The identify that story/book thread: Home of the gas pump boy

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The identify that story/book thread: Home of the gas pump boy

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fritz: Jul 26, 2003

I'm trying to remember the title of a book I saw a few times over the last couple years.
* From the cover blurb, it seemed to be about a kid in a dysfunctional family who had some kind of escape into a secondary world
* I think it was either by a Japanese author or a translation of a Japanese book (no anime)
* It was trade paperback, published sometime within the last five years

# ¿ Oct 12, 2011 03:15

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:39

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Carbuncle posted:

Hiromi Goto's Half World? (She's Japanese-Canadian and writes in English, if that makes a difference.)

Nope

Also this was shelved in the regular sf/f section.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2011 13:40

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Action Jacktion posted:

Probably Brave Story.

BINGO

thanks!

# ¿ Oct 14, 2011 03:47

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Hedrigall posted:

I never get enough of posting this:

Do you have the chart handy?

# ¿ Oct 6, 2012 22:55

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

stubblyhead posted:

I'm looking for the name of a book a friend of mine told me about a long time ago. It was a pulp fantasy sort of thing as I recall, so this is kind of a long shot I think.

It kind of centered around the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas to betray Jesus in the bible. Someone or several someones was trying to collect the thirty coins because having them all together would give the owner magical powers, or would make things happen that they could use to their advantage, something along those lines. Sound familiar to anyone?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Coin-James-Blaylock/dp/0441470750
?

# ¿ Oct 31, 2012 05:25

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

modernwinglish posted:

This is probably entirely too vague, but I've searched everywhere and figured this might be the place to ask. When I was in seventh grade, a friend loaned me a book. The cover was gray and the story had to do with dragons. Much of the book was illustrated (black and white) although it was still broken down into chapters and the majority of it was text. It was probably 300-ish pages. Judging from the look of the cover, my guess it was probably published sometime in the late 70s-80s. My friend and I both talk about enjoying the book, even though our recollections of the plot are vague. I really want to track it down and reread it. I understand that this description is a lot like the nebulous requests I'd receive all the time when I worked for a bookstore--"There's a book about a guy and the cover is blue. It's either fiction or self help. Find it."

http://www.amazon.com/Dragonworld-Byron-Preiss/dp/0671039075 ?

# ¿ Feb 2, 2013 20:05

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Non Krampus Mentis posted:

I'm looking for a book that I think was called something like "The Inner Life"

"The Interior Life", Dorothy Heydt writing as "Katharine Blake",

# ¿ Mar 21, 2013 21:32

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Sheep-Goats posted:

1) Postapocalyptic. Everyone has three letter names and all disputes are settled by one on one battle between fighters all of whom specialize in one single melee weapon, which is also party of their name. So like Bog the Club. They eat from these houses furnished with food overnight. Scientists live underground and are keeping the surface that way for some goddamn reason. One guy shows up who is a master of all weapon types, undefeatable in battle, eventually builds a coherent kind of society which the scientists disrupt through giving the protagonist some under the skin armor and kung fu training or some poo poo. Pretty sure it was a trilogy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Circle_%28novels%29

# ¿ Apr 30, 2013 18:12

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Barbe Rouge posted:

I need help. All I remember is this:

- fantasy
- main character female
- she's some kind of priest and a magic user, exiled from her temple
- there is an evil living wooden doll in the book

Wheel of the Infinite, Martha Wells?

# ¿ Jun 3, 2013 20:48

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

mirthdefect posted:

Book with (I'm pretty sure) a three-word title like "Gun says bang" or "Sounds of violence" - something agressive/combative.

It was recommended to me by someone who was into China Mieville so it's probably by a similar author. The only details I can recall are that the protagonist is some kind of investigator and he ends up (unbeknownst to him) investigating a ex-friend from his past who made some shady deals and now is some kind of spiritual guru/martial arts guru. Maybe Chicago is mentioned? A lighthouse?

Long shot: Gun with occasional music ?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2013 08:01

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

apophenium posted:

Can't for the life of me remember the name of that science fiction short story about a human woman and a non-humanoid alien locked in sexual strife. It was by a female author and I want to say it won an award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_%28short_story%29 ?

# ¿ Sep 30, 2013 05:04

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Captain Equinox posted:

Good God. THAT won a Nebula?

Awards are what they are, and at least it isn't that Mormon space whale rape thing.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2013 06:25

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Less Fat Luke posted:

I think this is a story by Peter Hamilton, written in the same universe as Olympos and Illium. There were a few of them over the years.

If it is, it's not the one in "New Space Opera" that Zola suggested tho.

ETA: and looking up Olympos/Ilium, it doesn't look anything like that story. Asker's probably best off heading to a library and digging through Dozois best-ofs.

fritz fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Nov 29, 2013

# ¿ Nov 29, 2013 03:27

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Transistor Rhythm posted:

This feels much like the novella engine summer by john Crowley. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_Summer

Not it.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 01:45

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Splicer posted:

Odd question: Was there a bit in the sewers with a "witch"? Did they live on the Street, capital S?

