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Is that an exact quote? If not, I feel like something similar might be found in asoiaf, Barristan or Ned talking to Jaime about the mad king.
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Jun 16, 2022 16:46
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Whybird posted: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've read it for sure. And I read almost all of Pratchett's stuff, it sounds like it could be from him but I can't place it either yet.
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Jun 16, 2022 16:49
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regulargonzalez posted:Is that an exact quote? If not, I feel like something similar might be found in asoiaf, Barristan or Ned talking to Jaime about the mad king. It's definitely not an exact quote -- it could have been "right up until the point your bullet entered his brain" for all I remember, but I think it was definitely phrased along those lines.
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Jun 16, 2022 16:59
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Whybird posted:It's definitely not an exact quote -- it could have been "right up until the point your bullet entered his brain" for all I remember, but I think it was definitely phrased along those lines. Are you also sure it was radicalized? I can also half remember it as it's a protagonist who killed more of a fallen-mentor. The antagonist was so sure of the control over the situation up to the moment his confidant kills him.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:09
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I definitely remember it as a turning point for the protagonist because he's blown away by the level of faith the fallen character had in him, and also by the realisation that he might have walked a different path and made things better.
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Jun 16, 2022 17:20
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I have a feeling this is going to be the new "That's the beauty of it -- it doesn't *do* anything!"
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Jun 16, 2022 17:47
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I've been trying to find this book I read as a teenager for years. The problem is that I remember a lot of the plot but not the author and the title was some unmemorable, one-word, generic thing that's not descriptive of the contents. The plot was about a guy who goes to a comic convention and meets a woman who is actually Medea from Jason and the Argonauts who is an immortal. Via sex she awakens memories of his past life and his latent psychic powers to be part of a team of other psychics with past lives. But there's also a child murderer going around the convention they have to stop and somehow the protag's awakening psychic powers also make a super hero woman he dreamed up in his head start manifesting in the real world to start killing criminals all 90s grimdark antihero style. It was kind of a buck wild story. I lost my hard copy to water damage a long time ago and I'd always wanted to find it again to see if it holds up as entertaining or may have just hit that right spot of 90s absurdity I responded to at the time. I've had no luck all this time and recently a friend suggested I try asking here so... yeah.
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Jun 20, 2022 02:24
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Fiend by C. Dean Andersson?
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Jun 20, 2022 03:28
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THAT'S IT! Thank you!
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Jun 20, 2022 03:33
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Heh. I goggled novel about man "comic" "convention" "medea" (and it turns out adding those quotation marks was really loving important) and it popped up eighth on the search results.
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Jun 20, 2022 03:41
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A sci fi story or novel, from before 1988-ish. The protagonists are transported to a future in which society has eliminated "Right brained" people, creativity and the arts were deemed frivolous and unnecessary and the only people left are "Left brained" scientists and engineers.
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Jun 20, 2022 12:51
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yaffle posted:A sci fi story or novel, from before 1988-ish. The protagonists are transported to a future in which society has eliminated "Right brained" people, creativity and the arts were deemed frivolous and unnecessary and the only people left are "Left brained" scientists and engineers. Isn't that kind of the plot of Equilibrium? All arts were destroyed? Or am I misremembering?
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Jun 20, 2022 19:45
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Anything that caused emotion was banned. Poetry, books, art, etc. Iirc.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:58
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Anything that caused emotion was banned. Poetry, books, art, etc. Iirc. How irritating.
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Jun 21, 2022 15:59
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Isn't that kind of the plot of Equilibrium? All arts were destroyed? Or am I misremembering? I remember it wasn't emotions, but creative or artistic thought, I think they had genetically eliminated the possibility of a "right brained" person being born.
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Jun 22, 2022 00:31
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Nah, they had that weird drug everyone took that suppressed emotions.
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Jun 22, 2022 03:19
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Yaffle isn't looking for the movie Equilibrium.
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Jun 26, 2022 17:06
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Nah, they had that weird drug everyone took that suppressed emotions. It sounds a lot like The Giver, though the protagonist is from that society rather than transported to it.
