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It really reminds me of some stories by Larry Niven in his Known Space series. Beowulf Shaeffer meeting a Pak Protector, perhaps?
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May 26, 2022 10:45
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papa horny michael posted:It really reminds me of some stories by Larry Niven in his Known Space series. Beowulf Shaeffer meeting a Pak Protector, perhaps? or Louis Wu on one of his sabbaticals? I think I've read it as well but I'm not sure it's Niven - around that time though.
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May 26, 2022 11:57
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lol
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May 26, 2022 12:42
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It's me, Ned! Ned Ryerson! Isolationist fucked around with this message at 13:31 on May 26, 2022 |
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May 26, 2022 13:23
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Isolationist posted:It's me, Ned! Ned Ryerson! I had to go back and check the last page in case it was me that suggested a Niven story before and I'd had a stroke and forgotten 
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May 26, 2022 14:47
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Leave posted:I've got a vague one here; I only read the beginning, but I'm pretty sure it was about a guy named Richard, who was crippled saving the life of some rich guy, gains psychic powers. I think it was a cyberpunk/horror kind of thing? I think Richard was completely disabled, and whoever he had saved/rescued was rich enough that he set Richard up on easy street for the rest of his life.
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May 26, 2022 23:11
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Gambrinus posted:Same author, is it Psychomech? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomech Holy goddamn balls, this is it! I remembered the cover, but couldn't think of how to describe it! Thank you!
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May 27, 2022 01:39
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A really strange, horny, sci-fi novel that I encountered as a child in the late eighties or early nineties. The cover was of a sci-fi/steampunk study or office, with a catgirl in a jacket lounging on a couch in the foreground. This was long before the whole anime catgirl phenomenon so more werecat looking than what you might think. I only read part of it so I'm pretty hazy on the details, but from what I remember the plot revolved around a group of people that discovered the multiverse was real, but that there were entities that had already destroyed most of the nearby parallel universes and they were making their way to this one. The entities disguised themselves as catgirls in order to seduce and distract key individuals to keep them from realizing their universe was doomed. The one part of the book that stuck in my memory was one very short chapter (less than a page long) which featured a multiverse-variant of one of the main characters distraught and furious because he realized that he was too late to save his universe. He is then tackled by a group of catgirls, which causes him to ejaculate in his pants, which only makes him angrier. I'm mostly curious about this one because I am pretty sure this was my first encounter with the concept of a multiverse/parallel universes. And catgirls.
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May 27, 2022 04:30
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 And I thought Heinlein's The Number of the Beast was a strange first encounter with that! Edit for I forgot this wasn't Discord. Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 03:47 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 27, 2022 04:37
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There's some kind of cat girl maid harem books apparently, maybe it was one of those.....?
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May 28, 2022 01:23
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someone told me to search for catgirl harem novels on altavista and my dad kicked down my door and took the modem and left without a word
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May 28, 2022 01:32
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Yeah, as you can imagine putting any combination of "catgirl multiverse apocalypse" into google has been profoundly unhelpful and has probably done irreversible harm to my search algorithm. It is definitely not the maid harem books. Google also suggested that but those were published in the 2020s and the book I remember was most likely published in the eighties or maybe even late seventies, long before the whole anime catgirl thing.
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May 28, 2022 02:03
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Fritz Leiber was horny as hell and his Hugo winner from the 1960s, The Wanderer, had catgirls, but I don't think that's it either.
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May 28, 2022 03:35
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Sesquiculus posted:Yeah, as you can imagine putting any combination of "catgirl multiverse apocalypse" into google has been profoundly unhelpful and has probably done irreversible harm to my search algorithm. There's a series with most of that you described but no cat girls, let me see if I can find it. Maybe my eyes glazed over reading about the tackle/ejaculation pile. The cat girl maid harem ones looked like they were made ages ago based on the covers,, sorry. E; I was thinking if the Long Earth which Definitely is more recent than you described. Synnr fucked around with this message at 08:43 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 08:34
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Leave posted:Holy goddamn balls, this is it! I remembered the cover, but couldn't think of how to describe it! Thank you! No problems. I've had some obscure questions answered here over the years so it's nice to give something back. I loved the Necroscope books when I was a teenager. I'll dig them out next time I go back to my folks.
