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Remulak
Jun 8, 2001
I can't count to four.
Yams Fan
rear end in a top hat travels to alternate dimensions to swordfight, and while in a life-or-death struggle performs a petty jam with the person trying to eviscerate him.

Another:

The evil Chinese invade America but the good Americans figure out a death ray that can murder only genetically Chinese people, and apparently others from that region. They use it to murder everyone it works on and the world is saved!

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docbeard
Jul 19, 2011

sebmojo posted:

A woman with a laser and a black hole on a stick is helped to close doors by an emo guy on a horse. Doors are closed, which ends poorly for almost everyone involved.

I read these when I was a kid and I remember almost nothing about them now.

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









They're real good, one of the best fantasy (though actually scifi) series imo.

grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.
The author, at a loss as to how to finish out a trilogy he didn't really plan for, gives up and just writes about birds.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


An alien smart home turns on when someone accidentally brings in something keyed to the wi-fi. The planet decides to get revenge by turning off some of the laws of physics while all the humans freak out and try to kill each other. Eventually a ghost possesses a robot so he can turn everything off.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


grassy gnoll posted:

The author, at a loss as to how to finish out a trilogy he didn't really plan for, gives up and just writes about birds.

this owns but i have no idea what book it is

LostCosmonaut
Feb 15, 2014

Defiance Industries posted:

An alien smart home turns on when someone accidentally brings in something keyed to the wi-fi. The planet decides to get revenge by turning off some of the laws of physics while all the humans freak out and try to kill each other. Eventually a ghost possesses a robot so he can turn everything off.

This is one of the expanse books but I forget the title

grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.

Tulip posted:

this owns but i have no idea what book it is

Not as good as it sounds, unfortunately. Tchaikovsky's Chlidren of Memory, which is a distant third to Children of Time. It's entirely okay, but definitely feels like he wrote himself into a hole.

Slashrat
Jun 6, 2011

YOSPOS

LostCosmonaut posted:

This is one of the expanse books but I forget the title

The 4th one, Cibola Burn, I believe.

Also, unless the book portrayed it very differently than the show, then afaik it wasn't the planet trying to get revenge as much as the planet actually being a billion-year old machine that had eroded to the point of looking like a planet, so when it got turned on and naturally and immediately started malfunctioning in "multi-gigaton-range explosion"-ways, the few surviving automatic safety systems reacted by turning off whatever laws of physics they could to prevent or delay further catastrophic failures. Gigantic fusion reactor can't blow up from maintenance neglect if the laws of physics no longer permit nuclear fusion processes.

docbeard
Jul 19, 2011

The series premise: a rebellious princess accidentally frees a demon, who then frees all his demon friends and causes an apocalypse. As penance, she is made immortal (and gets a fresh new identity) and teams up with a talking wolf to recapture the demons.

The various books involve a mine haunted by the demon of radioactive fallout, a demon-possessed baby (I think, this is the book I recall the least), a soul-sucking fog that temporarily subverts the talking wolf friend, and a +3 Axe of Berserking that our heroine is briefly overcome by. I think there were more books too but those were the ones the library had when I was a teenager.

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Fivemarks posted:

A weird future society that declared its independent from earth and uses massive amounts of cloned slaves has to, as part of a peace deal, cede colonization rights to a region of space to a peer nation. But to gently caress over that nation, they send a colony expedition of 1000 regular humans and 50,000 clones to a planet in that region, and intentionally set it up to fail and leave a decivilized population on the planet for the other nation to deal with. Along the way, the inhabitants of the planet form into two separate forms of coexistence with the native species of the planet, who turn out to be sapient.

Also there are Dragons.

Huh, just read this. I thought the colonists reverting to a neolithic state was an accident, partially Dragon influence but mostly because 1) the clones were controlled by some sort of mind-tape machines, and these mysteriously broke down, 2) neither the regular humans nor the clones had any plans for education, as their supplies and communications were supposed to be re-upped in three years, rather than 50, and 3 )maybe possibly genetic homogeneity or difference with the 39,000 clones (the title?! Hello?!) made the resulting population more broadly compatible with the lizard communication.

