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Ok, I've got two books here that I read as a kid and can't remember the names of. I'll probably never read them again, but they were pretty memorable at the time and it's been gradually driving me crazy not being able to remember what they actually were. I read them in elementary school, so this would have been sometime in the 90s, no later than 1998. In the first, the protagonist is hating school when she discovers the programming course and that she loves it. Then she gets into poo poo when someone else hacks the school grade computer and frames her for it (by obviously editing her grades, eg, replacing her D- in gym with an A). Eventually she tracks down the real perpetrator and everything turns out alright in the end. The book included source for some simple QBASIC programs, which I thought was pretty cool. In the second, the protagonist is a young boy who gets hit by a car. He wakes up trapped in a cat's body and most of the book involves him learning (with the assistance of an older, wiser cat) how to live as a feral cat in the big city. I remember a thing being "whisker telepathy", a form of nonverbal communication using whisker vibrations. In the end, he wakes up in the hospital back in his real body, and it's left ambiguous whether he was just hallucinating or whether his consciousness was actually transplanted into the body of a cat while his body was in a coma. I think that the title was a single word, a name starting with "J", and the cover art was just a close-up of a tabby's face, staring at you - but don't quote me on either of those.
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Oct 2, 2012 00:50
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AreYouStillThere posted:I'm not positive, but could the second one be Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams? It's not, although that looks similar; the one I'm thinking of was definitely a human-trapped-in-a-cat's-body story, rather than a story about cats as cats.
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Oct 2, 2012 01:13
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Zola posted:Yep, one word beginning with a J. drat! That's exactly it, thanks! For years, I was so certain it was called "Jenny", but after searching with no success I came to believe that my memory was faulty and it was some other J-name. It never occurred to me to try alternate spellings of the name.
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Oct 2, 2012 05:14
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pkticker posted:Now, my little mystery is how did I stumble on these Langford stories in the first place? Hmm... I read them in a hardcopy short story collection some years ago, so you might have originally found them offline. I didn't even know they were online until this thread.
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Dec 21, 2012 16:57
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Zola posted:I did some poking around and here's the hardcopy version, I think. Different Kinds of Darkness Nope, that's not it, it was a multi-author collection. Looking at the bibliography, it's probably the version in Year's Best SF 6 - I've picked up a lot of those collections in second-hand book sales over the years. E: Langford needs to badger his publisher and get He Do The Time Police in Different Voices and Different Kinds of Darkness on the kobo store. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Dec 25, 2012 |
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Dec 25, 2012 16:15
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Ganymede or Clementine by Cherie Priest, perhaps? They're not that good a match but they're the only things that come immediately to mind. The ships in question are zeppelins, though, not wet-ships.
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Dec 29, 2012 04:32
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This is a really long shot but I figure it's worth a try. Fantasy novel. Read it sometime between 2000 and 2005, but it may have been published earlier. It was the first book in a series, and the subsequent books hadn't (I think) been released yet. The book had "fire" and "ice" in the title (not necessarily in that order); it wasn't any of the Song of Ice and Fire books, though. I remember nothing else about it except that I liked it and would like to see if the series was ever finished. Searching various places (amazon, isbndb, etc) for books with 'fire' + 'ice' in the title published before 2005 has been a bust, although apparently a lot of people have written books called "Fire & Ice" (and when they're part of a series they always seem to be book 2 for some reason). I realize this is incredibly vague, I'm hoping someone else has read the same series and remembers the title of the first book.
