I read a book in the early 80's (sometime between 81 and 83) that I have been trying to remember the title of for a long time. I got the book from my high school librarian as a reading suggestion, so it may have been a young adult book, but I don't know.   The only think I remember about the story is one of the weapons that the "good guys" wore.   The weapon was a hand gun type of weapon that they wore in a holster that was on the forearm of their gun hand.  The weapon was somehow connected to the nerves in their wrist so that when they tensed their hand or arm in a certain way the gun jumped into their hand.
56503
I listened to this on audiobook and it was great.  The premise was a human ends up travelling to an alien planet. The aliens have a perimeter to their 'base' that is under constant attack from the planet's animals. It is revealed towards the end that there is some sort of signal being transmitted that is making all the animals and plant life attack a certain point on the planet (where the aliens are).   Other major plot points I remember: The human traveller falls in love with an alien. The aliens have a sort of virtual training environment that simulates life outside the perimeter, where plants attack you etc. There is a secondary alien group that the human ends up with, and although they are rivals to other group, they have a trade set up.   Any help much appreciated! Thanks.
26371
This  reminded me of a story I read in the 90s.  A woman is caught shoplifting a bunch of metal items by throwing them into her purse. She has no memory, and the purse is empty. Anything metal they put in disappears. The police turn it over to government scientists, who investigate by attaching a large lump of metal to some extremely strong wire and dropping it in like a fishing line.      They have it hooked up to the biggest, strongest crane available, and they begin reeling it back in. They reason that if whoever is on the other side can't let go, it could turn their universe inside out or something equally unpleasant, thus giving Earth the leg up in opening negotiations.   and then      The tension on the line increases until is under too much tension to cut. The story ends with the line slowly sliding back into the purse, with the realization that their plan has backfired in the worst possible way.   Anyone know the name of the story and author?
65670
I read this in the early 1990s when I was a teenager and I have no idea whether it was old or new at the time.  Changing your body involves going in to a tank of liquid. People wear bodies of many and various different types (probably chosen mainly for fashion reasons) but certain body types are prohibited although I don't really remember any of the reasons why.  The main character is persuaded by someone to change his body to an illegal type. Perhaps he becomes involved in some kind of secret underground organization. The new body is of a type that he has never seen before. The main thing that I remember about it is that it has a panel of lights built into the chest and after he has learned how to he is able to communicate with other people in bodies of this type at incredible speed by flashing these lights.  I've spent considerable time web searching with no joy whatsoever. I'd love to re-read this book... the image of the flashing-chest-array communication has been stuck in my head ever since I read it but I can't remember whether anything else about it was noteworthy.
75599
Read the book once in the late 90's The only things I can remember are:   Dragons were some sort of war machine (built and maintained, rather then real, living creatures) A bunch of somewhat magical creatures working in a factory. The pilot of the dragon has small needles inserted into their arms. Lastly, I'm associating the color green with the cover.   Anyone got any ideas?
111100
I read a book 12 years ago.  I believe it had Ever on its name.   It was about these high schoolers that went to sleep and woke up in a world of magic or medieval. I do know that when they went to sleep that would travel back and forth. I know it's not much but if you can help thank you.
18064
Back in the 70's my local library had a novel about a human coming to a human-colonized (I think) planet where mind control was common and where he was there to solve a crime. There was a hierarchy based on how many other people you could control, starting in the single digits and eventually going by tens up to eighty or so. The main character's local associate was something like a 40 working on 50, and our hero gets in trouble with his associate at one point for interrupting a mind duel he's engaging in on the road to 50.   Those in the single digits do most of the grunt work, though fortunately for our main character those who have no mind-control powers at all are exempt - he also chats with a "disabled" native at one point who is very glad to be disabled and out of all the competition.  Standard attire is a catsuit with your number over your heart, and what I remember most about the (hardback) book is the dustjacket, which depicted a woman who filled out her catsuit exceptionally well.  I have a vague recollection that the book was originally published in the 50's, but I wouldn't swear to it.
46792
I can not remember if it was a short story or a novel, but I am leaning towards it being a novel. There is a colony of humans and I can't remember if they crash-landed or not.   There is a creature that they come to discover after it has killed a few people. The creature has some kind of chemical in its body that is like a super-adrenaline. One part is I remember is one of these creatures getting very hot from using up its reserve of this chemical and it dived into a river or pond and it started to steam. Something like that.  It has to be at least 10 years since I read the story.
58593
This is a short story, I think by Ray Bradbury or Sheckley.  Two (?) adventurers/archaelogists are inside of the weapon cache left by Martian civilization which was destroyed by war. Eventually they find a chamber marked "Absolute weapon" (or ultimate weapon). They fight over who will get it, and only one of them survives. He opens the lock, releasing sentient blob that eats his fallen companions and then him, as well.
49338
I'm looking for a science fiction novel that I would've read from a library in the early 2010s. I'm fuzzy on the plot, but it was in a setting with space travel, and I believe the view shifted around to follow the separate characters.  I do recall two distinguishing characteristics in particular:  Some people use a brain upload/backup to restore themselves to a new body after an accidental death, maybe retrieving the recorder if possible to include memories immediately before death. However, this may not be an accessible service for everyone due to cost/coverage, and I think a large corporation handled it. People might've kept identical clones on hand or opted for a brand new body, but I think it meant very little fear of death. At least one character, maybe an investigator/reporter/mercenary, died in an explosion (?) and was restored midway through the book.  Some others chose the (less common) option of linking several bodies together to form a group consciousness, where a single unified mind inhabited all of the bodies at once. They could purchase more bodies to connect, and gained similar immortality since any body dying would not affect the whole.  I remember that at one point, a character entered a store and was irritated when the employees carried on a conversation as she moved to the right aisle, only to realize they were a group mind and thought she'd noticed. She entered into a relationship with them later and, at the end of the book, ended up buying more bodies to become a group herself.  I've googled around for this book for a while and looked through Wikipedia's  and , but I didn't recognize the plot anywhere. Hope a detail stands out to someone out there, I'll try to answer any more questions!