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Jun 26, 2022 23:16
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Please keep things straight. This is the book that yaffle wants to find:yaffle posted:A sci fi story or novel, from before 1988-ish. The protagonists are transported to a future in which society has eliminated "Right brained" people, creativity and the arts were deemed frivolous and unnecessary and the only people left are "Left brained" scientists and engineers. yaffle posted:I remember it wasn't emotions, but creative or artistic thought, I think they had genetically eliminated the possibility of a "right brained" person being born.
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Jun 29, 2022 17:33
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Hello, thread - you've come through for me before, so how about this? Read at least 40 years ago, it was a Sci-Fi, probably young adult, or whatever that was called, 40 years ago. A novel rather than a short story. There was a "feeling cube", or a "feeling block", and my friend can't remember whether the cube/block was something that was physically felt, or something that responded to emotions. The protagonist was a young person, the ending was ambivalent, rather than a happy ending, and there was a threat to the world from (possibly) outside the Earth. It wasn't on a school's reading list, so it would have been from a local library in the USA. Not a lot to go on, of course! But do it, goons.
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Jun 30, 2022 20:52
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Hey thread. I read this book about 10 years ago. I believe it had been recently published, but I think it took place in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of the iron curtain. Maybe Russia, or Ukraine. I remember the author's name as Bulgakov, but not Mikhail Bulgakov the famous author, so maybe I'm mixed up. And the title was one word, one syllable. It was a word for a kind of tar distillate gunk that can be rolled into balls and chewed like gum (!?) which forms an important plot point. Like "Skit" but I know that's Swedish for poo poo, so probably not that. Something like that though. It's got a dark humorous mood. The story: A guy gets out of prison. All he has on him is the lump of the chewable tar stuff, and his clothes. He is searching for a treasure he hid before he went in. He bums around town at night and gets into trouble. Big spoiler follows: The treasure is a large diamond which was wadded into the chewable tar stuff without him knowing when he went into prison or something, so his efforts to search it out were all futile as he'd had it with him from the start
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Jun 30, 2022 21:58
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Zift, by Vladislav Todorov, who is Bulgarian, which is probably where the wires got crossed with Bulgakov.
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Jul 1, 2022 02:35
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Zift, by Vladislav Todorov, who is Bulgarian, which is probably where the wires got crossed with Bulgakov. Precisely! Correct on all counts. Many thanks.
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Jul 1, 2022 08:01
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This is a short story in a collection of short stories. I read it probably between 1989 -1993 in the UK. It was a hardback book, something along the lines of "War stories for boys", or "Flying tales for boys". Those aren't exact titles, but it was along those lines. There were black and white illustrations. Story in question was about early aviators (maybe balloonists, maybe aeroplanes) who went too high and found some terrible alien species in the higher reaches of the atmosphere that attacked them. I thought it may have been HG Wells, but went through the bibliography on Wikipedia and nothing stands out.
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Jul 2, 2022 21:14
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Gambrinus posted:This is a short story in a collection of short stories. I read it probably between 1989 -1993 in the UK. I actually think this is it ! https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Life-Flying-Stories-Library/dp/B0022WOO2O But I can't find a list of the stories inside (and I'm not paying £140 for it).
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Jul 2, 2022 23:52
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Everywhere else has it for like 10-20 bucks. Also maybe this will help
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Jul 3, 2022 00:06
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That story's The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle.
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Jul 3, 2022 01:10
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Runcible Cat posted:That story's The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle. Legend. Cheers! I actually checked his bibliography on Wikipedia as well, but it wasn't listed. Now to find what book it was actually in, because that contents page above doesn't seem to have it.
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Jul 3, 2022 01:16
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Gambrinus posted:Now to find what book it was actually in, because that contents page above doesn't seem to have it. It's on Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/537/537-h/537-h.htm
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Jul 3, 2022 01:19
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Gambrinus posted:Legend. Cheers! I actually checked his bibliography on Wikipedia as well, but it wasn't listed. The isfdb page: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?84011 lists a bunch of collections, but is not always exhaustive.
