Asklemmy

Story Time In the early years of the 1980's I got a book from the scholastic book fair. It was the second in a series, but even without backstory I loved that book. I read it over and over till the spine gave out. We grew up on the poorer side so replacement was not an option. Eventually puberty hit and focus shifted. Then one day like a dream I started to think about that story. The name of the book and characters lost, I sometimes would bring up the story in conversation and nobody would know what I was talking about. Fast forward to the mid 2000's and a movie came out. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I loved that movie so much and I couldn't understand why. When I eventually heard about the series of books it was based on I bought the whole set. I tell you, reading Prince Caspian after all those years was like getting to spend time with a long passed loved one. To this day still one of my favorite stories.

I read a book that a friend lent me in high school where orcs were the protagonists. They found a portal or time travel machine (can't remember which) that let them travel to modern times and comandeer modern military equipment like assault rifles, tanks, and helicopters. I always wanted to finish reading it, but returned it before I could. I've tried searching for it but have come up empty handed.

Young children's book, I viewed it at preschool. I remember being so engrossed with the art. I think it took place in space and the little colorful characters looked like sparkly Dots candy. I have tried to find it as an adult, but there's so many children's picture books is impossible to search what little info I have to go off.

i used to be an avid reader and scifi short stories were my addiction. i've forgotten most of the titles, but can remember fascinating aspects that have haunted me over the decades.

one is in the future and human beings have micro-robots in their bodies ensuring whatever life span that they wanted for themselves. the protaganist in the story wants to go home and rest but she can't because she's lived in everyone single house in her neighborhood at point or another in her last few hundred years of existence and she can't remember which one she's currently live in. she revisits her most cherished memories of living in the neighborhood to help her jog her memory and ends up remembering which one is the right home.

another is set in a near-ish future where the non-rich retire in virtual-reality-like micro-realities because they cannot afford to reired real life due to the american government's severe austerity policies and a generations-long severe economic depression. the people in these realities end up having children within these realities and the reactionary christo-fascist american government labels the is new life as abominations to be controlled. the communities of these virtual realities seek to emancipate themselves via migration to canada; but doing so is illegal and the american government has created an ice/gestapo-like police force to stop them. the people natively born in the virtual realities have existences that span weeks in the human world and the culture & time-scale it engenders makes them incapable of "passing" as humans in the android bodies that they have commissioned built for them in the black market for the journey to canada; so they rely on the retirees who had lived in the human world to control the android bodies with their virtual realities stored inside them. the protagonist volunteers and almost fails until an alien intervenes.

a third is also set in the future that has time travel and a corporation has levied it to kidnap people from the past to force them to work for the corporation as slave labor out of thier ignorance of the future. the protagonist is not one such person, but he is forced to work with a younger version of himself who he knows despises him for "selling out" to the corporation and he remembers the virulent hatred he felt for his older self when he was younger. they both work in hr and the older one's job is to fire the employees of the company right before they encounter life altering sicknesses/injuries/death to avoid insurance payouts to the employee's families. he has a change of heart after he's tasked with firing an employee moments before he is killed by a dinosaur at dinosaur-tourism theme park that the corporation's subsidiary has created and he himself is fired and then killed almost right afterwards by same dinosaur.

In elementary school, when I was still learning English as an immigrant, I read about a third of this book about a society that criminalized every kind of candy under the guise of being healthy. Like actually criminalized, the book talks about how kids caught with candy are sent for "rehabilitation" and any adults selling candy to kids are imprisoned for life. It wasn't until I was older did I realize it was most likely commentary on the War on Drugs and now I really want to finish it but don't remember what it's called.

I read a fiction in high school about like the afterlife, and it mentioned the best English playwright wasn't Shakespeare. It was some nobody who only showed his writing to his neighbor, but the neighbor was an asshole and told him it was trash. Don't remember anything else about it but that stuck with me.

1950s-1960s pulp Japanese sci-fi show in black and white where the villains are dressed in silly-looking outfits with antennae and a big "Z" in the centre. The first episode's plot was about a scientist's daughter being kidnapped.

It was about a futuristic world where the world and technology were intertwined and people would change how they looked, often becoming part animal or whatever, but then the technology goes down (I forget how) and everyone has to adapt to the real world and learn to live in it again

Children's book, isolated world that exists on a 3 tiered mountain and is totally self sufficient and the fig somehow is the staple crop. Young adult gets curious and explores and finds the dystopian truth. The unique bit was the architect of the mountain paradise thing had such a large intellect he used strings of 6 numbers to recall memories like a biological card catalog. There was also a website where you could plug in the numbers from the book to pull up like blueprints and pictures. I wanna say it starts with "Ae-" but I havent been able to find it since I read it in '08

Is your book Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein?

A much shorter list would be all the books/stories I am sure of.

I had a story cassette I cannot find again. The story was a guy who went hunting. He had three bullets, missing the first two shots. The third did a whole bunch of crazy shit. I remember a limb split, catching three turkeys by their feet. Somehow he got a buck. I think the limb fell on a bear. I can't remember much more but it went on.

A story I read about a company (?) creating an AGI which for safety reasons is disconnected from the internet. It then creates business plans or something for them, and they give it more and more compute power, until it can generate fantastic movies and series for people to enjoy. They publish those stories which become instant successes. The AGI slowly uses these movies to make society a better one by influencing the viewers subconsciously. I don’t remember the ending, but it was quite a good story.

There was a really good book about a ghost ship that used to come and go at a port. I read it in highschool. I remember it had a purple cover but I don't remember the name.

Somewhere in a book of sci fi and fantasy short stories for children, there's a fourth or fifth grade retelling of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", and it was fucking terrifying at that age.

A short-story compilation, horror book that had a blue cover with the names of all the authors down one side of the cover.

The well-written, but particularly disturbing story was about a girl street waif, who had been found by a man on his doorstep. She had an injury and he nursed her back to health(then the rest of the story happened, which contains spoilers). Very descriptive medical assistance passages.

I kind of think Dread by Clive Barker may have been one of the other stories included, but that is possibly misremembered.

Read circa 1994.

I have one in mind, I'll tell you it if I remember the name.

I found a book in the library around 2007ish?

The cover looked like a weird toilet I thought at the time, I didn't understand it. It was about the life of a guy who grew up gay in some Southeast Asian country, maybe Vietnam? And how terrible it was and the last chapter was him immigrating somewhere west and living with a lover.

I was a very sheltered 16 year old so it had an impact, even though I wasn't a boy or gay. Just a sad part of life.

Never found it again. Googled books with toilet covers or a gay kid from Asia, but it's not really specific I guess.

End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov (and its reimagining in Palimpsest (2009) by Charles Stross) involve a time-traveling secret organization that has its headquarters hidden away in time/outside of time. They don't so much drain resources though as manipulate history to ensure a safe course.