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Oh duh, you're right. I was thinking someone had gone to the wrong book signing and given Mike something to sign that very much wasn't within his oeuvre, rather than giving the book as a gift or w/e.
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Oct 9, 2017 02:34
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Not sure there has to be a connection? Probably just some dude named Mike who thinks Art might be interested in Barnes' work for the reasons stated. You are right... I'm pretty sure the book was just a gift to Art from some dude named Mike. Steven Barnes is correct. The book is "Iron Shadows". The main character is a hot babe with a black belt who teams up with a black private investigator. This goodreads review of it makes me kind of disappointed that I didn't buy it: quote:This is, hands-down, the worst book I have ever read. The prose is awful. The plot is awful. The issues are treated in offensive and gross ways. The pacing sucks. I'm trying to think of something nice to say. ...wait for it. Nope.
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Oct 9, 2017 02:42
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The Grey posted:Steven Barnes is correct. The book is "Iron Shadows". The main character is a hot babe with a black belt who teams up with a black private investigator. This goodreads review of it makes me kind of disappointed that I didn't buy it: If you're picking between Barnes', y'all should check out John Barnes who had one novel reviewed like this: "Kaleidoscope Century is one of the most unpleasant books I’ve ever read, I can hardly believe I’ve read it again. All the same it's a major work and very nearly a masterpiece... This is the most unsuitable book for children in the history of the universe... But despite making no sense, rape, murder, and a very unpleasant future, it's still an excellently written and vastly ambitious book, with a scope both science fictional and literary. That's what ultimately makes it a good book, though I do not like it."
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Oct 9, 2017 02:47
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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.
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Oct 9, 2017 18:13
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Enfys posted:I'm trying to remember a book, or a short story, or possibly a story within a book, involving giant hostile whales. Face of the Waters by Robert Silverberg. I mean, it's the closest thing I know, although it's a bit different from what you're describing.
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Oct 9, 2017 21:03
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Are they explicitly sapient sperm whales? Kij Johnson's "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" is a possible contender, not sure about the descendant stuff though. It's been collected in a few "best of" places and won a Hugo and a Nebula for best novella.
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Oct 9, 2017 22:19
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Enfys posted:I'm trying to remember a book, or a short story, or possibly a story within a book, involving giant hostile whales. Could it be 'Cachalot' by Alan Dean Foster?
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Oct 10, 2017 21:11
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I posted here a few years back, but never got an answer, so I'll try again. Story about a female dog detective. I think it was in first person. I had it on audiotape in the late eighties/early nineties. I remember the phrase "gray around the muzzle" in it.
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Oct 11, 2017 22:04
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Enfys posted:I'm trying to remember a book, or a short story, or possibly a story within a book, involving giant hostile whales. That is actually my Dishonored fanfic
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Oct 11, 2017 22:30
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Short story, probably published in a sci-fi anthology somewhere. Main character is a man who's ostracized by his gentle future society because he killed someone. Nobody does that anymore, so as punishment they cast him out and genetically engineered(?) him to stink but also be incapable of smelling himself. He makes statues of people with weapons and leaves notes under them to try to get other people to join him. A boy nearly reads one of his notes but then the wind changes and he catches a whiff of the man which scares him off. The note says something like "Pick up a sharp thing and stab, or a heavy thing and crush. They can't stop you." and he's basically an incitement to murder someone because the man is so lonely he wants company or whatever.
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Oct 12, 2017 15:24
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Short story, probably published in a sci-fi anthology somewhere. "The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight.
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Oct 12, 2017 15:44
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SaintFu posted:"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight.
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Oct 12, 2017 16:16
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A vaguely recall a series about vikings where the protagonist's younger sister is kidnapped and his family seems to hate him for no reason. There's a sequel where the sister turns out to be a changeling and is brought back to the faeries. The protag tries to convince his fake sister and real sister to come back home. I can't remember how it worked out.
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Oct 13, 2017 20:35
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SF book, maybe from the 70s? Aliens appear on earth and build cities of crystal and light, but don't communicate with us. I'm not sure if I ever actually read it because I think I'm remembering the blurb instead of the actual story. That's not a lot to go on, but I remember the cover too - my memory and artistic skills are not good enough for Google, but maybe someone here might recognise it? A man crouches behind a rock in the desert at night, looking at a vast structure of glowing coloured lines in the distance.
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Oct 14, 2017 04:41
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uvar posted:SF book, maybe from the 70s? Aliens appear on earth and build cities of crystal and light, but don't communicate with us. I'm not sure if I ever actually read it because I think I'm remembering the blurb instead of the actual story. That's not a lot to go on, but I remember the cover too - my memory and artistic skills are not good enough for Google, but maybe someone here might recognise it? 
