Understood. I’ll take a look myself and see what I can find.
Another vaguely remembered book series.
There is a war going on between alien species. The side made up of largely pacifistic species are losing badly but discover Earth and realize that recruiting a species with a long, long history of fighting would help them. Which it eventually does. The response by the other, more aggressive side is to surrender, knowing that after being at space war for a few hundred years humanity would turn its own violent tendencies against its own side.
ETA: I was just thinking it might be Alan Dean Foster as it seems like his style, and it is - it’s The Damned Trilogy. D’oh!
ETA again: Which was mentioned in this thread back in 2008.
Asked, answered and me quoted all before I need respond. Cool!
Also the theme of one of Alan Moore’s “Time Twister” stories - see the second one on this page (although the first one is fun too).
Actually, you answered it 17 years before I asked the question.
< narrows eyes at Andy >
So…tell us again how you’re so familiar with all these “time travel” stories?
I loved those stories.
I just ran across the issue with the first story in it and reread it tonight. So much fun
Not really SF but set in a future dystopian society where the US is ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship. I think it comes from around the height of the Cold War and is supposed to be an Awful Warning of how we mustn’t let it happen here. Scene is a junior school classroom where the teacher has been telling the kids how everything they have is due to the “great leader”, and to prove it she suggests that they should close their eyes and ask the Great Leader to give them some candy. They all do that except for one kid, little Tommy or whatever, who peeks and sees the teacher going round putting candies on each kid’s desk.
The Children’s Story, by James Clavell.
The part that got to me was when the US flag was taken down, cut up, and distributed to the class. Johnny, the kid who’d peeked, thought he was wonderfully lucky because he’d gotten a piece with a star on it.
All this talk of time travel puts me in mind of a novel I read back in the late ‘80s. The 20th century world is on a timeline where Spain is the dominant world power (Francis Drake never managed to burn the Spanish Armada), time travel technology was invented by a monk named Bonaventura, and the protagonist is a cop who specializes in solving and preventing Time Machine-enabled crimes.
This might be a novel that was cobbled together from a series of short stories about the cop. In the last chapter, at the end of his adventure he returns home to 20th century Nuevo Yorke, only to find that time travel doesn’t work any more, Drake did burn the Armada, Bonaventura never invented time traveling tech, and now he’s stuck in New York.
The author might have been John Varley, but I won’t swear to that. (ETA: probably not; none of the titles in the bibliography on his Wikipedia page rings a bell.)
John Brunner, perhaps - “Times Without Number”
Holy cow! You ARE pretty good at identifying Science Fiction stories!
As advertised!
Glad I found the right one.
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N/M
Responded to the now deleted comment
Sorry…I responded to you in the other thread (I forgot where I was…my fault)
I have no idea why this just happened to pop into my head the other day, but …
At least a novella if not a book, probably vintage 1970s. It takes place on/in a planet/place that had been ruled with an iron fist by a being known as The Deel (there’s more than a touch of Celtic mythology in play: its servants include flamewings and pookas). The work I remember is actually a sequel, and takes place after The Deel had been overthrown; the protagonist returned to the planet/place for reasons that were somewhat obscure, but IIRC involved getting into The Deel’s mountaintop HQ.
Not a lot to go on, I know, but my search-fu isn’t giving me anything and perhaps what I’ve provided will jog someone’s memory.
Was it Emil Petaja’s DOOM OF THE GREEN PLANET, the sequel to his LORD OF THE GREEN PLANET?
Horror novel from past 15 years
This bioweapon is accidentally released from a secret Government weapons lab on an island in a forested area.
A bunch of locals and people camping on the island get it, and it manifests itself with something like tapeworms x100 where it gives whoever catches it an incredible ravenous hunger that’s impossible to ignore and a lot of people when they reach the peak of the infection try to eat other people because they’re delirious with hunger. There’s a scene of somebody trying not to eat other people but they’re so hungry they start eating rocks and it winds up killing them because all the rocks they eat destroy their insides.
Nailed it in one. When I looked it up I saw that it was paired with Dean R Koontz’s Star Quest (which I distinctly remember, since I was a fan of Koontz when he was writing SF) in an Ace Double. DotGP wasn’t the reason I picked it up, which is why I didn’t recall the plot correctly.
Grazie. Now to see if I can find it — and the first story — for less than the $85 Amazon would want (if they had it).