31005
I vaguely remember reading a young-adult book about a group of kids.  The kids turned out to be aliens, and the one identifying mark they had was that their blood was silver (or something else)?  I think the kids also have powers.  I vaguely remember a cover that had a gaping mouth and something that looked like they were supposed to be sound waves coming from it.  Does anyone know what this is?
77919
I read this in the mid '80's or early 1990's. A group of heavily armed elite Earth soldiers is kidnapped just as they were about to be overrun and annihilated. Given the choice of being returned to their certain doom, or taking part in an off world adventure, they get recruited to guard an alien crop from attack from the earlier, less technologicaly advanced bands of soldiers that were captured and recruited to guard the previous seasons of the alien harvest from earlier recruits. Oh yeah. (I think) They ride centaurs.
83802
I remember reading a series when I was around 7th or 8th grade about aliens who had taken over Earth by putting metal caps on people when they were "entering adulthood" to control them (not direct control, but it would keep them from rebelling). There was a faction of people who able to escape and had fake caps and would save teens who were about to be capped.  The main protagonist was a teen boy who was a boxer (or training to be a boxer or something). The aliens would hold tournaments for the humans and whoever won would be "worthy" to serve as personal slaves to the aliens.     The protagonist won and was able to get inside to try and learn more about the aliens from the inside.
61901
I remember starting, and losing, a book in the late 80s, early 90s, that I have been trying to  remember for a while now.  It's not much to go on, I realise, but the main crux of the plot, until I left the book in a phone booth :/, was an ice age (either implied or stated, I can't recall) was starting, and a (I think implied) glacier was moving closer to the main castle or walled city of the novel.   The setting was not specifically High Fantasy, but a medieval style setting.  The interesting thing I always remember about the book was that the antagonist appeared to be the ice itself, slowly, but inexorably, getting closer.
29582
I think this story dates from the 1950s, plus or minus a decade - I read it about 30-35 years ago in a (then) fairly old story collection. It involves explorers on a planet falling into a gelatinous object that dissolves most of their bodies except for their brains and nervous systems. About four of them fall in to the same creature, and they discover that by thinking about it they can grow limbs and other body parts. At first they try to fight each other, by growing arms so they can hit each other's brains - and one of them realises that growing a skull would be a good idea - but later they agree to grow legs and move the creature around co-operatively. I would love to identify this story.
99606
There's been a couple of questions lately about different creatures/rocks/trees that are living at a different time-rate than humans, and it got me thinking about a story that I'd read when I was in 6th grade and hoping to find again.  I read the story in English, in the US, in 1980. Here's where it gets tricky... the story was actually on a card, maybe 6" x 8", with a small illustration on each side. It was in a teacher's box with many other cards (different stories) in a classroom. We were assigned to read a story/card once a week or so and there might have been questions about the story on the card itself, or we might have just had to note that we read it. I don't think that all the rest of the stories were necessarily Sci-Fi, just short stories to get the attention of a 6th grader. I do not remember any of the other stories.  The story itself was short, as I said, maybe 2 pages (card sides) long, and illustrated with 1 or 2 drawings of 2 large (maybe 30-50') statues that vaguely resembled Easter Island statues but had arms and legs. One statue was sitting/laying on the ground, and the other was standing nearby. There had been pictures of the statues taken quite a few years previously, and a person was in a small plane taking more pictures now. Comparing the pictures it was noticed that the statues were slightly moved (the standing one's hand had moved closer to what appeared to be a gun on it's hip), and it was determined that they weren't statues but rather creatures who lived at a much slower time rate than humans, and that the standing one was coming to the defense of the fallen one.  Does this sound familiar to anybody?
116375
I remember reading this as a kid and it starts out with:   a boy in his home village where the other kids are mean to him during sports and they heat up their home with floating logs or something.   The kid is being hunted by some reaper character and that reaper finds him at a place called "The Edge" or something similar.   He buys a glove covered in an expensive dust that purifies things and is really rare.  In one book they had to climb down the edge for some reason.  There was another part where people only communicated telepathically and when sneaking into somewhere he only thought of light.  One of the main things is the floating ships and how he is really good at flying them and he assembles a team for a mission or something.  There is like float powder and stuff.  I read this close to 10 years ago.
30881
I'm looking for a story where a small number of humans and members of alien species are abducted by alien slavers. I believe they had canine or feline characteristics. I don't recall how it happened, maybe the slavers were betrayed by their employers, but in the end the slaves and their captors were thrown into a large arena of sorts and were being hunted. It was very Hunger-Games-esque. The humans slowly formed a kind of friendship with one of their former captors, although I believe he ended up dying. I don't remember how the story ended.   Two very specific things I remember:   The food intended for the slaves aboard the spaceship was color-coded according to species.   The slaver aliens follow some strange code of honor that forbids them from using ranged weaponry in personal combat. When questioned why they carried guns aboard their ship, they explained to the humans that they did not intend to use them to kill, but considered them tools for herding cattle.