History BeyondTheImpossible / Literature

* Later novels in DiscWorld Later more or less follow the line that a witch's curse ''works'' if and only if the target knows they've done it. Unlucky Charlie, the target for the cursing at the Witch Trials, ''cannot'' be aware they've done it because he's a scarecrow, so points are given for general inventiveness. Except for the year when Granny Weatherwax made his head explode.

* Nora and Maya from DarthWiki/{{Crushed}} look so good in their swimsuits they can make Nigel, a blind man, have a NoseBleed.

* ''Mariel of {{Redwall}}'' introduces the Honourable Rosemary, whose [[AnnoyingLaugh laugh is so annoying]] it can curdle cream from thirty paces away. Yep, a laugh that can excelerate the spoilation of diary products. [[InformedAttribute but it just might be a rumor.]]

''Mariel of {{Redwall}}'' introduces the Honourable Rosemary, whose [[AnnoyingLaugh laugh is so annoying]] it can curdle cream from thirty paces away. Yep, a laugh that can excelerate the spoilation of diary products. [[InformedAttribute but it just might be a rumor.]]

* In Lucian's TrueStory the people of the Moon are at war with the ''people of the Sun''. The narrator not only survives going to the sun, he doesn't seem impressed by it at all. Of course every word of the story is like that the operates on logic such as "Aristophanes is a wise and truthful man".

* In Lucian's TrueStory the people of the Moon are at war with the ''people of the Sun'', the attendant difficulties are dealt with by wearing armor made of beans.

Events in Film that are not possible. '''only list examples that fit the description'''

* In Lucian's TrueStory the people of the Moon are at war with the ''people of the Sun'', the attendant difficulties are dealt with by wearing armor made of beans.
* HarryPotter: Throughout the books we are told that no wizard can fly without the aid of a broom or a thestral. Voldemort, being the beast that he is, can fly though. No explanation is given as to how exactly he does it. Oh, Snape is able to fly too.

* In Lucian's TrueStory the people of the Moon are at war with the ''people of the Sun'', the attendant difficulties are dealt with by wearing armor made of beans.

* In Lucian's TrueStory the people of the Moon are at war with the ''people of the Sun'' a problem they deal with by wearing armor made of beans.

* Let's put it this way: there's a reason one trope got named ''{{Lensman}}'' [[LensmanArmsRace Arms Race]].

