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A short story with Lovecraftian elements. I read it in the UK when I was a kid circa 1990. It was in a collection of short stories in hardboiled with a blueish cover. Pretty sure it wasn't actually by Lovecraft. The story had a man who came into possession of some kind of figurine that looked a bit Egyptian (not sure about that). He became a bit obsessed with it and copied the pose of the figurine and then fell asleep and woke up in a sort of weird dream world. In this dream world was a pine cone made out of human fingernails. Any ideas?
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Sep 21, 2016 19:39
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What's the name of that Asimov or possibly Clarke story where the heroes kick a guy off the tiny moon of Jupiter they're on and hold him hostage by threatening to let his orbit decay? I remember the author had to do painstaking orbital mechanics to figure out what would really happen.
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Sep 26, 2016 19:46
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Is it Jupiter Five by Arthur C. Clarke? Another story that benefits from orbital dynamics is Heinleins Stranger In A Strange Land - the abriged version that was first published doesn't really feel like a Heinlein novel.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:26
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Octofoot posted:Hey, I just had a massive wave of nostalgia for a slightly horrifyingly illustrated kids' book I had when I was little. Damned if I can remember the title, but I kind of remember it was about a marvelous egg or amazing egg. The illustrations were what I liked most, they were this weird unsettling artistic style that was like halfway between Goya and Hieronymous Bosch? I also remember one illustration that had this really imposing lion-like monster that I think was called King Ticonderoga. I don't really remember fully, but I think everyone was fighting over this egg that hatched a little bluebird or something. If anyone can find it for me, I will love you forever. For anyone who was wondering, I found it- it's Ratsmagic by Wayne Anderson, I highly recommend it.
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Sep 27, 2016 02:45
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My partner is trying to remember the name of a story about a taxi driver called Eddie who begins to receive letters in the mail. Each letter has a task for him to complete, but the tasks become more complex as the story goes on. Any ideas?
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Oct 3, 2016 08:42
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Yellowed paperpack, probably 70s-80s, from a public library. A (paraplegic?) retired cop meets a woman in some kind of virtual reality game and it turns out she's a teenager and yeah, it gets as sketchy as imagined. I think maybe the cop was trying to track down a teenage boy criminal of some sort? Cop might be paraplegic because he was shot by a woman's ex-husband after he started sleeping with her? I honestly don't know if I hallucinated this book altogether.
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Oct 3, 2016 17:34
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Yellowed paperpack, probably 70s-80s, from a public library. Piers Anthony, Killobyte. You didn't hallucinate it but I wouldn't bother tracking it down for a reread personally.
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Oct 3, 2016 19:26
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Piers Anthony, Killobyte. You didn't hallucinate it but I wouldn't bother tracking it down for a reread personally. Got to teenager and guessed Piers Anthony, 'faith' in humanity restored.
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Oct 3, 2016 20:38
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"Piers Anthony" and "faith in humanity" don't belong in the same sentence.
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Oct 3, 2016 22:54
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Lemniscate Blue posted:"Piers Anthony" and "faith in humanity" don't belong in the same sentence. "Has destroyed my" between the two phrases. But honestly I maintain that an important part of a nerds development process is the day they discover piers Anthony and the exciting smut it brings. And then the day they become embarrassed that they ever read him. It's amusing that h himself is not yet self aware enough for the second part.
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Oct 4, 2016 04:17
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Piers Anthony, Killobyte. You didn't hallucinate it but I wouldn't bother tracking it down for a reread personally. That's one metal title though, in a terrible 80s this-pun-hadn't-yet-been-done-to-death way.
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Oct 4, 2016 17:04
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GlenMR posted:My partner is trying to remember the name of a story about a taxi driver called Eddie who begins to receive letters in the mail. Each letter has a task for him to complete, but the tasks become more complex as the story goes on. I am the messenger by Markus Zusak?
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Oct 4, 2016 20:54
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I'm trying to remember a fantasy book I read in the 90's. Some guy was sent back in time and became apprenticed to a mage. I remember he was kind of a screw up and ended the book fighting a huge worm/centipede. It felt like it was part of a series. I realize now as an adult it may have been a self insert, but I'd still like to know what it was.
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Oct 5, 2016 23:47
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Travic posted:I'm trying to remember a fantasy book I read in the 90's. Some guy was sent back in time and became apprenticed to a mage. I remember he was kind of a screw up and ended the book fighting a huge worm/centipede. It felt like it was part of a series. This possibly? I also thoughtScott Meyer's "Off to be the Wizard" but that's from 2014ish
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Oct 5, 2016 23:58
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Big Bad Beetleborg posted:This possibly? I also thoughtScott Meyer's "Off to be the Wizard" but that's from 2014ish That seems very close. I'll have to check it out. Thanks.
