, the latter of which is also available on Microsoft Windows. In addition there is a trading card game available based on the storyline of the EV Nova universe.
Foundation and Earth is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, the fifth novel of the Foundation series and chronologically the last in the series. It was published in 1986, four years after the first sequel to the Foundation trilogy, which is titled Foundation's Edge.
The concept of self-replicating spacecraft, as envisioned by mathematician John von Neumann, has been described by futurists including physicist Michio Kaku and discussed across a wide breadth of hard science fiction novels and stories. Self-replicating probes are sometimes referred to as von Neumann probes. Self-replicating spacecraft would in some ways either mimic or echo the features of living organisms or viruses.
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) is a science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. An example of space opera subgenre, the novel is a "fix-up" compilation of four previously published stories:
Peter Siebold is a member of the Scaled Composites astronaut team. He is their Director of Flight Operations, and was one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo, the experimental spaceplanes developed by the company. On April 8, 2004, Siebold piloted the second powered test flight of SpaceShipOne, flight 13P, which reached a top speed of Mach 1.6 and an altitude of 32.0 kilometres (105,000 ft). On October 31, 2014, Siebold and Michael Alsbury were piloting the SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise on flight PF04, when the craft came apart in mid-air and then crashed, killing Alsbury and injuring Siebold.
Backwards is the fourth and final Red Dwarf novel, directly succeeding Grant Naylor-written Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life, and existing in a separate continuity from Last Human written by Doug Naylor. It is set in a fictional universe version of Earth where time moves backwards.
Against the Fall of Night is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. Originally appearing as a novella in the November 1948 issue of the magazine Startling Stories, it was revised and expanded in 1951 and published in book form in 1953 by Gnome Press. It was later expanded and revised again and published in 1956 as The City and the Stars. A later edition includes another of Clarke's early works and is titled The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night. In 1990, with Clarke's approval, Gregory Benford wrote a sequel titled Beyond the Fall of Night, which continues the story arc of the 1953 novel. It is generally printed with the original novel as a single volume.
The Draconians are a fictional extraterrestrial race from the planet Draconia. They were featured in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Their only television appearance to date was in the 1973 serial Frontier in Space. Unlike many "monster" races in Doctor Who, the Draconians were articulate and portrayed as having a sophisticated and advanced culture like feudal Japan. In his 1996 memoir of his time on Doctor Who, written just before his death, actor Jon Pertwee cited the Draconians as his favourite of all the monsters he had encountered during his time as the Third Doctor.
Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is a 4X turn-based strategy by Stardock for Microsoft Windows. It is the sequel to the 2003 game, Galactic Civilizations, and was released at retail and on Stardock's online subscription service, TotalGaming.net, on February 21, 2006. An expansion, Dark Avatar, was released in February 2007. A second expansion, Twilight of the Arnor, was released in April 2008.
"The Heart of the Serpent" is a 1958 science fiction short story by the Soviet writer and paleontologist Ivan Yefremov.
Galactic North is a collection of science fiction short stories by British author Alastair Reynolds, published by Gollancz in 2006. It comprises most of Reynold's short stories and novellas set in the Revelation Space universe.
House of Suns is a 2008 science fiction novel by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds.
The Revelation Space series is a book series created by Alastair Reynolds that debuted with the novel Revelation Space in 2000. The fictional universe it is set in is used as the setting for a number of his novels and stories. Its fictional history follows the human species through various conflicts from the relatively near future to approximately 40,000 AD. It takes its name from Revelation Space (2000), which was the first published novel set in the universe.
First Lensman is a science fiction novel and space opera by American author E. E. Smith. It was first published in 1950 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 5,995 copies. Although it is the second novel in the Lensman series, it was the sixth written. The novel chronicles the founding of the Galactic Patrol by Virgil Samms, the first sentient being in our cosmos to wear the "Lens", a unique badge of authority which is actually a form of "pseudo-life" that grants telepathic powers to the defenders of Civilization.
The Last Legionary series is a series of five books written by Canadian author Douglas Hill. The books are Young Legionary, Galactic Warlord, Deathwing Over Veynaa, Day of the Starwind and Planet of the Warlord. The series has been described as a simplified version of E. E. Smith's Lensman series.
Prisoner of the Daleks is a BBC Books original novel written by Trevor Baxendale and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It features the Tenth Doctor without a companion and was released on 2 April 2009, alongside Judgement of the Judoon and The Slitheen Excursion.
Galactic Odyssey is a science fiction novel by American writer Keith Laumer. It was originally serialized in If magazine from May to July, 1967, under the title Spaceman. Later the same year it was published as a standalone novel titled Galactic Odyssey.
Metroid is a series of nonlinear science fiction action games published by Nintendo, featuring both side-scrolling and first-person shooter elements. The player character and protagonist of the series is Samus Aran, a spacefaring bounty hunter that battles Space Pirates and an extraterrestrial species called the Metroid.
Galactic Derelict is a science fiction novel by American writer Andre Norton, the second in her Time Traders series. It was first published in 1959, and as of 2012, had been reprinted in eight editions. It is part of Norton's Forerunner universe.
The Ground Crew Project is a UFO religion begun in the 1980s and based in California and Hawaii which later split into the Ground Crew and the Planetary Activation Organisation. It was founded in California by Sheldon Nidle who began to post it online in 1996, and is now an online religion. It is an optimistic religious ufology that believes the Earth is on the verge of a cosmic transformation which was expected to happen as the Earth apparently made its passage through the high energy properties of a ‘photon belt’ in the 1990s. The religion's aim is to prepare humanity for large-scale, first contact between Earth and the “Galactic Federation”, claimed to be an extraterrestrial organisation which will help in the supposed transformation. Members of the group are being prepared to play key roles as intermediaries between the claimed extraterrestrials and the population of Earth. After failed predictions, the contact is now believed to happen “as soon as possible” and the ground crew are to actively help in ‘raising’ mankind beforehand.