Sure.
Yeah, go ahead. SF means ‘speculative fiction’ and includes fantasy. Perfectly valid for this thread. And as for not remembering details, people on this forum frequently solve puzzles with little information.
By all means, AHunter3, let’s hear it.
OK, here goes.
There was a contest set up like a sports event — in the sense that Team A and Team B are opponents, and the matches are one-on-one between a member of Team A against a member of Team B — but dead serious and not just for fun, as in “the loser dies”.
There was a character on (let’s say) Team A who either literally was a very young girl (but somehow cognizant way beyond her years) or else manifested that way… NOTE: there’s definitely a character matching that description in the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, so I keep going back to that thinking this is from that series, but I can’t find it [/NOTE] She has adorable cute mannerisms and essentially the personality of a preschooler but she’s calling the shots for Team A.
Team B (forces of evil, et al) has a seriously badass practitioner of whatever-the-heck it is they do against each other in the one-on-one thingie, and the little girl looks at the two teams and figures Team A has no one who can defeat him (pretty sure the badass is indeed a “him”) and going right on down the line Team B’s second-best would not be able to take out Team A’s second-best either. So she pits the best person from Team A against Team B’s number two warrior, Team A’s second best against Team B’s #3, and so on and this works well. Team A folks are high-fiving each other, not seeing where this is going. Then at the end she herself has to go out against the Team B badass and everyone realizes it’s going to be a massacre and it’s very touching & all what she’s done as she goes out there to her death at the age of four.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. I don’t remember if the contest-stuff was spell casting or whacking at each other with swords (although I’m guessing it’s supernaturalesque) or if there was a literal arena or what. I don’t know specifically that it was “age four” either but that kind of thing, very young.
Does this sound like any specific Jim Butcher tale, or anything else y’all have encountered?
The asymmetric match-ups (with the best warrior facing the second-best, and so on) is a plot point in Piers Anthony’s Battle Circle, but that didn’t have any precocious pre-schoolers.
And Ivy from the Dresden Files certainly never did anything like that, nor was there any such matchup between anyone else in those books.
I’ll have to look for a copy online to see. It also occurs to me that it sounds a little like Mother9Horse9Eyes. I’ll look at that too.
Good news! My friend figured out the first one. It’s from Another Earth:
From Another Earth
Rhoda Williams : You know that story of the Russian cosmonaut? So, the cosmonaut, He’s the first man ever to go into space. Right? The Russians beat the Americans. So he goes up in this big spaceship, but the only habitable part of it’s very small.
So the cosmonaut’s in there, and he’s got this portal window, and he’s looking out of it, and he sees the curvature of the Earth for the first time. I mean, the first man to ever look at the planet he’s from. And he’s lost in that moment.
And all of a sudden this strange ticking… Begins coming out of the dashboard. Rips out the control panel, right? Takes out his tools. Trying to find the sound, trying to stop the sound. But he can’t find it. He can’t stop it. It keeps going.
Few hours into this, begins to feel like torture. A few days go by with this sound, and he knows that this small sound… will break him. He’ll lose his mind. What’s he gonna do? He’s up in space, alone, in a space closet. He’s got 25 days left to go… with this sound.
So the cosmonaut decides… the only way to save his sanity… is to fall in love with this sound. So he closes his eyes… and he goes into his imagination, and then he opens them.
He doesn’t hear ticking anymore. He hears music. And he spends the sailing through space in total bliss… and peace.
Does anyone know of a scifi story (I’m not sure that it’s not a TV show, though) where a group of humans and non-humans are newly living and working together, and some of the humans stumble over the body of one of their non-human friends. People begin to think that one of the humans murdered him, but in the end it was all just a big misunderstanding because it turns out that the humans didn’t know that the “dead” character’s species periodically molts, and they had just found his shed old form? Kind of like an insect or hermit crab does, but a lot more fleshy like us than an exoskeleton which made the confusion more possible.
Since we’re expanding out into fantasy, there’s one or two that I’ve been wondering about, which I would have read in the late 80s or early 90s.
The first one was a fantasy novel with a kingdom that was laid under a terrible curse by some ancient evil sorcerer, and the only way to break the curse was a self-sacrifice using the Macguffin dagger. The main character was an innocent who was for some reason possessed by the spirit of that ancient sorcerer, and eventually ended up making that self-sacrifice… except that it turned out that he was fine afterwards, because the dagger killed the evil spirit possessing him, not him.
And then there was a series of books, of which I think that one was the first, but the rest of them were definitely the same series. I specifically remember two of the side characters, each of which eventually got their own books. One was an anthropomorphic griffon (referred to, of course, as The Griffon), who had a magical whistle that could be blown three times, to summon the three parts of his heritage: Once to summon a bunch of cat-people, once to summon a bunch of bird-people, and once to summon a bunch of faceless humanoids.
The other character was in the form of a horse (I think referred to as the Dark Horse), but was actually a manifestation of the Void between the worlds, that wizards travel through to go to other planes, or to teleport to other places on this plane. He had a friend who was another void manifestation, but shaped like a small humanoid, named “Yoreal”, or something like that, after the first wizard who summoned him and immediately exclaimed in surprise “You’re real!”.
That sounds rather like “Curse of Chalion” by Lois McMaster Bujold - it was published in 2001 though. There’s a demon inhabiting the hero’s body in the form of a tumor - and a knife attack destroys the demon (and the guy attacking the hero) but leaves the hero safe and healed.
“Werewolf Girl” by Nic Andersson. I wouldn’t know that, except that I read the same short story.
…
I have two:
one. a far future decadent (neo-feudalist?) society (yeah, one of those) with has forgotten death. a court jester or performance artist in a black leotard and a silver skull masks and two batons with fire at both ends, tries to remind them of death. Stephen Fabian illustrated it and it appeared in a late '70’s issue of Galaxy. I feel certain that I would remember the cover of that issue, but I haven’t found that exact one. (maybe I read it in a copy of the magazine with the cover ripped off?)
two. a title called something like “Our Lady of [something” .an alternative history story in which World War I drags on for decades. the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up after several decades. World War I has ended, but now (alternative history) World War II has begun. I remember this as an excellently written short story, which for some reason did not get enough attention. it appeared in early '80’s Asimov’s. I’ve looked on ISFDB but still turned up nothing.
Yup, Peter Morris, that’s definitely that one. None of the rest of the series sounds familiar, but then, that’s just going by plot synopses I’m finding online, and it was a long time ago I read them.
Note that particular book is a collection of previously published stories, and two new ones. It was published 2017, so you must have read the story in an earlier book or magazine. No wonder the others don’t sound familiar.
I saw it in a collection, probably published in the oughts, probably full of time travel stories, maybe with a foreward by Turtledove (was on a big kick of him around then). The story however, may be from way before that?
The sory created a time travel machine that went back in time, but was subject to quantum uncertainty, only changing things that wouldn’t have an effect on our timeline. One trip back saw three Roman soldiers at a certain point, another saw two.
A religious scientist found the execution of Jesus, then watched the resurrection happen miraculously. When he tried a second time, he saw the disciples break into the tomb to hide the body and tell the story of his resurrection.
A fun little story about faith. Any ideas what it would be?
Yeah, once I had the lead from that link, I looked up the original books (published starting in 1989, which would be about right).
I’ve read that one. I think it was originally published in Asimov’s. I’m sure I can find it. Stand by.
Great - that’s been a long-standing unidentified story. Hope you’re right.
No luck so far. But at least I can confirm that someone else remembers it. I recall that the scientist described himself to the narrator as a fundamentalist, and that at the end of the story he is drunk/distraught.