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Oct 6, 2016 13:13
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Big Bad Beetleborg posted:This possibly? I also thoughtScott Meyer's "Off to be the Wizard" but that's from 2014ish Holy poo poo, I had a copy of The Ambivalent Magician as a kid and had completely forgotten about it until this post. Never had the earlier books. I think I need to track these down now.
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Oct 6, 2016 18:05
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Name this book based on a decade old memory and piss all details. 1: Two (or more) astronauts go to the moon (mars?) and enter a previously sent spaceship that stopped contact for unknown reasons, one of them drinks from a bottle of wine they find and during take off one of the other astronauts realizes it was blood (or something) because it wasn't frozen, and then the drinker turns into a vampire.
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Oct 6, 2016 19:36
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Internet Kraken posted:Another crosspost from PYF because its annoying me that I can't remember what this book was; This is from awhile back but I'm pretty sure this one is called Skeleton Man. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0026772SI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
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Oct 6, 2016 20:14
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504 posted:Name this book based on a decade old memory and piss all details. Right, now I'm at work and can google: could it be Elegy by Charles Beaumont? There was a Twilight Zone episode by the same name based off of it, but I'm unsure if the differences are due to it being an adaptation or if you're misremembering, or if I'm on the wrong track.
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Oct 6, 2016 20:31
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Asking for a friend: Trying to find a chapter book she liked as a kid, so it was published around or before 1990. There was a kid, she thinks a girl, who goes into a fantasy land and has adventures and there's a king lion that changes color based on his mood and he's very moody. That's all she's got. Thanks!
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Oct 13, 2016 14:41
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When I was a kid, I could swear that I read a book about two brothers who go into a magic land, but get separated. One of them ends up being cooked into an egg that is almost fed to the other, before he finds out. It's not The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren, although for years I was sure it had to be it.
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Oct 14, 2016 04:56
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Dr. AA Hazredstein posted:When I was a kid, I could swear that I read a book about two brothers who go into a magic land, but get separated. One of them ends up being cooked into an egg that is almost fed to the other, before he finds out. As I read it I was sure too, but the egg threw me off. Does he get turned into an egg magically or technologically? There's a Norwegian kid's book about a kid named Odd (which is a pretty normal name in Norway) whose head is an egg. Apparently he has to wrap it up in towels and a tea cozy when he goes outside. Looks like it's from 2010 though so probably not it.
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Oct 14, 2016 05:39
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Snapchat A Titty posted:As I read it I was sure too, but the egg threw me off. He and a couple of other kids are put in an oven and that gets them inside eggs, not transformed into them. As in his brother breaks his shell and gets him out. It's all part of this weird decadent and monstrous society that brother is inducted into.
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Oct 14, 2016 05:43
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Goddamned fairy tale tropes. I'm reminded of Krabat, but that's not it either. The kids are mostly turned into ravens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaIh7rVofAw
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Oct 14, 2016 05:55
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Shageletic posted:It's been eating at me, but I have this memory of this fantasy series where there is a world where people use illusionary magic all the time, until I think the main character starts using magic that actually changes the property of things. Any idea what that might be? The Man Who Was Magic, by Paul Gallico?
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Oct 15, 2016 13:22
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Heck, this thread worked last time. Some random SF I read as a kid. No idea if it was a short story or a full book. One of the aliens lived in two-dimensional time - it could hop between timelines to pick ones where, for instance, it didn't get shot by bullets. Other characters were fighting it for some reason and they couldn't kill it but thankfully it... uh, decided to go away or something. That's all I got.
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Oct 20, 2016 17:14
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I read a short story once but have no idea who wrote it or which book it was in Third person telling of a sudden world wide landing by alien ground troops, after a brief period of panic we realize we have them utterly outgunned in every way shape and form (to the point even streetgangs are easily driving them back) Our "first wave" of resistance is able to drive them back and even overwhelm and capture their ships, aliens are utterly shocked by this. Anyone know what the hell I'm talking about? FAKE EDIT May have been a sci fi magazine.
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Oct 22, 2016 02:15
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504 posted:I read a short story once but have no idea who wrote it or which book it was in The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove? e: or perhaps his later Worldwar books ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Oct 22, 2016 |
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Oct 22, 2016 02:19
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If that's not in the OP then it ought to be. It's probably the most requested story ID in the thread.
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Oct 22, 2016 03:19
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Heck, this thread worked last time. Could be The Golden Man by Philip K. Dick. He's a mutant, not an alien, and he sees the future instead of hopping between timelines, but otherwise the same idea.
