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A short story in which one's status in the afterlife is determined by whether anyone alive remembers their name. As long as your name is remembered on Earth, you stay in some kind of limbo, but once it's finally forgotten you can "move on" (something that might not have been explained in detail). I think the story focused on one guy from ancient Sumeria who wanted to move on, but couldn't because there was a stone tablet bearing his name in a museum somewhere.
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Jun 21, 2021 00:07
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Poor Ea-Nasir. Haha, I don't think the ancient guy was named in the story, but I was definitely reminded of that when I remembered it.
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Jun 21, 2021 02:08
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I found my story! It happens to be featured as a preview on the author's site: https://eagleman.com/excerpt/
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Jun 21, 2021 22:31
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Trying to find a folktale/ parable that goes like this: An illiterate peasant (or similar fool-archetype character) and a scholar have a debate, but for some reason, they aren't allowed to talk. So they have to communicate by symbolic gestures. The peasant has no idea what's going on and interprets the scholar's gestures as threats and responds with threats of his own. For example, the scholar holds up two fingers to signify the duality of good and evil (or something) and the peasant interprets that as "I'm gonna poke your eyes out" and holds up a fist, which the scholar then interprets to signify (for example) the unity and power of God. This goes on for a few exchanges, with the scholar interpreting the peasant's gestures as wise philosophical statements, and the peasant is declared the winner. I think I've also seen a version where the scholar is a princess who promised to marry the peasant if he defeats her in debate. Also one where the peasant is a Christian and the scholar is either atheist or Muslim, sort of like a proto-version of those atheist professor email forwards.
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Jul 23, 2021 21:22
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Thanks! That page looks like a really fun rabbit hole, whether or not the story I remember is there. It's possible that I'm conflating different tales that share a similar theme. Edit: Oh and I think I remember another variation in which the debaters hold up items (e.g. an apple) instead of or in addition to gesturing, and the peasant/fool character thinks the scholar is offering a trade. ScienceSeagull fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jul 23, 2021 |
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Jul 23, 2021 22:06
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The Chad Jihad posted:This is the variation I am familiar with: Thank you, that's certainly it! I wonder if the other versions I remember exist, though. Also, after reading about the abacus-eating gasoline pump boy story earlier, I had to restrain myself from giggling in the middle of a meeting.
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Jul 24, 2021 02:20
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Section 9 posted:Maybe the Time-Life book on the solar system? I remember the "potential lifeforms" for Jupiter were these goofy looking balloon things and some sharp birds that killed them by popping their balloons. Were these the pics? https://thomastapir.tumblr.com/post/114371806261/whimsical-wildlife-of-the-solar-system-the Easy-Bake Coven posted:I googled "folk tale silent debate" and found a variation that seems pretty close to your initial description: Thank you! Those are a bit closer to the form of the tale I remembered, but clearly part of the same tradition.
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Jul 25, 2021 22:55
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Oh, I just remembered another weird book from my childhood. It was about a kid who was a "worry wart," and he started to grow actual warts all over. I recall it being illustrated in a sort of garish cartoon style, a bit like Rugrats or other Nickelodeon cartoons.
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Jul 25, 2021 23:19
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This guy collects and writes about old horror paperbacks, so he might be able to help: http://www.gradyhendrix.com
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Jul 26, 2021 01:55
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regulargonzalez posted:Sounds like a Mrs Piggle-wiggle book, but they had iirc one illustration per chapter and I wouldn't call it garish. They were black and white old timey drawings, because the books were themselves old. But maybe they were updated with xxtreme illustrations at some point Heh, I liked those books as a kid, and I'm sure the book I'm remembering wasn't one of them! It was more along the lines of David Greenberg's Slugs in writing style (might also have been written in rhyme). This might be it, although the publication date doesn't fit (unless it's a reprint?) and the art style seems different: https://www.amazon.com/Worry-Wart-Wes-Smarties-Book/dp/0970829612 ScienceSeagull fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 03:57
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Flaggy posted:Sci Fi book I think its about time travel or travelling to different planets, and when you travel you have to take a pill to go to sleep, and a guy/kid doesn't take the pill and goes absolutely crazy. The Jaunt by Stephen King?
