The Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster. The cocktail from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy which says:

[T]he effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. The Gu ide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterwards. The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than the Encyclopedia Galactica.

• Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit.
• 
  
• Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V - Oh, that Santraginean sea water, it says. Oh those Santraginean fish!!!
• 
  
• Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzene is lost).
• 
  
• Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it (in memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia).
• 
  
• Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones; subtle, sweet, and mystic.
• 
  
• Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian suns deep into the heart of the drink.
• 
  
• Sprinkle Zamphour.
• 
  
• Add an olive.
• 
  
• Drink... but... very carefully...

Finagle's Folly: A cocktail which McCoy makes for Kirk on the 10,000th occasion that Kirk is depressed over losing control over his ship. (In this case, to a supercomputer in "The Ultimate Computer.") McCoy brags that his cocktail is famous "from here to Orion." But Kirk tastes it and grimaces. (Scotty probably would have liked it.) Oh, and apparently, Quark on Deep Space Nine makes a decent Finagle's Folly as well.

The Mother Teresa. In one of Spider Robinson's many Callahan's Crosstime Saloon novels, which all take place in a bar as you might imagine, he invents a type of martini called the Mother Teresa, because it has a prune resting in the bottom of the glass.

The Bull Shot. Larry Niven's version of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon is called the Draco Tavern, and the bartender sells all sorts of weird drinks (including "Green Kryptonite") to various alien visitors. One of the most popular drinks seems to be the Bull Shot, which Niven describes as "consomme and vodka." This is especially popular with the Glig, "grey and compact beings." (It's short for "Gligstith(click)optok.")

The Flaming Rum Monkey. Author Pat Murphy mentions the Flaming Rum Monkey in her metafictional odyssey Adventures In Time And Space With Max Meriwell, which features Murphy's pseudonym Mary Maxwell as a fictional character. Mary makes a habit of ordering a Flaming Rum Monkey to see what the bartenders will come up with, since they have to invent one on the spot. But in fact Murphy has come up with a recipe for a Flaming Rum Monkey, and here it is:

Put a teaspoon of brown sugar, a sprinkling of cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and a teaspoon of coconut syrup (the kind used in pina coladas) in a warm mug. Add a little boiling water—just enough to dissolve the sugar. Let the mixture steep for a minute. Pour in two ounces of dark Jamaican rum and one ounce of dark creme de cacao. Fill the mug with boiling water and stir.

Now for the flames! Put a pinch of brown sugar in a big spoon. Fill the spoon with 151 rum. To warm the rum, hold the spoon over the mug filled with hot water.

Light the rum in the spoon. Tip the spoon into the mug. The mixture in the mug will burn with a lovely blue flame.

Don't singe your eyebrows. Don't burn your tongue. Blow out the flames and try a sip of your Rum Monkey. Hot, sweet, and touched with coconut. Enjoy your Rum Monkey and dream of possibilities.

Star Wars Cocktail. Want to make one of those weird drinks they're drinking in the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars? This site claims to have an actual recipe — and it sounds like the most revolting drink imaginable. Equal parts Southern Comfort, Amaretto, Sweet'n'Sour mix, and Sprite... you might as well just smoke some crack and drink the entire contents of the Slurpee machine at the movie theater. Which might be just the ticket for enjoying Clone Wars, you never know.

The "foaming cocktail". Actually, we don't know the name of the drink Za orders in Iain M. Banks' The Player Of Games, but it's referred to as a "foaming cocktail." And here's what he actually orders:

I'd like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Eflyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with roasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawlic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof.

The baby jellyfish - small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy."

Adrenalin and Soma. The favorite cocktail of cowardly thief Vila on British space opera Blake's 7. It sounds like a weird mixture of uppers and downers — like an Irish coffee — but it always seems to make Vila quite mellow.

Aiguille Delaz from Gundam 0083. This strategic genius chose to pull out of the battle of A Baou Qu, the last stand of the One Year War. Instead, he massed his forces in a makeshift headquarters in the middle of a debris field, and prepared his masterplan. Operation Stardust involved having a pilot steal an experimental nuclear-armed Gundam warsuit. Delaz shows off the nuclear-armed warsuit, which proves the corruption of the Earth Federation, and then goads the Federation into showing off its strength in a set of space maneuvers that leave it vulnerable to the nuke — which destroys two-thirds of the fleet.

Ender Wiggin, from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. Starting out as a laser-tag champion, he gets more and more badass until he becomes the greatest space strategist in history. He thinks he's just fighting a series of simulated battles, but he's actually giving orders to real Earth ships dispatched decades earlier — and he comes up with the crazy risk-taking strategy that destroys the "Bugger" homeworld and pretty much wipes out their species.

Kara Thrace aka Starbuck — You can talk about what a great leader Adama is, or how good Admiral Cain was at coming up with the craziest, most bat-shit strategies to confuse her enemies. But the craziest person on Battlestar Galactica is also the craftiest — just look at the plan Starbuck comes up with to distract the cylon basestars away from the resurrection ship using decoys. The basestars get distracted, and then Galactica and Pegasus take them on. And then Lee's stealth ship takes out that all-important get-out-of-death-free card for those cylons. Rawk!

John Christian Falkenberg, a CoDominium naval officer turned mercenary created by Jerry Pournelle for the CoDominium future history series. He's sort of a space tactician, even though most of the battles he fights are on the ground on various planets where the colonists are rising up. He's frequently facing superior numbers of better-armed insurgents, and has to use a mixture of blitzkrieg tactics and fighting dirty to pull out a victory.

Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars novels. The blue-skinned red-eyed Imperial Thrawn was already a chessmaster of space battle when the Empire fell in Return Of The Jedi. But after the Empire had collapsed in a rain of Ewok claws, Thrawn rebuilt a small fleet around his Imperial Star Destroyer and set about trying to retake the galaxy. He found a supply of clone troopers, recruited a rogue Jedi, and managed to control half the galaxy. He tricked the Jedi scum into thinking Coruscant was blockaded by totally imaginary space mines, and managed to assemble a formidable fleet out of almost nothing. His only downfall came from understimating the bun-clad head of Princess Leia. Also from Star Wars, there's Admiral Ackbar, who can recognize a trap when he sees one.

Captain Benjamin Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Trek is full of great tacticians, including a never-ending parade of admirals who only exist on video screens. But Sisko gets his hands dirty — sometimes literally — in planning all the big battles against the Dominion. His finest moment was probably planning Operation Return, the huge assault by 624 starships to retake Deep Space Nine. He had to convince one of those stuffed-shirt admirals that DS9 was a higher strategic priority than defending Earth, because DS9 controlled the wormhole, the key to the quandrant. Faced with a solid wall of Dominion and Cardassian ships, Sisko had to play a game of wits with Cardassian leader Gul Dukat, trying to trick the Cardassians into opening a hole in their lines. Dukat saw through Sisko's strategy and tried to set a counter-trap, but Sisko managed to use Dukat's trap to push through. Here's the fleet Sisko was commanding:

Donal Graeme from the Childe Cycle of novels by Gordon R. Dickson. He's an "intuitive superman" with a superb grasp of battle tactics. He's also a master of deception (notice a theme here?). In one campaign, he tricks the enemy into landing on a planet to engage a massive ground force — only to find that the ground force is an illusion. They're trapped on the planet, with Donal's forces threatening to bomb them from orbit unless they surrender.

Captain John Sheridan from Babylon 5. One of the most cunning fighters in the Earth-Minbari war, Sheridan took out the Minbari's biggest ship by mining asteroids with nuclear weapons. In "Endgame," he has to outwit General Lefcourt, his former mentor, who can anticipate all of his moves, including a diversionary ground assault on Mars. But Lefcourt fails to anticipate Sheridan's tactic of having telepaths disable all of Lefcourt's ships.

Just remember, you may think all these discussions about space battle tactics are purely academic, but some people out there are already thinking about how to kick ass in space for realz.

Note: this thread on the Bad Universe and Astronomy Today forums was really helpful in thinking about this post. Some really good stuff there, check it out.

