The book is a collection of stories of the protagonist travelling on his scavenged ship between planets and offering bioengineering services.  Remember one story with an overpopulated planet he was hired to bioengineer food nutritious enough to solve the food shortage problem.   The protagonist is tall (above 7'), bald, aphephobic, misanthropic and has a clowder of cats.
35307
I recall reading a book where the nondescript quirky captain of an independent starship was hired to take a group to a possible lost starship. The ship was a giant ecological repository and contained tech which had since been lost. Everyone tried to board, running afoul of various creatures and defenses. The independent captain (thought least likely to survive) wound up somehow managing to become recognized by the ecological ship as its new captain-owner, and spent the rest of the book providing its services, on his terms.  Part of this story also appears as a short story in an Analog magazine.  I probably read this in the late 80s, early 90s.
23959
Trying to remember the name/author of a book:   Long book. Many many separate small chapters. Scifi about humans, on non-Earth planet. They have poisonous native life, and can only eat a few brought from Earth plants. Because of that, they practice cannibalism, to no waste human body proteins. The story opened with consuming a body of someone who recently died. It had a pretty complex plot, with politics, war, technology, social structures, etc.  Social/sexual customs were kind of weird even leaving aside rituals around cannibalism. But it was NOT Heinlein, I'm sure of that :)   I don't know the year it was published, but it was pretty old, I took it around 1993-95 from a library and the physical book looked well-read by that time.
15734
My dad read a book series that he recommended to me last year. Now that I am ready to start it, neither of us can recall the title. He said there were several in the series but he can't recall how many.   The book is about traveling to a new planet, presumably with the goal of colonizing it. The crew are clones who have no memory. I think the goal was for the older original versions of the clones to transfer their consciousness into the clone bodies to be able to live on the new planet but something goes wrong.   There is an indigenous species on the planet who are humanoid but have kangaroo like tails.   The clone crew has markings on them that they don't understand until late. Apparently they are markings to indicate status or role on the new world. The person who they voted as there leader, it turns out, is marked as a servant or slave class.
119449
I read a story in a sci-fi short story collection (about 35 years ago) in which the POV character is fleeing invading aliens with his child in his arms (I think the wife is dead).  He knows he's about to be caught and killed by these rapacious, violent aliens who just want to destroy. Finally, the alien emerges from the trees and the story describes how the hero looks - feline, with a tail.  The hero confronts the killer - man!  It was a cool story that blew my 8th grade mind.  BTW, its not Frenzy.
40973
I thought this was a trilogy from Michael Moorcock - but maybe not. I can't remember the name of the trilogy or any of the books (the one I read was a three-in-one volume, like The Stainless Steel Rat was).  In book 1, the wisest political and scientific minds on Earth forsee a complete annihilation of the human race on Earth, and build a super spaceship to carry a remnant to a far distant planet - and no hyperspace here... The people were to be kept in cryogenic stasis for a time.  I think the second involves some of the people waking up for some reason.  The third involves several generations later when the people on the spaceship have begun to worship the ship itself (and its computer) as supreme beings, and have no knowledge of the actual facts (that they are on a computer-controlled spaceship vessel). One of the people on the ship dares to "go behind the curtain" (and violates all kinds of religious rules) and finds that they are actually on a computer-controlled ship, and that something has gone wrong and they are about to crash. He saves the day somehow.  UPDATE: Could be by Ben Bova too. I can't remember for sure.
38458
I read part of the series in 2005, a young man was the protagonist, he was traveling to different worlds. I think he was telepathic and the most identifying thing I can remember was he had a flying snake or asp as a pet which possibly was his protector? He was in danger for some reason. Also there was a romantic interest female. The books were very distinct from one another. The second or third book he visited a planet that was extremely bio-diverse, where he was on top of all this vegetation and he realized how many layers of vegetation he would have to get to before he got to the ground and it was vast. I never finished it and it's been driving me nuts.
64156
Here's what I remember:    Takes place in the future on a giant, bigger-than-a-planet spaceship found and now run by humans Humans are genetically altered and/or are enhanced with nanotechnology and have essentially become immortal and can be healed from almost any wound The surface of the ship is inhabited by former humans who have mutated into a new species, and live their entire lives in a kind of space suit The plot involves the discovery of a small planet within the ship that the protagonist is stranded on along with many others, and they form a civilization and live there for centuries   Anyone know the name of this book?  I can never remember it.
54901
I believe the main protagonist’s name is Falconer. A human spaceship crashlands on a planet where  conditions are inimical to human life - including a hostile sentient native species. So the humans build a large enclosure for themselves and undergo induced mutations so each succeeding generation is better adjusted to conditions on the planet than the last until finally the last generation is ready to step out of the enclosure.
103440
Like the subject: short sci-fi story about Earth blockaded by other human colonies.  The best humans have colonized some stellar systems. But they begin to treat humans of earth like inferiors. A war began, colonies won the war and blockaded the earth, but despite this the earth won. Who is the author?
