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Two sci-fi books I read when I was a kid and then they got ripped up and discarded by some family members due to Family Drama. One was about how Earth was being deliberately kept in a state of political chaos and disorder as a "farming ground" for extra-terrestrial agents of some kind. Like, all the hardship of living on earth was being kept in place to raise a crop of "street tough' agents or something. The characters had been recruited from Earth to be part of this agency and were getting some kind of advanced mental training. The second book was similar, earth was being kept in a state of political chaos and disorder as a virtual playground for alien voyeurs, who were essentially dialing into the viewpoints of various Earthlings so as to experience the horrors of Earthly existence vicariously. They may have been by the same author; I think they were marketed as a pair but I can't clearly remember. Any ideas? This was back in the 80's so my memory's more than fuzzy. I haven't ever run across them since, so they may be a bit esoteric. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Feb 26, 2011 |
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Feb 26, 2011 19:30
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Engelbrecht posted:The first one just might be Jack Chalker's A Jungle of Stars, but I read it so long ago I'm not sure. I don't *think* so, but I could be wrong. I don't think the recruited "agents" actually died on earth, I think they were Missing Person'd. I think they got taught like psychic teleportation and telepathy and how to attack other people with their minds, and earth people were good candidates because all the hardship meant that the earthlings whose minds weren't "broken" had tougher, more resilient minds for that kind of telepathic warfare. There were like training levels and a level 4 was stronger than a level 3 but the training for level 4 broke some people who'd been effective level 3's. Or something like that. Both of them were really hippy dippy trippy, like "THIS is why we all can't just get along! ALIENS!" I think they had sixties-ish / seventies-ish covers, too, with big swirling patterns, though I could be wrong on that point also.
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Feb 26, 2011 23:00
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Zeth posted:Looking for a sci-fi book of some sort- found it in my library's new paperbacks section sometime between 2000 and 2004 I think (though I could be wrong). It was about a guy with a suit of armor of some sort that was a possibly-intelligent symbiotic thing. There may have been some psychological issues involved, and I think the armor may have needed to feed off the guy in some way in order to keep living/working properly. Was it a situation where the main character had deliberate self-inflicted amnesia & had locked away his memories in a "lockbox" sorta thing, which he could choose to break if he wanted, but Bad Stuff might happen? If so, could've been the Golden Age series by John C. Wright -- Golden Age , The Phoenix Exultant, The Golden Transcendence. They date to about 2002-2004.
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Mar 20, 2011 22:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Two sci-fi books I read when I was a kid and then they got ripped up and discarded by some family members due to Family Drama. SO nobody has any idea on these ? =(
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Mar 22, 2011 00:45
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Two sci-fi books I read when I was a kid and then they got ripped up and discarded by some family members due to Family Drama. I finally figured these out. Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies by John D. McDonald.
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Apr 13, 2011 04:39
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Engelbrecht posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_the_Chtorr ? Holy poo poo, the guy who wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles" did his own SF series? Is it any good?
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Jun 11, 2011 15:37
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Engelbrecht posted:Yeah, I can't imagine anyone dim enough to try and get a class of 16-year-olds to read it either, but from the description it's pretty much got to be that. It'd be great stuff if you were all 10, but it's not the kind of kids' book that older people will appreciate for any other reason than nostalgia. Yeah, that one was all kinds of awesome in 8th grade, but if you're reading it later, you're reading it as a children's book or you aren't going to enjoy it. Absolutely bizzare assignment for an honors level high school course.
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Jun 11, 2011 19:56
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edit: beaten, nvm
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Nov 17, 2011 16:21
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Tuxedo Ted posted:I've got two. There are a few stories on this theme, by the most likely is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Waters_of_Babylon
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Nov 23, 2011 16:37
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Maybe Slan by A.E. van vogt.
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Apr 22, 2012 19:24
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Karthe posted:I checked out a SciFi book from a local library years ago, back when I was just starting high school. The book went throughout space and time, jumping between different people and their stories - I never finished the book to see how they all tied together. I can only remember bits and pieces of the various stories, though. I remember there was a ship that played a prominent role in the story, and it could travel long distances in a short amount of time; I think it played a part in a few peoples' stories as the ship exchanged hands throughout history. Blackholes or wormholes or something like that also reoccurred - maybe it was related to the ship? I'm going to guess it was one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. Was it funny?
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May 24, 2012 21:24
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Was there any magic/sorcery involved? Sounds vaguely like the House With a Clock in its Walls series by John Bellairs, but I don't think those were ever made into films.
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Jul 5, 2012 20:47
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CherryCat posted:I'm not sure I have enough details to find this but you never know. I'm looking for a childrens book, most likely from the early 90's with an almost Celtic art style. All I remember of the story is that there was a girl who I think was called Oona, a tower on a cliff and something to do with stars. I've been looking for this for years since I remember loving the illustrations as a kid. A quick google says "The Magician's Tower" (An Oona Crate Mystery) by Shawn Thomas Odyssey.