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Jul 28, 2021 23:05
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wizzardstaff posted:Someone in the comments claims to have a copy at home! Scans may be coming! Looks like the English scans have not materialized, but someone has scanned an entire copy of the Dutch version (Super Brikke), and you can read it in OCR /Google Translate form: https://old.reddit.com/r/Whang/comments/plsiqq/found_a_dutch_copy_of_superbrikke_at_a_library/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Whang/comments/plwyyj/superbrikke_english_translation_full_book/ Super-Brikke posted:"Suddenly he felt like to give gasoline. That feeling you have when you have to pee. But that was impossible. because his dick would too be gone, thought Brikke.
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Sep 14, 2021 17:07
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This version has been filtered through OCR and Google Translate, so the original text may be more euphemistic. The whole Dutch version has been scanned, so I'd love to see a translation of that if any bilingual speakers have time. Also an odd bit of synchronicity from the SCP thread (well, posted a few days ago but I just now saw it):
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Sep 15, 2021 03:27
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Teen/YA sci-fi short story featuring humans and aliens (reptilian humanoids, I think) coexisting on a desert planet. The aliens have a rite-of-passage where they walk through the desert on the hottest day of the year, and the human protagonist wants to join his alien friend on the trip, even though it might kill him (no human has done this before and they're not adapted to the heat as the aliens are).
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Oct 23, 2021 03:52
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Note: I haven't actually read this book, just recalling an article I read about it, so it might be way off the actual book. A novel about a family of circus freaks, including a pair of conjoined twins, an albino woman who is a talented musician, and a boy with flipper-like limbs. The plot centers around flipper boy gaining a literal cult following, and some of his devotees get surgery to modify their limbs into flippers.
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Nov 3, 2021 21:58
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Saw this in a StackExchange discussion: quote:I remember reading about something like this once... A species had wiped out its home planet and all animal life was a genetic modification/variant of the sentient species... Does anyone know what book/story (or other media) this could be referring to? I feel like I've read a few sci-fi stories with similar premises, but nothing that quite fits. Also, another precedent for the unstoppable ice machine is this Scandinavian tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_Sea_is_Salt ScienceSeagull fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Dec 9, 2021 |
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Dec 9, 2021 03:50
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Thanks!Biplane posted:Those are cool but also the stuff of nightmares. If you like Man After Man, look up All Tomorrows.
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Dec 10, 2021 00:24
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Short comedy story where someone dies and goes to heaven and meets God, who turns out to be a black woman. They're surprised because they always pictured God as an old white guy, to which God replies with something like "What did you expect, this is a sappy liberal story!"
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Feb 11, 2022 00:23
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Blood Nightmaster posted:I'm like 90% sure this is a chapter near the end of Ellen DeGeneres' first book "My Point... And I Do Have One", possibly adapted from an early 90s routine of hers? I haven't read it since I was a kid but the whole thing is apparently on the Internet Archive if you make an account with them Oh cool, I'll take a look when I have more time. I recall reading it sometime in the late 90s so the timing probably checks out.
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Feb 27, 2022 01:11
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Short story involving a company that creates genetically modified mini-dinosaurs as a sort of designer pet/living toy. They're semi-sapient, and can talk. The story mainly focuses on a shelter for abandoned and neglected mini-dinosaurs. I think there's a bit where the dinosaurs sing a Barney-esque song that they're all genetically programmed to know.
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Mar 29, 2022 02:19
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Runcible Cat posted:The Measure of All Things, by Richard Chwedyk Thanks, that's it! And yeah, I recently read Lifecycle of Software Objects, which is what reminded me of it.