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Oct 14, 2017 07:52
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Incredible.
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Oct 14, 2017 11:16
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Wow. Thank you very much.
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Oct 14, 2017 13:34
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That was amazing, both of you
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Oct 14, 2017 14:08
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nerdman42 posted:A vaguely recall a series about vikings where the protagonist's younger sister is kidnapped and his family seems to hate him for no reason. There's a sequel where the sister turns out to be a changeling and is brought back to the faeries. The protag tries to convince his fake sister and real sister to come back home. I can't remember how it worked out. Maybe the Trolls series by Nancy Farmer? The first book is The Sea Of Trolls where Jack and his sister are kidnapped by Vikings and sold as slaves. In the second book, The Land of the Silver Apples he does find out that his sister is a changeling.
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Oct 15, 2017 03:46
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That's the one! I'll have to track down a copy again. Thanks!
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Oct 15, 2017 21:32
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Repost from a few years ago. I read this around 1999-2000. Post-apocalyptic book set in England. I remember flooding down Tottenham Court Road (in London, I was living close by there at the time, so it stuck with me), and some fella (the bad guy?) on an abandoned cruise ship. There was a scene towards the start when a woman was about to be impaled vaginally on a pole, and the narrator shot her in the head to spare her that.
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Oct 23, 2017 00:03
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I have a friend who read a fiction book a long time ago about a pilot who receives signals from another plane but everyone thinks he's hallucinating. Later on he hooks up with a librarian. That's all I got.
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Oct 23, 2017 07:19
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Gambrinus posted:Repost from a few years ago. J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World?
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Oct 23, 2017 14:43
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Mammon Loves You posted:J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World? There were no vagina impalings in that one though.
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Oct 23, 2017 17:59
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Mammon Loves You posted:J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World? No! Although annoyingly that keeps coming up when I try to Google it.
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Oct 23, 2017 20:25
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A few years ago I found a short story online (full text available to read) about a genius linguist or archaeologist that had just arrived on Mars. The story is very short, maybe just a few dozen pages. In the story there are native Martians, but they are a dying species. The protagonist has some friction with his coworkers, partially because he is new and is able to gain the trust of the locals quickly, but also because he is quite arrogant. He is invited to read their ancient texts and eventually discovers that their people have been dying out because they cannot have children and the Martians still around are thousands of years old. He had formed a relationship with a Martian and the twist at the end is that he had impregnated her, potentially saving the Martian civilization. The story is very pulpy and is written a bit like an heroic epic. Googling is leading me nowhere. Any help would be really appreciated.
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Oct 24, 2017 01:10
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Roger Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes".
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Oct 24, 2017 01:39
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Roger Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes". You rule, thanks!
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Oct 24, 2017 01:42
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Trying to identify an old anthology my uncle had about 20 years ago. The only two stories from it that I can remember as "The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship" and probably "The Yellow/Green/Velvet Ribbon" about the woman who told her husband to remove the ribbon from her neck as she lay dying and her fuckin' head just falls off. There was also a tale about an adventuring boy who found a cave filled with sleeping soldiers and a king (perhaps King Arthur?), and a bell/gong he couldn't ring or else they'd wake up, but that is a bit vague to be searching with. This version had (I think) an illustrated cover of a garden grove with a yellow title card, but could be very wrong on that. e: Semi-related, is there a resource where you can put in the name of a story and find the names of collections in which it has been included? Big Bad Beetleborg fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Nov 5, 2017 |
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Nov 5, 2017 23:22
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http://www.isfdb.org/ is one such source for genre fiction. The story about the woman and the ribbon is very familiar, and I think it might have been on Pseudopod (or some similar podcast) in the past year, but I just can't place it. E: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2236282
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Nov 5, 2017 23:51
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It's not that one, but that's a handy site to have, thanks. I'm pretty sure it is this one, because I distinctly remember that cover. Weirdly, it appears to be a revision of a much older anthology from the 50's with some of stories swapped about that looks like this: 
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Nov 6, 2017 01:43
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I remember reading a book about ten years ago about people on a tropical island, and I think it was similar to Battle Royale in that there was some kind of "game" going on to kill each other. There was a giant screen on the island that was constanly blaring music/showing movies and the only thing you could eat was candy from vending machines. It was designed to drive people crazy. Anyone know what it could be? Searching google gives me a bunch of similar premises, but not the one I read specifically.