Note: I was almost done compiling this list when I came across this helpful post from Lev Grossman at Time.com, and its equally helpful comments. (Although the person who thought the ship in Farscape was called "Moira" cracked me up.)

Mogo the Green Lantern planet, from Green Lantern. Created by Alan Moore in his classic "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" short comic strip, Mogo is a whole planet wearing a green-lantern ring and defending the galaxy against wrongdoers. He's been brought back in recent issues of Green Lantern Corps. and has actually managed to communicate with the otherLanterns, despite the whole "not socializing" thing. How does he travel around? How does he defend all the planets in his sector of the galaxy? It's not clear to me, but here are some more details, including a link to scans of his first appearance.

Ego The Living Planet, from Thor and various other Marvel Comics. Which sentient planet is bigger, Ego or Mogo? It's hard to say. But I'm going to come down on the side of Ego being more awesome, because he cruises around and acts sleazy — as in one of his most recent appearances, where he falls in love with Earth and tries to seduce the entire planet (which has become sentient). In a smackdown between Ego and Mogo, my money is on Ego, even though Mogo has the magic alien ring. You know Ego would fight dirty, because everything he does is dirty.

The Beast With A Billion Backs from Futurama, "The Beast With A Billion Backs." The second direct-to-DVD Futurama movie involves our heroes contacting another universe, and then they encounter a planet-sized tentacle monster, voiced by David Cross. And Fry becomes pope of a new religion. (There are also planet-sized creautres in Tarkovsky's Solaris and in the GWAR mythos.( Here's the trailer.

Unicron from Transformers. We can only hope Michael Bay tries to take on this concept at some point — a mechanical planet who transforms into a humongous giant robot in space. And then he goes around eating other planets. In his first appearance, he was voiced by Orson Welles. I love how, in his planet form, he has giant metal horns sticking out. Party on, Unicron. But could he beat the planet-eating Galactus?

Gaea from John Varley's Titan. A planet-sized entity orbiting Saturn, Gaea is a "sentient space habitat that may or may not be batshit insane," as Bookslut puts it. The controlling intelligence of Gaea presents itself as a middle-aged woman who's obsessed with classic movies. In the second book of the Gaea trilogy, she offers miracle cures to humans whom she deems worthy, and in the third she provides a refuge for humans fleeing Earth's nuclear war.

Marvin The Paranoid Android, from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Well, he's always reminding us his brain is the size of a planet, although we never actually see this mega-brain.

Solaris, The Tyrant Sun, from DC One Million. The "One Million" event, in which the Justice League traveled forward to the 853rd century to meet their curiously similar counterparts, was probably the 17th most demented thing Grant Morrison has written, and that's saying something. A giant artificial sun, Solaris causes his own creation in the late 20th century (thanks to a time-travel paradox) and then becomes one of Superman's arch-enemies. Finally, in the 500th century, Solaris becomes a good guy, but never quite gets over his jealousy of our solar system's "real" sun. So he plots to kill the original Superman, in a plot involving a galactic super-Olympics. To be honest, I've read this comic three times and still don't understand it.

Evil Nebula, from Captain Simian And The Space Monkeys. Half-human, half-black hole, Lord Nebula could run over Mogo and Ego and barely even notice. And the Evil Nebula thinks big — in the first episode, he decides he wants to absorb the entire universe into himself. ("It's an ego thing.") But he's not too big to come up with a monkey enemy for Captain Simian, the vicious Rhesus-2. Plus he's voiced by Michael Dorn, which is full of win.

The Behemothaurs from Iain M. Banks' Look To Windward (2000). Lev Grossman suggests these in his blog post. And StrangeHorizons describes them as "miles-long symboitic gasbags." They live in a massive drifting weightless

The Cloud, from The Black Cloud by Sir Fred Hoyle. In this classic 1957 novel, a Jupiter-sized interstellar cloud floats into our solar system and threatens all life on Earth. Scientists struggle to communicate with the Cloud — and they succeed. It turns out the Cloud has a "brain" made out of complex networks of molecules. And the Cloud turns out to be sort of size-ist towards poor limited humans:

[I]t is most unusual to find animals with technical skills inhabiting planets, which are in the nature of extreme outposts of life... Living on the surface of a solid body, you are exposed to a strong gravitational force. This greatly limits the size to which your animals can grow and hence limits the scope of your neurological activity.

The spaceship-eating amoeba, from Star Trek, "The Immunity Syndrome." An 11,000 mile single-celled creature, this huge but pretty monster has to be destroyed before it reproduces and eats the entire galaxy. There's also an episode of the Trek animated series, "One Of Our Planets Is Missing," where they go inside a similar huge creature that's draining their power and munching on planets. But in that case, Spock manages to communicate with the creature, which is another one of those size-ist jumbo sentients and doesn't believe that such tiny creatures as ourselves could be intelligent. You could also make a case that the massive planet-crusher in "The Doomsday Weapon" is sentient, although it's never made clear. And another giant Trek baddie, of course, is the "crystalline entity" who stars in some of the most boring TNG episodes. Oh, and then there's V'Ger from The Motion Picture.

Jane from the Ender's Game saga by Orson Scott Card. An artificial intelligence, Jane occupies the entire galactic ansible network and is the only one who can make faster-than-light travel possible. Her one weakness is that when the Galactic Congress shuts down the galaxy-wide internet, she shuts down too.

The Calebans, from Frank Herbert's Dosadi Experiment and Whipping Star. Huge, unimaginably advanced creatures, the Calebans manifest themselves as stars in our universe. They give humans the secret of the "jump door," which allows you to teleport anywhere in space instantaneously. As Timothy O'Reilly writes:

[T]he Calebans are as close to infinite beings as he can imagine. Their visible embodiments are stars, and on a deeper level the Calebans are one gigantic consciousness that forms the topological matrix of the manifest universe. The jump-doors are simply an expression of their pervasive existence behind or apart from space.

For Better Or Worse, SciFi's Most Adorable Sidekicks

Stitch: Lilo and Stitch

He burps and eats everything. A cross between a bug and a dog, he was sort of sweet... until he did the whole Elvis impersonation, and then I was out the door. I can't stand animals dressed as people (alien animals or otherwise).

R2-D2: Star Wars

An obvious choice, but possibly the cutest bucket of bolts in the history of robots. Despite being a giant trash can, he was surprisingly expressive — you could tell when he was mad by his fussing and futtering. If you took a vote on which robot you wanted to be stuck on a deserted Tatooine with, hands down it would be R2. While C-3PO is wonderful, if I had to chose it'd be R2 based on the fact that, "goodness gracious me," would get old after about five minutes. Sorry C, He's the droid I'm looking for.

Rebecca "Newt" Jorden: Aliens

Oh no, an adorable girl is left on an alien infested planet! Surely she won't be a massive hindrance at all. Too late, she's fallen into an air vent. Once I found out that the dirty blonde girl nickname was "Newt," I lost all my love for this character. You could make a case against Bishop as well, but he was OK in my book.

Hud: Cloverfield

He had me at, "I'm just saying how freaky would it be if a flaming homeless guy came out of no where." His innocence and one-liners completely humanized this story. I don't even remember any of the other characters' names really. Hud was a great mix of that 20-something guy that is part idiot and part child, which was most evident any time he tried to talk to Marlena.

Robin: Batman

He thinks everything Batman does is totally yay, which is valuable because one thing you don't want from a sidekick is questions. Especially when you say, "Robin go check out that scary cave with no light, I'll be right behind you." He makes a great victim when there aren't any ladies around for you to save. His boyish good looks play in his favor but, his naivete demeans him. Robin get a 50/50 split on annoying versus lovable.

Hurley: Lost

Not all people can pull off charming with that much going on, but Hurley manages to. His whole "cursed by the numbers" schtick and his ridiculous bad luck in his first flashback were borderline annoying, but once he went bananas his charm became more of a quirk. He's the heart of the island and a lot of people forget that as he follows orders from chiseled jawline Sawyer or smarty-pants face-stubble Jack.

Arthur: The Tick

The shy little moth to The Tick's massive ego. His nervous stammer and mutterings are the perfect compliment to The Tick. And let's not forget the fact that he's often mistaken for a bunny, that's cute laugh out loud.

