Bassoe
Well-known member
So! We've all done it; watched a film/TV show/anime/video game/book and then forgotten what it is; so, if you post what you can remember of it here; we'll try to help. Also post your own requests for lost media identification.Going Postal by Terry Pratchett said:
A short scifi story in an anthology of short scifi stories - Setting is an entirely automated amusement park with a sort of Land Of Faerie theme. All park character robots are controlled by AIs made partially from uploaded human consciousnesses but only the protagonist, the leader of the Wild Hunt really understands this and remembers fragments of their human life. The park was abandoned a long time ago and apparently the civilization which built it deteriorated enough that centuries later when humans moved in, nobody interrupted either to stop the trespassing or protect the squatters from rampaging haywire robo-fair folk. A pack of vicious mechanical hellhounds the size of bears were involved. The story also had a "dog toy" consisting of a transparent plastic ball with a holographic projector displaying the moving illusion of a sort of tiny winged fairy inside it which they used to destroy the park's controlling computer by tossing it at it and having a bear-sized robotic dog stomp through the delicate vacuum tubes to 'fetch'.
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A short scifi story in an anthology of short scifi stories - A passenger aboard a STL starship is thrown overboard when the ship hits an asteroid fragment at relativistic speed and explodes. He survives thanks to his spacesuit, an AI and autodoc-equipped piece of clarketech which is probably smarter than he is but his trajectory is random enough that rescue efforts fail to find him. He spends the rest of his life adrift and after he dies, the AI goes a bit crazy and starts using the autodoc's sterilization equipment to selectively breed his gut microbes with the intention of recreating something sentient, eventually successfully.
Not part of the Great Ship series, although Mere's life in that series was similar. Nor was it Stephen Baxter's Fubar Suit.
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A short scifi story in an anthology of short scifi stories - A group of people at a bar in the near future discuss what traits a posthuman would require to genuinely be immortal, concluding that chief among them, their hypothetical posthuman would need to be able to manufacture all its own components using only equipment built into its own body, since if it was to live forever, a statistical unlikelihood like the collapse of technological civilization would, like any non-zero statistic multiplied by infinity, be inevitable and it would need to be able to modify itself to pass for a default human or whatever default humans evolve into to avoid being killed by any perticurally xenophobic culture of default humans or evolved default human descendants. The ending implies the person who brought the topic up in the first place was already such a posthuman created by a precursor civilization, gauging whether they could come out of hiding.
Also, it isn't Letter to a Phoenix by Fredric Brown, despite the obvious similarities. And I'm pretty sure it was newer than Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson.
Update, found it, Ancient Engines by Michael Swanwick.
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A short scifi story in an anthology of short scifi stories - Colonization of a new planet is having trouble due to a native species of nonsentient predatory animals, 'sphinxes', which are catastrophically overpowered, nearly indestructible monsters. The weakness of the sphinxes, they lay eggs which they abandon and the eggs aren't as invulnerable as their parents. I'm also pretty sure Ursula K. Le Guin's Vaster than Empires and More Slow was also reprinted in the same anthology, if that helps narrow things down.
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A short scifi story in an anthology of short scifi stories - A vaguely humanoid monster forms from plant and fungal tissue growing around a skeleton lost in a forest river. The result is only identified since the person the skeleton once belonged to had a metal plate in their skull.
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An alternate history short story in an anthology of short scifi stories, in which somehow, dynastic era china had conquered the entire world and was working on a space program. One of the human mathematicians involved in calculations was confronted with an amateur inventor demonstrating their new 'electronic calculating engine' which they accurately predicted that, if the technology was allowed to spread, would inevitably take their job and attempted to covertly dispose of the machine and its creator to protect their own job security. The story was probably based upon/inspired by/ripping off Ray Bradbury's The Flying Machine.
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A space opera novel with a planet of monks who control a quasi-religious monopoly on functional immortality through symbiotic/parasitic plants. There's a planet whose inhabitants are a group of 'monks' with a quasi-religious monopoly on functional immortality. There's a parasitic/symbiotic plant organism (I don't remember if it was microbial algae or a multicellular parasite or if it was sentient or not) native to said planet which can meddle with the biology of its host, fixing any damage, but only the monks have figured out how to communicate with/control it, so if anyone other than them tries to use it, they'll die horribly of parasitic plant growths. The monks have leveraged said power into various demands, including the establishment of a quasi-serf caste of offworld prospective immortality seekers. A couple decades of servitude in exchange for being allowed to leave and live forever.
The novel was not Cestus Dei by John Maddox Roberts, or Endymion by Dan Simmons.
Update, found it, Son of the Tree by Jack Vance.
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A child's guidebook to cosmological phenomena and theoretical concepts (dyson spheres, the fermi paradox, etc), with the addition of various unscientific but entertaining speculative biological theorization including 'Jupiter Fish', the high-gravity exoplanet Peg and its low-gravity moon Moo, both of them inhabited by alien life, an alternative 'human' from a timeline where different species took over in the cambrian period (it was radially symmetrical) and Robert L. Forward's Cheela and Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud (both mentioned by name).
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A space opera novel in which an extremely mechanistic future human culture completely lacking a concept of artwork and media for pleasure instead of merely transference of information makes first contact with an alien civilization.
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A novel in which one of the sideplots is a group of mad scientist sociologists who'd concluded that theocracy would the best political system, if its tendency of inevitably being taken over by power-hungry corruption instead of true believers could be avoided and this could be accomplished by making actual consequences for lack of faith. Specifically, by building self-replicating mechanical monsters which were programmed so that they could be warded off by specific ritualized rules and prayer necessitating the existence of a priestly caste in society to perform said rituals and prayer and on a randomized period measured in centuries, the rules of said rituals and prayers would randomly change to shake things up for the priestly caste.
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