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May 28, 2022 14:11
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Resident Idiot posted:Fritz Leiber was horny as hell and his Hugo winner from the 1960s, The Wanderer, had catgirls, but I don't think that's it either. No, not this one. The cat-entities didn't have names or even any speech from what I remember, though I guess that might have changed later in the novel - I only read a bit of it. I also read a lot of Leiber when I was young so I think I would have remembered if it was him. Good guess though, thanks. Synnr posted:I was thinking if the Long Earth which Definitely is more recent than you described. Yeah, the plot summary on wikipedia also says technical plans distributed on the internet plays a big part in the plot setup and the book I'm thinking of predates the web. It's also not the Nine Princes in Amber books though that has plot similarities. Thanks for the guess though.
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May 28, 2022 21:08
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Trying to remember a nonfiction book I've heard of. It's a collection of articles/essays by authors with different areas of expertise, all describing the same small location (a town or street) with attention to their particular interests. E.g. one writes about trees, one about insects, one about place names, etc. Might have been called something like "Ten Walks"?
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May 31, 2022 03:06
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ScienceSeagull posted:Trying to remember a nonfiction book I've heard of. It's a collection of articles/essays by authors with different areas of expertise, all describing the same small location (a town or street) with attention to their particular interests. E.g. one writes about trees, one about insects, one about place names, etc. Might have been called something like "Ten Walks"? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803166-on-looking
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May 31, 2022 09:38
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Large, hardcover, coffee-table style book of science-fiction illustrations (Chris Foss style stuff), published some time in the early/mid-1980s. Bought this in the UK but I imagine it was just as available elsewhere. The one thing that made this unique was that the editor wove a novella sized story between all the (otherwise unconnected) illustrations, which told the story of a colony ship leaving Earth, arriving at a new planet, and then getting involved in some conflict. Apparently there was some sort of sequel or companion book, another illustration anthology that tried to tie all the illustrations together with a story.
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May 31, 2022 18:05
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Retroblique posted:Large, hardcover, coffee-table style book of science-fiction illustrations (Chris Foss style stuff), published some time in the early/mid-1980s. Bought this in the UK but I imagine it was just as available elsewhere. One of this series? https://www.goodreads.com/series/76965-galactic-encounters-series Or this one? https://www.goodreads.com/series/64380-terran-trade-authority
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May 31, 2022 18:20
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Isolationist posted:Short story 4: I've read this but can't think of the name either. IIRC, the race had been engineered by their ancient ancestors to have this swappy-penis thing, with the intent that it would remove sexism (since every time you gently caress, you wind up changing gender) without removing the concept of sex or gender itself. Naturally, eventually religious zealots decide whoever was born with a penis is in charge, and I think the protagonist was being persecuted for being an unmarried woman or something. I read it in either the late 2000s or early 2010s, and I was hitting up anthologies pretty hard back then so you're probably right about that part. edit: in particular, I remember anthologies that were edited by Gardner Dozois, that might be a starting point.
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Jun 1, 2022 03:11
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Probably not what you're looking for (it's just a minor plot point) but the swappable peen idea also appears in Greg Egan's Oceanic. It's known as a "bridge."
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Jun 1, 2022 15:14
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Gambrinus posted:No problems. I've had some obscure questions answered here over the years so it's nice to give something back. I nearly gave up on the book. The first seventy-five or so pages just bored me to tears.
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Jun 1, 2022 20:56
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Checked all the Gardner Dozois listings I could find one by one, don't think it's in there (though I'll admit I read most of those anthologies) and MAN I'd ironically forgotten how rock solid Greg Egan is - Reasons to be Cheerful is great. Not Oceanic, but good suggestion (I'm honestly surprised to find Greg Egan stuff in both of the recent suggestions, didn't think he was well known at all - criminally underrated)
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Jun 2, 2022 14:18
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Friend is trying to find a book: "Does anyone know the title of a book where the main character finds a photograph of about 100 people all looking in the same direction and decides to hunt them down to find out what they were looking at, only to discover they're all dead?"
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Jun 3, 2022 07:21
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Comedy option of The Shining. No loving clue though. They have any more info like when they read it or what the cover looked like or was it an ebook, etc?
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Jun 3, 2022 07:49
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That sounds neat. Pls no extra spoilers about why they die
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Jun 3, 2022 10:53
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I gotta say, I'm pretty hooked by that concept, keep us updated if you find it
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Jun 3, 2022 13:56
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escape artist posted:Friend is trying to find a book: Jack Vance The Book of Dreams
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Jun 3, 2022 14:04
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Wikipedia says that there are only 10 people in the photograph, but they all have ranks of 99 to 111 in their organization.
