Space Whale: Difference between revisions

** Still better/worse: Superboy calls him on the coincidence the first time they meet.

** And that's not even the only space whale in ''Legion Of Super-Heroes''. In the original continuity, Lightning Lad lost his arm to the "Super-Moby Dick of Space!"

* The ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'' villains The Brood traveled in lobotomized space whales known as the Acanti.

** You haven't lived until you've seen a whale doing a high-speed close-orbit approach of a planet to free its ancestor's soul from a citadel of evil.

* The illustrated ''[[Discworld (Literature)|Discworld]]'' story ''[[Discworld (Literature)/The Last Hero|The Last Hero]]'' includes a sketch drawn by Leonard of Quirm of a [[Our Dragons Are Different|space-dragon]] that resembles a whale. It's not made clear if it actually exists or not (Leonard's notes indicate that the Giant Dung Beetle ''does'' exist, and the Imaginary Hull-Borer almost certainly ''doesn't'', but don't comment on the space dragon either way).

** Discworld itself is carried through space on the back of [[Turtle Power|another enormous aquatic animal]].

* An Italian satirical science-fiction novel titled ''Terra!'' featured an extended Moby-Dick parody sequence, with metal-rich asteroids and miners.

* [[Alan Dean Foster]]'s novel ''Cachalot'' (1980), part of the [[Humanx Commonwealth]] universe. In the future, Mankind had decided to save the last survivors of the cetacean species of Earth (whales, dolphins, orcas) and transplant them to a planet almost completely covered by oceans which had no native sentient species (or so they thought, because they didn't look deep enough in the oceans). The cetaceans prospered, on a world that belonged to them and on which humans and thranx were only allowed as traders and researchers. By the time of the novel, all the cetaceans are sentient to some degree, with the toothed whales more so than the baleen whales (either due to evolution or genetic Uplifting done prior to the whale diaspora or shortly afterwards, it's not entirely clear). Some species of toothed whales have even grown more intelligent than humans and live for hundreds of years since they are no longer hunted. The book ends with the revelation that these whales have developed [[Psychic Powers|psionic powers]] like telekinesis and telepathy (since they have no hands and thus a civilizations based on song, not artifacts and tools), and with the help of these powers they can levitate their bodies from the water and travel into space.

** Also, the whale survived for only a few minutes. A whale could hold their breath for that long.

* In the 1970s Robert F. Young wrote [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?26084 a series of stories] about a man who teams up with a space whale. (The stories also featured lots of complex typewriter-generated graphics, for reasons best known to the author.)

* It didn't take long for Star Wars Expanded Universe to invent some: the first example of a space whale species was introduced in 1984 by one of the earliest Star Wars novels. Other examples followed, eventually making their ways into cartoons (see below).

* The Star Trek TNG novel ''Dark Mirror'' by [[Diane Duane]] has a [[Sapient Cetaceans|dolphinoid]] ambassador aboard the Enterprise-D; he [[My Significance Sense Is Tingling|detects differences in the hyperstrings]] when the starship has crossed between universes. In fact it's his sense that something is different that gives them time to figure out what's going on.

 

== Live Action TV ==

** In series 5, {{spoiler|Spaceship UK's engine is in fact a captured Space Whale, almost literally (they call it a star-whale).}}

*** In this case it even gets the bonus points {{spoiler|since the ship wouldn't exist/would fall apart without it.}}

 

== Real Life ==

 

 

[[Category:Index of Fictional Creatures]]

[[Category:Flying Tropes]]