"Fireproof windscreen" and "Ejectable lifeboat module" sound like foreshadowing to me ...

I don't want to be the one to tell him.

"Idiocracy" is only frightening if you realize that it's a documentary.

"If I find out whose idea this was, I'm going to hang them by their thumbs in our deepest dungeon for a year," said Kramer, brushing sweat from his shaven scalp.

Do you perhaps mean 'nematodes', rather than 'nematoads'? #corrections

So who else immediately thought of the 'gargoyles' from Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash"?

He could also have mentioned that "THX-1138" (not part of "Star Wars", of course, but perhaps representative of Lucas's favorite themes) culminates in the protagonist fleeing from a city into the wilderness.

"Really? You Earthlings thought that our Universal Navigational Beacon System was a natural phenomenon? Pulsars, you call them? That's really funny. Anyway, we're glad you've been getting some use out of them, but we're really here to talk about your subscription for use of the service. As you're just starting out,…

The best form of immersion training is to date a native speaker. Or try to. I think it comes down to motivation.

Her name was Irina or Yelena, something Russian anyway. I'd seen her around but never really paid much attention to her. We called them 'the trimmings', all the pretty boys and girls who didn't seem to have any real job on board except to hang around and project an air of glamor and sophistication. They were as much a…

I think a Swiss arrow (aka Dutch arrow, gypsy arrow) uses a similar principle, although substituting a string for the rigid atlatl/hul'che. [en.wikipedia.org]

By the time you find out, it'll be too late.

In hindsight, maybe we should have anticipated that the fearsome wolf-bee alliance would find a way to use radioactive volcanoes to set fire to our homes, leaving the botulism-infected survivors paddling in swamps of electrified sewage, with no way out except the release offered by their cyanide pills.

With the particular spambot software you encountered, typing anything containing the words 'bot' or 'spambot' will produce a canned denial, such as "A bot? not hardly babe. Are you?". If you continue to call it a bot, it will disconnect after the third such message, without even delivering its pitch.

Given that you'd have a ridiculous temperature differential between sun-side and night-side, I'd expect some vicious wind conditions across the terminator. I would actually think that if the planet retained an atmosphere, warm gases moving from the hot side would bring some warmth to the cold side (and the inverse),…

It's worth mentioning that the platypodes live at the antipodes, from which I infer that the singular of 'antipodes' is presumably 'antipus'.

All I can think of is the story arc in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" in which one of the characters is in a stressful interaction with a cephalopod, and the other takes the opportunity to turn it into a grammar lesson. If I recall correctly, the final version was "An octopotamus is got me!"

The catch is that the habitable zone around red dwarfs is close enough to the star that planets are likely to become tidally-locked: one side of the planet is always facing the star, the other side always facing away. To say that such a planet is 'habitable' is stretching the definition more than a little.

"Motion posters" ... "teaser trailers" ... coming next, the 30-second MP3 preview of the novelization of the film ...

It seems to move in a single plane, not growing larger or smaller. That suggests something projected on the glass of the window.