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Oct 22, 2016 03:38
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ToxicFrog posted:The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove? The road not taken, that's it! I misremembered some parts, but that deff the one.
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Oct 22, 2016 04:39
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Lemniscate Blue posted:If that's not in the OP then it ought to be. It's probably the most requested story ID in the thread. That and Niven's Inconstant Moon. Holy  , this thread started nearly nine years ago.
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Oct 22, 2016 05:04
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Hobnob posted:Holy I was going to start a new one, but this one got stickied. The only thing I would add is that when someone says, "I read this when I was a kid", they should say when that was.
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Oct 22, 2016 14:17
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Mister Kingdom posted:The only thing I would add is that when someone says, "I read this when I was a kid", they should say when that was. I'm not sure that would help though, may even add confusion. I had no idea the short story I got in a new book 10 years ago was written in 1896 (H.G Wells you fricken' madman!)
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Oct 23, 2016 05:58
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504 posted:I'm not sure that would help though, may even add confusion. I had no idea the short story I got in a new book 10 years ago was written in 1896 (H.G Wells you fricken' madman!) It can work great the other way though. When you say you read a book around 30 years ago people can rule out everything significantly more recent than that. If you vaguely describe some cyberpunk book but can say it was from the mid-80s or earlier that narrows things down an awful lot.
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Oct 23, 2016 06:31
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I read this possibly-YA science-fiction story in 2000, plus or minus a year. This was in Australia, though I doubt it was an Australian author, and the book was written in English. I'm fairly sure it was a moderately-long novel, not a short story. I believe it was a relatively new book at the time (i.e. 90s, not 80s or earlier). Frankly, I'm not entirely certain about anything except the reading date since I've begun doubting every memory while trying to find it, but my best-guess recollection of the plot is below: The book is set in the future, with the Earth empty of human civilization, but covered in (hostile?) life, genetically engineered for increased intelligence/sentience. The plot involved a man and a woman (crash-?) landing, and travelling to some other location across a variety of landscapes, including a desert and sea, necessitating modifications of the spaceship to wheeled/tracked movement and other types of vehicles, reducing each time and eventually ending as a basic wind-powered raft. They are assisted by two bipedal robots which may have been named Gog and Magog, which slot into the ship when not active, and are entirely good-natured and helpful; one of the robots is blinded (by a snake?) during the journey and the other may have lost the use of an arm. Near the end of the journey, on the raft, one character wonders whether the air/wind itself is somehow intelligent. I don't think the ship itself was intelligent. I don't recall the humans having any particular abilities. I don't recall where they were going, why/if they crashed, or how/why the Earth was abandoned. I'm fairly sure there were no aliens or encounters with ruins/robots/conversational life during the journey. It might have had biblical references, e.g. Adam & Eve being sent out of Eden, though I don't think it was explicitly Christian if so. I feel like the author's name began with a K, but this is probably wrong, and I'm pretty sure I checked all the obvious K-authors in the past. I've never had any luck searching with the remembered robot names, so I guess they're wrong too..
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Oct 23, 2016 14:20
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Mister Kingdom posted:The only thing I would add is that when someone says, "I read this when I was a kid", they should say when that was. Give a decade at least. Even if it was written in the 19th century and you read it in the 21st any kind of hint can be helpful.
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Oct 23, 2016 18:08
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A short story I read for middle school in the 90s. I think it was about racism and being black in (probably) mid-century America. I remember one part where this black community puts on a play, or a musical, or something on stage. Even though it's an almost-exclusively black community, the seating arrangement is one row of seats for white people, then a few empty rows, then the remainder for the seats for black people. But even then, the black people arrange themselves so that lighter-skinned people are near the front and darker-skinned people are at the back. That scene has stuck with me for a long time. I'd love to know where it was from.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:22
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Hi goons! This is a book that I read some years ago, most likely translated from German (or perhaps Bavarian or something similar). The book centers around a paranoid nobleman who lives in an enormous castle in the forest. There is some discussion of forestry, I remember, but the majority of the book is a long, entrancing but clearly insane rant on the part of the nobleman to one of his young retainers. I think there was some discussion of an illegitimate child and the count's father, and part of the rant took place on the ramparts of the castle. Edit: I believe it took place perhaps in the late 1800s? It seemed much older due to the castle and everything but I think the idea was it was an area kind of untouched by time. I'm pretty sure I remember there being a truck, however, but it could've been a wagon I suppose. Dammit I wish I could remember more. Play fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 00:07
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That could possibly be Gargoyles, by Thomas Bernhard.
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Oct 29, 2016 04:22
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