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Demon of the East posted:I remember seeing a fantasy collection of short stories that all existed/took place in the same fictional city/world written collaboratively, I think, by many different authors. The title contained the word "Cat" somehow (It's not Catfantastic)and is was not from the 90s or 00s, based on the make of the book. That is all I can remember and this is driving me crazy. Did the short stories or the setting actually involve cats, or was the word just in the title?
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Apr 1, 2013 23:47
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When I was a kid, I had a book about these really stupid fake dinosaurs. Like, it was about a fictional dinosaur-like species that liven on a fake not-Pangaea called Thingamajiga or something. They were all horribly designed fake dinosaurs and were like, all stupid puns and jokes. It was written like an introductory children's science book, walking through the evolution of the fake-dinosaur things. Some of them I remember was a T-Rex thing that was a big dinosaur with a tiny head giving a piggyback ride to a tiny dinosaur with a giant head. One was a Duodiplodicus, which had tails on both ends. The Triceratops analogue had the horns and crest on its butt instead of its head. I can't find it because the name was a silly pun, and I can't remember it.
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Apr 2, 2013 06:12
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There's a science fiction story that I actually remember fairly well, except for the name and author, and Google isn't helping. In it, scientists open a portal to a parallel Earth that developed along very different lines: whereas our Earth developed in biology, the other has instead highly advanced physics. We pass messages back and forth through this little portal, and soon afterward the bacteria we inadvertently include overwhelms their world in pandemic. Billions die on the other side, and we hastily develop and send them a cure, which works to stop the disease—but, again inadvertently, the treatment renders what little population is left sterile. The rest of the story is a laundry list of retaliations from this hopeless, dying world—they succeed in widening the portal, only to send across energy beams and nuclear weapons far more destructive than anything our world has known. We essentially end up plugging our side of the portal with a monolithic chunk of concrete, but their (increasingly infrequent and poor) attacks keep penetrating it. The final entry remarks that it has been decades since the last attack, and it is likely that the other Earth is now devoid of human life, but nobody really wants to risk unblocking the portal to find out.
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Apr 3, 2013 01:55
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A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:There's a science fiction story that I actually remember fairly well, except for the name and author, and Google isn't helping. In it, scientists open a portal to a parallel Earth that developed along very different lines: whereas our Earth developed in biology, the other has instead highly advanced physics. We pass messages back and forth through this little portal, and soon afterward the bacteria we inadvertently include overwhelms their world in pandemic. Billions die on the other side, and we hastily develop and send them a cure, which works to stop the disease—but, again inadvertently, the treatment renders what little population is left sterile. The rest of the story is a laundry list of retaliations from this hopeless, dying world—they succeed in widening the portal, only to send across energy beams and nuclear weapons far more destructive than anything our world has known. We essentially end up plugging our side of the portal with a monolithic chunk of concrete, but their (increasingly infrequent and poor) attacks keep penetrating it. The final entry remarks that it has been decades since the last attack, and it is likely that the other Earth is now devoid of human life, but nobody really wants to risk unblocking the portal to find out. This sounds a lot like an SCP entry.
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Apr 3, 2013 02:03
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pkticker posted:This sounds a lot like an SCP entry. Oh goddamnit, that explains it. Well, now everyone knows I have horrible taste in fiction. (Thank you a lot.)
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Apr 3, 2013 02:13
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I saw this description for a book on Amazon a while back, but can't figure out what it was now... it may be a Kindle only book. The basic plot involves Mexican drug cartels building a drone air force and attacking the United States with it.
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Apr 5, 2013 05:24
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rollick posted:The Man-Kzin Wars? I think the Kzin were giant cats or something like that. That's not it either. The book was strictly fantasy. Thank you. Avshalom posted:Did the short stories or the setting actually involve cats, or was the word just in the title? I have no idea. I have never read the thing deeply enough to know if cats were prominently or if the setting and all the stories in fact used them. I just know it was in the title.
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Apr 7, 2013 01:30
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Demon of the East posted:That's not it either. The book was strictly fantasy. Thank you. I may have the answer. This more or less covers everything you've said 1. a fantasy collection of short stories that all existed/took place in the same fictional city written collaboratively by many different authors. 2. Is not from the 90s or 00s, based on the make of the book. 3. The book was strictly fantasy. Merovingen Nights is a shared fantasy world by CJ Cherryh. The particular book in the series I linked you to came out in 1987 and contains the story "Cat's Tale".