Pretty sure I remember these facts:
* The creche of kids was a starship crew in training
* They had enhanced senses and could communicate through pheromones
* The older dude kidnapped the narrator and did some kind of mind-control thing so that, IIRC, she could take him up the space elevator or something
* The pheromone thing turned out to be plot-critical at the end because it was the one mode of communication that the kidnapper's mind control thing didn't squash

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 02:33

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

What's that book about people living on a wall? Vertically.

It's... well it's a big loving wall, and they live on it. I can't remember more than that.

It's been published probably within the last 5 years or so.

"Farewell Horizontal" is older but got reprinted or a new edition a few years back.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2014 20:32

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Chance II posted:

This is probably a long shot due to the lack of details but I'm trying to remember the name of a book I read years ago. A guy sees fairy tale creatures and for some reason ends up on a cattle drive in the old west and plays chess with death maybe? All I really remember clearly is the description of some fable monster chasing him around in the woods. It is essentially a walking tree with hatchet arms and and the front of it opens up like cabinet doors making a chopping sound.

wild guess: "the Flight of Michael McBride"?

# ¿ May 18, 2014 16:15

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Captain Magic posted:

All right this is driving me a little nuts. When I was a kid in the nineties, we bought books on the reg from Scholastic. One of the books I read had the following plot:

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BOOK IN MY HEAD

could be "the Silent Strength of Stones" by Nina Kiriki Hoffmann?

# ¿ Sep 22, 2014 23:28

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Added Space posted:

I think the title of this book was something like "Illegal Aliens", but that's too generic to Google and I can't remember the author.

The first half is about a ship of alien pirates/trolls who go from planet to planet to freak out the locals with tall tales of empires and invasions. They're stopped by a group of scientist, then killed by a biker gang that the aliens had earlier abducted. The first half ends with Earth being blockaded.

In the second half the Earthlings get a single ship past the blockade and go in search of a navigation cube to plead their case to the Great Golden Ones. They visit a ship graveyard and a planet of libertarian bug people. Eventually the whole thing is revealed as a misunderstanding and the book ends with an off-screen nose flute orgy.

Probably https://www.amazon.com/Illegal-Aliens-Nick-Pollotta-ebook/dp/B004PYDS24

# ¿ May 9, 2016 19:30

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Hughlander posted:

Looking for a story probably originally posted here by someone else.

Was a journal from a member of a society of pneumatic clockwork devices.

They forsee their apocalypse as the difference in airpressure is changing and they have no way to charge their brains or can conceive of a pump that would do so that wouldn't cost more energy then it produces

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

# ¿ May 31, 2016 20:10

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

navyjack posted:

Any idea where I can find an ebook? Only seeing hard copy on Amazon

He's got it on his website:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/toast-intro.html

# ¿ Jul 8, 2017 15:44

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Enfys posted:

I'm trying to remember a book, or a short story, or possibly a story within a book, involving giant hostile whales.

There are a group of characters on a ship traveling across the ocean, and the journey is extremely perilous because gigantic sapient whales roam the seas and destroy ships whenever they can. The journey is very tense, and then eventually a whale finds them and starts wrecking their ship. One of the characters has some kind of telepathic ability (?) and tries to connect to the whale mind only to discover that the whales are entirely without compassion and their minds are too enormous and alien to ever car about paltry human lives...or something like that. The main character on the boat was also possibly the future version (or descendant?) of the main character in the overall story.

This sounds weird, but I swear I read it. Or possibly dreamed it.

Could it be 'Cachalot' by Alan Dean Foster?

# ¿ Oct 10, 2017 21:11

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Added Space posted:

A short story about a highly rigid society. Our viewpoint character is a kid who grew up in isolation with a bunch of musical instruments and spent all day free styling. One day a malcontent pops in, explains he's being watched by society and that his life was engineered, and drops off some Mozart for inspiration while warning the kid not to sound derivitive.

Shortly after a pair of cops who have obvious mutilations show up and tell the kid he no longer sounds original. He will be dumped into a general labor pool and is forbidden from making music again.

The kid starts improving instruments so the cops come by, break his hands, and send him to a worse job with other deformed people. He sings for them and then gets his tongue removed. There may also be a third step I'm forgetting.

At the end the kid is now one of the heavily mutilated cops sent to punish some other trouble maker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaccompanied_Sonata

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 19:44

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

wizzardstaff posted:

Also I want to live in your shoes where that series is obvious and not-obscure. It's one of my favorite thrift store finds from childhood but I've never met anyone else who's heard of it.

