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nuvan posted:
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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# ¿ Nov 17, 2008 09:03 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 14:27 |
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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. Comedy answer: I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein.
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# ¿ Nov 26, 2009 14:51 |
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Mad Mage Era posted:Oh my goodness, that just might be it. 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 |
# ¿ Nov 30, 2009 19:47 |
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Was Taters posted:I read a science fiction novel in the past couple years and I can't remember oh, most of it. Fatkraken's got a good answer, but I just reread Manifold: Time and it's the specific one you're thinking of.
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2009 16:53 |
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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.
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# ¿ Jan 2, 2010 19:12 |
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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. By any chance was it "Homo Sol" by Isaac Asimov?
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# ¿ Jun 27, 2012 04:53 |
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Sounds like Gateway by Frederick Pohl. EDIT: Beaten twice.
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# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 19:00 |
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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?
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# ¿ Aug 17, 2012 08:48 |
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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".
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# ¿ Oct 13, 2012 05:04 |
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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 |
# ¿ Jan 5, 2013 16:08 |
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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. Possibly "Rifles for Watie" by Harold Keith?
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2013 17:54 |
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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?) 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.
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2013 00:16 |
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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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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.
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# ¿ Jul 8, 2013 23:38 |
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GuyDudeBroMan posted:Ha! That is totally it. 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.
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# ¿ Sep 19, 2013 12:55 |
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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.)
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2013 12:55 |
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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. 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/
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# ¿ Dec 31, 2013 05:08 |
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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
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# ¿ Dec 31, 2013 14:57 |
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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.
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# ¿ Jan 1, 2014 01:35 |
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That sounds like "Thief of Always", one of the few Clive Barker books I've liked.
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# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 01:20 |
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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.
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# ¿ May 4, 2014 07:44 |
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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.
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:54 |
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Cheers.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 00:02 |
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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.
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# ¿ Nov 23, 2014 18:01 |
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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.
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 23:35 |
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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?
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# ¿ Apr 3, 2015 03:54 |
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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. The other one that gets suggested when this type of story gets asked about is "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove.
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2016 02:31 |
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Amstrad posted:I'm glad this thread exists. Sounds like Piers Anthony's "Killobyte". So very, very 90s.
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2016 13:01 |
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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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"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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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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Hey I think that poster up there might just think they have your answer.
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# ¿ Dec 3, 2016 17:56 |
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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/
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# ¿ Dec 21, 2016 21:22 |
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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. That's one of Larry Niven's Draco Tavern stories, but I can't quite recall a title offhand.
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 13:39 |
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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.
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# ¿ Jun 18, 2017 15:39 |
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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. I think I read this E/N thread.
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# ¿ Jun 20, 2017 20:39 |
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Steven Barnes practices a whole shitload of martial arts, I'd be surprised if some variety of Kung Fu wasn't among them.
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# ¿ Oct 9, 2017 02:07 |
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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.
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# ¿ Oct 9, 2017 02:29 |
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Roger Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes".
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# ¿ Oct 24, 2017 01:39 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 14:27 |
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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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# ¿ Feb 25, 2018 03:56 |