necroid posted:

Thanks dude, it's this one!


I didn't remember the vampire virus from outer space but the plot is the right one...

Shonagon posted:

I hope this is OK to ask here: I need a quote identified! Only I can't remember either the quote or the speaker.

It's some tough nut American writer (of the 'bottle of whisky a day' type) and he said something along the lines of "I'd rather let the stableboy gently caress my wife than an editor touch my writing." Only that's not it, and googling similar words has got me nowhere, and I can't find it, and it's really annoying me. Anyone??

Doctor Zero posted:

The first is a book I read as a kid (long time ago). The cover was green & black from what I can remember (paperback). I think it was aimed at young adults. The story involved a young boy who may have been orphaned. He went to live in this old creepy house that I think was on an Everglades-like swampy area. There were marshes, and reeds, and the boy would take a rowboat or canoe out into the swamps. There was something vaguely creepy going on, that might have involved searching for treasure. I think there was a girl living near by that he befriended or something. I vaguely recall a scene at night with a lantern out on the swamps. Very vague, I know. This probably describes 50,000 different books, but I would dearly love to read it again as an adult. It was probably terrible, but I liked it at the time.

Lot 49 posted:

This actually sounds a bit like a book someone was asking about on the previous page which turned out to be Swampland by S. R. Martin.

Hydronium posted:

There was a series I loved as a child, probably British, maybe from/set in the 1930s or thereabouts. It was about a group of kids who I think went back in time and did cool things... I remember a lot of scenes being set in their playroom. Maybe they'd build castles and things in it and then be shrunk and trapped in them? At any rate, they were somehow transported to another world (maybe back in time or into the castle they built?) and had adventures based on Ivanhoe.

Google isn't helping me out much with this one.

Edit: Wow, nevermind. Found it like 10 seconds after I posted this. It was Knight's Castle by Edward Eager.

regulargonzalez posted:

Hm, that just reminded me of a series I read as a kid because my mom had read them when she was my age and wanted me to read them too. Wonder if it's the same series ... my memories of it are incredibly dim, except that I think they were written around that same time (1920s or 30s), and the kids ate a lot of biscuits (which my mom said were probably the British words for cookies). For some reason I'm thinking the series I have in mind was written by a woman, though. But same general premise - kids would either go back in time or to some fantasy land and have adventures. And it wasn't the Narnia series.

e: Looking at Edgar Eager books, I see he wrote Half-Magic. I'm more certain that he's not the right author I'm thinking of -- the fantasy books I mentioned above were more literary in nature than Half-Magic (which is a fun kids book in its own right).

Autarch_Severian posted:

Hopefully I'm not repeating a request that has already been in the thread. I scanned through it and didn't see any mention of the story I remember.

It's a short story, science fiction, I had to read it around 2002, but I remember it was from possibly the 70's-80's. It's roughly about the future of the cold war, where America and Russia send a squadron of soldiers each every year to fight to the death in some sort of large arena, the last 'team' with a survivor or group of survivors wins resources and bragging rights for a year, and the survivor is allowed to live the rest of their life without having to obey laws.

I know it's probably "the survivor" or "the arena" but there are quite a bit of short stories and stories with those names.

Lot 49 posted:

William Faulkner. Google gave me:

"I get drunk, I get mad, I get thrown from horses, I get all sorts of things. But I don't get edited. I'd rather see my wife get hosed by the stable boy."

plus a whole lot of sites about guys who want other men to sleep with their wives.

Hobnob posted:

Possibly E. Nesbit's stuff (Five Children and It, etc., which involves some time travel), but those would be set rather earlier (1890s or so). I don't remember many biscuits though. (Interestingly, Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle is referenced heavily in Half-Magic.)

uXs posted:

Been looking for this for ages:

There's a spaceship that lands on what seems like a deserted planet. Turns out it's actually an agricultural planet for invisible aliens. They get attacked by invisible flying things (probably an automated defense system against pests), and some people die when the ship's AI acts logically and raises the shields when the enemy things come too close.