* In {{Harry Potter}} about [[spoiler:twenty-something people]] die, including [[spoiler:Harry Potter himself]]. ([[IGotBetter He gets better]].) How many people can you kill of in a seven book series?
** Especially considering how many bought it in the last book.
** It's a war. If there was a war where twenty-something people died in Real Life, people would be glad it wasn't more. However, considering it's a children's book changes things...
*** Actually, [[spoiler:At least fifty people die, in The Battle At Hogwarts alone. Harry sees their bodies in the Great Hall, separated from Voldemort's]]
* From the ''first chapter'' of ''Literature/ThePrincessBride'' comes this gem. By the end of the book, Buttercup's all but describing her love as "over nine thousand."
-->''"I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. Your eyes are like that, did you know? Well they are. How many minutes ago was I? Twenty? Had I brought my feelings up to then? It doesn't matter. I love you so much more now than twenty minutes ago that there cannot be comparison. I love you so much more now than when you opened your hovel door, there cannot be comparison."''
** Westley then tops that by explaining how much greater his love is compared to hers.
** Referenced (and parodied) in ''Jack of Fables'', when Jack copies this speech practically word for word and tells it to the Snow Queen. Unlike Buttercup, though, Jack doesn't really love her and just wants to mooch off her and live in her palace as long as he can.
* How [[MacrossMissileMassacre many missiles]] can be fired off at once in an ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' battle?[[hottip:*:The current record is about half a million, in the opening engagement of the Battle of Manticore.]]
* [[{{ptitlen9ir3dhv}} China Miéville's]] ''Literature/IronCouncil'' - What sort of golem is Judah Low going to whip up this time?
* ''Pandora's Star'' features a battle in which a wormhole-jumping spaceship instantaneously warps around a planet fending off an enemy barrage. The adversary's response? [[spoiler: Open enough wormholes around the ship to blast it with ninety-six nuclear missiles from every conceivable angle. ]]
* The ''{{Lensman}}'' series is made of this with its LensmanArmsRace. ''Galactic Patrol'' starts with spaceships capable of ''[[FasterThanLightTravel ninety parsecs per hour]]'' and firing "super-atomic" explosives (which might be matter-antimatter explosives, since they liberate 100% of their mass-energy). By the beginning of the third book there are flotillas of armed, moving ''planets''; by the end, whole planets made of antimatter are used as faster-than-light projectiles routinely, and there is a psychic super-mind (the "Unit") capable of destroying the Eddorian planet, which "all the physical weapons of all the universes" could not harm.
** Um... not quite. The planet-sized antimatter bombs were never FTL, except in their transport from place to place. You're confusing them with the Nth-space planets. The Unit did not actually destroy Eddore; it was merely the 'chisel' for the shattering of the Eddorians' final lines of TELEPATHIC defence (and their subsequent destruction) by the Arisians' and Lensmen's telepathic 'hammer'. The planet remained intact.
** And you forgot the Sunbeam, which takes the entire energy output of a star and turns it into a {{BFG}}. And the bad guys were already working on a ''improved'' version that would be able to hit a target across ''interstellar distances''.
* ''TheDresdenFiles'': What [[CrazyAwesome mind-blowingly awesome]] trick will Harry pull this time? How many new scars can he get? How much more BadAss can Murphy become before she becomes the female equivalent of [[TengenToppaGurrenLagann Kamina]]? How bizarre and gory can the villains' tactics get? How much can we scale up the ThirtyGambitPileup? How pretty can Thomas be? How's Harry going to top [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome The Dinosaur Incident]]? How much ass can be kicked? How many more mind-blowingly evil and powerful people can Harry piss off?
* And on that note, ''CodexAlera'': How outnumbered can the heroes be? What ridiculously over-the-top awesome plan is Tavi going to pull off next?
-->'''Doroga:''' [[LampshadeHanging You may have noticed that he does things...big]].
-->'''Bernard:''' Big?
-->'''Doroga:''' He saw that the creatures tracked him by heat. So he set the forest on fire.
** Part of Tavi's modus operandi is to get the enemy somewhere he can light a whole bunch of them on fire- hell, one time he not only did it once, but twice, and then followed it up in the climax of the action by- after his foes have used their magic to block out the sun- bringing the sun to them. Magical multiple refraction laser, activate!
* [[MatthewReilly Matthew Reilly's]] books. [[UpToEleven Big time.]] Where to begin? Oh, let's go with flying a stealth plane out of a collapsing ice cave, killing ''twenty men'' with ''one grenade'', pinning a man trying to kill you while missing a leg, crushing Humvees with a plane in an underground hangar, driving said plane into an elevator shaft large enough to ''hold'' planes with the elevator over fifty feet down, hijacking a ''space shuttle'', chasing down a ''ballistic missile'' with a ''plane'', getting on the other side of a car pinning you to a tunnel wall by ''driving up the wall and flipping the car over the other's roof'', getting a boat dragged by Boeing 747, flipping a double-decker bus over a wall so that it lands on its roof and rolls the right way up, killing a helicopter with an ''enemy-driven'' jet ski, having a convoy chase down a jumbo jet on an Egyptian highway, climbing from one plane to another while both are flying, a one-winged 747 sliding down a slope of spikes, a tsunami throwing a supertanker up a mountain, one man holding off a platoon from a citadel by using trebuchets, killing your enemy by decapitating them ''with a subway'', having an fight scene beneath a descending elevator, running thirty feet on the backs of caimans, and disarming a planet-destroying bomb from inside a tank that fell from a plane 30,000 feet up.
* ''TauZero'' concerns time dilation in a slower-than-light colony ship, the ''Leonora Christine''. To begin, it flies close enough to lightspeed that a 30-something-light-year journey will only take about a decade, from the point of view of the ship...but the main reason for this is the need to decelerate. When the ship's deceleration system is damaged and [[SpaceFriction the crew need to find a safe place to turn off the engines without being shredded by interstellar hydrogen]], they need to accelerate closer and closer to lightspeed, to increase the time dilation on-ship enough to be able to survive the journey... but the faster they go, the emptier space has to be to count as a vacuum...and the faster they have to go to be able to survive the longer and longer journey to the emptier stretches of space. It's made even crazier by the fact that the ship's objective speed only changes by the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the speed of light.
* For PaulBunyan and other TallTale figures this is pretty much the reason they exist, to make each subsequent story even bigger, more outlandish, and more absurdly implausible than the last. For example, after all the story's explaining how inhumanly large Paul is, there then come along story's like "Paul Bunyan's Cornstalk," where the titular stalk of corn grows so fast that, when Paul tries to chop it down, he's never able to hit it twice in the same place; by the time he makes a second swing of his axe, the stalk's grown so high that the first chop mark is over his head and out of sight!
* How many potential murderers will reveal to [[TheFatherLukeWolfeTrilogy Father Wolfe]] their motives and opportunity to commit the crime in ''Father, Forgive Them''?
* [[FearAndLoathingInLasVegas How much drugs can Duke and Dr. Gonzo put in their systems?]] Answer: a lot.
* The ''NewJediOrder'' series: how many planets and how many billion people are we going to obliterate/kill/sacrifice today while the heroes care little?
* Vorkosigan Saga: Miles. Nuff said.

