If you are up for what might be a bit of a trivia challenge, help me identify the author and title of 4 books matching these descriptions. I remember reading these books 25 years ago and I enjoyed them, but being a kid, I just read whatever I got my hands on, I didn’t think to note the authors and seek out more books. So here are the clues:
A combat pilot in a world war 2 raid on the oil fields of Ploesti suddenly finds that he has entered a parallel universe which, strangely enough, is embroiled in its own world war 2. Clue: In the parallel universe, the surrogate for England is a country called Blodland.
A man wakes up to find that the US east of the Mississippi has been attacked by a combination of nuclear bombs and biological warfare and he is mostly alone. The US east of the Mississippi river has been cordoned off by the military. Memorable moment: The main character sneaks across the river by stealing a soldier’s bio-suit and I.D. tags. He is almost given away by the incongruity of the assumed name with his AB negative blood type, with the medic remarking “You must be some kind of Egyptian Moscowitz.”
A couple in another world is being pursued by a villain known as a “Beller”. The woman, for some reason, can be killed by a bell-like device, and she has neural implants in her brain that alarm when such a device is near. Memorable moment: They come back to earth and are put off by the taste of the preservatives that have been added to fast food since they have been away.
A character is trapped in an alternate primitive human world through a gate of light shaped like a circular rainbow. Memorable moment: A native tries to communicate that she has seen the gate by grabbing a handful of flowers and twirling them in a circle.
I’d enjoy reading these again, if anyone can identify these I’d appreciate it.
Nope. There were no civilizations involved, just hunter-gatherers. And the gate was definitely a circular rainbow sort of deal with no code-breaking involved, it was very specifically described. But thanks for trying.
That might be from Philip Jose’ Farmers Lords of Creation series. In one of the later books, Kickaha and his girlfriend ( one of the Lords ) are being pursued by enemies called Bellers. The Bellers are an ancient technology created by the Lords. They created bell shaped helmets designed to store and transfer human minds, so they could switch bodies. Unfortunately, they discovered that an unoccupied Bell will devolope it’s own mind. When various Lords used them, they were replaced by the Bellers, who tried to conquer the Lords.
No, it is not. The basic plot is that the ancestors to the Amerind went west instead of east and colonized Europe. Their society is close to early Twentieth century with a few major differences (no modern medicine for example). I’m quoting this from memory, since I read the book about 20 years ago.
Some Googling of “Blodland,” and a translation from a Portugeuse website, suggests that the book is Philip Jose Farmers The Gate of Time; according to that website, it was revised and expanded into Two Hawks from Earth in 1979.
On second thought, The Gate of Time may not be right for #1, based on this story descriptionRoger Two Hawks thought he’d probably bought it when he bailed out of his flaming bomber. His plane had made an eerie shudder just before he jumped, but nothing could have prepared him for what he found on the ground: Men dressed in skins, fighting with knives and arrows, speaking no language he’d ever heard. The War - and with it all the rest of the world he knew - had vanished, and been replaced by a savage struggle for control of a primitive parallel Earth. Two Hawks’ technological know-how makes him a valuable prize for his captors - too valuable to be set free … and too dangerous for the other side to leave alive.
Number 3 sounds like Behind the Walls of Terra, the fourth in the World of Tiers/Lords of Creation series by Farmer, as Der Trihs said.
The 4th one sounds like it could easlily be part of the same series as well - maybe one of the earlier ones. Looking for these gates was a big part of the overall plot of the series, iirc.
I read this in grade school, and distinctly remember the rainbow ring, and the young girl they met. I also recall a moment where they cooked some meat and she wouldn’t eat it, because she was used to it raw. I can’t tell for certain from the descriptions, but I’m pretty sure this is the book I’m remembering.
And while I’m here, and since I’ve got a nine-year-old who likes to read–
Among the juvenile SF I read in grade school was a book I liked tremendously at the time, but can’t remember the title or author. I had found it, oddly, in the school library, and it was not a new book, so it dates from before the seventies. A man in a spaceship was orbiting a star–there was something odd about the star, but the details don’t survive in my memory. The man’s brother had disappeared in the same place some time before. It turned out that creatures (for some reason the image in my mind is giant ice cream cones with tentacles) lived in the vacuum in an asteroid belt–there weren’t any planets orbiting the star, I think–and they had saved his brother somehow, and at the end of the book they were re-united.
I remember this book too! It’s got a young cavegal in it who keeps taking off her sarong and embarrassing the hero. For some reason I even remember a line of her dialogue: “die-tie-pie?”