The awesome thing about science fiction is that anything can happen — including the occasional incredibly convenient miracle. Sometimes circumstances become so desperate and dire in a science fiction tale that even the "
reset button" can't fix them — and that's when the "deus ex machina" shows up. The term, meaning "God from a machine," comes from classical theater, where a wheel-and-pulley deity would literally show up to sort everything out. And in science fiction, god literally can come out of a machine. Bow your head before our taxonomy of the most unlikely miracles in scifi history.
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