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Jan 28, 2013 03:46
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Zola posted:This maybe? mystes posted:It doesn't have both words in the title, but just in case you may want to consider the book A Cavern of Black Ice, published in 1999 and the first installment of a fantasy trilogy. In responding to these and looking up covers for Black Ice to see if it looked familiar, I remembered parts of the cover, and that was enough for me to remember the title, and it has nothing to do with fire or ice. I'm sorry.  The book, for those wondering, is The Lord of Snow and Shadows by Sarah Ash, the first book of the Tears of Artamon trilogy. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Jan 28, 2013 |
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Jan 28, 2013 07:00
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Gothmog1065 posted:The second book was a series I believe. I don't remember much, but one part where the group you were following was going through a mountain cave of some sort. At some point they come across an open room that had a dragon and a dragon rider encased in ice. Thinking on it, I think the dragon riders were rare. Either way it seems that the rider was wielding a lance of some sort, and that the main hero felt the rider's eyes on him. It's been a long time since I read them, but that one almost has to be a scene from one of the Dragonlance books, probably Dragons of Winter Night.
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Jun 22, 2013 06:31
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Popular Human posted:I pulled up the first chapter online and this is definitely not it, although this seems pretty funny, so thanks! I remember the story (I'm pretty sure it was a short story) was very China Mieville-esque, but not actually Mieville. In Pratchett it's called the golem's chem. In classical golems it's a shem or sometimes the specific Hebrew word emet. Any of that help?
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Dec 21, 2013 17:22
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ClearAirTurbulence posted:I think I read it for free on the internet. Anyone recognize it? I read that, but I don't remember what it was called or who it was by. I want to say Stross, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually by Stross and I'm just having a hash collision with his Eschaton setting.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:33
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Poldarn posted:Here is a vague one. Centaur-like aliens have a warp-drive malfunction that puts them in our section of the galaxy. They don't know where they are but decide to invade Earth or one of it's colonies anyway. A bunch of farmers from a high gravity world are drafted to fight the invaders on a different planet, I can't remember if it's Earth or not. The book talks a bit about how life on the high gravity planet sucks. The only other thing I remember is that they mention how blasts from whatever plasma/pulse/laser weapons the humans use "unravels" after a few miles so they don't have to worry about missed shots hitting someone miles away. John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata series?
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May 19, 2014 19:52
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TorpedoFish posted:There was a YA or possibly even juvenile novel I read when I was that age, so it would've been published no later than the very late 90's. In it, a young British kid has some sort of mental breakdown and somehow swaps minds with/takes on the personality of a soldier fighting, possibly in the Gulf War. There's a lot of conversation between the kid's older brother and a psychologist who's treating the kid about what's actually happening. Conrad's War?
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Jul 11, 2014 12:20
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foxatee posted:Yeah, that second one really sounds like Needful Things by Stephen King. It's been a long time since I read it, but I thought that in "Needful Things" the stuff he sold always worked, but part of the price was that the person buying it had to sabotage someone else.
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Jul 20, 2014 01:34
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Popular Human posted:Help me out, I'm trying to remember the name of this old sci-fi story and who wrote it. That's Kid Brother, from the Asimov short story collection Gold; one of the few robot stories not included in The Complete Robot.
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Jul 29, 2014 00:19
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Puzzle Thing posted:Ahhhhhh, I think whatever that is, that's it! The hyperspace thing sounds incredibly familiar. This also sounds really familiar to me but I can't remember what it is either.
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Mar 23, 2015 18:15
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This was a book, or possibly series of books, that I read as a kid. I don't remember exactly when I read them, but probably early/mid 90s. It's SF. The main character is a boy, he has no siblings but does have a robot companion who looks just like him. The only way to reliably tell them apart is that the robot has a characteristic stiff-legged gait. There's one story where they get captured by space pirates(?) who want their help retrieving some radioactive materials from the bottom of a pool; they foil the plot by switching places (the boy imitates the robot's walk) and using the robot's inherent immunity to radiation to convince the pirate leader that they have some sort of radiation-immunity drug (which is actually future aspirin or something similar). The pirate leader takes a bunch of it, swims down to grab the radioactives, and dies. I also remember a scene (possibly in the same story) where the bad guys are trying to reprogram the robot wirelessly, but (again, or possibly still) they've swapped places. But when they're done, the boy is so shocked at finding out what the bad guys are planning that he forgets to do the robot-walk and is found out.