In a sentence, "What if Acadians but the first nations people were dinosaur sized lizards"

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


Slashrat posted:

The 4th one, Cibola Burn, I believe.

Also, unless the book portrayed it very differently than the show, then afaik it wasn't the planet trying to get revenge as much as the planet actually being a billion-year old machine that had eroded to the point of looking like a planet, so when it got turned on and naturally and immediately started malfunctioning in "multi-gigaton-range explosion"-ways, the few surviving automatic safety systems reacted by turning off whatever laws of physics they could to prevent or delay further catastrophic failures. Gigantic fusion reactor can't blow up from maintenance neglect if the laws of physics no longer permit nuclear fusion processes.

It was definitely a security system designed to kill intruders; the 12 perfectly symmetrical and spaced "moons" started shooting down anything that dropped through the exosphere into the atmosphere proper.

Fivemarks
Feb 21, 2015

docbeard posted:

The series premise: a rebellious princess accidentally frees a demon, who then frees all his demon friends and causes an apocalypse. As penance, she is made immortal (and gets a fresh new identity) and teams up with a talking wolf to recapture the demons.

The various books involve a mine haunted by the demon of radioactive fallout, a demon-possessed baby (I think, this is the book I recall the least), a soul-sucking fog that temporarily subverts the talking wolf friend, and a +3 Axe of Berserking that our heroine is briefly overcome by. I think there were more books too but those were the ones the library had when I was a teenager.

Chainsaw Man part 3 looking tight.

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Further addendum re: why Neal Stephenson chose to burn down his literary career for the insurance money:

because software is going to write books in the future, anyway, might as well just suck up to the man where wealth and stupidity peak

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Oh man I wish I had noticed this thread was back sooner.

I've talked about David Weber books, I've talked about John Ringo books, but what if ... they wrote a series of books together?

It's the future and humanity is ruled by a space monarchy (of course). The main characters are the youngest prince, third in line for the throne, and his space marine bodyguards. I say "bodyguards" but it's actually an entire marine battalion which apparently has to go everywhere he does. The logistics of him going to college must have been a nightmare. Anyway, the prince is kind of a mid-20's failson but isn't too terrible a person, especially as a protagonist in a Ringo book (or at least Ringo-adjacent). His personal marine division aren't too fond of him but don't outright hate him.

He's sent out on a tour of the outer systems, possibly just to get him out of everyone's hair, and the ship gets ambushed. Through some clever maneuvering they're able to abandon ship and sneak down to a nearby planet and the enemy thinks they're dead. The planet is named Marduk and is a jungle hell-hole with a pre-industrial native race of big four-armed amphibian people. Due to orbital mechanics they land in a completely different hemisphere than the sole imperial spaceport that trades with the locals and are going to have to walk the whole way there.

Over the next two books the prince saves the life of a local warrior-poet who swears a life-debt to him, they upend several polities, they get a larger and larger army of local followers, their advanced tech breaks down but they uplift a lot of the local tech to eventually meet in the middle at about a Civil War-era level, and they learn from an anthropologist with a subspace radio that the prince's two siblings were also killed and that it was a coup and not a random attack that stranded them there and his mother, the empress, is apparently being held prisoner by a cabal of nobles who have seized power.

They have to build sailing ships to get across an ocean and shoot their way through an Aztec-like state that's way into amphibian sacrifice. All this time the prince is being turned into a cool badass by his mentors, the Mardukan he saved and the commander of the marines.

Finally after a year or so they get to the spaceport and commandeer a ship to Earth. They set up a restaurant serving "authentic Mardukan food" with a bunch of their alien friends in the actual Mt. Vernon, now a lovely suburb of what was once Washington DC but is now the imperial capital. They get to conspiring with military buddies who are unhappy with the new regime and put together a pretty elaborate coup plot in no time at all. There's a big battle at the palace and they rescue the empress. She's in bad shape and abdicates the throne to her surviving son despite being really pissy about it. The end!