Gizmo: Gremlins (2)

Another coin toss here, because don't we all like to get drunk and sing the mogwai song? And yet the need to dress him up as Rambo totally crosses the line from cute to crappy.

Short Round: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

One line, "YOU CALL HIM DOCTOR JONES." Everything about this character was harnessing the power of cute for good. From the boxes he tied on his shoes for driving to his open-eyed screams, all charming.

Wicket: Ewok Adventure, Star Wars

Who else could level out Mace's wild tantrums. Good cute, like the kind of teddy bear I would actually want to own.

Elliot: ET

After watching this movie who didn't dress up in an orange hoodie and bike around with a white alien bundle for Halloween, or Saturdays? Elliot is a spot on example of the right amount of child-like/charm wonder in a great sidekick.

• 
  
• LucasArts' first adventure game was actually Lucasfilm Games' Labyrinth , based on the movie of the same name. The developers consulted with Douglas Adams on the game, and he suggested that they make it a hybrid game that starts as a text adventure, and then turns into a graphical game.
• 
  
• Their first true science fiction game was 1987's Maniac Mansion, which contained the technology that was used in LucasArts' games for over a decade. It introduced new ideas like multiple endings, multiple character, and clues there were hidden in the cutscenes, which was a clever way to make you watch them.
• 
  
• LucasArts famed SCUMM engine was created for this game, and used for many more of their interactive adventure titles. SCUMM actually stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. It's been ported to multiple systems, and you can still play those classic LucasArts games on it.
• 
  
• Maniac Mansion was inspired by B-movies, and features a storyline complete with mad scientists, disembodied, sentient tentacles, and an evil mastermind played by an also sentient Purple Meteor. Players have to figure out how to stay alive and save the Earth from the Meteor.
  
• 
  
• In part of the game, characters can actually microwave a hamster, and when this game was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System, they were ordered to take it out. However, they noticed it a bit too late, so it made it onto all the North American game cartridges.
• 
  
• In 2004, fans collaborated and enhanced the game graphics, added music, fixed glitches, and released as freeware Maniac Mansion Deluxe.
• 
  
• LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games visited the world of science fiction again in 1988 with Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders, where titular hero Zak had to help fend off an alien invasion by the Caponians. They want to lower the intelligence of everyone on Earth by using dial tones.
  
• 
  
• Luckily Zak finds some ancient technology left behind by the Skolarian race which can be used to fight the Caponians. Unfortunately the parts are scattered all over Earth and Mars, and you have to go around collecting them.
• 
  
• In later games the developers decided to make it impossible to actually kill one of your characters, although this new "rule" was broken a few times.
• 
  
• LucasArts went on an adventure game tear after Zak McCracken, producing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure in 1989, The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990 (probably the title most remembered and most associated with LucasArts), and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge in 1991.
• 
  
• During this period, in 1990, Lucasfilm Games became LucasArts during a reorganization of the company.
• 
  
• They returned to the realm of science fiction with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1992, the sequel to Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle in 1993.
• 
  
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was a game not based on any previous Indiana Jones, and featured Indy going to the lost city of Atlantis. He eventually encounters a huge machine called the Colossus, which runs on a mineral called Orichalcum. This device gives the Atlanteans godlike powers, and comes in handy if you want to turn yourself into pure energy.
  
• 
  
• The cover art for the game was created by lead artist William L. Eaken in an effort to emulate Drew Struzan's work on the previous Indiana Jones movie posters. In fact, LucasArts eventually released movie-style posters promoting this game.
• 
  
• Dark Horse Comics released a four-issue miniseries based on the game, and also for the planned sequel that never came out called Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix. It involved Indy finding the Philosopher's Stone that could transmute metals and bring people back from the dead. The Nazis planned to use it on Hitler's ashes.
• 
  
• In Day of the Tentacle, you return to the original Mansion, and do battle against the Purple Tentacle, who drinks toxic waste and grows arms. Oh, and he also wants to take over the world.
  
• 
  
• This game features time travel, and lets you go back in time to interact with historical figures like Ben Franklin, John Hancock, and Betsy Ross. In fact, time travel ends up being the very thing that saves the day. Just try and forget the fact that they are portapotties turned into time travel devices called "Chron-o-Johns."
• 
  
• Inside the game, you could use Ed's computer to play the complete and full version of the original Maniac Mansion. Other games have done this since, but Day of the Tentacle was one of the first.
• 
  
• In 2004 Adventure Gamers compiled a list of the Top 20 Adventure Games of All Time, and Day of the Tentacle topped the list.
• 
  
• By the mid to late 1990s, LucasArts adventure games had begun to decline in sales. Console games were becoming more popular, as well as first person shooters. The Dig became the last science fiction game released by the company in 1995. After that they released two more Monkey Island sequels, and the afterlife themed Grim Fandango before shutting down the adventure games development in 2000. Since then, LucasArts has focused mainly on developing Star Wars and Indiana Jones games.
• 
  
• The Dig was an ambitious game produced by Steven Spielberg for LucasArts, which very nearly didn't come out. It was based on a story idea that Spielberg originally had for Amazing Stories, and had dialogue provided by Orson Scott Card, and was written by both Spielberg and interactive fiction author Brian Moriarty. It began development in 1989, but wasn't released until six years later.
• 
  
• 
  
• The story involved a team of astronauts placing explosives on an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, a la Armageddon. However, things go pretty well, and the mission seems to be a success. However, once they investigate the surface of the thing, they get zapped to a faraway world. Commander Boston Low (voice by Robert Patrick) and his team have to explore their alien surroundings and find a way to get back home.
• 
  
• The Dig was the first LucasArts game to have its soundtrack sold separately on CD, and a novelization of the game was written by Alan Dean Foster, who has written numerous Star Wars novelizations, and well as ones for the Alien films.
• 
  
• LucasArts actually filed a "notice of opposition" with the U.S. Patent Office against the website Digg in 2007, saying that they were infringing on their trademark on The Dig. They settled out of court, and the opposition was withdrawn later that year.
• 
  
• Most LucasArts games feature reference to other LucasArts games, the numbers 1138 (from THX-1138, Lucas' first film), and Han Solo's line "I have a bad feeling about this." Several of the games also feature a plant named Chuck, which has become a running joke amongst game developers. He first appeared in Maniac Mansion, and later made his way into other games.
• 
  
• Besides the science fiction games, LucasArts also produced the motorcycle adventure Full Throttle (my personal favorite), the magical adventure Loom, the Monkey Island series of pirate adventures (four games total), Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Grim Fandango. Hopefully, we'll see games like this coming out once again.
• 
  