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May 14, 2015 13:51
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Selachian posted:Probably Alfred Slote's My Robot Buddy or one of its sequels. I don't recall the exact details, but I do remember the bit about the robot walking with stiff knees, and the boy pretending to be the robot by imitating his walk. That's the one! drat, those titles are a hit of uncut nostalgia. I could have sworn the copy of "COLAR: a tale of outer space" I read was called "The Secret of COLAR", though. Maybe I'm just getting it mixed up with The Secret of NIMH somewhere. E: found plot summaries for some of them and "My Trip to Alpha 1" was another book I was trying to remember that I didn't think was in the same series at all.
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May 14, 2015 15:02
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Washout posted:What was the series or author with the Vaun Neuman seeded machines that were some sort of infection (cubes containing the seeded machine and could make people into superhumans?) and humanity had to work and avoid the devils deal and also fight them off at the same time? If it's not Singularity Sky, it could be Asher's Polity series (where the nanotech in question are called "Jain nodes").
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Jan 8, 2016 17:38
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This is going to be horribly vague, sorry. A book about a guy living alone in the wilderness. I forget if he was trapped there for some reason, or left human society voluntarily. I think that the book covers a span of several years and ends with him meeting people again. The one bit I remember clearly is that at one point he gets an overwhelming craving for liver, and kills some wild animal and eats its liver and feels much better afterwards, leading him to speculate that he had some kind of nutritional deficiency that was satisfied by eating it, hence the craving. At this point the book says something like "liver he had craved, so liver he had sought, without knowing why". I would have read this in grade school, I think, so mid-late 90s, but it could easily be older than that. E: holy poo poo, google, I searched for [book about a guy living alone in the wilderness who eats liver] and My Side of the Mountain was the first hit. That's the book. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Feb 24, 2016 |
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Feb 24, 2016 03:45
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Phy posted:SF heist story about a guy who designs impossible-to-steal-from vaults getting roped into stealing from his own latest creation, a labyrinth (maybe on the moon), complete with a silent murderous robot as minotaur. I think I remember the book being clear about the difference between a labyrinth and a maze, and having something to do with pattern recognition, like there's a part where the labyrinth will kill him if he doesn't type or walk with the exact rhythm that his former client would. I have no idea what book this is, but it sounds rad as hell.
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Apr 23, 2016 18:57
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I am nostalging hard for some books I read as a child, but can't remember titles or authors. All of these were fairly large, thin paperbacks with full-colour illustrations. I would have read these around the early 90s. The first one was about a cat with, I think, some mice as friends. The only scene I remember clearly is where the cat is visiting a launch site where they're preparing to launch some kind of scientific rocket; the cat gets into a wiring closet, disconnects all the wires, and makes a nice nest out of them to nap in. When it wakes up it can't remember how the wires were connected, so it puts them back in a way that "looks even better than before" (or something to that effect) -- they're arranged into the shape of a cat's face. This causes the rocket to go wildly off-course when it's launched later. The second one was also about a cat and may have been in the same series/by the same author as the first one, but I don't think so. The cat goes exploring with its human (or possibly searching for its human?) and finds a massive underground temple complex and a cult worshipping Bast. Another story (definitely featuring the same cat, possibly in the same book) involved a trip to the north pole looking for an icebound ship.
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Aug 10, 2016 20:38
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Runcible Cat posted:Complete guess: the Church Mice series? The cat's called Sampson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_Mice_series That's definitely the first one and almost certainly not the second one. Thank you!
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Aug 10, 2016 21:07
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Could this have been Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat? I read it as a kid. Ancient Egypt was his first time hop and then uh... Wikipedia says "Rome, Britain (55 BC), Ireland (AD 411), Japan (998), Italy (1468), Peru (1555), the Isle of Man (1588), Germany (1600), and America (1775)." It definitely was not time cat -- the cat lives in a big house(?), goes exploring, and finds tunnels and canals and temples under the house somewhere. There's a procession of cats chanting "Bast, Bastet, Bubastis!" or something like that. E: holy poo poo, found it in a Google Books scan of Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children's Illustrated Books -- it's the Zoom the Cat trilogy by Tim Wynne-Jones. The north pole expedition is Zoom Away and the Bast cult is Zoom Upstream.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:37
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Big Bad Beetleborg posted:This possibly? I also thoughtScott Meyer's "Off to be the Wizard" but that's from 2014ish Holy poo poo, I had a copy of The Ambivalent Magician as a kid and had completely forgotten about it until this post. Never had the earlier books. I think I need to track these down now.
