Spoilers

[mneme]

willshetterly posted a set of rules for commenting in his blog/journal, including "no spoilers". Naturally, I had to post some.

I've numbered them, to make it easy to guess what they're spoilers -to- -- some are easy, some trivial, some pretty hard. drcpunk is ineligible because she guessed most of them already and was told the rest.

1. It's a sled. (fleetfootmike)
   
2. He's a she. (easy, but arguably devotedbear. Ambug was the first to name it, though)
   
3. They win. They win, but the king still dies. One wins, two lose, one doesn't play, all but one dies, and he's not the one that won. (kokoinai)
   
4. After going to the moon, they come home. (stormsweeper)
   
5. After going to the moon, they go into space and conquer the galaxy.
   
6. The big bad guys lose. The big good guys have left the building.
   
7. They do, in fact, find the promised land. And keep it for a while. Here are some rules for you to follow. (fiddledragon)
   
8. He loses, but gets a new job, and so do all his friends.
   
9. They win. But that's boring, so they start over again. (tirerim)
   
10. They die and go to heaven. (fiddledragon)
    
11. Five return, and one goes alone. (fiddledragon)
    
12. Some go, two stay and rule. And two stay for a long while, and then go.(fleetfootmike)
    
13. They live happily ever after.
    

(the last one's not worth guessing, but it's the only spoiler without a specific behind it)

Comments

[mneme]

#9 is not the Dark Tower (actually, I've never read any Steven King. Should fix that at some point).

The Princess Bride is an amusing answer for #13, and yeah, I should have encouraged people to give their own answers for it. Though that's not exactly the -real- ending to the Princess Bride.

That said, yay! Yes, #3 is a spoiler for the Three Musketeers, 10 Years After, and the Vicompte de Bragelone. It actually didn't occur to me that I was giving enough info for a canny Brust fan to figure this out, though of course I was.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

The Paarfi analogue of 10 Years After is generally better and bouncier. I do take issue with one thing in it, but at least it's not "The male ingenue and his ladyllove are boring wusses".

[kokoinai.livejournal.com]

Is #5 Foundation and Earth? It sounds like the end of the Foundation series (I don't really remember that series after the first few books, but I do remember visiting a robot on the moon). Could also be Old Man's War with some stretching to fit.

#6 (the good gods have left, the evil gods remain and normal people have to defeat them) is a pretty common background for books. A Fire Upon the Deep fits. So does the Godslayer duology (which I'd recommend to almost anyone who would read your lj).

I'm clearly firing in the dark here.

[mneme]

#5 is not Asimov, nor Staltzi. #6 isn't Vinge. I've never read Godslayer, so it isn't that either.

(the clue I've given for #5 and #6 is pretty large, and I'm not going to expand upon it).

And yeah, the motif (though that's not exactly the one I'm getting at; both parts are a spoiler, not just one part) is one that appears in multiple works; that was actually one of the more fun parts of the exercise; some of the "spoilers" are fairly universal, but most are guessable despite this.

[kokoinai.livejournal.com]

#5 could be Ender's Game, except the Battle School was in Earth orbit (and then he went to a base inside an asteroid). But at least it's a better guess than my previous ones ^_^. I know it's wrong, however, because you've said #6 was by far the more popular work, and well there are certainly works more popular than Ender's Game, I'm hard pressed to think of one one far more popular, at least within SF/fantasy circles.

(Scalzi, btw)

(Google feels like cheating, and is doubtful in is efficacy, but I now believe I have not read the books referred to by #5 and #6.)