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Jul 3, 2022 02:24
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Kind of weird one. Probably pre-1980. A man pilot has crashed his plane and I think when he comes to they tell him he has been revived in the far future. It is peaceful and idyllic. The people are human, but they have evolved so that they are all hermaphrodites with both male and female gonads. Their clothes just have holes wherever because no part of the human body is taboo anymore since everyone has the same equipment. All babies are born as pairs of twins, and spend some time in hospital after birth. He's a little weirded out because he's like a 1950 dude, but he deals with it. Shocking twist: he's not in the far future at all. He is in the present. Humans haven't evolved, this small community was deliberately created (and hidden) by folks who believe in the intersex future. All the children are twins because they take a boy and girl and combine them after birth. All procreation is managed to keep up the ratios. I think he finds out about this because one kid had their "twin" stillborn so that kid was not able to have the procedure and remains male? The dude flips out. Humans evolving to be intersex was weird, but humans choosing to be intersex is horrible. So they erase his memory and send him home. The whole thing was a test to see if baseline humans had socially evolved to the point where they could accept the body mod intersex humans, and since he couldn't they decide to stay secret. My googlefu is weak and google keeps trying to send me to Left Hand of Darkness, but that's not it.
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Jul 3, 2022 03:48
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Facebook Aunt posted:Kind of weird one. Probably pre-1980. I'm 90% sure I've read this one but I'm blanking on a title. Feel like I remember a domed city in the distance on the cover but that doesn't help much.
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Jul 3, 2022 04:00
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Venus Plus X by Ted Sturgeon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Plus_X
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Jul 3, 2022 04:33
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Action Jacktion posted:Venus Plus X by Ted Sturgeon. Yes! That's the one. Dang there were some weird stories back in the day. I read a ton of old science fiction as a kid and these days I find myself thinking "was that real or did I imagine it" all the time.
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Jul 3, 2022 04:54
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Beachcomber posted:I'm looking for a sci-fi short story. I may have even encountered it here first.
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Jul 6, 2022 02:00
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I tried searching ISFDB for titles with "China," but at a glance, nothing looked relevant. Something I'm looking for myself: a short story in which scientists prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the existence of the immortal soul. The story is mostly about social and religious ramifications of this discovery and the further questions it raised (e.g. when does a fetus acquire a soul?). There might also have been an additional twist where it turned out that some humans don't have souls, and there's no way of telling without a soul scanner or whatever.
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Jul 10, 2022 16:10
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ScienceSeagull posted:Something I'm looking for myself: a short story in which scientists prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the existence of the immortal soul. The story is mostly about social and religious ramifications of this discovery and the further questions it raised (e.g. when does a fetus acquire a soul?). There might also have been an additional twist where it turned out that some humans don't have souls, and there's no way of telling without a soul scanner or whatever.
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Jul 10, 2022 16:18
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wizzardstaff posted:That sounds very much like Ted Chiang's style but no specific stories are coming to mind. Hell Is The Absence Of God maybe? Yeah, it is a Chiang sort of premise, but it doesn't match any of the stories by him I've read, and nothing else of his work seems relevant. "What's Expected of Us" is similar (evidence that free will doesn't exist) but isn't what I remember. I think this story I recall might have opened with a line like "On April 1, 2023, scientists proved the existence of the soul." Trying to search variations of that isn't helpful, though, since it just turns up actual articles about soul theory (and lots of Betteridge's Law examples).
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Jul 10, 2022 20:09
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Agh, what's the title of the kind of recent post-apocalypse book where the narrator turns out to be his best buddy's imaginary friend? Stupid title, was a big thing a couple of years ago. I kept thinking it was The Half-Made World but it's not.
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Jul 20, 2022 13:21
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Runcible Cat posted:Agh, what's the title of the kind of recent post-apocalypse book where the narrator turns out to be his best buddy's imaginary friend? Stupid title, was a big thing a couple of years ago. I kept thinking it was The Half-Made World but it's not. The Gone-Away World.
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Jul 20, 2022 16:20
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