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I was going to guess the automatic detective by Martinez.
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Feb 6, 2022 05:53
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I'm looking for a short story about a scientist who discovers a way to tell if any person has true consciousness or if they are basically just an NPC using some sort of quantum experiment if I remember correctly. It turns out that only like 10% of people are actually conscious and the world goes to poo poo as a result once the method of detection leaks out to the public. I could have sworn this was a Stephen King story in his Bazaar of Bad Dreams collection but looking at the wiki it doesn't seem to be in there. Maybe I just read it around the time I also read King's collection and that's why I remember it that way. Anybody know this story?
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Feb 6, 2022 09:13
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It's a novel, not a short story, but perhaps you are thinking of Quantum Night?quote:...They use the beam to perform a measurement on Jim's brain cells and find that they have three microtubules in a quantum superposition. This is revealed to be part of a taxonomy which they call Q1-Q2-Q3: four-sevenths of all humans have one quantum microtubule, two-sevenths have two and one-seventh have three, with these numbers only changing as a result of a coma or general anaesthetic. By observing behavioural traits of their test subjects, Kayla and Victoria hypothesize that Q2s are psychopaths, while Q1s are non-conscious humans who lack free will and become susceptible to mob mentality. Only Q3s are seen as having critical thinking ability and empathy at the same time. Also, while I'm posting, this would have been my guess for the detective book, which in reverse is a set of short stories instead of a novel 
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Feb 6, 2022 09:47
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Short comedy story where someone dies and goes to heaven and meets God, who turns out to be a black woman. They're surprised because they always pictured God as an old white guy, to which God replies with something like "What did you expect, this is a sappy liberal story!"
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Feb 11, 2022 00:23
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uvar posted:It's a novel, not a short story, but perhaps you are thinking of Quantum Night? Thanks for this. It turns out I have read Quantum Night (and just read it again) and it is very similar to what I am thinking of but not the same. I specifically remember the governments getting ahold of the tech to identify whether or not people were conscious and the story exploring how the world changed as a result. In Quantum Night the technology never gets out, although they do use it to make some changes to the world as a whole. I am very positive it was a short story, or possibly novella as well. I also still swear it was Stephen King but I've gone through his entire short story list on wikipedia and none of them are it or even close.
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Feb 11, 2022 06:50
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Recently, I wanted to re-read an old favorite fantasy series and noticed that oops, I had forgotten both titles and author. Welp, I hope this thread can help me out: The primary thing of the setting was that magic was derived from magical words, that were speculated in setting to be the very long names of demons or spirit entities. The more a word was known, the more it became "diluted" and less powerful. If you knew one word, you just became insanely good at whatever you already had a talent for, like if you were good with kids, knowing one magical word would make you into a god-tier Kindergarten teacher and so on. Two magic words, and you became an adept, someone capable of learning everything in a matter of hours and at a master-level. Never even touched a computer before? After two hours of studying, you are now able to build your own super-computer. That kind of thing. Three magic words and you became a magician capable of casting illusions so real you could make the entire world believe this one guy you hate is now a rat, including your victim. Four words and you turn into a wizard, capable of altering reality itself. 5+ words and you either burn out from too much power, or you share with someone you love and you combine into a new god and ascent. There were two series in total set in this world, the first about a young dumbass slowly becoming a wizard, the second one dealing with a crazed dwarf mage taking over the world, thanks to the obvious question brought up in every reader's mind since the first series started deploying magic mind control as a plot point. Back then as a teenager, I was amazed that the author included a lesbian pairing in the second series, as I had never seen this kind of progressive thing before in a real serious book, written by a mainstream author. Anyway, randomly typing setting details into Google didn't help me, but is this tickling anyone's memories? I also remember a wizard LARPing as a fantasy Roman general, and him summoning a giant horde of giant ravens to eat green-skinned orcs/goblins after they defeated his fantasy Roman legions in open battle, just out of spite.
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Feb 26, 2022 18:59
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Man of His Word series by Dave Duncan. Believe first one is Magic Casement. Love Duncan. He also wrote one of the early isekai series, The Reluctant Swordsman.