The series is way more focused on 19th century firearm development and less on weird sex stuff so I'm guessing Weber wrote 90% of it. There is a messed up part where it's described that the nobles who launched the first coup are controlling the empress with drugs and sex slavery so he was definitely involved in that part.

Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Feb 16, 2023

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Moon Slayer posted:

Oh man I wish I had noticed this thread was back sooner.

I've talked about David Weber books, I've talked about John Ringo books, but what if ... they wrote a series of books together?

That's a freaky combo

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

It's the future and our main character is this guy

He kinda styles himself a detective in this future post-scarcity city. With no bills to pay, everybody does what they like, more or less, within reason. One day he is employed by one of the City's faction/organizations/its complected - these are people who our main character, Charlie, describes as the sort of people who became MBAs. I forget if Charlie is upfront about this, but he I think lets the reader know that he was a time traveller at one point, in a time close to the reader's time.

There is a cute MBA lady who he's worked with before, and the problem is one of their senior guys has gone missing. Charlie's interest in this is double - not only as a case, but the guy who's gone missing - let's call him Dave - was a former client of Charlie's. The first section of the book involves Charlie, his girl Friday running around the future city trying to figure out where Dave went. They end up breaking into a sealed part of the city where there's a group of people who are pretending it is the 1950s forever because the future can burn a person out. There, some sort of trap is sprung, and Charlie is shocked to realize all of this has the mark of his arch-nemesis, Earl, who he was sure was dead. Not only is Earl gunning for Charlie, but he seems to have more broad-based sinister plans.

Charlie and Francis (the MBA lady) go find Gerald, who's an extremely tough SOB living in the extremely tough SOB part of the city. Charlie recruits him by saying "Earl is back", which is horrifying to Gerald, who was also positive Earl was dead - Charlie and Gerald killed him.

Then there's a section of the book where Charlie tells a vague story set in the present day, involving two guys who are best friends, and one of the guy's girlfriends. There's also some stuff about walking on the sea, as it is frozen from the perspective of somebody in an airliner at 40,000 ft. It's not clear where this is going.

Charlie, Francis and Gerald roll up to a beach and an ocean. There's an abandoned carnival there. Charlie says to Francis "OK, to find Earl we're going to walk in the world of dreams, like physically." I forget the prep for this, if there's drugs or some sort of meditation, but there are rules to follow, I forget them. Whatever they do, the ocean freezes, they can walk on water, and off into dreamland they go. There is an important detail here I've forgotten: they remain tied to the present time somehow, maybe astral projection? The distinction is important, because you can actually physically walk into the dreamworld (or similar) but this has a big danger: stay long enough in Dreamland, this is how Charlie became a time traveler. Of course, time travel to the FUTURE physics doesn't have a problem with, but time's arrow goes only in one direction: Only Foreward, the name of the novel.

Dreamworld has signs that Earl has been doing the dirt and hanging out there, and is def up to something. Dave was killed by his worst nightmare, and now we learn Charlie, Dave's, and Gerald's connection: in addition to normal detective work, Charlie has helped Dave and Gerald with their psychological problems by messing about on the dream level. Charlie's dream time ends with a "you've forgotten something" which wakes him up.

At some point in all this, we get Charlie's backstory, possibly told to Francis: He was one of the dudes in the vague story that discovers dreamwalking, as is Earl being his former best friend.. Charlie and Earl form a little beachside cult involved in dreamwalking. Much like a dream, I can't remember the order things happen: Earl is going slowly insane with some repressed emotional trauma, and thing come to a head involving Earl and Charlie's GF loving each other on the side, an abortion, and it was Earl's baby, and Charlie lets the abortion news drop in a really casual way, not knowing the side loving was going on? The Cult gets more angry and cultlike, Charlie walks in dreams for realsies along with earl, kinda like a psychadelic point break, and Charlie - entirely by accident - has traveled like 40k years into the future, abandoning his poor dad and mum, who owned a bookstore and had planned to have him inherat it. We also learn that Earl basically stayed in the dreamtime, went completely crazy, and like many nightmare men had to be put down.

