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Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

nuvan posted:

4. there's a ship travelling through some sort of hyperspace. one of the crew is telepathic, and maintains communication to earth through her telepathic twin. the farther they go, the more interference they get. stars have conciousness somehow.
Tentatively identified as (Gemini God by Garry Kilworth) by Rocambole

Aside from the conscious stars part, and the main character's gender, I'd guess this to be Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein.

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Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Mad Mage Era posted:

I remember reading the back of this book in middle school and, for one reason or another, I never ended up checking it out. It's a Young Adult sci-fi story about a girl who gets a brain transplant, but the brain's former memories start coming to the surface.

I wish I could go more in-depth, but again, I never actually read the book. Any clues? I'd sure appreciate it.

Comedy answer: I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein. :haw:

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Mad Mage Era posted:

Oh my goodness, that just might be it. :dance: If it's not, it's still drat close, though I get the feeling the book I was looking at wasn't a comedy. Thanks!

It's not a comedy - but it's not a YA book either by a long stretch.

Edit: VVVVVV Oh god what have I done? VVVVVV

Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Dec 1, 2009

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Was Taters posted:

I read a science fiction novel in the past couple years and I can't remember oh, most of it.

But I do remember that there's a ship sent off into space with smart squid? something like squid, anyway, on it, meant to start the process of terraforming a planet. The squid that they sent was pregnant and had progeny who went on to be instrumental to the story as well.

Anyone?

Fatkraken's got a good answer, but I just reread Manifold: Time and it's the specific one you're thinking of.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

timeandtide posted:

This one is for a friend: it's something from the 80s-90s, a fantasy that takes place in a future world, the main character is part of a family of nobles, his weapon is a hilt that cuts into the hand and activates some sort of blood sword, and it's part of a series. Also, it was probably a young adult title.

This is probably the Star of the Guardians series by Margaret Weis. First book is called The Lost King.

EDIT: Like all Margaret Weis books, the farther you get from 13 years old, the less good the book is.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

computer parts posted:

There's a sci-fi book/short story I remember where humans colonized many planets, but were generally divided and fighting each other, and there was an alien empire that was unified and was supposed to conquer all of us. There were a lot of Greek/Persian comparisons in the text itself, specifically that because the human colonies were always fighting they had better weaponry than the at-peace Persian Empire analogues.

It might have been a Niven short story, but I don't think it was him specifically. I'm pretty sure I read it in an anthology somewhere though.

By any chance was it "Homo Sol" by Isaac Asimov?

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
Sounds like Gateway by Frederick Pohl.

EDIT: Beaten twice.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
On behalf of a friend, during a discussion on horror literature and movies:

quote:

The discussion of evolutionary fear brought to mind an old, pulp piece I read in my early teens. I can't recall the title or author, but it was a sci-fi piece in which humanity is at war with an alien race. Both sides are so far from the other that they rely entirely upon long-distance psychic weapons that use fear to break their opponents' minds... but with no common evolutionary or cultural landmarks to guide their attacks, both sides find it difficult to actually instill fear in the other. I'll always remember the main character being repeatedly assaulted by intense, overwhelming, and only occasionally fear-inducing sensations... such as that of cats dragging him down, down deep into the mud... which is really kind of cute depending on the type of cat you choose to visualize

Anyone recognize the story?

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Splashy Gravy posted:

This is probably far too vague, but I 'll give it a shot anyways: It was a scifi book published no later than the 90's. The only scene I can remember was when the human protagonist was fighting an antagonist that was a humanoid(possibly bug-like) alien creature. The protagonist beat the living crap out of the alien by rapidly alternating the artificial gravity of the room the alien occupied from bone-crushing on the floor to bone-crushing on the ceiling.

You might try one of the Doom novelizations, that sounds familiar.

By the way, in certain tabletop RPG circles this tactic has been known for years as the ol' "Traveller Trampoline".

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
It's a short story in "How to Save the World", an anthology edited by Charles Sheffield. I'm away from my copy right now so I can't tell you the exact title but looking at a list of contents I suspect it might be "Buyer's Remorse" by Katherine Koja and Barry Malzburg?

EDIT: vvvvv Hey, I bet that's right. vvvvv

Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Jan 6, 2013

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Furious Lobster posted:

I've been trying to find a book that I read as a child and my google searches have been futile and fruitless. It is a historical fiction novel set in the Civl War era where the main character is a young man who decides to enlist in the Union army. There he meets the Bad Character who is a captain that orders a Confederate spy to be executed, which goes against the rest of the troops' wishes since the spy is also rather young for his years as well. After this occurs, the main character is sent to act as a spy for the Union army and enlists in the CSA. Through his travels with the CSA he meets a girl who is the sister of the Confederate spy who was executed in the beginning of the book. Also the Bad Union captain shows up as a traitor who has been smuggling the Springfield repeater rifles to the CSA; the main character makes a dramatic escape and the book ends.

