I didn’t read all of the pages, so forgive me if this one has already been done. And yeah, I’m probably on the fringe of what would be considered SF. But I think you might be up to the task. Actually, I’ll do two:
1: The majority of the human species is killed by a plague, and the few who remain are stranded on an island, eventually breed together, and ultimately a new descendant of humans evolves which resembles seals.
2: A special effects artist is hounded by his producer to create more and more frightening features on his puppet. He finally, in frustration, makes the puppet look somewhat like the producer, and the producer loves it.
Two juvenile (well, middle school age) ghost stories.
[ol]
[li]A brother and sister and their widowed mother move into a house in England to act as caretakers while the estate lawyers try to find an heir (Current Kids/CK). One wing of the house burned down long ago. While playing in the garden, they meet another brother and sister who are from a century and a bit prior to the current time (Prior Kids/PK). They used to live in the house and died in the fire. The fire was suspicious; the brother had inherited the estate when the PKs’ parents died and they were placed in the care of relatives, and the theory was that the relatives set the fire themselves. They had been mistreating the PKs, and the estate lawyer either ignored the Prior Kids reports/complaints or didn’t want to believe them. [/li]
The book is about the interactions between the two sets of children and, near the end, the boy slips back through time and with the aid of the ghost of the remorseful lawyer, the children who had originally died in the fire were rescued and the lawyer died instead. Later, the sister part of the Prior Kids’ siblings emigrated to America with the gardener’s son, whom she married. Her brother did not approve and disowned her.
At the end of the story, it is discovered that the Current Kids were descended from the sister of the Prior Kids, and the brother was the new owner of the estate. There was some discussion of time being like a wheel and that sometimes people could slip across the hub to visit the time directly across. I think the Prior Kids were named Sara and George, and the gardener’s son was Tom. I forget the Current Kids’ names, but they might even be Sara and George, also.
[li]The second story starts when a family of three (mom, dad, son) move into an old home in, I think, New England. The house was built before the Revolutionary War. The son meets the ghost of a boy about his age who died during the War, but not because he was in the army. He died because a neighbor of his family was a Tory, and he’d seen the Tory do … something? At any rate, he also knew the location of buried valuables (family silver maybe?), and the Tory neighbor killed him because of that. The ghost needed the valuables to be found so that, even after a hundred year, it would expose the neighbor as a traitor, but he always got his left and right mixed up so initially told the new boy the wrong location to dig.[/li][/ol]
Thanks alot! This had been bugging me for years! For the longest time I thought it had been “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” though the Wikipedia summary for that book doesn’t mention that plot thread I had in my head.
<gapes in awe>
Yes … yes, I think that’s it. The cover looks familiar, and the various synopses I’m coming across sound about right. How did you even guess that?
And it’s not even Richard Peck. I was convinced it was of his because of The Ghost Belonged to Me, and it so isn’t him. (I own all of his Blossom Culp books, so I thought it was him but not the character and I just hadn’t figured out which book it was.)
Here’s one maybe a little more obscure… set in a spaceship headed towards a secret destination, beset by a terrorist organization, they finally reach their goal only to be utterly shocked by what they find… major, major hint, using spoiler tags, for those who want to really test their knowledge:
Another book series that has been stumping me for decades
Saw this on the shelves in late 90’s/early 00’s. One of those books that was part of a series. It was about a second American civil war where a wealthy Ross Perot type funds a civil war that results in the US military vs a bunch of militia units in the midwest. Point of view was from the US military I believe. Cover for one was an American fighter jet dogfighting with a militia fighter jet over the Kansas cornfields and the militia fighter jet had bright yellow markings on it. I have a vague memory of the full plot for the entire series but the facts above are stuff I know for sure happened.
OK I’ve got one. It’s a book that I read around 1978-9. I would have been about 12.
There was an ice age and everybody went underground. the story takes place in New York and they haven’t actually communicated with anybody else in a long time. The protagonists have radio contact with someplace in Europe (which is illegal). There are also signs that the ice age may be ending. They get exiled from the city with some supplies and go off and I think cross the Atlantic over the ice and have various adventures along the way.
Time of the Great Freeze https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Time_of_the_Great_Freeze
"Time of the Great Freeze is a science fiction novel by American author Robert Silverberg, first published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1964. The novel concerns a group of explorers, living in an underground city somewhere in North America three hundred years after an environmental catastrophe has triggered a new Ice Age. They decide to leave their haven after making contact with London via radio transmissions. Once on the surface, they set out across the mostly frozen wasteland of North America, and eventually across the icy surface of the Atlantic Ocean, and along the way encounter descendants of survivors of the original catastrophe who were unable to seek refuge underground. "