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Oct 6, 2016 18:05
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504 posted:I read a short story once but have no idea who wrote it or which book it was in The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove? e: or perhaps his later Worldwar books ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Oct 22, 2016 |
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Oct 22, 2016 02:19
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Pham Nuwen posted:This sounds really cool and I want to read it, but I'm pretty sure it was a short story. It owns bones, but is also really obviously meant to be the first book of a trilogy, and he hasn't written the sequels yet. 
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Dec 13, 2016 04:50
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:I'm thinking of a book series that was more like a mini RPG/CYOA adventure thing? There was a thread of it in Lets Play a while back and i kind want to get into but for the life of me i can't of the title? If it helps i think Quest was in the title somewhere? You followed along with a piece of paper and used dice to keep track of stats and the like. There have been a bunch of these, usually called "gamebooks" or "adventure gamebooks". Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and Way of the Tiger are the ones I remember being played on these forums. Wikipedia has a list; perhaps one of the titles there will jog your memory? There are a bunch of ending with "quest".
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Dec 21, 2016 16:16
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:I mean not that combat is particularly hard or interesting after getting the Sommerswerd in the second book since the thing is so broken, but i do at least like these stories enough to keep interested in the neat progression of power it's got going on. IIRC from the Let's Read on these forums, it's completely possible to miss the Sommerswerd entirely, leading you to constantly get the poo poo kicked out of you in every subsequent book.
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Dec 22, 2016 16:10
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Banks happens to mention that killing yourself to get into one of machine-ran heavens is frowned upon in societies that maintain that sort of afterlife. I think it concerns the Chel heaven in Look to Windward, although there is some discussion of artificial heavens in mostly hell-oriented Surface Detail. I don't remember a subplot in which people did kill themselves to be together in the afterlife, and I've reread both books fairly recently. That reminds me of a thing now that I can't remember the name of. I'm pretty sure it's not what aricoarena is looking for. I don't remember if it was a short story or an aside in a longer book (maybe even one of those Banks novels?). I am mostly sure we never actually "see" any of this directly; it's just two characters talking about it. The gist of it is, there's a society of aliens they trade with, but one day the trade ships stop coming. They send a team to investigate and find that the entire species has committed suicide. They do some digging and find that one of their (?scientist-philosophers) had made and published a significant discovery about life and death just before the suicides started, but they can't translate it. They make copies and return home. In the subsequent years everyone involved in the investigation or the translation of the discovery commits suicide as well, at which point the records are sealed. I remember a conversation between the characters talking about it where one of them wonders what they discovered and the other replies something like "who knows? Proof that there is a heaven, and everyone goes there? Proof that there is a hell, and the older you die, the worse it is?"
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Feb 27, 2017 13:05
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Lemniscate Blue posted:That's one of Larry Niven's Draco Tavern stories, but I can't quite recall a title offhand. Nailed it. I grabbed my copy of The Draco Tavern and it's the very first story in there, "The Subject is Closed".