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Jun 3, 2022 15:22
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xcheopis posted:Jack Vance FYI this is book 5 of a 5 book series called Demon Princes.
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Jun 6, 2022 03:49
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Children's/young adult chapter book starring a cat, possibly a kitten, who ends up having adventures on the street. I don't remember if he's a pet that wanders out or a stray that's leaving the nest for the first time. However, one thing I do remember is him being warned about dogs early on, and later on when he first sees a bunch of cars on the street he assumes they're dogs because of how big and scary they are. Later on, when he meets a real dog, he ends up befriending it, which all the other cats are shocked about at the end. I also remember there being some kind of supernatural/science-fiction plot with the villain trying to create cyborg/zombie cats, but that might be a different book. I remember the cover being mostly reddish with a picture of the cat protagonist, who was mostly black with a splotch of white. There were also some interior illustrations.
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Jun 8, 2022 12:21
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GrayGriffin posted:Children's/young adult chapter book starring a cat, possibly a kitten, who ends up having adventures on the street. I don't remember if he's a pet that wanders out or a stray that's leaving the nest for the first time. However, one thing I do remember is him being warned about dogs early on, and later on when he first sees a bunch of cars on the street he assumes they're dogs because of how big and scary they are. Later on, when he meets a real dog, he ends up befriending it, which all the other cats are shocked about at the end. I also remember there being some kind of supernatural/science-fiction plot with the villain trying to create cyborg/zombie cats, but that might be a different book. I remember the cover being mostly reddish with a picture of the cat protagonist, who was mostly black with a splotch of white. There were also some interior illustrations. Could be one of the Warriors series by Erin Hunter? The villain and his cyborg cats sound like Tailchaser's song by Tad Williams, but Tailchaser is ginger.
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Jun 8, 2022 12:37
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I think that's the Varjak Paw series.
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Jun 8, 2022 12:47
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Runcible Cat posted:I think that's the Varjak Paw series. Yeah, that's it! Didn't realize there was a sequel, I'll try to see if I can find that too.
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Jun 8, 2022 13:17
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Runcible Cat posted:I think that's the Varjak Paw series. Dammit, that's the one book I'd have been able to identify itt (because it's illustrated by Dave McKean).
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Jun 9, 2022 09:47
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I was sure I'd already asked, but not in this thread, apparently. Children's science fiction novel. Read before mid-1990s, possibly late 1980s. Some sort of enclosed city, protagonist is head honcho's kid. Everyone gets knowledge bank implants plugged into their necks at a certain age instead of a proper education. Protagonist's best friend rejects the implant so he's enslaved. Protagonist escapes through a rubbish hatch and goes to live in the real world with some people. Finds his implanted knowledge is worth gently caress-all there. I remember at one point he tries to access "rafts" but there's no "how to build a raft" and he needs one. At some point the dad finds him but I don't remember what happens then. E: I think it turns out it's pre-determined by the city who "rejects" the implants to ensure a steady supply of slave labour.
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Jun 12, 2022 23:26
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I was sure I'd already asked, but not in this thread, apparently. Children's science fiction novel. Read before mid-1990s, possibly late 1980s. Some sort of enclosed city, protagonist is head honcho's kid. Everyone gets knowledge bank implants plugged into their necks at a certain age instead of a proper education. Protagonist's best friend rejects the implant so he's enslaved. Protagonist escapes through a rubbish hatch and goes to live in the real world with some people. Finds his implanted knowledge is worth gently caress-all there. I remember at one point he tries to access "rafts" but there's no "how to build a raft" and he needs one. I saw a similar query on Reddit last week that was solved as Devil On My Back by Monica Hughes.
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Jun 13, 2022 00:17
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wheatpuppy posted:I saw a similar query on Reddit last week that was solved as Devil On My Back by Monica Hughes. That's absolutely it, thank you 
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Jun 13, 2022 00:30
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There's a quote from a particular book that is rattling round in my head and I'm trying to find. A radicalised character who killed his mentor is told something along the lines of: "He believed in you to the end. Right up until the moment your sword entered his heart, he was confident you would do the right thing." I think maybe this is Death in a Discworld book but I can't place it at all.
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Jun 16, 2022 10:39
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