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Apr 7, 2013 02:17
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I need the name for a collection of sci-fi stories. The basic premise was that giant space robots were rolling around the galaxy killing all the humans. The smarter the humans became the smarter the machines became, and so on. One of the first stories involved a guy letting his pet monkey fly his fighter ship for him and attack a space robot because the robot couldn't read his pet monkey's mind. He trains his monkey to fly the ship, goes to sleep when they get near the robot, and the monkey comes out victorious. That sounds batshit insane but it's all I can remember. They were published many years ago, I want to say 80's or even earlier.
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Apr 9, 2013 20:17
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RndmCnflct posted:I need the name for a collection of sci-fi stories. The basic premise was that giant space robots were rolling around the galaxy killing all the humans. The smarter the humans became the smarter the machines became, and so on. In one of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories there's a pet dog-ape(?) hybrid that's used somehow. I think the berserker (which are giant space robots killing all life in the galaxy, so that matches) has some weapon that can directly attack human minds, but doesn't affect the pet. But it's been a long time since I read it, and I forget the details. Edit: Googling, it looks like the story might be "Without a Thought" in the first collection, Berserker (1967). Hobnob fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Apr 9, 2013 |
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Apr 9, 2013 20:33
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Zola posted:I may have the answer. This more or less covers everything you've said I'm not quite sure if that is it. Cat's in the title of the collection itself, and it's not part of an anthology series, at least as far as I know, so I'm leaning toward no. But the cover is ringing a bell, so I'll check that out despite my feelings of "no." At this point, I'm considering, with multiple people and myself having searched for this, that I'm either imagining this book/details of this book, or getting crucial details of the book wrong by partial memory. Or very simply, I don't have enough details for the book to be located reliably by man or search engine, thanks to my godawful memory. I'm going to ask that no one search any longer, as I fear this could just prove frustratingly fruitless due to possible errors on my part. So, thank you Zola, Avshalom, rollick and Captain Equinox for assisting me, and sorry if I've wasted anyone's time. Liavek and Merovingen Nights both seem very familiar in that they might be the book in question by the look of their covers, and they are interesting by themselves as books I desire to read sometime, so I'll procure those and see if either are it.
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Apr 9, 2013 23:39
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Hobnob posted:Fred Saberhagen's Berserker
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Apr 10, 2013 16:16
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This one's going to be tricky, I'm afraid. Children's books, hardback, mid-80s, and I read them in the UK, so they could have been UK books. My first ever teacher used to get them from the book club she was a member of. There was nothing memorable about the stories, but the gimmick was that each page was a double-page spread of a painted illustration, nothing too fancy, but there were things hidden in the pictures for you to find. Don't think Where's Wally (although the size and shape of the books was about the same), nothing small and tricky, the characters were large and page-filling. It's just that, in the top corner of one of the pages, you had a visual list of things to find hidden somewhere in the picture. The only one I remember was one where the child who was the star of the story was venturing into a garden shed, and the key in the corner had a little picture of a snail. Sure enough, there was an identical snail on one of the shelves or crawling on the wall, or something. And, er, that's it I'm afraid. I do have a title for one of them, but it's entirely unhelpful in tracking it down, because it was called Find the Penguin - or Hunt, or Follow, do something to the penguin anyway. The reason this isn't much use is that any search containing the words "penguin" and "book" just gets you Penguin Books. So. Long shot. Anyone? :/
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Apr 12, 2013 16:49
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Buml0r posted:This one's going to be tricky, I'm afraid. I'd put a small sum on them being published by Usborne, they did a hell of a lot of books like that.
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Apr 12, 2013 16:55
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I did some hunting around and found a series called "Mystery Picture Book" (link to Google search) that sounds similar to what you're looking for. There's one book called A mystery picture book : Benny's ball : Beachcombers : Hunt the numbers : Stop that penguin edit: vvv Well, I'm a librarian. I hope that's what you were looking for! ZoeDomingo fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 17:25
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^^^ Blummineck. If you're right, then that's ridiculously fast. Well done! I guess I'll have to try and get hold of them and see if they're the right thing. Edit - You must be right. "Mystery Picture" plus "___ The Penguin." I've purchased that one on ebay and it'll be here in a few days. I'll report back then! Thanks! Buml0r fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 17:41
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Back in the early/mid 1980s, in the UK, I used to have this large hardcover book full of sci-fi illustrations. I remember the likes of Peter Andrew Jones and Chris Foss having artwork featured. Lots of tech/spaceship/planets rather than figure work. Typical collection. What made this one stand out is that it had a short story running through the book, between illustrations, that told the story of some Earth colony ship arriving in orbit around a planet, whereupon some malfunction (or an alien attack) forced them to crash land. I loved the poo poo out of that book as a kid. Helped pass many a rainy Sunday afternoon. Hopefully someone else can put a name to it.
