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openNo Title Literature
I'm trying to remember a fantasy novel. I think the title begin with an A or E. It opens with a guy assassinating a woman, most likely a queen or other powerful figure, by throwing her off a dragon. Their is royalty invovled. A white dragon is supposed to be a royal wedding gift, but the party taking the dragon to the castle is attacked and the dragon escapes into the wild with its handler. It is revealed that dragons are not dumb, but are highly intelligent with a racial memory. Long ago, Humans and dragons were at war and humans were losing badly until they discovered the drug which is a closely guarded secert. Now, the white dragon is free she remembers all of this plus a couple hundred years of enslavement. The white dragon frees another dragon who dies killing humans or attempting to kill humans. People who raise dragons from eggs are peasants and die of a horrible disease that comes from the baby dragons.I think their skin slowly becomes solid. However, their riders are rich, because the dragons are controlled by the royalty and are really expensive to purchase and maintain. The human characters are mainly bastards with lots of backstabbing and murdering. I think their are three sisters, all princesses, one married, one to be married off, and the other independent minded and loves to ride dragons.
openNo Title Literature
A sci-fi kids book, although might be teen as well, published sometime in the last decade. It's set in a normal small town in the US. Several kids decide to build a humanoid robot. They load up numerous different books on his system, to give him an understanding of science and whatnot. Unfortunately, no one bothers to put any sort of inhibitions in his system. The robot goes berserk, although I can't remember how far off the deep end he goes. I remember that the kids try to pass the robot off as an exchange or transfer student from Peoria, Illinois. At the end of the story, the Cool Old Guy, who is probably the grandfather or non-parent relative of one of the kids, electrocutes/incapacitates/destroys the robot with a device connected to a telephone. I think he gets wise to the robot's existence towards the end. I remember that he calls the school in Peoria but finds that the android never went to school there. I can't remember the name of this book, or even any of the names of the characters. Thanks!
openNo Title Literature
Trying to recall a novel wherein the hero would put on a helmet and become a berserker, and he had to gain mastery over the helmet in order to use its strength effectively.
This is for my dad, actually - he thinks it was called "Deathstalker," but that's not turning up what he's looking for.
openNo Title Literature
This was a fairly recent novel, last ten years or so. The cover was marked with the "Sci Fi Essential Books" logo, but I can't seem to find it using that. The main character was one of a set of brothers (probably seven, I forget) whose father was a mountain and mother was a washing machine. He befriended a group of young people living in a boarding house or some such, but mostly one girl who had wings constantly trying to grow from her back. I seem to remember this led to a But Your Wings Are Beautiful situation between them. One or more of the main character's brothers were evil, and I think he was the only one remotely "normal" in his family. This ringing a bell for anyone?
openNo Title Literature
Swedish novel, which I believe I read for school. The characters were school children, probably early teenagers. The main character was named Erik, he was in love with a girl named Pia but she didn't like him at all. He admired some Swedish athlete, might have been a skier but unsure about that, who had a famous catchprase I cannot recall (wasn't Stenmark, though). He once got said athlete's autograph with a dedication to Pia, who in response took it and burned it to show she wasn't interested. Took place not quite in the modern day, but at least in the later half of the 1900's, probably 70's-80's.
Not that I especially want to read it again, but not being able to remember the name of the book or said athlete and his catchphrase is driving me absolute nuts...
openNo Title Literature
I remember reading this book when I was very young. It was about this cat, and he was watching this astronaut go through training to go to the Moon. The cat ended up going to the moon with the astronaut. So, on the moon, he found this mountain filled with these alien plants, and had his suit ruptured. The alien plant was able to be used to patch it, merging completely with the suit. There was something about a spider. I remember this book was fairly old and worn-looking. I'm sorry if this is too vague/incorrect.
openNo Title Literature
There was a picture book I used to have about a little boy whose grandparents accidentally left him with the aardvark at the zoo because they had really bad eyesight. The momma aardvark was also confused about why the boy wasn't eating ants or anything, and eventually they got them switched back.
Sound familiar to anyone? I'd like to know the title, as this was one of the picture books I really remember.
openNo Title Literature
I recall seeing this in the library when I was a kid; it's a children's book or at least a part of a children's anthology book. I don't remember any words, and each page has one picture on it. It shows how one village/town finds a giant egg, and how they worked together to open it, pour out the insides on a giant frying pan, cook the contents into a giant omellete and have a feast. As they did all this they get to have some fun, like, if I recall correctly, skating along the giant frying pan as if it was a frozen lake or an ice skating rink. I also remember after eating the omellete they turned the shell into a condo. This story really made me crave for eggs!
openNo Title Literature
I seem to recall a very obscure Fairy tale (I think). It was about a young girl who was kidnapped by an old witch, and Every day the witch would test the girl by sending her to a stream. She told her that if she could fill a bucket with water using only a fork, that she would release her back to her parents.
Any ideas.
Edited by pokedude10openNo Title Literature
There's SF series of stories or novels or whatever, where there are loads of other worlds accessible via some sort of a portal planet, and by entering each world you are being changer into one of the inhabitants.
openNo Title Literature
Okay, this is one that's been bugging me for years. It was a pretty thick fantasy novel, hardcover, and the cover had a girl standing in front of a pair of gates that had wings wrought into the design, so it looked a bit like she had wings. I remember the title being something very simple, and I'm pretty sure it was just one word.