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Feb 26, 2022 19:08
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Sounds like you're thinking of the same books as this person on Stack Exchange, who eventually found it was Dave Duncan's "A Man of His Word" series. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/192841/fantasy-novel-where-magic-is-granted-by-knowledge-of-words-of-power
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Feb 26, 2022 19:10
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Thank you! Dave Duncan was the one I was thinking of, and the Pandemia books was what I was searching for. Thanks! I'll try to get them as ebooks immediately. Edit: Man I just saw Dave Duncan died in 2018. That sucks rear end. 
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Feb 26, 2022 19:27
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ScienceSeagull posted:Short comedy story where someone dies and goes to heaven and meets God, who turns out to be a black woman. They're surprised because they always pictured God as an old white guy, to which God replies with something like "What did you expect, this is a sappy liberal story!" I'm like 90% sure this is a chapter near the end of Ellen DeGeneres' first book "My Point... And I Do Have One", possibly adapted from an early 90s routine of hers? I haven't read it since I was a kid but the whole thing is apparently on the Internet Archive if you make an account with them
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Feb 26, 2022 21:09
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Blood Nightmaster posted:I'm like 90% sure this is a chapter near the end of Ellen DeGeneres' first book "My Point... And I Do Have One", possibly adapted from an early 90s routine of hers? I haven't read it since I was a kid but the whole thing is apparently on the Internet Archive if you make an account with them Oh cool, I'll take a look when I have more time. I recall reading it sometime in the late 90s so the timing probably checks out.
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Feb 27, 2022 01:11
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i just remembered a book i had as a tiny kid in the early/mid-90s about a girl (blonde?) who had a kitten that would purr when scratched behind its (left?) ear. v short, maybe 1-2 sentences per page, full color images on every page ik it’s a dumb kids book which isn’t this thread’s usual, but i’d love to read it again if anyone recognizes or can find it
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Feb 27, 2022 17:16
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I’m trying to find an Australian sci-fi book I read years ago. The setting is post apocalyptic Sydney, which having survived a nuclear war more or less unscathed has become the closest thing there is to a superpower, run by a totalitarian dictatorship. All I can remember of the plot is that it involves a group of people finding out the rest of Australia is much more habitable than the government is letting on, and fleeing to what’s left of Melbourne. The protagonist is a cop assigned to bring them down.
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Feb 28, 2022 06:44
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Runcible Cat posted:STET by Sarah Gailey quote:None of it matters at all if you don’t know that Carter’s Woodpecker doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. Disagree.
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Feb 28, 2022 16:07
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Bargearse posted:I’m trying to find an Australian sci-fi book I read years ago. The setting is post apocalyptic Sydney, which having survived a nuclear war more or less unscathed has become the closest thing there is to a superpower, run by a totalitarian dictatorship. All I can remember of the plot is that it involves a group of people finding out the rest of Australia is much more habitable than the government is letting on, and fleeing to what’s left of Melbourne. The protagonist is a cop assigned to bring them down. is this a Mad Max prequel?
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Feb 28, 2022 17:42
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Splicer posted:Hmm. AI posting detected!
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Feb 28, 2022 19:34
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Libluini posted:Thank you! Dave Duncan was the one I was thinking of, and the Pandemia books was what I was searching for. Thanks! I'll try to get them as ebooks immediately. I met him a couple times as he was Alberta based. Didn't sell his first book until he was 53
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Mar 1, 2022 06:08
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Apropos of nothing "Alberta Based" strikes me as a username
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Mar 1, 2022 14:55
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Bargearse posted:I’m trying to find an Australian sci-fi book I read years ago. The setting is post apocalyptic Sydney, which having survived a nuclear war more or less unscathed has become the closest thing there is to a superpower, run by a totalitarian dictatorship. All I can remember of the plot is that it involves a group of people finding out the rest of Australia is much more habitable than the government is letting on, and fleeing to what’s left of Melbourne. The protagonist is a cop assigned to bring them down. CBD by John Heffernan maybe? If it's not that, some ideas to help you narrow it down: Salt by Gabrielle Lord And tomorrow and tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw doesn't have a plot match and sounds way too political to fit the bill. Shades Children and Obernewtyn both sort of fit in that they're both by Aussie authors and iirc they're both set after a nuclear holocaust but they seem a bit too fantastical. ... And finally, someone seems to have written a book entirely about how Australia is depicted in apocalypses?