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Apr 13, 2013 03:39
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Sonance posted:Back in the early/mid 1980s, in the UK, I used to have this large hardcover book full of sci-fi illustrations. I remember the likes of Peter Andrew Jones and Chris Foss having artwork featured. Lots of tech/spaceship/planets rather than figure work. Typical collection. I'm guessing one of the Terran Trade Authority books, though I don't know which one. Some of the books had stories associated with the pictures, though I believe the pictures were mostly reprints of old Pan (etc.) covers so they didn't always match the narrative.
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Apr 13, 2013 04:49
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Thanks, that looks like them. I don't really recognize any of the covers, but a Google image search for each title shows a lot of scanned pages that do look familiar. And the concept's pretty much identical, so it's 99% likely it's them and I didn't pay much attention to the covers.
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Apr 13, 2013 22:27
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A few months ago, I saw an SA banner ad for a zombie book written by an SA user. Unfortunately, a few days later I deleted my browser history. Any time I click on the page where you can see all the ads, it's just blank for me. Does anyone know what book I'm talking about?
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Apr 15, 2013 02:46
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ZNA by Matthew Boyd?
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Apr 15, 2013 06:14
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AnnaBanana posted:A few months ago, I saw an SA banner ad for a zombie book written by an SA user. Unfortunately, a few days later I deleted my browser history. Any time I click on the page where you can see all the ads, it's just blank for me. Does anyone know what book I'm talking about? do you have adblock blocking the ad's?
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Apr 15, 2013 06:41
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Nonfiction, science book for young adults, looked like it was from the '70s or '80s. Big, glossy pages. It was all about scale of objects and, like, sizes and speeds and weights of things in relation to each other. A lot of graphs, I think. The art was pretty abstract - a lot of light purples and blues, without black lines. Art was a major feature of the book, but it's been so long that I can't really remember most of it. Near the beginning, there was a beautiful page I can recall which showed that the relative size of a virus to a human was the same as a human and the entire Earth.
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Apr 15, 2013 11:14
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Science ficiton short story The premise was similar to that of First Contact: A space ship detects an an alien vessel and tries to establish communication. The twist was slighltly different: Some-relativity mumbo jumbo reveals, that the alien ship is just themselves in the past or the future.
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Apr 16, 2013 09:12
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I was talking to some dude in a hip german sausage place today and he was telling me about a book that was translated from French, and in it the author only speaks in like first person declarative sentences. He said it was on some list of best translated foreign books, the title starts with "auto". It's also pretty short, like 125 pages.
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Apr 18, 2013 08:13
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appropriatemetaphor posted:I was talking to some dude in a hip german sausage place today and he was telling me about a book that was translated from French, and in it the author only speaks in like first person declarative sentences. He said it was on some list of best translated foreign books, the title starts with "auto". It's also pretty short, like 125 pages. http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100384770
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Apr 18, 2013 08:56
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Ahhh there we go. I kept thinking it was 'autobiography'...
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Apr 18, 2013 09:01
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This book was one I read at camp ~15 years ago. I don't recall the title or author; all I recall distinctly was that it was a collection of separate stories about young people dying in horrible ways----one chapter was called 'In Love's Blood: Malaria' and it told how these two friends were vacationing somewhere tropical but one of them forgets to take his antimalarial pills and guess what! An infected mosquito bites him! The text described what was happening inside his body as he was swimming and making out with cute girls. The real stand-out line was from a nurse who eventually starts treating this comatose sap: 'His blood is black with malaria!' I'd like to reread the whole thing and see if it is really as crazy as I recall.
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Apr 23, 2013 04:01
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Astrofig posted:This book was one I read at camp ~15 years ago. I don't recall the title or author; all I recall distinctly was that it was a collection of separate stories about young people dying in horrible ways----one chapter was called 'In Love's Blood: Malaria' and it told how these two friends were vacationing somewhere tropical but one of them forgets to take his antimalarial pills and guess what! An infected mosquito bites him! The text described what was happening inside his body as he was swimming and making out with cute girls. Last Breath by Peter Stark.