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Nov 6, 2017 16:05
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Long shot probably - this was a book I must have read in 2000 or 2001 when I was a kid. It scared the gently caress out of me although it seems slightly goofy now. Basically the only thing I remember is that there was a "chest" or trunk of some sort called the "dead baby chest" that an infant (possibly sick and/or crying) had been hidden in to stop someone from finding it. The baby was forgotten and died, and would haunt the hallway or possibly wardrobe where the chest it died in was left. No one wanted to (or maybe no one was able to?) move the chest from that location. There was a crack in the top of the chest that the baby's ghost hand would come out of, and its crying could be heard at night. I think this was a library or bookmobile book, not one that I owned. I think this was set in a boarding school with a male and female character that may have been siblings, and also there may have been some steampunk or Victorian elements. Something is telling me this might be the Golden Compass but I don't think I've read any of those books and as a huge animal nerd I think I would remember the familiars. I was also obsessed with A Wrinkle in Time and Animorphs at this point, I think it was like a scifi/fantasy story with possibly magic elements? I also remember the cover being brassy or gold/orange in color, with maybe an eye or a clock on it.
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Nov 8, 2017 08:27
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been a while since ive read it but i am reasonably confident that there is no dead baby chest in the golden compass
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Nov 8, 2017 23:43
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Something I’ve read fairly recently. Possibly just one of the threads in a larger novel or some kind of a dream/hallucination within another story: a boy travels from a rural area to a large fantasy-type city. I think he might’ve been orphaned and the road was very perilous. In the city he becomes sort of an apprentice in the local police force analogue, although he could’ve gone the other way and become a criminal. Pretty soon he solves a big case/conflict/riot although he still has junior status. The city is possibly under threat of invasion or some kind of disaster? That’s all I’ve got, aside from a strong feeling all of this was actually happening on the sidelines of a wider sci-fi story.
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Nov 9, 2017 22:27
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Was his dad a cop as well? I remember reading something like that last year sometime I think. Guy's dad was a cop in the fantasy world of whateverthefuck and they were in a big city. Dad kept diaries of all the cases and whatnot. Can't recall the name offhand. Think the main character had some sort of magic ability too...
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Nov 10, 2017 08:58
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Something I’ve read fairly recently. Possibly just one of the threads in a larger novel or some kind of a dream/hallucination within another story: a boy travels from a rural area to a large fantasy-type city. I think he might’ve been orphaned and the road was very perilous. In the city he becomes sort of an apprentice in the local police force analogue, although he could’ve gone the other way and become a criminal. Pretty soon he solves a big case/conflict/riot although he still has junior status. The city is possibly under threat of invasion or some kind of disaster? That’s all I’ve got, aside from a strong feeling all of this was actually happening on the sidelines of a wider sci-fi story. Shot in the dark here, but the galaxy-wide Edeard flashbacks in Peter F Hamilton's Dreaming Void series? Summary; Edeard, an orphan and apprentice, lives in Ashwell, a town in Rulan province. A gifted psychic, Edeard is trained by Master Akeem in crafting and modding. Initially a loner, Edeard comes to prominence in his village after designing an alternative pump mechanism for the local well. Unfortunately Edeard's luck changes for the worse after Ashwell is raided by bandits. Forced to flee, Edeard joins the local caravan and travels to Makkathran the capital of Querencia. In Makkathran, Edeard joins the constables and after a brutal couple of months in training, Edeard graduates.
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Nov 12, 2017 11:16
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Isolationist posted:Shot in the dark here, but the galaxy-wide Edeard flashbacks in Peter F Hamilton's Dreaming Void series? Yes, thank you! That’s why I don’t remember how the story ended - I abandoned the book because I didn’t like the main plot. But there was something rather compelling about these dream sequences.
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Nov 12, 2017 11:20
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1. An economics "textbook" in comic book form. It starts out with a couple of guys on a desert island, and there's a chapter that's basically a long rant about how awful FDR was. (Title was something like "How the economy works and what to do when it doesn't.") 2. Not sure this was even in a book but I might as well ask: a satire of 9/11 conspiracy theories in the form of a dialogue between members of the Bush administration, showing how they'd plan out what conspiracy theorists think actually happened. I remember people repeatedly suggesting ideas for false-flag attacks and Dick Cheney or someone responding with "Nah, that's too simple." SerialKilldeer fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Nov 13, 2017 |
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Nov 13, 2017 05:28
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Trying to remember the title and author of a really good short story about time travel. An academic type invents a sort of time machine that will allow scientists to view the past, but not travel to it. It turns out that the device is impractical due to limited resolution as you look farther back in time. He then realizes, or has pointed out to him, a rather sinister implication of the technology. He struggles with the damage his machine will do if it falls into the wrong hands, and considers heading that off by putting it into everyone’s hands. I’m being a little bit vague about “the implication” because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who, like me, is too dim to see it coming while reading the story.
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Nov 13, 2017 05:34
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