At this point, I'd like to know the title so I can use it as an easier introduction to historical fiction for one of my younger cousins so she can then read The Killer Angels but I can't seem to find the title of this book.

Possibly "Rifles for Watie" by Harold Keith?

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

I Love My Axe posted:

This sounds SO familiar. I want to say that the kid was made to raise the puppy and was forced to kill it as part of some military training. (Kids were being raised as emotionless super soldiers or something like that?)

The game Bioshock has something similar and it made me think of this story when I played it.

There's a eunuch mercenary order in Song of Ice and Fire that do this, but that doesn't sound like what's being asked for.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Sheep-Goats posted:

I thought maybe I should put this in the scifi thread but it is a book ID so whatever.

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.

Sounds like Interstellar Pig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Pig).

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

regulargonzalez posted:

Kid's book I read in the 80s but I think it was fairly old, maybe published in the 50s (give or take a decade) where a couple kids befriend a weird looking astronomer kinda hermity guy. He's so weird looking because he's actually a mushroom man (??) and he takes them into space and maybe visits his home planet.

Eleanor Cameron, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, book 1 of a series.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

GuyDudeBroMan posted:

Ha! That is totally it.

Is it worth reading or is it a piece of poo poo like I was afraid of?

It's been a lot of years, but I remember finishing it with a feeling of "not bad for what it is". Try not to roll your eyes too hard at the subplot where the US government asks a bunch of scifi authors (including an rear end-kissing notHeinlein, on whom Niven had a massive mancrush) to help save the world because nobody else can get inside the aliens' heads.

Middle of the road for a Niven-Pournelle collaboration.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

bouncyman posted:

I'm trying to remember the name of a fantasy novel(?) that I started reading and never finished. I think it was pretty well known but I don't remember much about it... all I remember is that there was a city (or a country?) that some wizard had cast a curse over and removed from the memories of everyone. Nobody knew the country had ever existed and even the name of the place was forgotten... then I remember some dramatic scene where the main character remembers the name somehow and by remembering the name it unlocked all the memories of the place and its history and how it had been wiped out. Can anyone help please?

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. One of my favorite authors, check out his other books too. (Avoid the Fionavar series.)

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Curly Shuffle posted:

I'm trying to remember a hard sf novel that I may have heard about on the forums a couple years ago.
It starts with a guy who gets all hosed up in a helicopter crash when he was trying to train ai to fly. I remember the way he communicated was with morse code similar to Johnny Got His Gun. Anyway, he ends up getting his brain sliced up and scanned into a computer to make an ai that won't try to kill people. The subsequent revisions of this ai eventually take over like a benevolent skynet to protect humanity. The ai's try to fix global warming, gently caress up, and proceed to send ai-piloted spaceships out into the galaxy to seed new worlds with people. Then the story updates every few thousand years way out into the future.

Any clues?

Sounds like the "Passages" series of online novellas by Roger Williams aka "localroger" on the old kuro5hin boards. Archived on his personal site here: http://localroger.com/

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Lot 49 posted:

What's that one terrible story where future america is basically hell because of capitalism but it's okay because the main character wins the lottery or something and goes to australia which doesn't have capitalism so everything is free and the people are like gods with magic virtual reality powers.

"Manna" by Marshall Brain http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Lot 49 posted:

Ta. This started off better than I remembered but the Australian super society is just so ludicrous that the story falls apart when it gets introduced imo.

I find this to be the case generally with ideological literature, especially singularitarian stuff, like this and the "Passages" stories linked above. Great ideas and interesting setups, but once the author gets wrapped up in "and we'd all live happily ever after if we adopted my pet idea" or "and they all embraced my personal bugaboo and died horribly/suffered forever" the quality drops like a stone.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
That sounds like "Thief of Always", one of the few Clive Barker books I've liked.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
Don't know about the first one, but the rest are from an anthology by Iain M. Banks called "State of the Art". The story about the advanced spaceship visiting Earth is from his excellent series about the Culture.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

calandryll posted:

I've been trying to remember this book from when I was younger. I read it in 1992, which is when I think it came out. Young adult about a girl and a dragon. I don't remember any other details about it unfortunately.

Alternatively, Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede, though that came out a couple years before.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
Cheers.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Linnear posted:

Excellent. Sounds like the author had quite a few neat stories too, so off to Amazon I go. Thanks!

You are in for a treat, friend.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

cartoons123 posted:

Hi, I've been trying to remember a book for the longest time. The most I can remember is that it involved a girl who was running away from a foster home, I believe to find someone I forget if it was her mother or her aunt. The only other detail I can remember is that one of the characters was a little boy with aspergers syndrome.

This almost sounds like Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

there wolf posted:

A sci-fi series where the ruling class were a bunch of genetically modified super-beings who were pretty much all killed in a revolution engineered by one of the elites who was a general. One series in this world is about restoring the lost heir to the throne. The other is about a band of mercenaries post-restoration of the monarchy, the leader of which has one leg and a prosthesis concealing many weapons and he's hunting down his old partner who betrayed him who turns out to have transitioned into a woman. I can cough up a million more little details about this series, but none of them is a name that might lead me to finding a title.