* {{A Song of Ice and Fire}}, [[HighOctaneNightmareFuel Red Wedding]]. Because [[spoiler:[[HonorBeforeReason Robb]]]] broke off an arranged marriage one of his daughters, [[spoiler: [[CompleteMonster Walder Frey]] has many of Robb's Bannerman and army massacred. [[AnyoneCanDie Then he kills Robb.]] [[UpToEleven Then he kills Robb's mother Catelyn Stark.]] [[HolyShitQuotient Then Arya Stark is nearly killed.]]]] Beyond the Impossible indeed!
** Regarding Shagga, son of Dolf, who [[AnAxeToGrind has a thing for axes]]:
---> '''Kevan Lannister:''' The big hairy one wanted two axes, black steel, double-sided.
---> '''Tyrion Lannister:''' Shagga likes axes.
---> '''Lord Lefford:''' He still had that woodaxe strapped to his back.
---> '''Tyrion Lannister:''' Shagga is of the opinion that three axes are better than two.
* The longest sentence ever written in a story is apparently from a 2001 book called "The Rotters Club" which contains ''13,955 words''.

* From the ''first chapter'' of ''ThePrincessBride'' comes this gem. By the end of the book, Buttercup's all but describing her love as "over nine thousand."

* How [[MacrossMissileMassacre many missiles]] can [[HonorHarrington Honor ]] fire off at once?
** 69,984 missiles, in 7,776 pods. After ECM, over 37 thousand got through. On 85 targets. Oh and of those missiles? 54,208 were laser warheads. X-ray Lasers created by the nuclear bomb on the missile exploding...
** There's nothing particularly impossible about any of that. Spaceships can be arbitrarily large, and nuke powered X-ray lasers (albeit satellite based) are the very concept that caused the Strategic Defense Initiative to pick up the nickname 'Star Wars.'
** Trumped earlier in the battle of Manticore where the opening [[spoiler: and ONLY ]] salvo contained over half a million missiles, albeit that not being launched by Honor.

* ''TheDresdenFiles'': What [[CrazyAwesome mind-blowingly awesome]] trick will Harry pull this time? How many new scars can he get? How much more BadAss can Murphy become before she becomes the female equivalent of [[TengenToppaGurrenLagann Kamina]]? How bizarre and gory can the villains' tactics get? How much can we scale up the ThirtyGambitPileup? How pretty can Thomas be? How's Harry going to top [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome The Dinosaur Incident]]? How much ass can be kicked?

* {{A Song of Ice and Fire}}, [[HighOctaneNightmareFuel Red Wedding]]. Because [[spoiler:[[HonorBeforeReason Robb]]]] broke off an arranged marriage one of his daughters, [[spoiler: [[CompleteMonster Walder Frey]] has many of Robb's Bannerman and army massacred. [[AnyoneCanDie Then he kills Robb.]] [[UpToEleven Then he kills Robb's mother Catelyn Stark.]] [[HolyShitQuotient Then Arya Stark is nearly killed.]]]] Beyond the Impossible indeed!

* TheLongingOfShiinaRyo: the battle was over and the good guys had won, but when Shin-tsu saw [[spoiler:his best friend falling to an imminent death on the other side of the warehouse]] there wasn't much he could do. So he [[BigDamnHero defied reality to reach her and take the impact in her place]].

** And you forgot the Sunbeam, which takes the entire energy output of a star and turns it into a [[BFG]]. And the bad guys were already working on a ''improved'' version that would be able to hit a target across ''interstellar distances''.

** Okay, I know nothing about this Reilly guy or his books, but let me point out something to you about the M-67 fragmentation grenade, the standard issue "kill people" grenade of the United States Army: It has an ''automatic kill zone'' of five meters-- about 16 feet-- from the place where it blows up. In ''every direction,'' barring walls or landscape. And a ''casualty zone''-- as in "too wounded to fight, requires medical attention" of fifteen meters-- about forty-eight feet. Given that? Twenty men with one grenade is in no way BeyondTheImpossible.

* In the series the {{Belgariad}} after Mandorallen performs a particularly remarkable action, he is told that what he just did is impossible. In response he shrugs and Polgara begins pondering if it's possible to go Beyond The Impossible if you are not aware that the action you are performing is in fact impossible.

* ''TheDresdenFiles'': What [[CrazyAwesome mind-blowingly awesome]] trick will Harry pull this time? How many new scars can he get? How much more BadAss can Murphy become before she becomes the female equivalent of [[TengenToppaGurrenLagann Kamina]]? How bizarre and gory can the villains' tactics get? How much can we scale up the ThirtyXanatosPileup? How pretty can Thomas be? How's Harry going to top [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome The Dinosaur Incident]]? How much ass can be kicked?