10457
Can anyone offer any help with this..? I read it at school around 1976 but cannot remember the title nor the author. Thank you in advance!  A lone astronaut called - I think- Steve is stranded on a distant planet when his ship runs low on fuel.   His only companion is - again I think - a parrot. The fuel his ship uses is a filament or wire which is kept on a spool.   On exploring the locale he has landed in he discovers a huge building half-buried in a mountainside. He enters the building and discovers it is a museum filled with thousands of glass cases containing preserved specimens of various life forms as well as machines.   There is a robot curator that does repairs and, as the astronaut finds out, prepares cases for new exhibits.   On analysing the wire in one of the machines he discovers that is suitable as fuel for his ship so he winds a length of it onto his ships spool and leaves the planet just ahead of the robot collecting him and his parrot as museum exhibits...
87325
I read this short story a few years ago but I cannot remember the title or author. It was about a human scientist on another planet who was studying the native flora and fauna, trying to find something edible for humans. Does anyone know the title of this story?
116413
The book's story as far as I can remember is, space soldiers are fighting with bio mech suits against rebels (they are inside these suits and apparently there is a lot of bio gel). One soldier defects to the rebels who have alien tech. They implant alien tech into him as well and together they go searching for the creators of the alien tech. They find the alien who tells them that the tech they have is not important to it... keep thinking this tech may be alive and be an &quot;egg&quot;, not sure I remember clearly. Read the book in the late 90's early 2000's.
69723
I remember a lot of things about the book, but none of them have brought up a name and nobody I've asked remembers it   Pheromone technology plays a big role in the world- airborne pheromones serve as security systems that trigger allergic reactions in anyone not inoculated, were used to enforce cliques, and one of the major characters is basically an indentured servant to her mother because she was made addicted to a pheromone only her mother could supply. There was a bit about how you could use something sort of like those coin-operated binoculars to control drones in the atmosphere of Jupiter, but how they tended to be full of malware and would leave you craving various fast food brands. A biotech shuttle is mentioned as looking like "a bumblebee". There's a plot thread about a moon colony using cutting-edge biotech to grow habitation "pods"- towards the end one of the characters that joined the project and became merged with the facility as some sort of bioCPU takes over and launches the whole thing as a spaceship, I think using a hydrogen thruster fuelled by ice? There's a scene where a parking lot was "paved over with transparent plastic" years ago and you could still see cigarette butts and lotto cards frozen inside. Corporate agents(?) wore pastel-coloured ties because they were supposed to be "soothing".
97360
I'm trying to find an English-language short story I read in a collection about five to ten years ago (I don't have any idea of the original publication date).    Here's everything I remember:   The story is about human astronauts landing on an alien's planet, from the alien's point of view. Every organism on the alien planet is part of a single hive mind, and they can telepathically infect the humans (the aliens view this as beneficial, as any mind separated from the hive must be suffering), but choose not to once they realize that there's an entire planet of humans out there. The narrator alien is an organism that was designed by the hive to mimic a non-essential component on the spacecraft, so it can stow away when the humans return to Earth. The narrator alien is preparing to infect all of Earth as soon as the shuttle's door opens, but the component it replaced was the wire that opens the door, so it is fried instantly by the current.   Despite knowing all these elements of the story, I haven't had luck Googling it, because so many of these elements are very common sci-fi themes on their own, and I don't remember any unique names/terms.  I don't remember if I read this in a Sci-fi anthology book, or in a magazine (like 'Asimov').  Thanks in advance if anyone can help me track this one down, it's been bugging me for a long while.
86113
I read this story 30+ years ago in grade school. A man crashes on an alien planet. He has a small amount of water and accidentally spills some, and the planet replicates it but it must destroy part of itself to do so.  The man then finds some stale crumbs in his pocket, puts them in a trough, and the planet replicates them as well, but it's disgusting to eat. The man eventually decides that his situation is hopeless, so he lays down to die on a table in a hot room and thinks he can at least give back to the planet some of the nutrients it sacrificed for him. He falls asleep, and when he awakens, he has been transformed into an alien creature that is perfectly suited and adapted to live on the planet without discomfort to himself or damage the planet.
63704
It was a series of 3 or 4 books.  The crew of a ship were on a mission to recover something ( rings I think) from different planets.  Humans had been genetically altered to live on each planet.  Volunteers were permanently altered to blend in on the planet to complete their missions.
85338
I remember once many years ago reading a short story about how the Human Race established contact with an alien race. One of the exchanges involved one alien and one human meeting in orbit on a space station for the purpose of collecting what the alien would extrude from it's pores. This "elixir" would extend life expectancy in a human who ingested it. The problem arose that the alien was so "foreign" and grotesque that if one was to "view" it, one would go mad. This story is a narrative of the man sent to the station for the collection and his encounter with the alien.