fritz posted:

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

Abyss posted:

My googlefu has failed me on this one. A friend described a random book to me but couldn't remember the name, description is as follows:

"It would have been published no later than 2000, and was Hunger Game-esque. Instead of World Wars, each nation has a champion that fights in an olympic game every four years, and the last man standing wins and his nation runs the UN for the next four years."

quote:

Jillian Shomer had won the right to compete in the Eleventh Olympiad. She and her competitors were the best and brightest, three thousand of the finest minds and bodies that had ever strode the planet.

Yet within a few short years, ninety-eight percent of them would be dead. Only a handful would survive to take their place among Earth’s ruling elite.

The rulers of the 21st century had created a nearly perfect system of government: A world free from war, disease, and want, dominated by global corporations, managed by omniscient artificial intelligences.

And they’d created a nearly perfect system for selecting its future leaders: A new kind of Olympics that tested the mind as well as the body.

To win this coveted prize, the athletes used the most advanced technique available to medicine: The Boost, an operation that conveyed brilliant intellect and superhuman strength—at a terrible price…

Once Boosted, there followed burnout. The mind and body suffered mental and physical disintegration—and death—in just a few short years. The only way to halt the effects of the Boost was connection to the Link, the global information network that sustained the world.

And only those who won received the Link.

Sunswipe posted:

Couple of books I've been trying to find the details of for about twenty years. I read both of them either late 80s or early 90s, probably written earlier than that, both sci-fi, both novel length, different authors.

Second was set in latter half of the twentieth century and begins with an alien ship crash-landing in an American public park. The military respond, go into the ship, find the pilots from species A dead, but a prisoner from species B chained up. They gradually learn his language and he tells them that his people are fighting a war against species A, who are heading towards Earth with the intention to invade. The alien from species B offers to put Earth in contact with his people to build defenses on Earth. Earth agrees, and a station is built at one of the poles and weapons grade radioactive fuel is shipped there to power it. After a while, people get suspicious for some reason, and launch a raid on the facility to find out what's really going on. It turns out that there was a war going on, but it's not coming to Earth. Instead, both species we've encountered are stragglers from their respective fleets who have banded together to survive. The crash was a fake, with some aliens who'd already died used as the "pilots." The whole story was a scam to get fuel to allow the aliens to get home. Ends with Earth telling them to leave. The man who leads the attack on the polar facility was one of the men who established contact with the first alien, and has to shoot him to keep the mission covered up. The alien's name was something like Hes'bu or Hesb'u. Can't remember what the two species were called.

Any help with either much appreciated.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Piers Anthony, Killobyte. You didn't hallucinate it but I wouldn't bother tracking it down for a reread personally.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

"Piers Anthony" and "faith in humanity" don't belong in the same sentence.

Pham Nuwen posted:

I seem to remember an older science fiction story about how the existence of 'color' was some sort of... viral or mimetic transmission? So previously everything was black and white but then eventually people started seeing color? I've tried googling it but only get lists of people of color who've written science fiction.

Sixfools posted:

I thought about a book I read when I was 10? Today while watching mst3k. I know it's not A Sound of Thunder for sure but what I remember at the start of the novel sounds like it is, and then weirdness

A company provides time travel safari's to hunt dinosaurs and some people fall off and get stuck there. At the same time some teenagers wandering the woods somehow also fall back in time and they meetup with these crazy humanoid dinosaurs. There's some sort of attempt at communication after being held captive for some number of days where they are presented with a bowl. One of the teenagers notices flecks of blood in the bowl and realises it as some sort of ritual and cuts herself to add blood to the bowl and then they are trusted by the dinonoids. Later on the two groups meet and some how the teens get back to the modern era and so do some dinosaurs?

Am I crazy? all I can find online is A Sound of Thunder but this was a thick rear end book that my teacher let me count as 4 books for our read 100 books in the school year challenge thing she made us do.