• In Verne's story, the cannon that fires the passengers into space is called the Columbiad. More than 100 years after this book was published, the ship that sent the astronauts to the moon in the Apollo 11 mission was the Columbia.
• There are other correlations to the Apollo mission: in both cases there were three travelers, both ships blasted off (literally, in Vernes' case) from Florida, and the dimensions of the "shell" are very close to those of the Apollo Command/Service module.
• The French adventurer Michel Ardan in the novel was inspired by the French photographer, cartoonist, writer, and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. He was the first person to take aerial photographs, and inspired the Verne novel Five Weeks In A Balloon.
• In 1875 the novel was adapted into an opera, "Le voyage dans la lune." Although this was done without Verne's permission, it featured an enormous budget with music by Jacques Offenbach, huge palaces built out of glass, a live camel, and 673 costumes. Verne approached the creators of the show and complained to them that it was similar to his novel, and they apparently settled the matter, because the same team later adapted Verne's short story anthology Doctor Ox into an opera as well.
• Verne did his own rough calculations on what it would take to shoot something into orbit for this novel, and they turned out to be fairly close to the real thing. If Verne had lived in the 1950s and 1960s, who knows what would have happened.
• In the novel, when constructing the cannon, they have to dig a hole 900 feet deep, and 60 feet wide, to house the barrel. That's pretty damn big.
• Although the projectile is actually fired in this novel, the fate of the astronauts aboard is unknown. Verne later wrote a sequel called Around The Moon which details their trip which involves orbiting the moon, and somewhat impractically falling back to the Earth and being rescued.
• This book inspired the first science fiction film ever made: Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, in 1902. Later adaptations included From The Earth To The Moon in 1958 from RKO Pictures, and a comedy with Burl Ives and Terry Thomas in 1967 called Jules Verne's A Rocket To The Moon.
• In 1961 ballistics engineer Gerald Bull began Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) which fired very large projectiles into the sky, with the hopes of them one day attaining orbit. This would be much cheaper than using rockets, although the project was ended before they could get anything beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
• Bull kept trying to work on his idea to launch a satellite into space via a gun through the 1970s and 1980s, and produced an enormous gun based on his work called the GC 45. It fired 155 millimeter shells over vast distances, and was purchased by both South Africa and Iraq. Bull continued to work with the Iraqis on the design of the supergun, but was assassinated in 1990, most likely by Mossad agents, as Israel would have been the target of that gun.
• During the U.S. military's Operation Plumbbob series of nuclear tests in Nevada in 1957, a 900 kilogram steel plate covering a safety shaft was sent shooting skyward at enough speed to attain escape velocity, and it was never found again. Some researchers think that it broke the Earth's gravity and is in space somewhere, but others believe it melted in the upper atmosphere.
• When Disneyland Paris was designed, the Imagineers drew heavily on the French love for their native Jules Verne, and as a result Space Mountain was built as an homage to this book. In fact, there's an enormous cannon mounted on the building, which is meant to "fire" tourists into space. Inside the ride you pass by the Columbiad which fires and recoils as you pass it. Logos for the Baltimore Gun Club and the Columbiad Cannon are visible throughout. Additionally, the ride lies right next to the attraction inspired by Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
• A verneshot is a geologic term where a hypothetical volcanic eruption caused by a buildup of gas deep underneath the Earth's crust could launch parts of the crust and mantle into orbit. It's named in tribute to both Verne, and From The Earth To The Moon.
• Warren Ellis' excellent Planetary comic book features many homages to classic literature, including the discovery of the shell fired by the Baltimore Gun Club (now the American Gun Club). However, in Ellis' story there was a miscalculation in the trajectory, and the shell orbited the Earth for years before crashing back to Earth, and the astronauts aboard died due to lack of food and water.
• In 2005 a video game called Voyage: Inspired By Jules Verne was released, based on this novel and its sequel, and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells. It's set in the year 1851, and you play the part of French adventurer Michael Ardan who travels to the Moon aboard the shell. The story then deviates from Verne's work, having Ardan meet an entire civilization that lives under the surface.

• The Masks from Mission Impossible: The latex masks which could apparently turn a thin Tom Cruise into a chunky Philip Seymour Hoffman weren't exclusive to the movies. They used a fair share of these disguises throughout the television show, and the best part was when they'd cut from the live person to the dead looking fake mask being peeled away to reveal the operative underneath. At least MI:3 showed us a bit of how the machine that makes them works, but it still doesn't explain how they fit so well. The company that makes those could have made a fortune at Halloween every year.
• The Translator Microbes in Farscape: Science fiction properties have tried for years to get around the problem of everyone speaking English on new worlds lightyears away from Earth, and this has led to everything from The Universal Translator in Star Trek, to the Babel Fish in Hitchhiker's Guide, and the telepathic translating done by the TARDIS in Doctor Who. So, by the time Farscape came around, the writers decided to make them injectable translator microbes that let you understand whatever languange was hurled at you. Other people could understand you as well, but only if they were likewise injected. They didn't work perfectly, and often failed to translate slang like "dren" and "frell."
• Almost Everything in the 1960s Batman TV Show: Batman has had a slew of his own wacky gadgets, both in the comic books where he has an outfit for every possible encounter, and in the television show which really took the cake in creating bizarre items for Batman. Almost everything he used was a "Bat" something. In this clip from the show, you've got probably the lamest Batman gadget ever invented: The Bat Ladder. What exactly makes this a Bat Ladder, and why did he need to label it? In case he lost it somehow? Que ridiculo. Then there's the Bat-copter, the "Bat Auto Mode," and the Shark Repellent Bat Spray, which apparently makes sharks explode. He even has Barracuda, Whale, and Manta Ray repellent in there too.
• The Psychic Paper from Doctor Who: While this seems cool at first, eventually you start thinking it was an easy stopgap by the writers to get around the Doctor showing identification. In the old Tom Baker episode "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" (featuring the Doctor as a sleuth in Victorian London) the Doctor is asked to turn out his pockets, and he has everything in there from jelly babies to a toy Batmobile. We sure would have loved to see what Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant has crammed in there. Maybe a junior g-man badge would have worked just as well.
• The Giant Amplifier from Back to the Future: Doc Brown was an eccentric inventor, to be sure, but why on Earth would he create a massive speaker? Watching this movie again, it seems like it was just created for comic effect, and surely it would have blown out both of Marty's eardrums, scrambled his brain, and broken a bone or two in the process. Slight chance of overload my ass. Maybe the terrorists had asked him to build this thing too.
• Reed Richards and his Unstable Molecules: Unstable molecules sound like they'd be, well... unstable. Seems like just an easy way to explain why the Human Torch's clothes don't burn up, or why Sue Storm doesn't have to strip naked every time she turns invisible. Were the Thing's blue shorts made out of unstable molecules too? No idea what he needed them for. Reed supposedly made a fortune for the Fantastic Four by selling the patents to all of his inventions, but were most of them stolen? One thing is for sure, while he could seemingly invent a teleportation device out of a wristwatch and sticks of gum, he sure couldn't invent anything to turn Ben Grimm human again. So, how did Reed invent these things? In the movie the cosmic rays did it, but in the comics, it was just pure Reed Richards pseudogenius. It's also the name of an awesome graphic novel about the "real life" Fantastic Four by James Sturm.
• The Jetpack from The Rocketeer: Now, don't get me wrong, I wanted one of these things so bad that I could taste it. Who wouldn't want to slap on a funky helmet that makes you look like a hood ornament, a cool leather jacket, and just take to the skies? The problem was that later I realized this thing would totally burn your ass off. I mean, the flames shot out mere millimeters from his butt... how on Earth did he not scorch himself? Asbestos pants? Even one little throwaway line could have someone explained this, but now I just imagine Cliff Secord in a hospital bed with third-degree burns covering his backside. Plus, how could he even bend his legs upwards without melting those boots?
• Dick Tracy's Magnetic Space Coupe: Dick Tracy is probably best known for his two-way wristwatch radio, which later became a two-way television and eventually housed a computer to help him solve crimes. However, in the 1960s things got a lot more ludicrous when Tracy and Co. traveled to the moon via his Magnetic Space Coupe. While they were there, Tracy met "The Governor of the Moon" and his daughter, "Moon Maid." She eventually married Tracy's adopted son Junior, and they had a daughter together who... sorry, my brain just exploded.
• The Antigravity Belt Buckle in Ultraviolet: Or "Ultraviolent" as I like to call it. Milla Jovovich's badass vampire, er... "hemophage" with a conscience used this round little belt buckle to change her personal gravity, meaning she could walk on the ceiling, climb up walls, and it could even make her motorcycle drive up the sides of buildings. While we could (barely) buy the nanotech/portable hole technology in her wristbands and in that white plastic backpack, this thing just sent it over the top. What would keep her from flying off into the sky?