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Mar 2, 2022 15:36
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navyjack posted:Man of His Word series by Dave Duncan. Believe first one is Magic Casement. How does "isekai" in an English-language work differ from "portal fantasy", which is literally centuries old in English?
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Mar 2, 2022 16:08
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Arsenic Lupin posted:... what. Probably talking out of my rear end, but I was talking in the sense of “protagonist has a fatal encounter with truck-kun (in this case, cancer-kun) and is reincarnated into a magical world to save it.” I didn’t mean to invalidate centuries of anglosphere tradition or whatever I just didn’t give a gently caress
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Mar 2, 2022 16:24
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brothers lionheart is isekai 
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Mar 2, 2022 17:02
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An old kid's chapter book series I remember reading maybe around 18-20 years ago, each book was fairly thin and quick to read. It was about a brother and sister who find this weird alien computer and end up connected to an alien Internet, and attracting the attention of evil aliens. There are also two good aliens who come to help them in the form of a dog and a cat, and the dog is named Sirius. One of the books ended with them trying to fight the evil alien hacking by playing various kinds of games on the computer and it ended with them picking the wrong spot in Battleship/Minesweeper. The covers were all photos of the kids/dog/cat in front of a starry background with speech bubbles. I remember the overall series was titled [something]net, which is also the name of the alien Internet.
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Mar 2, 2022 19:30
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Outernet! There was also a tie-in browser game which I got very into at the time. Edit: Maybe? I don't think the kids were siblings, so maybe there were multiple different "The Internet but aliens" series in the early 2000s, it wouldn't surprise me.
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Mar 2, 2022 20:36
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There was this sci-fi book I remember reading a long time ago, about a linguist who was working on an interstellar trading ship. She had no interest in interstellar trading herself, she just wanted to focus on linguistics, but she had to work with the traders for... some reason, I think it was something along the lines of a work requirement for an advanced degree she was pursuing? Something like that. Much to her annoyance, she turned out to be really good at the diplomacy and problem-solving required of interstellar traders, and kept racking up career progression in this profession she wasn't even pursuing because she kept being instrumental in finding solutions to the problems the traders faced. For example, one episode dealt with two warring groups of arthropoid aliens, only one of which the humans wanted to trade with, and those were the ones on the losing side; to maintain that trade relationship, they had to find a way to help the friendly group win their war. The linguist eventually managed this by taking advantage of a lunar eclipse and a solar sail to manufacture a very unambiguous celestial omen favoring the friendly side, destroying the enemy's morale. A couple other details I remember: - In this spacefaring future, the modern form of English had merged with Spanish to form Spanglish; the linguist referred to our own modern-day English as "Middle English". - The final conflict came down to two groups of another alien race triumphantly reuniting after generations apart, which was all very well and good until both sides got a whiff of each other and immediately started murdering each other because of what turned out to be some very deep-rooted sexual mores. GeminiSun fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 4, 2022 11:10
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loving hell, I wanna read that book!
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Mar 4, 2022 12:46
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poo poo,I think I've read that but I can't pin it down. I'm go through my journal and shelves later and see if something rings a bell.
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Mar 4, 2022 13:54
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a lot of it sounds like The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell but it's obviously not it.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:22
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The broad strokes sound similar to The Human Division by John scalzi but the details don't match.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:45
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Also Embassytown by China Mieville is another space linguist novel, but I don't recall any moon stuff in there e: it actually sounds a lot like it, but disclaimer: it must be 10 years since i read it, so memory is fuzzy Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 08:12
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cptn_dr posted:Outernet! There was also a tie-in browser game which I got very into at the time. Nope, that was it, I must have just misremembered their relationship. Looked it up and found the exact cover I remembered!
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Mar 5, 2022 18:40
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It's also a little like Delaney's Babel-17 but a lot of the plot elements don't match, so it's not that.