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Mar 30, 2022 22:30
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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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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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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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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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Alan Smithee posted:Horror anthology I saw in the 90s These pages might be useful if you haven't looked there already: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BewareOfHitchHikingGhosts https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HostileHitchhiker Maybe look up "vanishing hitchhiker" urban legends too?
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Jul 23, 2022 20:13
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A large-format art book about life on other planets, presented as a collection of photos sent back by an explorer. On one planet he finds particularly unusual creatures and phenomena that seem to indicate intelligent design. The last footage from his camera shows him approaching an artificial-looking structure (which is speculated to be involved in terraforming or engineering the planet in some ways) and then the signal goes dark. There's an epilogue where another explorer visits and encounters a bunch of primate-like creatures who resemble the disappeared guy, implying that his DNA got into the terraforming machine. It's not Expedition by Wayne Barlowe, and to my knowledge it's not an art book for any movie or other franchise. I'm pretty sure the title was just "Worlds," but that is not exactly easy to search for.
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Oct 19, 2022 18:42
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:I think I found it: Thank you! This was so hard to track down.
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Oct 23, 2022 00:19
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A folktale or parable that goes something like this: A great king wanted to gain perfect knowledge of the world, but he realized he couldn't read every book in all the world's libraries, so he hired an army of scholars to read and summarize everything for him. This summary was still multiple volumes long, so he asked the scholars to summarize it, producing one book. Which was still too long to read, so he requested it to be summarized. After a few more rounds of TL;DR, the scholars presented the king with one sentence: "Life is suffering and then you die". I think I've also seen a slightly more optimistic version where the final summary is "this too shall pass." This is probably somewhere in the Aarne-Thompson index, but I'm not sure where to look.
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Aug 13, 2023 01:33
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Short story about a young man who falls asleep/gets knocked unconscious one day, and wakes up years later, older, with a family and a job. He remembers the intervening time, and was going through life normally during those years, but he didn't experience any of it consciously (basically he was a p-zombie. I think he goes through a few more of these time skips (there might have been a specific trigger for a time jump, or maybe it was random) and the story ends with him on his deathbed, reflecting on how little of his life he actually experienced.
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Sep 19, 2023 20:22
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I don't think it's either Vonnegut or Silva, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few stories exploring the same idea. Might have been online, actually.
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Sep 21, 2023 21:22
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GD_American posted:Isn't this.....the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work? It's how the neutron star creatures work in Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward, but they were literally made of compressed nuclear matter on the surface of the star. I assume humans in orbit would not be comparable.
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Sep 28, 2023 15:23
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I recently saw a reference somewhere to an old fantasy/horror story in which language becomes a solid substance, like black plastic, and indestructible. So every spoken word pollutes the environment, speakers and listeners become entrapped, and people try to cope by using nonverbal/nonvocal methods of communication. Anyone know what this is?
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Oct 7, 2023 01:55
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ToxicFrog posted:Book ID question from my wife! Maybe Eyewitness Time and Space? I remember that one having a metallic silver cover, but there may have been different editions.
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Nov 7, 2023 04:26
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A sci-fi story about an alien landing on Earth and being disgusted and horrified by humans. It can somehow sense human neural activity, and thinks that the brain is a horrifying parasite controlling the body. I think it wanted to "free" humans from these parasites.
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Nov 29, 2023 15:44
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Great story but that's not it!
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Nov 29, 2023 21:57
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Thank you that is it!
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Nov 29, 2023 22:59
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A fantasy story featuring some kind of ancient clockwork/steampunk machine sunken in a swamp, speculated to be the work of a civilization long vanished. I don't think it was ever really explained; it was just part of the world. This might have been part of an online series presented as a traveler's diary?
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Mar 15, 2024 05:14
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escape artist posted:I read a book or story, at least a decade back, that had a character seeing a 24-hour long presentation of the Hitchcock film Psycho, possibly slowed down or repeated? I wanna say it was Bret Easton Ellis or Don Delillo... That was a real art exhibition, and the book was DeLillo's Point Omega: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hour_Psycho#Aftermath
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Apr 18, 2024 23:35
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