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Apr 29, 2013 21:29
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regulargonzalez posted:Couple of sci-fi short stories I'm trying to remember. I think both are relatively well-known; not Hugo winners, but Hugo nominee type of deal. First Contact by Murray Leinster. 1945, so predates the Hugo, but is in a lot of short story collections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(novelette) quote:
Haha, this one is reaching back A Martian Oddyssey by Stanley Weinbaum, 1934. Both of these short stories are in the collection The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, which is a collection of the best SF short stories written prior to the beginning of the Hugo Awards, as voted on by the SFWA. You should buy it if you like this kind of thing.
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May 17, 2013 18:21
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Sri.Theo posted:I'm looking for a Winnie the pooh book that contains this quote: Searching google books doesn't turn up the direct quote anywhere except in "chicken soup for the soul" books, though there is an alternate attribution to various versions of the musical Annie. I suspect it's a false quotation.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:50
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Popular Human posted:Hey, this is really vague, but I remember reading a sci-fi/fantasy thing (a novella, maybe?) some time ago that was cool. It was about this group of people who make golems, except they're not really called golems, I think. They write symbols and commands on long strips of paper, and this makes things they've created follow rudimentary commands. I remember there were some people who were good at building the machines and some who were good at writing the commands, and there was some special term for the commands I can't remember. The plot involved a dispute between the protagonist and one of the other, more senior command-makers regarding the ethics of creating a command machine complex enough to think on it's own. Any takers? That sounds like an exact description of Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay except that that book is straight fantasy, not SF at all, and is a full-length novel,and they're actually called golems. So I guess not that close after all.
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Dec 21, 2013 16:06
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The Grey posted:This book was about civilation that had moved underground for some reason. It had kind of a City of Ember-like plot, only the main character was a typical sci-fi tough guy. I remember him working his way upward through the underground levels. It ends with him emerging from an underground portal on to the surface, so I think it may have been the first book in a series. Maybe The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster? Probably not though.
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Feb 9, 2014 04:48
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:What's that book about people living on a wall? Vertically. Stone and Sky by Graham Edwards? It's been lurking on my to-read list for a few years now.
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Mar 9, 2014 20:05
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Sobatchja Morda posted:
Complete Poe bibliography is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe_bibliography. If you're certain it's by him you should be able to find it in that list. Just click the links to each story in turn till you find it.
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May 2, 2014 04:31
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This may be the most generic description of a book I've ever posted. Don't know why it sprang to mind. A children's book with watercolor art about a horse that drew a carriage in New York City and was fed with sugar cubes. More than 25 years old.
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Jun 28, 2014 17:28
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Trying to remember where I read a passage about how an excess of joy or happiness could destroy one's reason as effectively as an excess of misery. Could have been in Sherlock Holmes, maybe aubrey/maturin, not sure; feels like it was something 19th century. edit: nevermind pretty sure it's Nutmeg of Consolation or the one before it quote:Another remarkable circumstance is, that immoderate joy as effectually disorders the mind as anxiety and grief. For it was observable in the famous South Sea year, when so many immense fortunes were suddenly gained, and as suddenly lost, that more people lost their wits from the prodigious flow of unexpected riches, than from the entire loss of their whole substance. ‘That is something to the point,’ he said, ‘but what I really want is a case of the sudden onset of folie de grandeur.’ He glanced at the measures recommended: diet low but not too low, bleeding of course, cupping, saline purgatives, emetics, camphorated vinegar, the strait waistcoat, blistering the head, chalybeate waters, the cold bath; and closed the book. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Apr 16, 2015 |
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Apr 16, 2015 03:37
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quote:"It's about a little girl who finds a fairy circle in the woods and a book. She is able to see the fairies fly around. Later you learn that it is because she is given tiny amounts of foxglove. What is really going on is a creepy old man is abducting girls..."
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Mar 10, 2016 01:57
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Centripetal Horse posted:Can the mods send this thread on a tour of GBS, or something? I am sure there are enough people on these forums that this thread needn't go three weeks between replies, but most of them probably don't know it exists. This is a decent idea and I'm definitely interested in ideas to help this subforum get more traffic. My concern with bouncing this thread to GBS is that it might just get spammed full of shitposts.
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Apr 24, 2016 01:29
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Splicer posted:Tour the other subforums, chickencheese style. It's on, though I went with the book recommendation thread instead because I thought it might be a little more generally applicable. Everyone please chip in with rec's for all the poor bookless fools out there http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3147139
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Apr 24, 2016 03:14
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DACK FAYDEN posted:I read this within the last few years - maybe part of one of the SF awards packets one or two years ago? The foreigner was chasing a fugitive and ended up swapping masks to trick him at some point or something. Beaten, but it's in one of the science fiction hall of fame collections, edited by Robert silver beef I think. Absolute classic and highly recommended.