Setting was either France, or something like it in feel. Or maybe it was just the characters that gave me that impression. Anyways, the main character is/was nobility of some kind, I think. She definitely was in the palace for a time, taking care of the queen, I believe, along with a bunch of other girls. They would take some kind of pill to give them enough energy to take care of the queen, dance, and socialize all the time.
For the plot, there were, I think, 3 machines that the people had discovered/unearthed. They didn't understand what they were, but I know they eventually started feeding people into one of them to kill them. It was the one with a more feminine name, Kokotte or something like that (spelled phonetically, because I remember taking the trouble to sound it out). There were also women that called themselves the "Coquettes of Kokotte". The main character's grandmother is fed to this machine.
There was also a boy, a street-urchin type, I think, towards the end that takes in the main character and hides her from people that are searching for her.
Anyone know of/read this? Much appreciated. :)
Edited by oneboot17openNo Title Literature
There's a kids' novel I read in the 80s or 90s that I want to add to But You Were There, and You, and You, but I don't recall the title. This girl's sister or cousin gets kidnapped by evil goblins and she goes on a quest to rescue her. Her quest companions include a robot similar to her know-all brother, and an eagle who reminds her of her father. At one point they meet the queen, who has no legs (the girl's mother is bedridden with illness). And the goblins turn out to have been torturing the sister or cousin by brushing her teeth until the enamel thins and scrubbing her face until she loses layers of skin (yeah, good hygiene as Nightmare Fuel. It was that sort of book...)
Edited by DaibhidCopenNo Title Literature
My girlfriend is trying to remember a Young Adults book (maybe in more than one part) that involved both killer sheep and 'zombie' snails (that when captured in a box, would move in the direction of the Big Bad). The protagonists were brother and sister, and their mother had died in a bus crash previously - there's a scene where they revisit the decaying bus and time starts skipping backwards, a skeleton of a goat rebuilds itself. Kind of creepy but offbeat in tone. Probably had a green cover?
openNo Title Literature
A couple of years ago I read on the wiki a description of a short story. I'm having trouble remembering the name of the story.
Basically a guy goes on vacation on some beach after his wife has died and meets this girl there who claims to be a time traveller. Eventually they fall in love. This girl is using her fathers time machine to travel back in time but has limited amounts of use.
Eventually she uses the time machine to go back to when the man is younger and changes her name and becomes his secretary and it turns out the girl is his wife.
Sorry about the long post but I really loved this story and want to find it again.
openNo Title Literature
I read this book a long time ago. It had a toy soldier who came alive, and it was written in Ye Old Butchered English. Not much to go on, but I would appreciate any leads.
openNo Title Literature
This was a short story we had to read in 12th grade. Possibly by a Canadian author who I think is male. The plot was very similar to Devil Went Down To Georgia. A town is corrupt from this dude who makes booze. A priest discovers that it's the devil and wants to take him down. He goes to confront the devil, gets into a fiddle contest and wins. In the end he destroys the devil and then marries his daughter.
openNo Title Literature
You know that show with the guy that does the things? And his friend is that dude that's always doing stuff?
openNo Title Literature
This a book I read back in the sixth grade. I remember specific details about it, it was about this seemly boy genius (or at least top of his class), I remember he discreetly gave party invitations to some of his classmates for a tea party or something so that the uninvited people wouldn't feel left out. He was once bullied and had his book bag painted to say "I am a ass" which he changed to say "I am a passenger on spaceship earth". His teacher (or some other adult) was a paraplegic but still drove. He was wondering how she 'activated the pedals'. I think there was some kind of show with a female dog in there too.
Edited by 041744openNo Title Literature
I'm choosing literature but this is actually a comic featured in Heavy Metal magazine. It was featured about the early 90s, I think (at the earliest the end of the 80s). I only saw the issue being read by a bunch of schoolmates and the rest of the details are all hearsay. From what I saw, it was about a tribe of women on an alien planet. They lure warrior men to go down a huge cliff wall, where the rest of the tribe hide in waiting to capture them. Once the men are caught, the women would tie them up and have sex with them to impregnate themselves; then they would, errr, cook them for the whole tribe to eat. From what I've heard, the planet was slowly falling apart (hence the giant cliff faces) and the inhabitants try to keep it together with cables/rope, and the women follow the ways of the black widow spider (hence their treatment towards men). I really would like to know the title of this story and who made it, and even the issue of the Heavy Metal mag that featured it. Thanks!
avatar: Durtal Okay, this might be a long shot, but: does anyone remember a series of science fiction guidebooks from sometime before the early 90s (possibly from the 70s or 80s) that were written as in-universe scholarly books about near future space wars and space ships? There were at least two of them, both hardcover. They had a lot of old-fashioned science fiction pictures, some of which featured spaceships in bright colors like pink and blue.
I used to take them out of the library when I was a kid in the early 90s but never knew why they were written as if they were true, because they didn't seem to be based on any preexisting franchise. I remember I liked the one that seemed to detail the war ships used in a recently ended war among factions in our solar system more than the one that focused on trade routes in a time of peace. I think the universe of the books focused more on our solar system and lacked any aliens or interstellar travel, but I could be wrong.
I'm going nuts. Maybe they really were reference books from the future.