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Feb 27, 2017 13:47
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Short story, probably read it 5+ years ago but it could easily have been from any time in the past 50 years. Two (or more) scientists are working on a time machine. They have it working to the point that they've sent subatomic particles milliseconds into the past. One of the scientists thinks that they should scale up dramatically. The other counsels going slowly and points out inconsistencies in the locations of the particles when they're sent back in time. Some kind of disagreement escalates to the point of the first scientist getting into the machine and sending himself back in time -- only to appear in space and die, because the further back you go, the further away you appear. (It's unclear whether this is a fundamental property of time travel, or because of the orbital motion of the earth, or what.) It may have been presented in a frame story of a post-incident report or the surviving scientist explaining what happened to investigators or the like, but I'm not 100% sure on that. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 17:35 on May 16, 2017 |
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May 16, 2017 17:31
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Absurd Alhazred posted:A teenager befriends an escaped intelligent rat or mouse. The rodent has this story about a horrible black river with monsters on it; we later discover that the river is a road, and the monsters are vehicles, like the teenager's motorcycle, which makes the rodent reassess their friendship with the teenager. Must have read this 20-30 years ago. This reminds me of (but probably isn't the same book as) a book I read from the school library, in about the same time period, titled (I think) "Hello, my name is ____" -- those being the first words the mouse speaks to the kid it befriends. I forget what name goes in the ____, though.
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May 29, 2017 14:29
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instantrunoffvote posted:I am Leaper by Annabel Johnson. Absurd Alhazred posted:Holy poo poo, that's it! Thanks! Guess you were on the right track, ToxicFrog. Never should had doubted you! Goddamn, that's the one! I thought I remembered it having that 90s as hell computer font on the cover, but I couldn't remember anything else about the cover art.
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May 31, 2017 03:06
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Asked about this one a few years ago with no luck, going to try it again. SF short story, which I probably read in a collection (as opposed to online or in a magazine) sometime in the early 2000s. A team of scientists are working on a time machine and have successfully sent small objects back in time short distances, but have detected "anomalies" in their position as they arrive in the past. One of the scientists wants to send himself back in time one day with a newspaper, another tells him the device is not safe to use, he ignores them and uses the machine anyways and comes out in space somewhere and dies. In overall structure and tone I remember it as being similar to "The Hole Man" by Niven, but it wasn't that and I'm pretty sure it wasn't by Niven.
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Dec 14, 2017 13:53
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Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:
FYI, this isn't a novel version of "Galactic North"; it's a short story collection that includes it as one of the stories.
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May 5, 2018 11:59
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uvar posted:Checking it further, it's gotta be the same book. So, thanks! I don't suppose there's a plot point in Anvil of Stars or Forge of God where people are told to go to shallow water along coastlines for their only chance to be transported off the planet, is there? Because that's the fragment the "same as previous" refers to. That might be Anvil of Stars; it ends with the few chosen survivors of humanity that the friendly aliens are able to evacuate going to coasts or lakeshores to board the escape ships while those who didn't get a spot on the fleet find a nice scenic spot to watch the end of the world from.
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May 6, 2018 20:57
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Femur posted:I am looking for a YA novel I read around 2000(??) about some national high school band get together, and the protagonist gets roomed with a drummer from winnipeg. They sneak out every night, and the roomate plays at the clubs they go to, and is a sensation. The protagonist sneaks him back out of the club. They get fame by doing this a few times.. Who Is Bugs Potter? by Gordon Korman? I haven't read it, but the synopsis sounds very close, and your summary sounds like an extremely Gordon Korman book.
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May 15, 2018 00:54
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wizzardstaff posted:Sounds like the Master of the Five Magics series by Lyndon Hardy. The imp computer was in Riddle of the Seven Realms I think. I've only read the first two books, but reading that description I was thinking "wow, that sounds Lyndon Hardy as gently caress. Was there something like that in Secret of the Sixth Magic?"
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Jun 29, 2018 23:48
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navyjack posted:Oh man I read ALL of those. Gave no fucks for Rick but wanted to grow up to be Scotty the Marine. I only had one Danny Dunn book growing up (Danny Dunn and the Heat Ray, which I remember nothing about), but I had a whole pile of Tom Swift Jr. books and probably read most of them three times over. And thanks to that site I now know about Tom Swift Lives!, which appear to be modernized (in terms of tech level, slang, etc) rewrites of the original books mimicking the original style, so I may need to check those out.
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Feb 19, 2019 02:11
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