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Apr 23, 2013 16:58
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Unfortunately I don't have a lot to go on, but if anyone recognizes this I'd appreciate you letting me know the title/author: I dimly recall a book I read around 8-10 years ago set in Japan during the time period where their society was under increasing pressure to "westernize". One of the main characters is a Japanese lord who has the ability to see into the future, which he uses to foretell his own doom. Another (possibly the protagonist) is an American woman who came to Japan to work as his assistant or something like that. The only other detail of the story that I can remember is that it ends with the woman going back to the U.S. with a Japanese man she fell in love with over the course of the story. I believe it was written by a Japanese or Japanese-American author.
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Apr 23, 2013 17:04
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Request from a friend on Facebook:quote:Okay, Facebook. Google has not been provided any answers, so I come to you for help. I am trying to track down a book I read in the early 90's. It was a collection of ghost stories for children (a "chapter book", only a few illustrations) with a giant ghost child on the cover playing with a bus like a toy. I remember it being sort of blue, and there are snowy mountains. There are stories within about a ghost in a computer, something about a ghost in the shower, and a haunted living room in which dad attacks a ghost with a baseball bat. Ringing any bells for anyone? I would so like to read it again and am having NO luck tracking down the title. Thanks all!
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Apr 24, 2013 04:27
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Action Jacktion posted:Last Breath by Peter Stark. Holy hell, thank you!
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Apr 24, 2013 06:39
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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.
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Apr 25, 2013 19:24
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Okay, there was this book I read in college for a class. It's one of those 'found documents except not' books like The Princess Bride (where the author claims he is editing a previously written document but in reality is making it all up). The book is supposedly two edited diaries (but in reality, all made up). The first diary is from a man recounting from the time of the 1880's or so how an extremely bizarre science-minded genius and friend of his attempted to save a woman and a baby's life (she may have been pregnant and suffered a horrible accident, I forget) by putting the baby's brain into the woman's (hence creating one 'new person') and all the strangeness that came from that, the end result being the woman became his wife. The second, much shorter diary is from the woman basically saying 'I have absolutely no idea what the hell my late husband was talking about, here was the real story' in which far more realistic things occurred (the brain into body thing becomes a head injury and a miscarriage for example) and ultimately recounts the woman's very sad later life story when she became a proponent of socialism/communism and had grand dreams of the workers of the world keeping its governments in check, only for World War I to break out and the world to immediately fall into its clutches, as her sons are promptly claimed by the meat grinder of said war and the workers of the world can't do a drat thing to stop it.
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Apr 27, 2013 11:38
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Google is failing me miserably. It's a thin book about a family of green-haired plant-people siblings who are the result of some kind of experiment. They run a coffee shop, dye their "hair" black and when they scream it sounds like a piano. They can't cut their hair and can move it independently, as I recall. It's by a Japanese author and I'm pretty sure it was published as part of a set of "easy books in English for libraries" by a large Japanese publisher. I think the word "Green" is in the title, but I don't remember. Has anyone heard of this weird thing?
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Apr 28, 2013 19:38
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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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I thought maybe I should put this in the scifi thread but it is a book ID so whatever. Three series. 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. 2) Kids get this obscure video game (but like an old rear end Commodore 64 kind of one) which is totally opaque and where everything has to be found through trial and error. First stage involves launching a rocket I think. One kid figures it out and gets sucked into the game (I think his friend is watching when this happens) which is now some sort of digdug thing but a shooter. It's very hard, there is a high risk of dying, I think it's indicated that if you die in the game you actually die, or maybe you get stuck in the game forever or something. There was more than one book, maybe just one sequel, I don't remember. 3) Very vague info here. There are people who are actually aliens. They are involved in some intergalactic rumble and turn into their alien self to fight when they root eachother out of their disguises. One of them is just a bunch of mold that consumes anything that touches it and has a hive mind or something. Somehow I think some human kids get mixed up in it all.
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Apr 30, 2013 17:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:A quick google says "The Magician's Tower" (An Oona Crate Mystery) by Shawn Thomas Odyssey. I doubt it's that. The book I'm looking for I read when I was a kid and that one was published this year.
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Apr 30, 2013 17:24
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Sheep-Goats posted:I thought maybe I should put this in the scifi thread but it is a book ID so whatever. Sounds like Interstellar Pig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Pig).
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Apr 30, 2013 18:04
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:Sounds like Interstellar Pig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Pig). That's it, thanks.
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Apr 30, 2013 18:10
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