• 
  
• The Holtzman Effect: In the Dune series, the spice melange was able to increase your lifespan, heighten your senses, and let you see safe paths through the space-time continuum. Of course, in order to use this last benefit, you had to live in a micro-gravity environment while being constantly saturated with spice. Plus, it would mutate your body into something fairly hideous. However, in order to actually fold space and make this travel happen, you'd need a Holtzman Drive, which used subatomic energy fields to fold space and let you travel over vast distances in the blink of an eye. Without a navigator, you might not make it to your final destination.
• 
  
• The Infinite Improbability Drive: In order to get around traveling over the enormous distances in space, Douglas Adams created this drive in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to avoid "all of that tedious mucking about in hyperspace." It was invented by a student who was sweeping up after a party, and decided that if such a machine was a virtual impossibility, then it had to logically by a finite improbability and went from there. Basically, when you activate the drive (which is an electronic brain hooked up to a Brownian motion generator... like a cup of tea) it causes you to pass through every point in the universe at exactly the same time. Then you just drop down the improbability levels, and hope you come out where you need to be.
• 
  
• The Stargate: In the universe of Stargate, you can travel over huge interstellar distances simply by stepping into the giant Stargate, and popping out on the other side where another giant gate exists. You could select which gate you wanted to travel to by dialing a "code" on the gates and locking the nine different chevrons into place. They were constructed as a network by a race of ancient alien beings, and basically open up wormholes for travelers to jaunt through.
• 
  
• Jaunting: In Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt" (found in the Skeleton Crew anthology) the technology exists to teleport people over huge distances. However, you have to be put to sleep for the trip, and revived on the other end. If you travel through while awake, very bad things happen. In fact, they send a convicted murderer through while awake, in exchange for him getting a full pardon. When he comes out the other end, he mutters "It's eternity in there" and then dies of a massive heart attack. In the story, a father tells his children about these bad things, and of course the son holds his breath when they hose them down with sleeping gas, so he can see what it's like. It ain't very pretty.
• 
  
• Artificial Black Holes: In the movie Event Horizon, the ship (of the same name) creates artificial black holes by using a gravity drive, and this allows them to fold space in order to travel large distance quickly. As usually happens with a technology like this, something goes wrong along the way. In this case, the ship literally ends up in hell, and seems to become possessed by an evil entity. Everyone goes a little bit nuts, Sam Neill tears his own eyes out, and that's about enough to make you not want to try out this method of travel.
• 
  
• Cryogenic freezing/sleep: In Alien and countless other science fiction books/movies, travelers often enter a suspended animation hypersleep so they don't go insane from space madness when their trip takes 40 years to complete. The downside is, everyone else you know in the world will continue aging at a normal rate, while you're frozen in place. This is why all of Ripley's friends and her daughter were dead once she was found drifting in Aliens some 57 years later. This doesn't mean that the ship you're in will be traveling faster than the speed of light, but when you wake up on the other side it'll feel pretty instantaneous, which is what really matters.
• 
  
• The Wave Motion Engine: Whether you know it as Starblazers, or under the original title Space Battleship Yamato, they both traveled the same way via the Wave Motion engine. This enormous device powered the entire ship, allowed them to fire the Wave Motion Gun, and also had to ability to make them jump quickly through space using tachyon energy. Since they had to travel 148,000 lightyears to bring back a device that would cleanse the earth of deadly radiation, this came in pretty handy. However, this could not be used constantly, since both the place of origin and the destination had to be locked in "phase," and if this wasn't done correctly the ship could destroy the universe.
• 
  
• FTL Drives: In the world of Battlestar Galactica, the ships of the colonial fleet and the Cylons alike both travel over large distances by using FTL drives. While a bit of a misnomer, since the ship actually teleports instantaneously rather than rocketing at speeds great than the speed of light (a la Star Trek) to a new destination, it still has the desired effect. The process by which this works is not actually discussed on the show, but we do know that the drives are powered by the ore Tylium, and that ships can even jump out of a planet's atmosphere. The constantly jumping episode "33" shows just how much they rely on this technology, and how the Cylons use it to stay a step behind, or a step ahead in some cases.
• 
  

• Spock: Not only could Spock serve as the poster boy for the entire half-human/half-something else universe, but they also worked his background into several episodes of the show, and the plot of a couple of the films. Plus it gave them the opportunity to write lines like "All right, you mutinous, disloyal, computerized half-breed. We'll see about you deserting my ship." Which Kirk said, and not Bones, who relished in taking digs at Spock's dual heritage. He also helped carve the way for other Stark Trek halfsies, like Deanna Troi (half Human/half Betazoid and Worf's son Alexander, who is 1/4 Human, 3/4 Klingon and 4/4 whiny.
• Doctor Who: Everyone knows that Doctor Who is from Gallifrey, right? Well, not the writers of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie. They had the 8th Doctor be half-human "On my mother's side," which opened up an enormous can of worms in the continuity, amongst the fans, and pretty much throughout space-time. The 10th Doctor later revealed that Time Lords can rewrite their DNA to imitate alien species, which seems like a stopgap effort at fixing that particular problem.
• Ripley: In Alien Resurrection (shudder) Ripley was brought back as a clone with half-human/half-alien DNA, with an alien queen embryo implanted inside her. The military scientists extracted the embryo, but decided to keep Half-Ripley alive. Which, of course, turned out to be a mistake because her human side is imbued with "kickass." Her resulting offspring was also a mix of Alien with Human traits. In fact, the original design for the creature featured very prominent male and female genitalia, which they finally removed in post-production. According to director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, "Even for a Frenchman, it's too much."
• Elizabeth: This half Alien/half human child from V: The Final Battle was the resulting offspring from the climactic ending of episode two of that miniseries. When Robin gave birth to those two babies, one a girl with a forked tongue, and the other a boy who looked like a lizard, it was one of the most shocking moments of the show. It was probably only topped by the fact that the Visitors were reptilian aliens. Elizabeth ended up having strange magical powers that saved the day in the end, plus the bacteria that killed her brother but left her alive was developed into a weapon called "Red Dust" that the humans used against the Visitors. Looks like cross-species sex pays off after all. Just ask the Cylons, and while you're at it find out what the hell is happening with the whole Hera subplot, especially now that we have Nicky and Hera: dual Cylon offspring.
• Robocop: Okay, in all fairness, he wasn't really half human, since most of his body had been replaced by robo-parts, but he still had a human brain and a human face. In fact, I'm not sure why the bad guys didn't just target his lower jaw whenever they were out fighting him in public. Looked fairly vulnerable to me. Still, he did have to power down from time to time (so he could dream and further the human plot points) and he also ate that strange sludge that tasted like baby food, so he had enough human workings going on in there. Thank you for your cooperation.
• Mariner: Kevin Costner's Waterworld flick has been popping up on cable every time you blink lately, and I have to admit that this film isn't as bad as I remember. Sure there are some dorky moments, but Costner's Mariner character as a half Human/half fish combo leads an interesting life. Rather than seeing him battle Dennis Hopper and his cronies, I'd like to see a Discovery Channel-esque special that just followed him around on his trimaran and showed us what his life was like. After all, at the end of the movie he returns to the waters to do... who knows what?
• King of the Land of Half: Did you know there was an entire land dedicated to Halves? Everything in the entire land was split into different halves, and was presided over by a king who wore half kingly robes, and a half suit of armor. His crown was made up of two different halves, and his breakfast bowl was made up of try different types of bowls, perfect to hold his Quaker Halfsies cereal in. This rice/corn combo cereal came and went in the early 1980s, but not before Jay Ward of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame could animate this Half King/Half King wonder. He might not be scifi, but the cereal featured Nutrasweet, which is certainly space-aged and likely to turn us all into mutants. And speaking of mutants...
• Kuato: Technically he might be a mutant, but he sure looked like a half Mutant/half Human to us. After all, he couldn't get around very well without the lug whose belly he was growing out of walking around and feeding him and all that jazz. What was really special was that no matter how fucked-up you thought Kuato looked, he was the real brains of the operation. You sure hope that poor guy never got punched in the stomach, plus it probably made shopping for clothes a real interesting experience. I just want to know where Kuato "went" while he was tucked up inside the guy's guts. Was it like regressing back to the womb? Check out the clip below that shows what he might have been like at parties.

