Is that canon? Because I don’t recall anything about sandworms making oxygen.
If you count the Dune Encyclopedia as canon, it is. The sandworms eat sand (silicates) and excrete oxygen extracted from the sand while using the silica as nutrient.
[quote=“nevadaexile, post:70, topic:680636”]
I find Pandora from the Avatar universe to be extremely unlikely. This is due to:
[ol]
[li]A race of giant catlike humanoids which evolved from…what again?[/ol][/li][/quote]
My pet theory is that the Navi are themselves the “avatars” of another alien race who tried to exploit the unobtanium long before humans discovered Pandora. The pre-Navi used similar technology to adapt to Pandora’s environment (though they kept some of their original traits, hence their humanoid bipedal binocular distinction from the native fauna) but when they started “plugging in”, they gradually “went native” and after a dozen generations, lost any memory of their former identities, though they’re intelligent enough to be unimpressed by human tech and unfazed by human avatars.
The shocking twist would have been Sully discovering the rusting remains of their original base and the skeletons of their original forms.
I’m not really a fan, or more than a casual observer of the books, but isn’t the North America/Panem we see in the books actually mostly flooded, as the result of ice caps melting, and/or other apocalyptic events?
Add on to that that the setting is (I think) some unspecified number of centuries in the future—well, it’s faint praise, but it’s at least better thought-out than Waterworld. 
I don’t have any problem with an author constructing a world to suit the story they want to tell, even if the extended logic doesn’t make sense. It’s about the story, not a fictional biospherography.
But Hunger Games pushes the believability too far for arbitrary reasons. And then there’s the all-gummint-is-baaaad hammer.
So basically they’re unburning silicon dioxide? How exactly is that supposed to yield energy? It would make more sense for them to be nuclear-powered.
I think that’s overstating the case.
We don’t get much backstory detail but apparently Panem (Latin for “bread”) began as a command-economy regime to try to keep the population fed and an industrial civilization going after war and environmental collapse destroyed what came before. But of course as it usually does corruption set in and the rulers in the Capital became a privileged elite. Meanwhile District Thirteen, surviving in underground bunkers, by necessity became an extraordinarily regimented society.
The books are realistic in that the rebellion doesn’t succeed because of courage or freedom or anything idealistic; it succeeds because District Thirteen was a rival power base, without which the rebel Districts wouldn’t have stood a chance. And when it did look like it was going to be a case of “meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss”, Katniss’s single act of sabotage quite possibly forestalls this.
We don’t learn much about what happens afterwards but hopefully the (surviving) Districts are at least somewhat better off. I wouldn’t say the theme of the books is that government is evil, but that governments- and the power they are ultimately based on- are blindly amoral and that the only counter to this is individuals following their consciences.
The scale of the economy is completely out of whack. District 12 is 8000 people living somewhere in Appalachia. They’re meant to provide enough coal to power the entire national economy? That makes about as much sense the human powered battery scene in the Matrix.
The entire country is 13 small pockets of civilization and then vast, mind bogglingly huge swathes of empty space. Imagine if the entire of West Virginia, Kentucky and Western Tennessee were empty except a tiny town of 8000 people. This is what’s posited by the Hunger Games.
Each of the districts produce one kind of good which is crazy inefficient. Think about it, all the food that District 12 is eating comes from District 11 which is presumably located somewhere in the midwest. All the coal from District 12 is going to the Capitol in the Rocky Mountains. You’re shipping immense amounts of goods halfway across the country for no real good reason. Not to mention maintaining 1000 miles of railway track to service 8000 people.
District 12 is using some kind of 1950s style mining technology with lots of manual human labor and regular mine collapses but the Capitol has crazy 23rd century genetically mutated dog creature tech.
There’s a loophole in the reaping rules which is never addressed, for the career districts, what’s the incentive not to put your name in the maximum amount of times possible since you know it’s impossible for you to get picked.
That’s not even getting into the political science and human psychology elements of the story, just the world building alone falls down if you poke at it even a little bit.
The books say that Districts One and Two are less horrible than the others because they produce more valued products: high tech and loyal soldiers. Maybe the average citizen there doesn’t need extra rations. Or maybe jokers who tried to game the system DID get chosen, until people learned not to do that. As for the rest of the country, I’d presumed that part of the oppression was deliberately keeping the outlying Districts on the verge of actual starvation, to keep them too preoccupied with survival to think about rebellion.
That’s probably what all Klingons say, regardless of their occupation. We only see the warriors on the tv show.
Somewhere on Kronos, a father is telling his son, “No! A dishonorable trade! You will be a kosher butcher, like me, and your grandparents, and your great grandparents, and everybody else on this planet, and all of their ancestors!”
There actually was a Klingon scientist on one of the TNG episodes (“Suspicion”, I think), and of course the Klingon nanny in “Sins of the Father” (the fact that she personally takes out a warrior or two in that ep being beside the point).
There was a lawyer in one of the DS9 episodes.
I sort of figured being a “warrior” in Klingon culture was sort of like being a “gentleman” in Victorian England. It wasn’t actually a profession, more like an aspirational code of behaviour.
That lawyer had a smile like a shark. Scary dude.
Also, there was a Klingon chef running a restaurant on DS9. And General Martok recalled how when he couldn’t get a commission as a crewman, he joined the fleet as a lowly ship’s cook.
Was he a Navy SEAL at one time?
They have feasts, to be sure, but it’s not real food. It’s just tolkein food.
Hmph, the author could have made at least a tolkein effort.
I’d wondered about the low-population issue with District 12, myself…musing that, since the Hunger Games/ration allotment system was a terror tactic anyway, if the whole thing wasn’t a slow-motion genocide scheme. The coal being not especially valuable, perhaps used as a dangerous form of “busywork,” or could be supplemented by other sources, fuels, or by automated mining.
Or, just a domination tactic that was working too well, and was becoming unsustainable—with attrition, and residents apparently not being required to have children, the District was suffering a demographic collapse. And Panem was soon going to be suffering from a coal shortage, if it wasn’t already. :smack:
Per Star Trek: VI one of Worf’s ancestors was a Klingon defence counsel.
It’s from Children of Dune (Ch. 25, my bolding):
. This is further elaborated on in the Encyclopaedia, which will always be part of my canon, damn it.
And there’s this in the Ecological Appendix (the story of Kynes) in Dune itself:
The inside of a sandworm is a roaring chemical furnace, apparently. Not that I know how it would work.