Reminds me of Clarke’s The Pacifist The Pacifist - Wikipedia but sounds a bit different than you described
No, that’s definitely not it.
On thinking about it some more, the problematic question that was asked might have been something about a peace plan that involved nuking one’s own territory. Or maybe I’m conflating that from a different story.
I was reminded of this by the current MPSIMS thread about reincarnation. I don’t recall much about this work; I don’t know if it was a short story or a novel, but I’m pretty sure I read it in the 1960s or 1970s, possibly in Analog magazine, possibly not. The only thing I recall is the idea that reincarnation happens routinely: when a person dies, their consciousness is (immediately?) transferred to a newborn baby. However, the shock of the transition and finding oneself in a new helpless body with only partially operational sensory input drives the person insane, so they almost immediately lose the memory of their previous life. I’m not positive, but I think that part of the plot involved some technology to cushion the transition, which would allow newly born people to retain their previous memory and personality. Does this ring a bell with anyone?
Bears a certain resemblance to “Soul Search” by Spider Robinson (published in Omni in 1979)
Just read that online, nothing about finding a way to preserve memories across reincarnation.
I’ll keep on it - it sounds so familiar
I can’t help with that one; but it’s made me think of another. Also a short story, I think, but I’m not sure; and not recent but I’m not sure how old. Incarnation exists, at least for humans, but apparently only within the species. Human population has gotten so high that we’ve run out of human souls, and children are being born apparently physically fine but effectively mindless, because there wasn’t any soul available to enter into them.
Actually, this is a plot point in Heinlein’s Beyond this Horizon - they find evidence of reincarnation by using a telepathy machine to read the mind of an unborn child, who turns out to have a lot of memories of the outside world, but after birth, most of them fade
Hm, I definitely did read Beyond This Horizon; maybe that’s the book I’m remembering.
An interesting variation on that theme is “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August”. It’s reincarnation within a time loop. When the guy dies, he’s reborn in his original baby self. Over the first few years, all his memories gradually return.
There are other people like him, and one near-constant is that the first couple of times they’re re-born, they go a little crazy as toddlers, because they’re remembering all this stuff that kids shouldn’t know, and predicting the future, and they can’t handle it. Most of them end up committing suicide a couple of times before they figure out that this time loop thing is real.
My wife is looking for a book where a comet hits or comes close to the Earth- and it is not Lucifers Hammer (a masterpiece) or the Clarke one?
Maybe this one?
Could be.
The Vitanuls by John Brunner
Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s it.
(And . . . I know a Lee Eckhardt. Might not be the same one, though.)
It is a small world (after all)
And it’s only fair that I cite scifistackexchange - they’ve cited the SDMB several times.
The Age of Unreason series by Gregory Keyes involves a comet or asteroid hitting Earth. I don’t remember which book it was; it might have been Newton’s Cannon.
Don’t really think this is it, but H Beam Piper’s Last Enemy is the only thing that comes to mind.
Yeah I thought of that one too
At least 30 years ago I read a science fiction novel. Here’s what I remember of it:
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took place on a planet, not on spaceships
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main character was female
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either nobility of some sort or at least wealthy
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she had a brother with a short name (“Rif” or something) who was a sexual sadist and would abuse the female staff
…and that’s all! I almost certainly own it, as I wasn’t using libraries much back then, which means it’s on my several shelves of SF. But I’ve looked repeatedly and just don’t recognize it.