• Babbage had a life-threatening fever when he was 8 years old, and the parents ordered that his "brain was not to be taxed too much." Babbage later thought that this left him free to daydream, which led to his computers.
• Babbage was later schooled at the Holmwood Academy, which only had 30 students. They also had a massive library, with many books focused on mathematics, which he fell in love with.
• He worked on calculating machine designs from other inventor/mathematicians like Blaise Pascal, Wilhelm Schickard, and Gottfried Leibniz. All of these men had designed working calculators from the 1500s on. In Shickard's case, he had invented a calculating machine called "The Speeding Clock" that could work with six-digit numbers and would ring a bell to indicate memory overflow. It was later destroyed in a fire, but a working replica was constructed in 1960.
• Babbage himself first proposed building a "calculating engine" with much more capacity in 1822, and he went on to design several machines which he called "Difference Engines." Sadly, they were never built because of their enormous size, cost, and also because Babbage's personality frequently clashed with investors. Also, in 1827, Babbage's father, wife, and two of his sons died... all in the same year. He had a resulting mental breakdown which further delayed any construction or design.
• The first Difference Engine design had over 25,000 parts, would have been eight feet high, and would have weighed 15 tons. It was never fully completed during his lifetime, although different sections were later assembled and shown to work by his son, Henry Provost Babbage, after he inherited them.
• Babbage revised his designs for the Difference Engine No. 2, although this was never built during his lifetime either. In 1989, the London Science Museum began constructing one from his designs, and it was completed in 1991. It has 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron and steel, weighs five tons and measures eleven feet long and seven feet high.
• Only two versions of this Engine exist: the one built for the London Science Museum, and a second one that was built by the museum on special commission for millionaire Nathan Myhrvold.
• The first completed Difference Engine No. 2 performed its first calculation in 1991, and returned results to more than 31 digits. That's more than your souped-up pocket calculator.
• A separate printing unit that Babbage designed was constructed for the Engine in 2000 and didn't need USB a to b cables or a serial interface. Pretty fancy stuff for the 19th Century.
• Babbage improved on his Difference Engine ideas again by working on plans for an Analytical Engine that could be reprogrammed by inserting programs on punch cards into the machine. This was the first programmable computer, which later led to other scientists improving on these ideas and eventually to the modern computer.
• Besides working on engines and calculating machines, Babbage also served as a mathematics professor at Cambridge for many years, won a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society, working on railroad rail gauges, invented uniform postal rates, ran for Parliament, worked in cryptography, and also invented the "pilot" (better known as a cow-catcher) that was mounted on the front of locomotives to "push" cows off the tracks to help prevent derailings.
• Babbage also didn't suffer from what he called public nuisance very well, either. He published "Observations of Street Nuisances" in 1864, which was a summary of 165 nuisances that he observed over 80 days. He also wrote "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows" after counting the broken windows on a nearby factory.
• On a side note, growing up in Dallas, Texas, I used to beg my parents to take me to a little software shop to buy computer games. It was called Babbage's. Today it's better known as GameStop, but I still have a soft spot for that geeky little store.
• To this date, Charles Babbage's brain is preserved in a glass jar at the London Science Museum, just awaiting the perfect moment for reanimation.

• Big Guy: If you haven't read Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot oversized graphic extravaganza, then you need to go out and pick it up right now. We'll wait. Ready? Okay. Big Guy is an over-armed, over-achieving battletank complete with his own boy scout do-gooder companion, Rusty. Now, the secret is that Big Guy is actually pilot by Lieutenant Dwayne Hunter, so he's not really a sentient robot. However, the world at large doesn't know this, and if you assemble a robot army, you're going to want to fight in it, right? Well, here's your e-ticket. We'd take him over Voltron or the Power Rangers megabot any day.
• Maxmillian from Disney's The Black Hole: This blood red robot could hover and had whirling blades at the ends of his arms... what's not to love? Sure he had good old laser blasters, but when he could turn your guts into a blended smoothie, who cared about guns? His ominous, scary head terrified me as a kid, and he'll do the same to human ground troops. Just keep him away from circular saws and other cutting tools.Oh, he also serves as a handy storage device for deposed megalomaniacs as well, in case you find yourself needing that sort of thing.
• Nixon from Hard Boiled: Geof and Frank also collaborated on the amazing Hard Boiled, which features more destruction and mayhem than a Michael Bay movie, all in intricately drawn in Geof Darrow's "obsessive attention to detail" style. Armed with just a handgun and his bare (later robotic) fists, Nixon cleaves his way through just about everything you can imagine, including giant barreling cars and a dog with laser beams for eyes.
• The Iron Giant in KickAss Mode: Have you seen The Iron Giant? This sadly unappreciated film was directed by Brad Bird for Warner Bros. animation, and really deserved a larger audience. The quirky 1950s retro-setting was perfect for this story about a lost alien robot superweapon who winds up on Earth and wants to be Superman. Of course, when he went haywire and turned into a giant gun that could take out anything, that's when he was at his most awesome. Of course, the movie wanted you to think that was bad, but we think it's incredible. Bring on the big guns!
• The Robot from Lost in Space: He may not have had a name (although his crate said ONE General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental ROBOT, so he might have been GUNTER), but he was loyal, always at the ready, and able to shout "Danger!" whenever something alarming was about to happen. Plus he was a perfect foil for that nebbishy Doctor Smith. Now, the Lost in Space movie might not have thrilled everyone (I actually enjoyed it), but the updated Robot in that (with the same voice) was a badass with plasma blasters attached. Both versions had treads, waving arms, and a giant round head. What more can you ask for? Well, step one would be to order him to destroy Matt LeBlanc.
• The Terminator from The Terminator: You can't really make a list of badass robots without including the Terminator, but which model do you pick? All of them? Only one? The T-1000? The Arnie models? The Summer Glau-bot? We have to go with the original from the first movie, because he was much grittier, to the point, and without a sense of humor. Plus he could growl out "Fuck you, asshole" better than any of the other models, who apparently had their language sanitized.
• Soundwave from The Transformers: Screw Optimus Prime and Megatron, even though either one would be a more powerful, logical choice. No, we like Soundwave because of his awesome voice. Who didn't want to talk like an old-school Cylon? Plus he could transform into a Walkman and fool all of your friends. Plus the cassettes became his recon sidekicks. The toy was a lot more heavily armed than the version in the cartoon, and a lot more badass. He had a microphone that could turn into a missile launcher. What more do you need? "RAVAGE, EJECT. OPERATION: ASS-KICKING."
• The Gunslinger from WestWorld: There is probably nothing scarier than a relentless Yul Brynner-bot without a face chasing after you relentlessly. Except maybe two of them. Just like the Terminator he never got tired, had a fast-walking pace that never faltered, and was always ready to blow your head off. Yul Brynner's own face was steely enough to be frightening, but once his own face popped off exposing the transistors and wires beneath he was nightmare-inducing.
• The Killbots from Chopping Mall: Originally released as Killbots, this Roger Corman produced film features three security robots going haywire in a mall in California and chopping everyone into shreds. Plus they had those creepy Cylon-esque red eyes which just meant they were up to no good. Strangely, it'd didn't do too well as Killbots, but they released it again as Chopping Mall, and it brought in some bucks. Not a blockbuster, to be sure, but check out what a gory name change can do. These are the guys you'd want on the front lines, cutting through the infantry so the big guns can sit back and wait.
• Ultron from Marvel Comics: Not only is Ultron one of the most ultimate killing robots ever devised, he also has a grinning visage that will scare the crap out of you just by seeing it. Granted, he was a bit unstable and the Avengers seemed to have no problem taking him down again and again, and he was even created by one of their own. However, if you can get past his epithet shouting, revenge driven programming, he'd make a good asset to have if you ever need to talk someone to death.
• Mechagodzilla: You've got to have one giant weapon you keep in reserve, ready to bust out and make everyone pee their pants just when the time is right. Who better than Mechagodzilla to do that? In fact, trot him out in his Godzilla disguise first, and then you have people thinking "Oh crap, it's Godzilla!" Then once they think they've defeated him, but actually just destroyed his fake Godzilla skin, you've got people thinking "Oh crap, it's Mechagodzilla! Screw it, we surrender." Built by aliens, he's a badass robo-copy of Japan's mightiest protector.
• Major Motoko from Ghost in the Shell: If you ever want to see a woman take on a tank all by herself with nothing more than an automatic rifle, then look no further. Sure, she's a cyborg with some cloaking technology, but that hardly makes her any less badass. As a field commander on the ground, Motoko could issue commands and kick ass at the same time. Of course, she'll also obsessively leave the field to follow up on Puppetmaster clues and hints, but that might be a small price to pay for her skills.
• HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey: You'd need someone to run the numbers and come up with strategies while all the fighting was going on, and who better than good old, red-eyed HAL back at the base crunching scenarios? Of course, the downside is that is things start looking like they might threaten HAL at all, he'll pull the plug on everyone else to save himself. However, he'd explain it to you in that calm, easy cadence, so you probably wouldn't mind at all.

