Timecube redux

Actually, on rereading, I think I see what that poor nutter - I'm sorry, The Wisest Human to ever live on Earth (such modesty) - Gene Ray's on about.

He sees 4 times of day as "corners" around which it pivots: dawn, noon, sunset, midnight.

At any given time in 1 24h period, it's dawn somewhere - the start of 1 day; noon somewhere else (.25 way thru' a 2nd "day"); sunset somewhere else (.5 thru' a 3rd "day") and midnight somewhere else (.75 thru' a 4th "day").

Ergo, 4 days in every 24h.

He fails to notice that dawn and dusk vary with latitude and season, making it a very odd-shaped "cube".

Also, of course, at any given moment, somewhere on the Earth's surface, it's any given time of day. It varies continuously. Thus we have timezones, splitting the continuous variation into 24 fairly manageable, slightly wobbly, bands.

With this difficulty in grasping a continuously-variable quantity, here, one guesses, is someone who is not going to grasp the calculus.

I'm worried now that I understand him. Well, I think I understand him. Oh dear.

The SFnal gimmick quiz

Tiring of my ceaseless failure to do anything but abjectly badly in lyrics quizzes, I present a contrast. Here's one for readers of speculative fiction.

Who invented these ideas, gadgets or entities - and where?

Plot Devices

1. A weapon which works by causing fatal accidents to "coincidentally" happen to the target.
2. A green alga-like organism which can regrow people's missing body parts.
3. A simultaneous translator which can speak in rhyming couplets or the regional accent of its user's choice.
4. A wormhole gate which can transmit sound and vision – but not matter – from any known location, including in the past.
5. An instantaneous communicator that includes every message ever sent through it in every single transmission.

Weird mutants

6. The telepath who becomes immortal by successively taking over others' bodies, which they must do every day or so. Further clarification: this one's been around since Egyptian times and despite (or because of) having no genes of their own - their body is long, long gone - they are running a selective breeding programme on humans, cultivating psi.
7. An individual whose children become extra bodies for the single, original mind. One remote descendant becomes a second group mind. Between them, they take over all human life.
8. A mind who, without volition, wakes up in a different body every single day and eventually keeps a diary to assert their individuality.
9. The small child who makes bad things happen to anyone who annoys him in any way (for example, by playing music) - including the entire town in which he lives.
10. A small sentient creature like a cross between a mouse and a beaver, which is a powerful teleporter, telepath and telekinetic.

Implausible explanations

11. Crop circles are caused by the ground-level re-emergence from hyperspace jumps of spacecraft piloted by hairy spider-like aliens.
12. A starship, with really big shock absorbers, is propelled by repeatedly exploding nuclear bombs behind it.
13. Faster-than-light travel can be achieved by repeatedly sending a starship through a matter transmitter to its own far end, many times a second, thus giving all its passengers a constant headache.
14. God was brought into existence by linking together all the computers in the universe. Its first action is to seal the switch shut with a bolt of lightning.
15. God was brought into existence by the merging of humanity and computer intelligences at the heat-death of the previous universe.

Odd aliens

16. Toroidal (donut-shaped) organisms which only become intelligent when collected into conical stacks; their memories are stored externally in waxy secretions.
17. Mammalian creatures in which groups of four or more share a group mind, transmitted by human-inaudible sub-sound.
18. Intelligent human white blood cells.
19. The distant evolutionary descendant of an electronic pyramid-marketing scheme.
20. Large, flying insectile organisms from a low-gravity world with an extreme empathic sense.


I'm looking for pieces of written science fiction, either novels or short stories, including both author and title.

Comments screened until I feel like revealing the answers, in a day or so. Just post a comment, it's easier than a poll this way.

EDIT: a couple of questions clarified slightly to reduce confusion. If it's been done repeatedly, to the best of my knowledge, I'm referring to the first work to use the idea.

Quiz scores so far

15 17 19 entries so far. I am delighted!

So, I hope this doesn't put anyone off. In case it might, and you're thinking of having a go at my little SF quiz here, don't click on the cut!

I'm awarding 1 point for author, 1 point for title. Half a point for initiative, like getting the last line or some other such salient observation.

None of them are movies or other media references. They're all books, short stories or both.
( High-score table and a few hints... )