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Apologies if these are unwelcome inquiries, but it's surprisingly hard to google for this sort of stuff so I've got a couple of these I'd like to run by the thread. The first is a sci-fi story that I would have probably read in the late 90's, but could have been from earlier. It was something of a weird...reincarnation young adult romance novel? It follows a girl through the story of her life, where I believe, initially, she's destined to be a colonist for an exoplanet, but she witnesses several weird events including seeing an older version of herself at one point. The plot unfolds to reveal that she has this sort of destined soul-mate, except she almost never gets to be with him for any real length of time before fated events another version of herself put into place intervene. She clones herself and reincarnates over and over again; she ends up fostering both spacebound humans and the alien race they war with. She creates a ship that survives the end of the universe and guides the creation of a new big bang to eventually create a weird timeloop where she's responsible for setting into motion all the events that happened to her before. The book ends with her standing on an alien planet and seemingly looking forward to finally spending at least one lifetime with her crush (which is slightly silly and loses a little of its intended gravitas anyways because I think one of the previously-mentioned offshoots of herself ended up parenting the eventually-alien-evolved-humans with him, but maybe that's just the point in the timeloop it stops at). Another is a short story about a kid who is a graffiti artist, and ends up with a brain tumor due to spray paint fumes. Some goosebumps-rear end shenanigans ensue where they maybe-metaphorically fight the brain tumor monster, only to wake up in the hospital with the tumor removed. I believe the story ends with a hospital tech eating a sandwich next to the empty jar that was supposed to contain the brain tumor. I think that this came in a compilation novel with at least two other short stories, and I think one of them was about a kid time-travelling to the Cambrian where they are tasked with causing the Cambrian extinction event (by...blowing up a cliff with dynamite I think???), which they fail resulting in them returning to the present and expressing relief that nothing has changed when they see their parents who are giant trilobites just like the kid remembers. Another story I believe is about a child in an alien class where they commit a faux pas by giving away something irreplaceable, I think, like a photograph, or something to that effect, and there's a whole discussion about teenage liminality and how they're neither really a child nor an adult, and they end up getting the photograph back. If I'm recalling this correctly, this actually interesting bit of late-childhood/early adulthood writing is immediately cut short by a joke about an alien race who communicates by devastatingly noxious flatulence. I can usually find stories from the big-name authors if I search major plot points or particularly memorable imagery, but the shall we say 'less-celebrated' work is incredibly difficult to locate.
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Nov 15, 2023 22:51
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AnonymousNarcotics posted:The first one sort of sounds like The Starlight Crystal by Christopher Pike Nailed it in one, thank you! Reading a summary I'm not surprised that my recollection of details was poor, but that's definitely the right novel.
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Nov 15, 2023 23:44
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The Chad Jihad posted:So, this might be Bruce Coville's "I, Earthling" from Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens, through the haze of memory Ooh, this sounds correct, from what I see with a little googling. I probably just lumped it in with the wrong short-story collection after, you know, decades of time working on the memories.
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Nov 29, 2023 07:38
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