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Mar 5, 2022 19:24
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No specific book in mind, but that plot feels awfully CJ Cherry like
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Mar 5, 2022 21:36
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For years now I've been trying to remember the name of a sci-fi short story that I heard on an Audible collection which seemingly no longer exists and has been removed from my library; it might have been an Arthur C. Clarke story? I recall it being about a man who has traveled to an alien world full of ancient ruins, which I believe another civilization was living near but not occupying or using. The ruins contain a room or a great plaza full of portals, which the protagonist ends up going in and out of. I vaguely recall him looking for someone, maybe a woman? That's all I remember, but the image of the portal room and this guy wandering through this ancient place has been stuck in my head for years. Does this ring a bell to anyone?
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Mar 9, 2022 02:59
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Kestral posted:For years now I've been trying to remember the name of a sci-fi short story that I heard on an Audible collection which seemingly no longer exists and has been removed from my library; it might have been an Arthur C. Clarke story? I recall it being about a man who has traveled to an alien world full of ancient ruins, which I believe another civilization was living near but not occupying or using. The ruins contain a room or a great plaza full of portals, which the protagonist ends up going in and out of. I vaguely recall him looking for someone, maybe a woman? That's all I remember, but the image of the portal room and this guy wandering through this ancient place has been stuck in my head for years. Does this ring a bell to anyone? It's a long shot, but the image of ancient ruins, portals and the protagonist wandering through them reminds me of By His Bootstraps, by Heinlein.
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Mar 9, 2022 15:24
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:No specific book in mind, but that plot feels awfully CJ Cherry like Pretty sure it's not, unless it's one of her short stories; she likes first contact scenarios but generally she has one first contact in a given book and spends the whole book (or, sometimes, several books) digging into it. It's definitely not the Chanur books, Cuckoo's Egg, Voyager in Night, Serpent's Reach, Hestia, Rider at the Gate, 40k in Gehenna, or Faded Sun, and while it's been a long time since I read them I'm pretty sure it's not either of the Hanan Rebellion books either -- and I think that's everything she's written featuring aliens? There's a lot of A-U books but they're humans-only. I did look through my shelves and journal without turning up anything likely, but it still feels familiar. Arsenic Lupin posted:... what. Generally speaking, the difference is that in a portal fantasy the protagonist(s) travels physically to the fantasy world (and may in fact travel back and forth between our world and the fantasy one several times). When in the fantasy world they are absent from their world of origin. In isekai, the protagonist's consciousness is projected into the fantasy world, but the body they inhabit there may have no relationship to the one they occupied in the real world, which may be unconscious, dead, in a coma, etc (if you even know what state it's in at all), and it's often ambiguous whether the fantasy world really exists, or is merely a dream or hallucination. I'm not entirely convinced that "isekai" is a useful term to apply to works like Jennie or The Chronicles of Tomas Covenant, since it implies a whole bunch of tropes and genre conventions that aren't at play in those books, but they definitely aren't portal fantasy either.
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Mar 13, 2022 03:02
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To add further the Dave Duncan book that started this conversation might not even qualify, since the protagonist isn't physically transported elsewhere, his mind is shunted into a very different body in the new world.
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Mar 17, 2022 19:16
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I'm cross posting from the GBS white whale thread and this is a little different. I have a picture of the book cover from a TV show and would like help finding out what the book title is. The source is Season 1, episode 8 of House of Cards. Timestamp is 21:20. Ben Daniels character is having a phone conversation with Robin Wright and he's drinking a beer on the couch. The book is open on the couch next to him, and he stands up and walks away. There's no closer shot of the book than this. My original picture was a phone pic of my laptop so apologies again for the quality. Here's a slightly better picture taken from a HiDef TV.  The title looks like it says The New Something Something. Daniels character is a photographer living in New York so I thought it might be something photography or NY related. The cover looks more orange in this version than the original yellow. I thought for a second it might have been The New York Trilogy (a book I already own) but Google doesn't show me any editions having that same cover.
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Mar 22, 2022 14:27
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3rd word reads as "next" to me and the 4th starts with T. Can't find anything useful called "the new next t____" but there's James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time which looks like it could fit. Can't find an edition with that particular cover, though.
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Mar 22, 2022 14:46
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I kinda see the last word as Tomorrow
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Mar 22, 2022 15:08
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