Which again raises the question of how the gently caress Earl is still alive. Well, aside from people getting increasingly freaked out in the city, what with some sort of Mad scientist plan to harvest people's brains, I have no memory of how the climax happens, but basically: it was Charlie, unconsciously, all along. Earl is a dream creation of Charlie, who feels a lot of unprocessed guilt about the whole Friends-beachcult-permenantly disappearing on his parents, and the dream-Earl was a manifestation of this, as was the devious poo poo he was doing, partially by controlling other people through dreams, often clients of Charlie who he helped out of psychological conundrums. In fact, it's Francis who tweaks the realside part of this equation, basically because crazy supervillain schemes are impossibly old fashioned in the future City, like if I was coming at you with clockwork robots. Somehow the dreamside finally works out though at somepoint Gerald gets mulched.

Later: Charlie and Francis are bangin' and even moved in together, she's a good influence on the waster time's orphan, he's started to work through his poo poo.

Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith

Fivemarks
Feb 21, 2015

Moon Slayer posted:

Oh man I wish I had noticed this thread was back sooner.

I've talked about David Weber books, I've talked about John Ringo books, but what if ... they wrote a series of books together?

It's the future and humanity is ruled by a space monarchy (of course). The main characters are the youngest prince, third in line for the throne, and his space marine bodyguards. I say "bodyguards" but it's actually an entire marine battalion which apparently has to go everywhere he does. The logistics of him going to college must have been a nightmare. Anyway, the prince is kind of a mid-20's failson but isn't too terrible a person, especially as a protagonist in a Ringo book (or at least Ringo-adjacent). His personal marine division aren't too fond of him but don't outright hate him.

He's sent out on a tour of the outer systems, possibly just to get him out of everyone's hair, and the ship gets ambushed. Through some clever maneuvering they're able to abandon ship and sneak down to a nearby planet and the enemy thinks they're dead. The planet is named Marduk and is a jungle hell-hole with a pre-industrial native race of big four-armed amphibian people. Due to orbital mechanics they land in a completely different hemisphere than the sole imperial spaceport that trades with the locals and are going to have to walk the whole way there.

Over the next two books the prince saves the life of a local warrior-poet who swears a life-debt to him, they upend several polities, they get a larger and larger army of local followers, their advanced tech breaks down but they uplift a lot of the local tech to eventually meet in the middle at about a Civil War-era level, and they learn from an anthropologist with a subspace radio that the prince's two siblings were also killed and that it was a coup and not a random attack that stranded them there and his mother, the empress, is apparently being held prisoner by a cabal of nobles who have seized power.

They have to build sailing ships to get across an ocean and shoot their way through an Aztec-like state that's way into amphibian sacrifice. All this time the prince is being turned into a cool badass by his mentors, the Mardukan he saved and the commander of the marines.

Finally after a year or so they get to the spaceport and commandeer a ship to Earth. They set up a restaurant serving "authentic Mardukan food" with a bunch of their alien friends in the actual Mt. Vernon, now a lovely suburb of what was once Washington DC but is now the imperial capital. They get to conspiring with military buddies who are unhappy with the new regime and put together a pretty elaborate coup plot in no time at all. There's a big battle at the palace and they rescue the empress. She's in bad shape and abdicates the throne to her surviving son despite being really pissy about it. The end!

The series is way more focused on 19th century firearm development and less on weird sex stuff so I'm guessing Weber wrote 90% of it. There is a messed up part where it's described that the nobles who launched the first coup are controlling the empress with drugs and sex slavery so he was definitely involved in that part.


I remember reading those in high School, the Prince Roger series.


