“He tasks me – and I’ll have him. I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.”
Khan Noonien Singh, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Isn’t that line (and several others) just an adaptation from Moby-Dick ?
It’s deep symbolism mumbo-jumbo.
CJJ
June 26, 2013, 10:16pm
83
Not quite sci-fi, but there was an old episode of the Rockford Files that fits into this theme. Jim and his occasional-sidekick Richie are trying to bluff their way past a couple of employees by pretending to be computer technicians. I don’t remember much (other than the specific gibberish), but it went something like this:
Rockford: Well you see, the 1600 docking transfer button was jammed and it was hitting against the deactivator tripod.
Richie: Yeah, you want me to microspool and see if we’re still ghosting at 1600 LPS?
Employee: What are you talking about?
Rockford: That’s computer talk. It’s probably a little confusing.
Employee: Well, I’m a computer programmer, and that’s gibberish.
Colibri:
Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmexlike snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…
E.E. “Doc” Smith, Children of the Lens
Hard to pick just one passage from E. E. Smith, but that’s a good one.
Much of Star Trek qualifies, but I think my favorite mumbo jumbo of the series is the interbreeding.
Heh, reminds me a non-sci-fi scene from Frasier where Roz and Daphne were trying to bluff their way into a company file room for some reason, vaguely along the lines of:
Roz: We just flew in from Corporate, and they’re demanding compliance with the new standard or it’s my job and probably your job, too!
Dubious Employee: “Corporate” is downstairs.
This is an oldie but goodie from Rockwell.
Work has been proceeding in order to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a machine that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such a machine is the “Turbo-Encabulator.”
— Salwen, Bernard (15 April 1946). “For Nofer Trunnions”. Time. Turbo encabulator - Wikipedia
Ninjaed, save for my close scrutiny.
[Kahn]DAMN YOU![/Kahn]
Dr. Cal Meacham : “Interociter incorporating planetary generator”. “Interocitor with voltarator”. “With astroscope”.
Joe Wilson : Here’s something my wife could use in the house. An “interocitor incorporating an electron sorter.”
Dr. Cal Meacham : Oh, she’d probably gain 20 pounds while it did all the work for her. You know, Joe, according to this, there’s no limit to what it can do. Laying a 4-lane highway at the rate of a mile a minute would be a cinch.
Joe Wilson : Cal… maybe we’ve been working too hard.
Dr. Cal Meacham : “Complete line of interocitor parts, incorporating greater advances than hitherto known in the field of electronics.” What exactly is an interocitor?
Joe Wilson : I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.
Dr. Cal Meacham : Well, I do. I want to know what it is and what it does. Order the list of parts on these pages.
For this sort of thing, we can always count on H.P. Lovecraft:
“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
Something bumped into me – something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living … Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things? … The war ate my boy, damn them all … and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret … No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’ fat face on that flabby fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died! … Shall a Norrys hold the land of a de la Poer? … It’s voodoo, I tell you … that spotted snake … Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do! … 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust … wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?.. Magna Mater! Magna Mater!.. Atys… Dia ad aghaidh’s ad aodaun… agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!.. Ungl unl… rrlh … chchch…
Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
The Men in Black movies did a great job with mumbo-jumbo:
Kay: Not bad for your second day of work, is it?
Jay: This definitely rates about a 9.0 on my weird-shit-o-meter.
Kay: You should’ve been here for the Zeronian migration in 1968.
This thread feels weirdly meta, what with Colibri posting about Qadgop the Mercotan and Fear Itself posting about Cal Meacham.
Not magnetically-relative-to-spin; that is how there can be such thing as antineutrons.
drewtwo99:
*Dune *has so many of these things but unfortunately I can’t recall a specific quote. I think that pretty much the whole first book counts as unexplained Mumbo-Jumbo, and that’s what makes it the greatest sci-fi book ever written. One that I like is:
Jihad, Butlerian: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
Ok so this fragment is itself an explanation of something, but it leaves so much to the imagination, and the full idea of that “thou shalt not…” quote is mind boggling and interesting.
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
Unfortunately, Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson wrote all of those really bad prequels to try to explain everything. I almost wish I hadn’t read them, because theytook the magic out of the “Real” novels.
I tried to pattern the beginning of my speech at my Navy retirement ceremony after that line. It didn’t come out very well.
I couldn’t figure what this is from until my mind’s ear suddenly heard it in the appropriate voice. Good one.
Marvin the Martian!
Good Lord man, get a grip!
njtt
June 27, 2013, 12:51am
97
[“Gamma rays on. Yobba rays on. All in order captain, I’m ready.”
“Boost the meson power, Husky.”](Space Patrol (1962 TV series) - Wikipedia )
Colibri:
Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmexlike snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…
E.E. “Doc” Smith, Children of the Lens
Hey! I resemble that remark.
I used to know a wench named Cynthia.
Watch it! Cynthia and I have been married for over 3 decades now. Do not make me go all xmex-like on you…
