@cstross Ou est le femme fatale?
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@robparsons As it's a Stainless Steel Rat homage *and* a Glory Road tribute, there are already stand-ins for both Angelina and Star in there. Adding another one would be too much!
Taking a cue from #TheStainlessSteelRat, one would have to have:
1. Time-travelling villain who turns out to be doomed from the start because xe actually has a closed loop worldline.
1. Snowball planet. Unexplainedly supports an advanced civilization.
And of course from a wider field of pulp there are many others:
1. Jungle planet, where absolutely everything will eat you, including even some of the rocks. Harrison and Foster did variations on this.
1. Marooned impossibly far from home, at the centre of a supervoid or something. Magically, just like every episode of the A-Team, there are resources from which one can improvise a getting-home machine. Smith did this one several times.
@robparsons
#SciFi
Can't do time travel (this setting leverages the setting of my 2010 Hugo-winning novella "Palimpsest": I already went there)
Jungle planet: I have plans.
Marooned in the void: kinda-sorta going there if by "marooned" you're willing to give me "got stuck somewhere electronics can't work". The setting is already mind-numbingly huge, don't need to dump the Bootes Void on it.
#EESmith gives you huge latitude on what counts as marooned, so you're alright.
In the #Skylark series one case was being so far across the universe that the mounting platform for the comms array had to be the size of a planet in order to damp vibration to the point that the beam wasn't wobbling across entire galaxies at the receiving end.
In the #Lensman series one case was being in a different universe where the speed of light was huge, and another was being so far across the multiverse that only True Love could locate which universe Our Hero was in.
Smith was all about going bigger in the next novel. (-:
In Doc Smith's Skylark series, they also needed the planetary size ship to house the planetary sized setting circles. So there was enough room for enough degree markings to measure the angular separation between itty bitty galaxies on the far side of the universe.