I've got one: Its about the life of the Byzantine General Belisarius. David Drake helped another writer write it.

Shalhavet
Dec 10, 2010

This post is terrible
Doctor Rope
It is the future and nobody noticed when humanity disappeared. Asimov's Laws means that the robots don't want humans to come back, except some do and trick the main character into transporting a chicken egg. The only remaining human turns out to be another high class escort robot so our protagonist emigrates. Legs are expensive.

Shalhavet fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Apr 2, 2023

The Iron Rose
May 12, 2012

:minnie: Cat Army :minnie:

Shalhavet posted:

It is the future and nobody noticed when humanity disappeared. Asimov's Laws means that the robots don't want humans to come back, except some do and trick the main character into transporting a chicken egg. The only remaining human turns out to be another high class escort robot so our protagonist emigrates. Legs are expensive.

Saturn’s Children by Charlie Stross. A delightful book, that I found far superior to the typically more highly regarded sequel/shared universe Neptune’s Brood.

Asterite34
May 19, 2009



The Iron Rose posted:

Saturn’s Children by Charlie Stross. A delightful book, that I found far superior to the typically more highly regarded sequel/shared universe Neptune’s Brood.

Is that the one with the hilariously bad cover art that makes it look like a self-published erotica novel starring that cyborg from Tripping the Rift?

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:

Asterite34 posted:

Is that the one with the hilariously bad cover art that makes it look like a self-published erotica novel starring that cyborg from Tripping the Rift?
I'm not familiar with that cyborg, but yes.

Apparently he'd vetoed an awful cover on his last book and the publisher wouldn't let him do it again.

Beefeater1980
Sep 12, 2008

My God, it's full of Horatios!






Asterite34 posted:

Is that the one with the hilariously bad cover art that makes it look like a self-published erotica novel starring that cyborg from Tripping the Rift?

Yes. The books are weirdly fun though.

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Since this thread has been bumped and has a few more eyes on it I'll point out that I've started a similar thread for bad military thrillers over in the Internet VFW!

VictualSquid
Feb 29, 2012

Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.
Huh, I remembered more of this then I though when I started writing:

Our main character is a boy called Jinto who is the son the president of the last independent planet in the galaxy. The cold open starts with the space elves attacking the planet and threatening to nuke them from orbit. Jinto's dad surrenders the planet in exchange for him becoming a space elf duke and staying ruler of that planet.
Second chapter gives us a timeskip during which Jinto went to school on a different planet anonymously to avoid getting killed by the angry population of his home planet. He is now waiting to be picked up by a ship to empire's military academy.
The shuttle that picks him up to the transport is piloted by the female lead Lafiel, she is a space cadet a few years older then him. After they banter and become friends and she drops a long infodump about the setting. Then it is dramatically revealed that she actually is a princess of the empire.
The ship they are on gets attacked by some enemy country. And before that the captain tells Jinto and Lafiel to evacuate on a shuttle. But on the way to the next inhabited planet they have to refuel at a remote asteroid mining operation.
They chat with the Baron running the mine. It turns out he is the only space elf and only man in that system, all of his subordinates are women. Lafiel is getting creeped out and suspicious, Jinto stays oblivious.
They get split up and Lafiel is invited to a private dinner with the creep where he keeps hitting on her, while Jinto is locked into the space garden where the baron's father is locked up also. Turns out the baron is racist against planet-born people like Jinto and his own father.
Jinto and the old dude get chatting about the background setting. Lafiel starts convincing some of the servants to revolt against the creepy baron.
After some shooting she takes her shuttle again and grabs the dudes from the garden from space, and the baron chases them in his own shuttle.
A bit of space fighting and he gets blown up.
They grab the fuel they need and fly on to the next novel in the series.

Crest of the Stars by Hiroyuki Morioka

Groke
Jul 27, 2007
New Adventures In Mom Strength

Asterite34 posted:

Is that the one with the hilariously bad cover art that makes it look like a self-published erotica novel starring that cyborg from Tripping the Rift?