I've known a bunch of people who have read and liked it (myself included, at least for the first two), but yeah I think it dropped out of the zeitgeist pretty fast.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2018 00:53

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

This is terrible, he uses his knowledge of the upcoming Armageddon to pressure a 14 year old girl into sex

If that's not a classic sf trope idk what is.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2019 15:45

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

bowser posted:

Someone on these forums once posted a portion of some sci-fi story where the protagonist gains the ability to see in 4 dimensions. The description of their new sight was really neat. I'm looking for the name of the book and if anyone has it, that specific portion.

'The Universe Between' by Alan Nourse?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 16:39

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Buried alive posted:

Long shot, but here we go.

I saw this in a bookstore years ago and didn't pick it up. It had a dark blue cover. It was titled "The thinking person's guide to math and astronomy" or something like that. It opened with some examples of different ways to describe a chess board or sets of dominoes or something and narrowed it down to a single statement that encapsulated all of them. The whole thing was an exercise in communicating the meaning behind the phrase "simple is beautiful".

Wild-rear end guess: "The intelligent man's guide to science" by Asimov?

# ¿ Dec 23, 2019 22:40

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Doctor Jeep posted:

I recently read a fantasy book and promptly forgot the title, the author, characters' names, any proper noun in it actually LMAO. I remember that it's in a country ruled by a foreigner king who got control of it while getting it rid of demons, who exist but some are not what they seem. The story is told in the past and the present. There are flying squads that use these giant birds which imprint on their riders or something.
The current king is trying to call back his father's old captain of the guard and is using his aunt, the captain of the bird riders' squad, to do it. Also the world has an equivalent of the Jews (a people who have a reputation for being scheming traders) who are being pogromed. There are other things going on but I don't want to spoil it in case someone else wants to read it.
Help?

That sounds a lot like Kate Eliot's "Black wolves" which unfortunately is in contractual hell and has no sequel.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2020 12:26

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

ScienceSeagull posted:

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.

I'm reminded of the debate between Panurge and Thaumast in Gargantua&Pantagruel

quote:

Everybody then taking heed, and hearkening with great silence, the Englishman lift up on high into the air his two hands severally, clunching in all the tops of his fingers together, after the manner which, a la Chinonnese, they call the hen�s arse, and struck the one hand on the other by the nails four several times. Then he, opening them, struck the one with the flat of the other till it yielded a clashing noise, and that only once. Again, in joining them as before, he struck twice, and afterwards four times in opening them. Then did he lay them joined, and extended the one towards the other, as if he had been devoutly to send up his prayers unto God. Panurge suddenly lifted up in the air his right hand, and put the thumb thereof into the nostril of the same side, holding his four fingers straight out, and closed orderly in a parallel line to the point of his nose, shutting the left eye wholly, and making the other wink with a profound depression of the eyebrows and eyelids. Then lifted he up his left hand, with hard wringing and stretching forth his four fingers and elevating his thumb, which he held in a line directly correspondent to the situation of his right hand, with the distance of a cubit and a half between them. This done, in the same form he abased towards the ground about the one and the other hand. Lastly, he held them in the midst, as aiming right at the Englishman�s nose. And if Mercury,�said the Englishman. There Panurge interrupted him, and said, You have spoken, Mask.

And it goes on from there.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2021 17:34

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Ramc posted:

Okay guys I was referred here from the GBS what is your white whale find stuff thread.

The book is just so tantalizingly *almost* in focus.

That thing on the back cover looks familiar, it might be a publisher or series mark. I don't have much of an old pb collection anymore but I'll check the shelves.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2021 00:48

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

regulargonzalez posted:

And it's interesting that it's one of the few King novels that doesn't end with the good guys to some degree beating the bad guys. I guess ... Thinner. Not many others. [/spoiler]

It's been a long time since I read Thinner but didn't the protagonist run over a Romani lady while getting his dick sucked? Not sure that's a 'good guy'.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 13:23

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

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

# ¿ Jul 3, 2022 01:19

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

woke kaczynski posted:

someone stuck in a time machine that I think could only go forwards in time?

You mean you're not?

# ¿ Sep 25, 2022 23:00

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

MrGreenShirt posted:

Science fiction book (I found at a dollar store maybe 20 years ago) centered on a perfectly normal woman who is in contact with psychic jellyfish who live in a tidal cave on an alien world.

Preternatural, Margaret Bonanno.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2023 00:22

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:39

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Tea Bone posted:

I'm looking for a book that a lot of people on a thread in these forums were reading a few years ago, I made a mental note of it and have of course forgotten the book and the thread I found it in.

People were reading it in countdown Halloween time, it had a cast of classic horror characters (vampires, werewolves etc), I believe it was a murder mystery but I could be wrong on this point. Someone compared the tone of it to the Addams family or Munsters where horror is the theme rather than the genre.

I think it had a title about 30 dark nights or something similar.

A Night in the Lonesome October.

# ¿ May 6, 2024 20:21

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The identify that story/book thread: Home of the gas pump boy

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