Then there's also a part about an alien spaceship landing and the alien being all invisible getting inside their own spaceship. But it's telepathic and they force it to become visible by torturing one of their own crew members, after which they can kill it.

I think there's also a boxing match somewhere, maybe, and it's possible I'm mixing up two books.

Any ideas?

Oncogene posted:

In High School we were issued a book with a collection of short stories in it. One of these stories was about a society where the roles of sexual intercourse and intelligent discussion were reversed. That is to say, people had sex just as they would a discussion and to ask someone their opinion on something was a deeply intimate thing.

Anyone remember this?

Hughlander posted:

Torturing own crew to make an invisible alien visible has been in this thread before, I think I looked it up on wikipedia after it was posted and it was a novella in a series about an explorer... Not sure that'll help much but I'm sure it's answered in this thread somewhere.

Doctor Zero posted:

Sounds kind of like Brave New World, but that's not a short story.

puchu posted:

Was walking through a bookstore where they had this one book on display. Its back cover said something about how in a world where some people had gifts of some sort, the main character (who was female) had the gift of killing or something. I completely forgot the name of the book or the author so I'm stumped. The title was one word though, I do remember that much.

Pyruvate posted:

This is probably a long shot, but I was thinking about a couple books I had as a kid, two were part of an educational series, one was about the natural world and the other about transportation like trains and buses and airplanes. I sort of think they were Japanese (though published in English), since the little "everyboy" character who commented on stuff was sort of anime-looking, and they talked about and had pictures of Japanese bullet trains. A couple other things I remember is a drawing of some roaches crawling near some food, and some stickman devil-looking guys jumping off the roaches' backs onto the food to represent germs.

Pompous Rhombus posted:

I can't remember the name of them, but you aren't crazy. I think I had the full set of them when I was a kid; I remember getting a new one every month by mail. It had the little anime kid interacting with the different things in the books, like getting stung by a sea anemone and stuff. Those books owned.

Not A Hydroxyl Ion posted:

I'm trying to remember the name of a fantasy series. This much I do remember:

It has a female author
It centers around two thieves. In the first novel they meet and one becomes the other's apprentice, or something like that.
The quality of the books really began to drop as the series progressed.

Vague, I know, but any help would be appreciated. This is driving me crazy!

deety posted:

Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunners books?

Here's the first one:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74270.Luck_in_the_Shadows

Velvet Elvis posted:

I have no idea when it was published, but I believe it read it in the mid to late 70s.

Science-fiction action adventure genre. Basically, a human male is captured by an alien race and taken to a remote planet where he is the quarry in some sort of intergalactic hunt. Very similar to "The Most Dangerous Game" but with aliens. I think the participants were promised freedom if they survived long enough or reached a specific goal. If I recall, the protagonist makes friends with a large lizard man who is fond of mud-baths. I'm pretty sure needle-guns were involved. I think there may have been a sequel.

nuvan posted:

I asked about some books last year, and got answers for most, but I still am looking for two of them.

Here's the list I had:

1. group of people are on a ship orbiting mars. segregated by gender, they are given some sort of serum or drug to allow for very fast adaptation to their environment, which is slowing being changed to that of mars. they are being prepped to be the first martians. I think that at the end of the story they rebel against their creators

Keep Out! posted:

Daptine is the secret of it. Adaptine, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt

They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars.

"You're home, children," the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they'd built for us there. And he told us there'd be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.

Cantaloupe posted:

Wedemeyer posted:

Do you happen to know if this is a short story? Because it sounds a lot like Keep Out! by Frederic Brown. It's in Young Mutants, a book of short stories edited by Asimov, Martin Greenburg and Charles Waugh.

Cantaloupe posted:

Fire In The Disco posted:

It was a pretty fluffy read but enjoyable nevertheless, but I can't remember what it was called or who wrote it. Any help would be appreciated!