Yeah, and the punch line is that even although the cover art was cheesy and bad it's actually an appropriate depiction of the protagonist (an, ahem, pleasure robot, designed to, um, entertain humans but left "alive" long after there aren't any humans around anymore. She's supposed to look kind of cheesy and erotica-ish.)

Fivemarks
Feb 21, 2015
what was that one sci-fi series where transhuman hermaphroditic alien kangaroos being led by a human mind in one of their bodies became a huge problem and the book tries to portray the idea of all of humanity being turned into them as a good thing?

chainchompz
Jul 15, 2021

bark bark
In this book that does an interesting thing with presenting the narrative out of order, the villain makes a hosed up chair.

grassy gnoll
Aug 27, 2006

The pawsting business is tough work.

Fivemarks posted:

what was that one sci-fi series where transhuman hermaphroditic alien kangaroos being led by a human mind in one of their bodies became a huge problem and the book tries to portray the idea of all of humanity being turned into them as a good thing?

Animorphs.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


chainchompz posted:

In this book that does an interesting thing with presenting the narrative out of order, the villain makes a hosed up chair.

Honestly not the best Culture book but I liked it regardless.

chainchompz
Jul 15, 2021

bark bark
It has its moments.

Kazzah
Jul 15, 2011

Formerly known as
Krazyface
Hair Elf

Fivemarks posted:

what was that one sci-fi series where transhuman hermaphroditic alien kangaroos being led by a human mind in one of their bodies became a huge problem and the book tries to portray the idea of all of humanity being turned into them as a good thing?

The Forever War was a bit like that, but I don't think there was a human mind in any of the aliens

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Kazzah posted:

The Forever War was a bit like that, but I don't think there was a human mind in any of the aliens

The alien in that book was a hive mind who was in essence just responding to being attacked by humanity - the war abruptly ends once humanity establishes a hive-mind itself and contact is made.

Unkempt
May 24, 2003

...perfect spiral, scientists are still figuring it out...

Fivemarks posted:

what was that one sci-fi series where transhuman hermaphroditic alien kangaroos being led by a human mind in one of their bodies became a huge problem and the book tries to portray the idea of all of humanity being turned into them as a good thing?

Could be 'Web of the Chozen' by Jack Chalker, though it's one book (not a series) and I haven't read it in decades so it might not be.

zonohedron
Aug 14, 2006


Oh good. No one's done this one and I haven't read it in at least ten years.

A spaceship prospecting for valuable planets has a navigation error. This will not matter until the end of the book.

Astronauts try to mine fuel even though radiation is killing them. This will not matter until at least the third book.

Settlers on an alien planet want to try diplomacy with aliens. None of these people are ever mentioned again.

Finally we meet the series protagonist. It is two hundred years later. He is the ambassador to the aliens, except the human government prohibits him from using the alien language except in writing and only with words he already has in the dictionary. He has been talking out loud with the alien leader anyway, because he is much better at languages than anyone else, especially everyone at the only human university.

Suddenly he goes to visit the leader's grandma. She doesn't like him because humans aren't elegant, and also humans get upset when the aliens use sanctioned assassinations to solve social problems. Obviously she poisons him and has him punched repeatedly while dangling from the ceiling. Eventually she tells him that the humans who sent settlers to the planet have come back and she thought his government was keeping it a secret instead of being oblivious. (It never occurs to him to take offense at being tortured, because that must mean the alien grandma likes him.)

Aliens not allied with the alien government kidnap the protagonist and he tricks them into encrypting his hard drive by putting in today's date for the password instead of the actual password. He feels like a failure for thinking about going skiing instead of missing his girlfriend at all.

The end.

Peyote Panda
Mar 10, 2019

This book would have come out in the late eighties/early nineties. I cannot remember the name or the author. My memories are vague and I may be conflating a couple of things from other books I read around that time (particularly the cloning part).