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

Forever War does similar stuff with the protagonist returning to earth and freaking out about gay sex and feminism once every few hundred years

pidan posted:

I'm looking for a dark fantasy story I read online. It was posted in one of those online fantasy magazines, this year or at least not long ago.

The plot was set in / after the second world war in the US, in a lovecraftian setting. The main character was a woman from a town of lovecraftian fish people, who had lost her family in a fish people internment camp and now worked in a bookshop in a big city.
The story describes her encounter with Dagon cultists. Some of them don't believe that she's a fish person and don't take her description of her native religion seriously. They plan on sending one of their members into the ocean to become a fish person. The protagonist knows that this won't work and reports them to the police for their own good.
There's a book out where she continues working with the police on the typical mythos cases. I want to read that book, but I can't find the story or the book again.

I think the author had a feminine name.

Tl;dr gimme SJW fish people

Less Fat Luke posted:

Pretty sure that's the short story Antibodies by Charles Stross.

IYKK posted:

Some of these things, Egyptian gods and the prostitute/oracle thing might be from Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny.

Astrofig posted:

There was one I read at Barnes and Noble a few months back that I really should have bought but didn't, and now I can't recall the name of it. The idea is that a rage-virus escaped a testing lab, but for *reasons*, only men were affected by it. It started with a fever and headache and gross drippy eyes, and later changed the afflicted into 'roided out rage-monsters who would turn on and kill any woman they came into contact with. It was told from the viewpoint of a highschool girl whose boyfriend and father are among the first to change.

Astrofig posted:

Longshot but here goes. It's a sci-fi story, possibly published in the 70's or 80's? I don't recall much of the plot except that there's some kind of huge creature from whom steaks can be sliced off while it's alive and it lactates white wine; some rich lady was hosting a party and brought one of said creatures along for catering (it apparently painlessly regenerated the sliced-off flesh? I recall the wine was a chablis because at age 13 I didn't know what that was and had to go look it up.)

Also there are centaur-like aliens (possibly hermaphroditic?) who 'speak' via singing and there's like three genders; it takes like five adults to successfully birth one child as it keeps getting passed back and forth; there's reference to 'foremothers' and 'hindmothers'. Also I recall a passage very approximate to this one:

' "I'm horny," she sang, "wanna screw?"

'Horny' and 'screw' were not exact translations but they were as close to the concept as the human mind could come'

quote:

It was sixty revs after the preliminary scout first discovered the site and found it good. The flacks and hypes were returning from their forays into the woods, laden with game. These were ape-like creatures: two of the few predatory species Gaea had ever produced. Gaea was not good at predators. A hype would have fared poorly in an African jungle. But in Gaea, most of the fauna were not good at flight, either, simply because they had no predators. The principal source of meat, the smilers, did not have to be stalked–they didn’t run–or even killed. Meat could be harvested from them in long strips, doing no harm to the smiler. Many a smiler steak was sizzling in the commissary building as the first great feast was prepared and laid out on long trestle tables with immaculate white cloths and big crystal jugs of chablis. A breathless quiet fell over the site as all awaited the arrival of Gaea. It was broken only by the excited meet, meet, meeeet of the bolexes as they jostled each other for position.

The ground began to tremble. She came through the woods. There was a reverent gasp from the assembled Priests as her head came into view over the treetops.

Gaea was fifteen meters tall. Or, as she preferred to have it, “fifty foot two, eyes of blue.”

Mrens posted:

I read it about 5 years ago, it was a short Sci-Fi story about a man who gets captured by aliens. His brain is removed from his body and put into a flight simulator, with the end goal to attack a human settlement and trigger a war. He used to be a computer programmer and manage to escape the simulator and reprogram it, and eventually turns on his captors. It seems that this story was part of a larger set of books I've been trying to find. I also believe it had War in the title.

Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:

I'm trying to remember the name of an oldish science fiction story. It might have been written by Arthur C Clarke, but I might also be getting that mixed up because of the newspads in 2001: A Space Odyssey. George RR Martin and Harlan Ellison are also candidates.