• Johnny Five from Short Circuit: This guy couldn't kick any ass, so make him zip back and forth in a shooting gallery style and let your 'bots with distance weapons take shots at him.
• David from A.I.: If you want to train your bots on how to capture kids and hold them for ransom, use good old David-bot and his Teddy for some games of hide and seek in urban settings. Just be gentle, because the kid could hardly eat spinach, let alone take a pulse-rifle blast to the spine.
• V.I.N.C.E.N.T. from The Black Hole: Okay, I'll say it here, I have a true soft spot for this movie, and for V.I.N.C.E.N.T. However, he wouldn't have been too effective as a soldier (unless you had just offed his buddy B.O.B... continually), so if you put him out to pasture for target practice, at least he'd be doing some good. Sorry, little buddy *sniff*.
• C3P0 from Star Wars: R2D2 may be useful enough to keep around in an engineering or repair bay somewhere, but C3P0 was useless. No speed, no weapons, and a mouth that wouldn't quit? Use him for hand-to-hand combat training and see how many languages he can say "Not in the face!" in.
• Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation: Come on, how annoying did this guy get? Surround him in an open field and let the whole crew go to town. Keep spare parts around so you can repeat this over and over.

• 
  
• Battlezone was developed in 1979 by Atari and released in 1980. Morgan Hoff at Atari was the lead designer, and Ed Rotberg served as the principal programmer. Both had worked on many of Atari's other classic games.
• 
  
• Battlezone was a tank simulator that gave you two joysticks, one for the left tread and one for the right, and a single button that fired your gun. You would drive all over an alien landscape, complete with an erupting volcano, and blast enemy tanks and spaceships while dodging simple geometric shapes.
• 
  
• In addition, the screen would "crack" when you were killed by an enemy, and would also play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture when you would enter your initials for the high score.
• 
  
• Battlezone incorporated many new design elements that hadn't been seen in coin-operated games before, like a persicope-like viewer and realistic (for the time) simulated tank driving. The game also featured a built-in step to allow shorter gamers to reach the periscope.
• 
  
• The game featured wire-frame vector graphics in black and white, but they overlaid red and green cellophane onto the monitor to make it look like the game actually had different colors. The radar and warning messages were in red, while the main graphics were in green.
• 
  
• Once the game was released, it was an instant hit. In fact, it became so popular that the United States Army approached Atari and had them design a version of the game that would train gunners on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Only two prototypes were produced that featured realistically modeled enemy helicopters, tanks, and other vehicles.
• 
  
• Ed Rotberg was so incensed that Atari was getting involved with the military, that he had several shouting matches with his bosses. He agreed only to stay on at Atari as long as he never had to work on another military project again.
• 
  
• Because players covered up most of the game with their face and body, other editions were designed like one without the periscope (because of concerns over hygiene as well, with everyone pressing their faces up against the viewer) and a cocktail table prototype.
• 
  
• Rumors persisted that you could drive up to the volcano, enter a secret passage, and then find and explore a castle. Also, people thought that if you continued driving straight for over an hour (!) you could eventually reach the mountains and find a tank factory that was building the enemy tanks. Sadly, neither were true.
• 
  
• Red Baron was a game released almost a year after Battlezone, featuring similar wire-frame graphics and gameplay except sit in a World War I biplane instead of a futuristic tank on an alien world. In fact, many Red Baron cabinets were just conversions of Battlezone units, and you could peel off the Red Baron stickers revealing the Battlezone artwork underneath.
• 
  
• Battlezone remained popular much longer than most games that came out at the same time, and several different versions of been produced over the years. The game was ported to just about every home and portable video game system, and there were multiplayer versions and sequels produced for PCs.
• 
  
• In Battlezone, the 1998 remake for PCs, they included an actual story. Meteors fall on the Earth in 1957, and the Americans and Soviets find a rare element inside them called bio-metal, which lets them build vehicles with special abilities. Of course, the Soviets and Americans use this ability to wage war across the solar system rather than better mankind.
• 
  
• Peter Hirschberg is an amazing computer animator and arcade owner who frequent makes 3D models of old arcade cabinets in his spare time. He contributed models to the retro-gaming documentary Chasing Ghosts, and you can check out his Battlezone and Tron models here. Keep in mind there are completely rendered in the computer, and are not photographs or filmed images.
  
• 
  

Time Cop. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only one who can safeguard history against those who would change it for their own evil ends. But a corrupt U.S. Senator (Ron Silver) is messing with the timeline in order to become president in 2004. Van Damme quickly figures out what's going on. But then Silver changes history some more, so when Van Damme returns to his present, everything has changed and Van Damme no longer has a job. It's up to Jean-Claude to go back once again and change the past a second time, getting rid of Silver in the process. Weirdly, this is one of the best movies about time travel in spite of its action-movie star.

(Versions of Van Damme's Time Cops show up a lot in SF, including the ChronoGuard in Jasper FForde's Thursday Next novels, and the temporal police from the 29th century, who show up in Star Trek: Voyager a few times. Stephen Hawking has famously theorized that some kind of temporal police must exist, to prevent the horrendous paradoxes that would otherwise happen. In Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, they're referred to as the "Quantum Angels.")

Primer. Abe and Aaron create a time machine, which requires you to lay inside it for as long as you want to go back for. They go back and start meddling with their own pasts, speculating on the stock market and tinkering with other things. But soon they're making more serious changes — knocking out their past selves and taking their places. They live through the same day or two over and over again, creating alternate timelines with subtle differences each time. Eventually, Abe and Aaron start trying to counter each other's interference, but keeping up with which version of Abe or Aaron you're seeing gets trickier and trickier.

Back to the Future Part 2. When "Doc" Brown carelessly leaves his Delorean time machine unguarded, that big lunkhead Biff goes back in time to 1955 and gives his younger self the means to become rich and powerful far beyond his pathetic dreams. Our hero, Marty, has to go back in time to 1955 for the second time in a row — except instead of changing Biff's future as he did in the first movie, he's just trying to undo the changes that Biff has already made.

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. Jud Eliott III gets a job as a time courier, showing tourists the wonders of history. But some of his crazy colleagues start messing around with the timeline and wrecking history, so he has to keep going back and trying to fix the damage without attracting the attention of the Time Patrol. And then he falls in love with a time paradox named Pulcheria, his own great-great-great-great-grandmother, and it all goes to pot.

The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Harlan belongs to a time agency called Eternity, which exists outside of time itself. He and his fellow agents go around changing history to reduce human suffering. But then Harlan has a falling-out with his bosses over his girlfriend Noÿs, whom they want to erase from history. Harlan is supposed to help one of his colleagues, Cooper, go back to the 24th century and become the scientist whose discoveries later make the Eternals possible. In a fit of pique, Harlan sends Cooper back to 1932 instead, so he can't lay the groundwork for Eternity and Eternity will never exist. Finally, after the Eternals un-erase his girlfriend, he agrees to go back and rescue Cooper from the past — but then his girlfriend Noÿs reveals that Eternity's secret purpose is to edit history to make sure humans never colonize the stars. So instead Harlan helps her to change history so that humans discover atomic energy earlier, and start down the path of space exploration. As a consequence, Eternity ceases ever to have existed.

Lightning by Dean Koontz. Laura has a guardian angel who shows up to help her whenever she's in danger, but then it turns out other people are trying to undo the "angel's" work. Some evil Nazi time travelers are trying to destroy Laura. As Laura's son explains:

They can hopscotch around us.. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like... if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic.