The protagonist is a space secret agent in the future. He has an artificial skeleton giving him enhanced strength and durability, possibly along with other built-in gadgets. He also has transparent plastic skin covering that acts as armor at the cost of slightly inhibiting his sense of touch. Because of the latter his entire skin is covered with this coating except for his dick (and possibly also to serve as an Achilles's Heel so he doesn't get too cocky, har-har). At one point while trapped in a dungeon, paralyzed by someone overriding his artificial skeleton, our hero imagines himself decaying or being eaten away by rats until there's nothing but the transparent skin draped over his metal skeleton with the cockhole allowing a mild breeze to ripple the skin like a windsock.

Saving memories and cloning dead people to resurrect them is common enough that we're actually meeting the protagonist's clone after he was recently captured and killed by some infamous intergalactic criminal. The hero has a childhood trauma from being abandoned by his mother at around the age of seven. When he pursues the criminal who captured and killed his original self only to be captured in turn, he ends up in a sexual relationship with a servant of the criminal who looks just like his mom when she ditched him. It turns out she is his mom, somehow brought forward in time from just before he was abandoned to the current day.

The protagonist defeats the villain but his mother is tossed back to her original era. He follows her to the past and convinces her to come back to the present with him so they can continue their relationship. He assures her that her kid will be fine without her, though I don't recall if he ever actually tells her he is her son.

I had not read enough classic sci-fi at that point to realize that the above perversity was not an outlier but practically de rigueur in some sci-fi circles. Not that this was classic sci-fi, but you know what I mean.

Fivemarks
Feb 21, 2015

Peyote Panda posted:

This book would have come out in the late eighties/early nineties. I cannot remember the name or the author. My memories are vague and I may be conflating a couple of things from other books I read around that time (particularly the cloning part).

The protagonist is a space secret agent in the future. He has an artificial skeleton giving him enhanced strength and durability, possibly along with other built-in gadgets. He also has transparent plastic skin covering that acts as armor at the cost of slightly inhibiting his sense of touch. Because of the latter his entire skin is covered with this coating except for his dick (and possibly also to serve as an Achilles's Heel so he doesn't get too cocky, har-har). At one point while trapped in a dungeon, paralyzed by someone overriding his artificial skeleton, our hero imagines himself decaying or being eaten away by rats until there's nothing but the transparent skin draped over his metal skeleton with the cockhole allowing a mild breeze to ripple the skin like a windsock.

Saving memories and cloning dead people to resurrect them is common enough that we're actually meeting the protagonist's clone after he was recently captured and killed by some infamous intergalactic criminal. The hero has a childhood trauma from being abandoned by his mother at around the age of seven. When he pursues the criminal who captured and killed his original self only to be captured in turn, he ends up in a sexual relationship with a servant of the criminal who looks just like his mom when she ditched him. It turns out she is his mom, somehow brought forward in time from just before he was abandoned to the current day.

The protagonist defeats the villain but his mother is tossed back to her original era. He follows her to the past and convinces her to come back to the present with him so they can continue their relationship. He assures her that her kid will be fine without her, though I don't recall if he ever actually tells her he is her son.

I had not read enough classic sci-fi at that point to realize that the above perversity was not an outlier but practically de rigueur in some sci-fi circles. Not that this was classic sci-fi, but you know what I mean.

This sounds like Late Stage heinlein.

Peyote Panda
Mar 10, 2019

Fivemarks posted:

This sounds like Late Stage heinlein.
Yes. The author of this particular book wasn't any of the more well-known sci-fi writers (I can't remember who the author was but it wasn't anyone I recognized and this may have been their first novel) but the plot certainly felt like that even if the prose didn't have Heinlein's more fanciful presentation.