The story is about eBooks, way before eBooks were a thing. It's pretty much a story about the paper printing industry having anxiety attacks about this oncoming threat to their business model. It was pretty darn predictive, which is why I think Clarke is the most likely author. I can't remember many other details.

Splicer posted:

RedApe98 posted:

Thanks! Picked it up for $3 on my kindle, I hope it still holds up.

Gambrinus posted:

Is the third one Rendezvous with Rama? Probably not, because it's not a short story.

El_Zilcho posted:

Could this one be "Bow Shock" by Gregory Benford, in the 24th Dozois collection?

skasion posted:

Does anyone know a sci-fi (short?) story where a galaxy-wide alien civilization discovers the Earth is the only source of pot in the universe and the interplanetary weed trade quickly becomes the sole business of the planet because it’s otherwise completely unremarkable?

I’m pretty sure weed is what the story was about, but possibly it could have been some other random thing that was unique to earth and someone just made a joke to me about what if it was weed.

Runcible Cat posted:

They get even yikesier. And that's even without the later series (plural) where he got into making women superobese with magic, and the various magical/sf ways of making women (and occasionally men in women's bodies) into mindcontrolled superhot nympho sex slaves, and oh god why did you remind me of this poo poo. Dude was basically a Voltron of horrible internet fetish communities before the internet existed.

Runcible Cat posted:

Is that autocorrectese for pervier? Philip Jose Farmer is shoving his way to the front of the crowd and glaring at everyone. But yeah. There is always more and it is always worse, as they say...

Absurd Alhazred posted:

StrixNebulosa posted:
no one should be allowed to read Piers Anthony

Runcible Cat posted:

Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle? (It's a fix-up of several short stories; the one involving a teleporting tentacled cat creature is Black Destroyer.)

quote:

In the first section, the Space Beagle lands on a largely deserted desolate planet. Small scattered herds of deer-like creatures are seen, and the ancient ruins of cities litter the landscape. Coeurl, a starving, intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles on its shoulders, approaches the ship, pretending to be an unintelligent animal, and quickly infiltrates it. The creature kills several crewmen before being tricked into leaving the now spaceborne ship in a lifeboat. It then commits suicide when it realizes it has been defeated.

Runcible Cat posted:

Cool. It's annoying me now, though, I know there's at least one other aliens-vs-vampires story out there but I can't remember title/author. An alien survey ship lands on a devastated Earth and finds a single survivor who turns out to be Guess What.

I thought it was van Vogt's The Monster, but that's just another of his usual supermen. Maybe Richard Matheson? Eric Frank Russell? Anyone know?

Human Tornada posted:

My dad is trying to remember a sci-fi/mystery novel where an alien weapon on a moon of Mars shoots two warning shots, one through the Earth and one through Mars and it goes from there. Possibly from the 2000s. Anybody have any ideas?

Human Tornada posted:

My dad's pretty sure it was Impact by Douglas Preston, that's exactly the kind of author he reads. Thanks all.

Shrecknet posted:

I read a book about a police detective in cleveland who gets turned into a vampire and solves crimes with his human partner. It's not Simon R Green, or it might be - but it's not his nightside series. Date it to approximately 2010-2015. Cannot for the life of me remember the title or author. Any help?

ChubbyChecker posted:

if you are only reading books written by morally good persons you won't have much to read

but fortunately for you, eddings was also a bad author, so you won't miss anything by not reading him regardless of the reasons

ChubbyChecker posted:

he hasn't been caught yet doing anything gross, but he's also a bad author

Fly Ricky posted:

OMG that's it! Thank you with every bit of my being.

Unbelievable. I had no idea about anything else he has written either. I will dive into Last and First Men immediately after I spend all night re-reading Star Maker.

edit: I’ve been wasting time on this site for ten years and this is bar-none the best thing that’s ever come out of it. Granted, it’s a small list, but this honestly is fantastic and I love you goons.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein?

It got made into a film called Predestination, which is probably one of the better examples of a science fiction book getting turned into a movie.

wizzardstaff posted:

Sounds like Manna by Marshall Brain.