Wild shot, since I only ever read part of the first one, but "Star of the Guardians" by Margaret Weis?

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

computer parts posted:

A science fiction story about Earth (and maybe some colonies?) who meet this giant alien empire and fear they're going to be conquered by it. I'm pretty sure it's a short story. In the end it turns out that the alien empire hasn't had real resistance in ages while the humans fought between each other a bunch so humanity has better weapons and repelled/beat them.

There's a specific analogy to the Persian War in there, where the alien empire is Persia and Earth and co are the Greek city states.

e: I've apparently asked this before, so it's not Homo Sol by Asimov.

The other one that gets suggested when this type of story gets asked about is "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Amstrad posted:

I'm glad this thread exists.

I read a book about virtual reality, this was back in the late 90s though. I have the impression the book was written in the 80s. The basic premise involved a male protagonist jumping from game to game, the book for certain involved at least a medieval castle attack/defend scenario as well as a more modern scenario involving guns and cars (the fact that they were manual transmission was an important point in one scene). Some note was made that the male protagonist was particularly skillful with a gun in this setting due to being a military veteran of some sort. Another relevant bit I can recall is that allocating skill points in one of the scenarios involved transferring liquid from one container to another, while being careful not to overfill/spill. The book also had a female character in a fairly typical romance interest/damsel in distress role.

I'd be grateful if anyone has any ideas.

Sounds like Piers Anthony's "Killobyte".

So very, very 90s.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

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.

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

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
"Piers Anthony" and "faith in humanity" don't belong in the same sentence.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
If that's not in the OP then it ought to be. It's probably the most requested story ID in the thread.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
Hey I think that poster up there might just think they have your answer.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Splicer posted:

https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home has a bunch of the Lone Wolf books available for free (and legit) online.

They're also available as an app for both iOS and Android: http://lonewolfthegame.com/

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

ToxicFrog posted:

That reminds me of a thing now that I can't remember the name of. I'm pretty sure it's not what aricoarena is looking for. I don't remember if it was a short story or an aside in a longer book (maybe even one of those Banks novels?). I am mostly sure we never actually "see" any of this directly; it's just two characters talking about it.

The gist of it is, there's a society of aliens they trade with, but one day the trade ships stop coming. They send a team to investigate and find that the entire species has committed suicide. They do some digging and find that one of their (?scientist-philosophers) had made and published a significant discovery about life and death just before the suicides started, but they can't translate it. They make copies and return home. In the subsequent years everyone involved in the investigation or the translation of the discovery commits suicide as well, at which point the records are sealed.

I remember a conversation between the characters talking about it where one of them wonders what they discovered and the other replies something like "who knows? Proof that there is a heaven, and everyone goes there? Proof that there is a hell, and the older you die, the worse it is?"

That's one of Larry Niven's Draco Tavern stories, but I can't quite recall a title offhand.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

Tourette Meltdown posted:

This is a long shot. 15-20 years ago, PROBABLY for school, I read a book that had some kind of nuclear winter/holocaust theme, and one of the characters was a stereotypical greedy/fat/bad man who either hoarded or stole or both all kinds of money and jewellery, and the end of his arc was him dying from radiation poisoning (I think), with all his watches and rings bonded to his skin. Does that strike a chord at all? I googled everything I could think of and scoured all kinds of middle school book lists, thinking I'd recognise it if I saw it. My brain says it was Ray Bradbury but I really don't think it was. I would've been 8-13ish, so appropriate for that age group (or possibly older teen). Help!

Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. One of a few books I enjoyed reading for school, though I'd forgotten the bit about the radioactive jewelry.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.

504 posted:

This book is a comic, I saw it at the library but didn't take it at the time, now I can't remember what it is called.

It starts with black panels as a couple lie in bed together, the woman tells the man she is no longer in love with him and wants to see other people, he agrees to an open relationship and they stay in the same house, further in he moves into another room and she brings a new boyfriend back to the house.

I think I read this E/N thread.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
Steven Barnes practices a whole shitload of martial arts, I'd be surprised if some variety of Kung Fu wasn't among them.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
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.

Probably Mike is an older fellow because you rarely see anyone who uses "Afro-American" anymore.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
Roger Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes".

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Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
A local museum has a temporary exhibit about space exploration, and the stuff about living long-term on the ISS reminded me about this one that I can't quite place:

A short story, near future sci-fi involving a psychological experiment in the months-long crew isolation necessary for travel to other planets. Turns out all the serious, professional crews crack up and try to murder each other, but the protagonists' crew of loony jokesters blow off steam and tension by pranking the hell out of each other and Mission Control, and wind up being most successful at staying mission-capable.

One of the pranks involved pretending that their habitat module had been invaded by aliens, and an accordingly goofy rubber mask.

Anyone recognize this?

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