The incestual elements were a bit of a surprise to younger me which is why the book stuck in my memory, but with fuller exposure to the genre past and present these days I'd find it a more original swerve if the dude wasn't loving his mom. :ughh:

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



There's an advanced civilization of space humans from Earth(I think), and they've discovered a less advanced(but still pretty advanced) society of other humans. They've been observing the other humans for a while, and deciphered their language and such, but they've decided that the best way to really learn about them is to disguise one of their own as one of them and send him down there to walk around and see what's going on. The protagonist is the guy they choose. The other humans are all super fit and athletic and ripped so they print the protagonist out a new body that is just obscenely muscular and buff, and also specify that they make him Native American because, as the narration indicates, they look the strongest. They dress him up like one of the Buff people and drop him on their planet.

He bumbles around for a while and finds out that pretty much all of their technology, doors and ATMs and such, activate automatically and none of it responds to him. He meets a married couple and their teenage daughter, and manages to learn from them that the reason for this is because all technology on their planet is powered by energy stored in the locals' bodies. This does not mark him as an outsider, though, because the energy dissipates over time and the only way to recharge is to complete an obstacle course. When your Obstacle Course Energy runs low, you need to catch a ship to the Obstacle Course Island and complete it to recharge it. The reason that everyone is so ripped is because the obstacle course is super dangerous and if you can't finish it you just left there to die, and the longer you wait the more annoying everything becomes and you have to like, wave your hand over the soap dispenser in the bathroom like 20 times to get it to turn on. The family doesn't indicate that this is like, a holy duty or anything, it's just like a chore that you have to do and they make fun of him for being so lazy about it that he can't even open doors anymore. They do explicitly acknowledge that it's a form of eugenics, though, which the protagonist seems cool with.

The protagonist also figures out at this point that the coloured belts that everyone wears are not just a fashion statement but actually indicate what job you have, and that picking a colour completely at random was a bad idea because the one he ended up with is the rarest one, which is called Deviser but which is pretty much equivalent to "King", although they're supposed to be treated like normal guys whenever they aren't ordering people around. He kinda plays it off as like "oh, yeah, well, I'm just trying to get an idea of how average people are doing to help me with my devising" and the family believes him, and then they invite him to come with them to the Obstacle Course Island because they've also been procrastinating on their Obstacle Course chores and their Obstacle Course Energy is running low. The protagonist also spots another agent from a different faction of the space humans, who is also bumbling around but is constantly getting owned because he thinks he's better than the locals and refuses to learn from them, and also because his boss didn't print him out a jacked bodybuilder body to inhabit so he's just like, a guy on a planet of olympic athletes.

They go do the Obstacle Course and it is fairly uneventful and nobody important dies. When they come back, there's some kind of natural disaster or crisis happening, and because he is a Deviser the protagonist gets summoned to some kind of HQ to direct a response. It turns out that he is literally one of only 2 Devisers in the entire region, and the other one is an old(but still completely jacked) guy who defers to the protagonist because he is an old man who only has a few more obstacle courses left in him. The protagonist is given a psychic mind control device for Devisers which makes all the locals unquestioningly obey him so that he can devise the best possible plan and perfectly execute it. The other agent from earlier runs in and steals the mind control device and tries to use it to enslave the locals, and it instantly vaporizes him. It turns out that there aren't many Devisers around is not only because the standards are really high, but also because they're expected to use this thing to do their job and if you have any selfish thoughts at all when giving commands it detects them and deletes you instantly. The protagonist puts it on, and dictates his plan to stop the disaster, and is fine because he really cares about the people and so on. Later he writes a report to his bosses that's all like "these people are better than us, in every way, we would be better off if we did obstacle course eugenics, too".

I only remember this because in the last section of the story when the protagonist and the old Deviser are talking, they use the word "devise" so many times that I am forced to think of it every time I see that word. "Deviser, what are you devising?" is a direct quote I'm pretty sure.

cock hero flux fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Sep 8, 2023

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Buttchocks
Oct 21, 2020

No, I like my hat, thanks.

cock hero flux posted:

A eugenic society that designs day-to-day technology around power crystals that people have to recharge.

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