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Jun 2, 2016 13:43
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mcustic posted:I am not familiar with Mr Beef's work Autocorrect is apparently anti-Semitic
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Jun 2, 2016 14:26
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Sperglord posted:I'm trying to find an online military sci-fi story. The premise is that there is a soldier fighting in a war between humans and alien bugs. The story followed the main character from earth through a series of planets, ending in a final battle in a cave system against the bugs. Starship Troopers by Heinlein, or a copycat.
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Jul 3, 2016 12:26
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chernobyl kinsman posted:highly recommend reading the top probe in this guy's rap sheet Hahaha, I'm a-gonna blame the admins for that one It's hilarious but there's a long delay between when reports get made, seen, queu'd, and approved and that kinda thing happens every so often as a result, largely because the forums coding is miraculously bad Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Dec 8, 2016 05:20
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Mister Kingdom posted:Trying to remember a comic book story: Same thing happens to the protagonist of Zelazny's Isle of the Dead, but several hundred years before the events of the story.
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May 12, 2017 22:53
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al-azad posted:I've only heard about this in passing. It's a Southern gothic short story part of a larger collection about a family traveling through the American south. Their car breaks down and the grandmother tells a story about a murdering highwayman I believe? They bump into the highwayman and his gang who goes by some given name like "the kid", invites the family to stay with him, and then takes the family one by one into the woods to murder them. Basically all I can remember about this! A good man is hard to find by Flannery O Connor.
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Jul 24, 2017 02:16
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Based on blurbs/wikipedia/dates, i'm pretty sure this isn't it. But it looks to be on the same level, and is available in my library's ebook collection, so I have checked it out. Yeah, at least one of the books you're talking about is either Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny or a book that copied from it wholesale. The giant spider pod bots are from somewhere else though.
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Dec 13, 2017 14:21
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Oh good, so a thing I can actually re-read and probably enjoy. Awesome! And thank you! Creatures of Light and Darkness is great but it's by far Zelazny's weirdest book. Like, he wrote it basically as a gag as his first novel while he was working at the Social Security administration, and it's wildly experimental and bizarre. Almost every chapter is in a different format -- one's a play, one's a lyric poem, one's a prophecy, etc. Zelaznys' a great author but you might want to start with Lord of Light or Isle of the Dead first as they're much more coherent. Creatures isn't really trying to be coherent, just interesting.
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Dec 14, 2017 14:11
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Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Worlds_Collide ? Probably not though.
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Jan 21, 2018 06:51
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Barto posted:I'm looking for a book I read as a child about 20 years ago. From google, I'm guessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Matt_the_First
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Apr 8, 2018 16:11
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Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:I've got another easy one. This is probably Googleable, but I hate to see this thread be so stagnant. Rogue Moon by algis budrys, I think. In the SF hall of fame collection. Except in that he's repeatedly cloning himself to test the alien thingy.
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May 4, 2018 00:41
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Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:I was going to say that isn’t it, because Rogue Moon is a novel, and involves people voluntarily going into the artifact. Then, I went to Wikipedia, and read that a “substantially cut” version was publish in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and included in the Hall of Fame as you mentioned. Could it be one of the other short stories in the Zelazny short story collection titled Unicorn Variations? Google led me to this which I haven't read : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Maze_of_Death and probably isn't it
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May 4, 2018 15:32
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Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:I'm trying to remember the name of a science fiction short story. The plot revolves around salvagers who make their livings retrieving cast-off metal shells from spacecraft. They live off-world, but I don't remember where. They need water for reaction mass in their ships. They want to be able to reload their water on Earth, but Earth politicians have made a big deal out of the spacers stealing Earth's precious water. I remember there's a bit where they go through the math, and show that zillions of ships using Earth's water for a gajillion years would only amount to some tiny fraction of a percent of Earth's total water, so the objections are horseshit, and purely being used as a political cudgel. "The Martian Way" by Isaac Asimov, you can find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame,_Volume_Two Apparently Asimov intended it as an attack on McCarthyism! but was too subtle
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Jun 29, 2018 16:25
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Esme posted:This is an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Also the Fairy Fruit in Lud-in-the-Mist chernobyl kinsman posted:y'all need to read the bible or something god drat. your nice old preschool teacher didn't teach you to read so you could grow up to read about people getting sexually hosed up from eating centaur meat Hey, no kinkshaming
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Oct 3, 2018 21:32
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chernobyl kinsman posted:it's from christina rosetti's the goblin market and its a metaphor for loving I talked about that in the Lud-in-the-Mist thread!
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Oct 4, 2018 00:20
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Hrm. Could it have been one of these? https://www.amazon.com/Gnomes-games...VV877NG8NWE9G0W https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0722656742/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i7 https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Gnom...&s=books&sr=1-4 https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Gnomes-Wil-Huygen/dp/0810916142/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=secrets+of+the+gnomes&qid=1551960723&s=books&sr=1-1 I just searched Amazon for other works by the illustrator of Gnomes. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 13:11
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