Tony Meyer

Featured Question: E.T. & Star Wars

Flimzy noticed that E.T.’s appearance was being used in dating events in Star Wars and asked a “Are E.T. and Star Wars in the same universe?“, the most viewed question on the site to date.

DVK explains that this is the case: Lucas and Spielberg agreed to merge their universes (although they probably thought they were just adding Easter eggs), starting with a kid in a Yoda mask and a snippet of the “Yoda Theme” in E.T. and matched by the appearance of other “Children of the Green Planet” (i.e. others from the same planet as E.T., Brodo Asogi) in Phantom Menace.

HoloNet News Vol 531 #50 has a brief mention of Senator Grebleips (“Spielberg” backwards), established in Cloak of Deception to be from Brodo Asogi funding an “Extragalactic Survey”, presumably the one where E.T. visits Earth (or the one where a member of Yoda’s race does, making popular the masks).

A sequel to the novelization of the E.T. movie, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, confirms the tie in by stating that one of the names given to the planet is Brodo Asogi, and Children of the Green Planet is the translation of the name of E.T.’s species.

If you’re interested in these sorts of cross-over Easter eggs, take a look for Han Solo in Firefly, Alien in Predator, and Warehouse 13/Eureka.

Launch!

After almost a year in beta, we now have over 3000 users and an active community of science fiction fans (as well as a few users that are actively working in this area) providing input, answers, moderation, blog posts and their own time to make the site a global success.

Congratulations to all the members – your effort has paid off, and today scifi.stackexchange.com has graduated from a beta Stack Exchange website to a full-fledged member of the Stack Exchange family.

What does this mean?

New design.


Be sure to check out the error, CAPTCHA (human verification), about, and 404 (page not found) pages, and check out the different look of meta (and, while you’re there, take a look at some of the hot meta questions).

Privileges have changed.

Now that we’re not a beta site, the privileges required to do certain things have increased. That means there are fewer people to do them, and you might not be able to do everything that you could yesterday.

If you see something problematic, please comment and flag. Your moderators will be happy to close, reopen, migrate, protect or delete questions or answers that need it, especially if there’s comments and/or flags from multiple users saying that’s what needs to happen.

Remember that anyone can edit.  Even if you lost the edit privilege, you can still edit any answer or question – it’ll just go into a moderation queue to be verified first.  Again, there are fewer people to work through these suggested edits now, too, so it might take a little longer for the suggestions to be processed, but generally our moderators are super fast, so you probably won’t wait long.  If your edit is approved, you get reputation, so it’s another way to build up to the privilege level that you used to enjoy.

Vote Early, Vote Often, and Vote Some More. Voting builds reputation, which will help more users earn the privileges that let the site be more user-run than moderator-run.  When you’ve run out of votes, find an unanswered or poorly answered question and answer it, to gather more reputation for yourself.

We’re linked in the footer of regular Stack Exchange sites

Hopefully we’ll get some new visitors as a result.  Please take care to be even more friendly and helpful than you already are to help out our new members.  In particular, if you down-vote or vote to close, please make sure that you leave a comment (or upvote an existing comment) explaining what’s wrong with the question/answer, so that we encourage better participation by these new users, rather than scare them away.

Let your friends and fellow fans know about the site (and the blog!) – we get around 1500 visits a day, but the more people who come, the wider the pool of expertise we can bring in.  This is just one giant leap towards becoming the authoritative site for science fiction and fantasy questions – we still need to work hard to get the rest of the way.

Movies Sister Site Launches

The Movies StackExchange site is now available to the public.  If you’ve got questions that need answering by a film expert, then this is a good place to ask.

There don’t seem to be many sci-fi or fantasy movie questions yet, but if you’re particularly interested in or expert in film, then you might want to keep an eye on the questions there (if you’ve got an account on our site with at least 200 reputation, then if you associate the two accounts – you’ll be prompted to do this if you use the same OpenID – then you’ll start off there with 101 reputation).

If you’ve got a question about a science fiction or fantasy movie, where do you ask that question, now that there’s both sites?  Consider who you would like an answer from: an expert in science fiction / fantasy, or an expert in movies in general; different types of questions will suit each site.  Some questions will be perfectly acceptable on both sites, and in those cases it’s up to the asker to decide where they’d like to ask (in general questions won’t be migrated between the sites, and duplicates may exist on both sites, as long as they are not exact duplicates).  You should definitely not post the same question on both sites, however.

Also, don’t forget that there’s a similar site for the written word, Literature, where there continue to be a reasonable number of science-fiction and fantasy literature questions, aimed more at a literature audience than a sci-fi/fantasy one.

Featured Question: In The Lord of the Rings, what important background information is contained in the poems?

Sometimes, a fairly simple question inspires an amazing answer.  DVK noticed someone say that there was important background information contained in the poems found in [tag]lord-of-the-rings[/tag], but couldn’t recall any himself.

Personally, I admit that I often skip or lightly skim-read poetry in novels.  Like many fantasy readers, I’ve read Lord of the Rings many times, and I’ve probably properly read the poetry only once or twice (I do remember using one of them in a school exercise, so it must be at least once!).  Partly this is because I don’t enjoy the poetry form as much, and partly I guess I’m assuming that nothing important is happening there and I’d rather move forward to the action.

This question has only one main answer (there’s another, but the question was later revised – I do love the description of The Silmarillion as a “wonderful and tedious read”), but it’s over 2,000 words long!  In it, Gilles explains that although you can get by without reading the poems – as I and I expect many others do – you’re reducing your enjoyment of the book by doing so.  I highly recommend that you go and read the full answer, which analyses each poem in turn.  Here I’ll simply touch on a few of the main points from each of the six books in the story.

In the first book of The Fellowship of the Ring, the poems introduce us to Hobbit and Elvish lore, behaviour, and attitude – there’s also the crucial rings rhyme (“Three Rings for the Elven-kings…”), which is probably the one poem that everyone has read.

The second book of Fellowship continues this, telling us more about the Elves, Bombadil, Dwarves and other peoples of Middle Earth, but also foreshadows events that will take place later in the story, and provides hints at the greater history of Arda that is more fully detailed in The Silmarillion and later books.  The poetry in this book tells us a lot about who Aragorn is, and the background of his and Arwen’s relationship; we also get a hint as to Frodo’s eventual fate.

Just as the travellers move on in The Two Towers, so does the poetry.  In book three, we learn more about the human lands and the Ents.  Galadriel’s poems to the company are particularly prophetic in telling Aragorn what he must do, and Legolas what his fate shall be.  The fourth book is the low point in the characters’ morale, and this is reflected by a lack of uplifting poetry – we mostly get rhymes from Gollum, which help us understand his character.

As we move to book five and The Return of the King, we get many poems and songs about the battles that are fought during this part of the tale.  We get another poem leading Aragorn to the Paths of the Dead, and more background about the current and past state of Gonder and the Rohirrim.

In the final book, the poetry is about the historic events that the reader has either just read through or is about to, and marking the parting of ways that ends the story.

What we learn from Gilles, overall, is that the poems serve to illustrate the various cultures and the mental journey of the characters.  It sounds like it’s time to pull the books of the shelf, and read them properly this time!

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