In hopes this doesn’t get locked…
One I’ve been trying to find for years - has to be at least 20 years old, if not more.
A scientist uses a hollow rubber statuette to hold leftover bits of experimental ooze. The ooze becomes sentient and mobile, and goes on a bit of an adventure. I believe the story ends with the ooze being put into the skull of a body that has lost its brain (or never had one), and becoming human.
Sort of a Pinocchio vibe, I guess. With some Pygmalion, maybe.
“The Smallest God” by Lester Del Rey, published in 1940 (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?45385). Would have found it faster but I kept thinking Ted Sturgeon or Fred Brown
AHA! I was thinking it could be something other than polyglot, but “who you” is hard to search for.
Of course, now “I Polyglot” turns up one search result: this thread. Asking to identify a SF story has a kind of quantum observer effect.
I asked about this once before on the Dope with no results, but I’ll happily try again.
This was a novel. Paperback. Prolly 1970s. I thought it was called Pen Island or Penitentiary Island but I’ve never been able to find it under that name.
Plot: In the future, crime is bad and society forms a new prison on an island (a la Escape From NY, etc.) Man is sent to an offshore penitentiary (framed for the death of his wife, I think). Guard towers out in the ocean form a perimeter. He has to learn and adapt to life with brutal men and women on the Island, where the most popular past time is either playing or watching a rough and tumble sport that is a cross between football, rugby, and a small riot.
He finds a woman, eventually becomes friends with the nasty guy who he tussled with when newly arrived, and in the end somehow manages to storm a tower and broadcast to the world what was really happening on Pen Island.
I’ve been trying to find this for more than 25 years now with no luck. I’m pretty sure I read it in the late 70s or very early 80s (no later than 82), and it was a book that I found in boxes of things at my grandparents house while visiting one summer. It was a lot of fun, and I’d love to find it and sit it next to my cherished copy of Walpurgis 3.
Sounds a bit like, but probably isn’t, Robert Heinlein’s short story “Coventry”: Coventry (short story) - Wikipedia
You say fantasy, but I’m remembering something similar, and it was SF. A human ship had been blown up in alien space and one of the aliens was raising a human child in order to give his people someone who might be able to communicate with the next humans that he was assuming would eventually come.
There were movies and such from the ship to expose the child to, so it’s not like he thought that all humans would just be able to talk to each other. It wasn’t an assassin he was raising the boy to be, but something else, something with status within the alien society. They’re used as judges. I remember a flashback with the alien’s daughter saying something like, “Decide between me and ____”, a request which trapped him into attempting to train her as a whatever, even knowing that she’d fail and die. So what I’m remembering was not told from the boy’s perspective, at least no totally.
Regarding the stones, not only was there a stone hidden under the fire in the room, (which was built on sand), but there was a stone hidden a foot under the stone hidden under the fire. Sorry that I don’t remember more. I think I read it in the late seventies or early eighties.
The date doesn’t fit, but “The Penal Colony” by Richard Herley sounds close (see here http://www.amazon.com/Penal-Colony-Richard-Herley/dp/0345358759). Amusingly, when I googled “Peniteniary Island novel” the first item found is this thread.
This is a really good story, by the way…
Hey, you are pretty good. 
Now to find a copy of it…
Weird, I don’t remember anything about aliens. But the bit about the second stone in the fireplace I do remember now that you say it, so it must be the same story. It may not have been mostly from the boy’s point of view, but he is really the only character I remember.
Yeah, I’ve looked at this book before, and 2 things don’t fit: the date, and there’s no mention of the brutal brand of football they play. The football thing was a large part of the book, with at least 1 chapter on practices/training and 1 describing a complete game.
I’ve also seen Desolation Island by Terry Lloyd Vinson when I google, but it’s way too recent.
They both sound like good reads, tho, so maybe the search hasn’t been totally in vain, eh.
You have to know the names of Mars’ other two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Then you get a third moon keeping the -os ending.
De La Rue writes:
> I was thinking it could be something other than polyglot, but “who you” is hard
> to search for.
O.K., here’s an opportunity for a learning experience. The SDMB is not just a place to get questions answered, it’s a place to learn how to answer those questions yourself. It hasn’t been easy for me to say this at times. There have been occasions when I point out to a poster that they could easily have answered their question themselves with an easy search on the right website, but they reply (in effect), “Screw you. It’s not my job to do any searching. It’s your job. I’m far above that sort of work. That’s why I come to the SDMB, to make you do my work for me.” Sorry, this isn’t aimed at you, De La Rue, but I’ve got nasty replies from other posters when I try to explain to them how to answer questions themselves.
Look at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi
Click on “Advanced Search.”
Since I was fairly sure that the title was “I _____, Who You?,” I entered the word “I” into “Term 1,” the word “who” into “Term 2,” and the word “you” into “Term 3” (all this in the “Title Search Form”). When I clicked on “Search Query,” I get a page of answers. One of them is “I Plinglot - Who You?,” written by Frederik Pohl. So it takes less than a minute to answer your question if you realize that the word “polyglot” isn’t there, but “I,” “who,” and “you” are there.
It’s in “The Early Del Rey” which is a nice book to have anyway (that’s where I read it). According to ISFDB it’s also in a collection called “Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age” edited by Terry Carr.
Thanks Wendell - I use ISFDB all the time but I didn’t know about the advanced features.
Can you tackle a children’s story for me?
It was a series, which is to say that there were at least two books by the same author with the same main characters.
One main character was a little boy from Earth. The other was a little boy from the (i.e., Earth’s) moon.
The totality of my recollection is that they visited the moon in one of the books and someone commented that while scientists on Earth were busy trying to learn more about the speed of light, scientists on the moon were trying to learn about the speed of darkness.
I read them ca. 1976-78. Been curious about them for several years now.
Looking forward to it!
Excellent point. As one browses or participates in a what-is-this-story thread, one hopefully picks up on useful databases and searches them first before turning to the SDMB in a last resort.
Also, a ISFDB note: any search terms in quotes will be listed as showing no results. Which I think tripped me up before, as I usually start a multiple-word search with the terms in quotes.
There was a story in Analog in the late '80s sometime. Archeologists where working in an urban landfill (Los Angeles)? Studying relatively recent history. They turned up the skeleton of a little girl, maybe 12 years old. It seemed like a tragic story, some girl gets kidnapped and killed, and buried in the dump. Then they found another skeleton, and another, and another. There were millions of skeletons in the landfill. It turned out the archeologists were the unknowing descendants of a body-snatchers style invasion, and these were the city’s former residents.
I’m not sure if there is a way to find this in ISFDB, since story entries don’t come with a synopsis (at least not the ones I checked from Analog).
That one I can answer off the top of my head: “Detritus Affected” by David Brin