Doctor Who. For a show all about time travel, Doctor Who doesn't have that many stories where the Doctor and another time-traveler are both changing the timeline back and forth, surprisingly. But the Doctor and his fellow Time Lord the Master get into some duels on a few occasions. The most over-the-top is in the comedy special "Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Death," where the Master and Doctor meet up in a castle. The Master goes back in time and bribes the architect to put a trapdoor right where the Doctor happens to be standing. But then it turns out the Doctor also went back in time, and bribed the architect even more — to put the trapdoor where the Master is standing instead.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a lot of cris-crossing back and forth in Reg Chronotis' time machine (much of which is lifted somewhat from the episodes Adams wrote for Doctor Who. In particular, the ghost of the last surviving Salaxian possesses a disgruntled literary magazine editor, inspiring him to go back in time to repair the Salaxian spaceship before it can explode, back at the dawn of life on Earth — which will have the effect of making sure life never develops on this planet. The instructions for fixing the ship are buried in the second half of Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan." But Chronotis and Dirk Gently, our detective hero, go back to Coleridge's time and ensure he never finishes that poem, so the instructions are lost and the alien plot is foiled.

Terminator. The Terminator movies and TV show are all about people and cyborgs traveling back in time to change, or safeguard history. The machines want to kill Sarah Connor before she can ever give birth to future resistance leader John Connor, so John sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect him — and Kyle becomes John's daddy. And then, the machines send more cyborgs back to kill John, and eventually Kyle's brother Derek ends up back in our time hanging out with his friend/nephew as well. And Sarah Connor either dies of cancer or travels forward in time past her own death date and somehow avoids it. Maybe in the second season of Sarah Connor Chronicles the machines will figure out they just have to wipe out the Reese brothers as kids, and all their problems go away.

Time After Time. H.G. Wells and Jack The Ripper battle each other in the bizarre future of 1979. Once they both reach the future, time travel doesn't play that much of a part in the story — except that at one point, Wells travels forward in time three days with his girlfriend Amy, only to find Amy's obituary in a newspaper. They have to travel back again and prevent Jack the Ripper from making Amy his fifth victim. (In the end, it turns out the obituary was mistaken, and it was Amy's friend who was murdered.) And then Amy goes back to the 19th century and marries Wells, changing history at least somewhat.

Meet The Robinsons. An animated Disney film, very loosely based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson. Tom Selleck invents a time machine. (We'll just pause to let you absorb that piece of info.) And then a villain named Bowler Hat Guy travels back in time to sabotage a memory-scanning machine that a kid named Lewis has invented, which gave rise to all the amazing inventions in Tom Selleck's utopian future. ("Tom Selleck's Utopian Future" will be my next band name.) So Tom Selleck's son Wilbur has to travel back in time to our time, to make sure Lewis repairs the memory-scanning machine.

Crime Traveler. In this British TV series, a physicist named Holly Turner invents a time machine, and a lazy detective named Slade uses it to travel back in time and solve crimes before they happen. But in the final episode, a criminal gets his own time machine, and travels back in time to give himself an airtight alibi for a couple of murders. Slade has to travel back as well, to catch the other time traveler in the act.

Research by Nivair Gabriel

• 
  
• The Large Hadron Collider was conceived in the 1980s, and eventually approved by CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), in 1994.
• 
  
• Some of the questions the LHC hopes to answer are: What is mass? What is 96% of the universe made of? Why is there no more antimatter? What was matter like within the first second of the Universe's life? Do extra dimensions of space really exist? Are stars just pinholes in the curtain of night? Okay, we stole that last one from Highlander. Sorry.
• 
  
• The LHC uses the tunnel originally built for the Large Electron-Positron Collider between 1983 and 1988, although it has required massive changes, including the construction of giant underground caverns to hold the large detectors for the system. Construction on those began in 1998.
• 
  
• The total cost of the LHC is not known yet, but it is estimated to be somewhere between five and ten billion dollars, which is quite a range. They've suffered many overages and setbacks since the project became active, CERN had its operating budget scaled back, and there were inaccuracies during construction.
• 
  
• In 2005 a technician was killed inside the tunnel when a crane load was accidentally dropped on him. If there's a movie waiting to be written about a ghost in the machine, this is it.
• 
  
• In March 2007 a pressure test involving several magnets failed, and as a result they had to push the planned startup date from November 2007 to May 2008.
• 
  
• The circumference of the LHC is 26,659 meters, making it the largest machine in the world. It also qualifies as the largest refrigerator in the world, with over 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen being used to pre-cool the 9300 magnets to 80 degrees Kelvin. Then they get pumped full of 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them all the way down to 1.9 Kelvin. Just remember to write your name on your lunch.
• 
  
• When it's operating at full power, protons will zoom around the track at 11,245 times per second at 99.99% of the speed of light. It boggles the mind! Screw collisions, why don't they just shoot for some time traveling?
• 
  
• Speaking of time travel, the devices inside the LHC can measure the passage time of a particle to accuracies in the region of a few billionths of a second.
• 
  
• The tunnel has to be kept at a near-complete vacuum so the protons don't run into random gas molecules. As a result, the interior atmosphere of the LHC will be 10 times less pressure than on the surface of the moon.
• 
  
• While the interior of the tunnels are kept chillier than the vast reaches of deep space, whenever the protons collide they will generate heat up to 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun.
• 
  
• Each experiment conducted in the LHC will generate enough data to fill 100,000 dual layer DVDs every year, which is a heck of a lot of info. They've built a distributed computing network around the world called the Grid which will process all of this data.
• 
  
• The LHC could receive an upgrade after ten years, turning it into the Super LHC. This basically involves an extremely expensive upgrade to their Super Proton Synchrotron to increase the luminosity.
• 
  
• Some of the things that people think might go wrong with the LHC are: Miniature Black Holes - these exist for only fractions of a second and then decay, but naysayers worry that they'll form up into a massive black hole that will start chewing up France. Strangelets - these are hypothetical forms of strange matter that could possibly turn everything they touch into more strangelets, meaning the Earth would become entirely made up of strange matter. We think that's already happened. Magnetic Monopoles - another theoretical particle that only has one magnetic pole, and could cause atoms to change into different types of matter, causing another chain reaction that would overtake the Earth.
• 
  
• With any luck, everything will be switched on in May, and protons will start slamming into each other this summer. Of course, look for the movie version where Shia LaBeouf runs into the control room, mere milliseconds before startup, fights off the guards, and powers everything down and saves the planet. It'll be out sometime soon.

We've tried to stay away from sounds made by an actual character, like Soundwave's awesome voice from The Transformers, or Darth Vader's breathing from Star Wars. Note: click on the name to hear the sound effect.

• 
  
• Spaceships in the 1950s: Back in the heady days of early science fiction movies, the Theremin (probably one of the coolest instruments ever invented) would provide the "Ooooh-EEEEE-oooooh" sounds of spaceships flitting about in the sky and other spooky paranormal sounds. It tended to be overused, and instantly became identifiable with cheesy scifi. If we ever get our own office Theremin, this is the first sound we'd ever make on it.
• 
  
• The Alien Heat Ray from War of the Worlds: In the original 1953 movie, the alien heat ray has an awesome cycling sound buried within the sound of the beam. We hope a real heat ray blast sounds this way some day — and we may have found our new cell phone ringtone.
• 
  
• The Alien Probe from War of the Worlds: This terrifying sound is one of those things you'd imagine from under the covers as a kid. Nothing is more "wet the bed" inducing than a good, scary scifi sound effect. Cursed alien probes.
• 
  
• The automatic doors from Star Trek: These doors were one of the most iconic sounds from The Original Series, and were even parodied by Shatner himself in Airplane II.
• 
  
• The communicating whistles and doorbells of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation: While the old Star Trek communicator used to make a sort of wolf-whistle sound at you, the doorbells on The Next Generation were crisp and punctual. How many people out there are using these as ringtones today?
• 
  
• The transporter beam from Star Trek: Besides the doors, this was another one of the sounds most identified with Star Trek. The original beaming sound is a bit dated, but still retro cool and... long. It took so much time for them to appear that