Okay so, I am very bad at remembering science fiction titles or authors. (It is very easy for gatekeeping fans to say I’m not a real fan because I don’t have an encyclopedic memory for every novel or story I’ve read, or every show that I watched. This is extremely annoying! It is also another story.) What I can remember is generally the overall plot of the story. Usually. Just not the writer or the title of the story. If the title is odd enough, I might remember that, but I won’t remember the name of the author. (Author names are generally the hardest to remember.)
So this is a list of stories I’ve read, of which I don’t remember the title or author. If you like, you can try to help me figure out the titles. Though if you guess “Left Hand of Darkness” for the novel that is definitely not “Left Hand of Darkness” I will probably scream.
- The plot of this story involves mutant kids who discover they are mutants. What essentially happened is that these kids have been isolated/institutionalized from society because their deformities are the result of (failed) attempts to make “designer” kids. The kids of course eventually figure this out, though not until causing a horrible panic with the outside society. (The panic was mutual as these kids were so isolated they were raised by robots and had never seen a baseline human.)
- This may or may not be a James Blish story. I first read it around the time I read “What Can Replace a Man?” (Which means, when I was maybe ten.) The only detail I remember is that it had one of those “ironic” endings where it’s revealed that the “scientists” observing a clearly delusional character are themselves delusional. The setting is some kind of facility/holding area for the remaining humans. This may or may not have been a robopocalypse situation.
- The only scene I remember from this story is that there were people hooked up in some kind of entertainment simulation. The problem with this was that somehow the really pleasant simulations they’d been experiencing have been turned into nightmares. Some people try to unhook one of the people in the simulation, but it doesn’t go well.
- One of them is a robot, and the other one is a sentient educational toy in the shape of a teddy bear. (This would technically make them both robots but still.) The basic plot is that they’re more or less friends, but the educational toy really, really wants to be able to do its job, which is to teach human kids. (Of which there is a terminal shortage where they a located, as they are both outdated models abandoned in the middle of nowhere.) So the robot tries to help the teddy bear find a place on several different worlds.
- This story was a descent into unreliable narrator and madness! It takes place in a distant colony world and involves various delusions this one character has about the large canid (?) predators on that planet. The slow revelation that it is in fact an unreliable narrator horrified me to the extreme. (The delusion the character is having is that the predators are sentient and can somehow acquire the memories of who they eat IIRC.)
- This story was one of the ones where I had no idea what was going on and I remember it because it’s disturbing and I can’t remember the ending. Basic synopsis: Big game hunters are going after the last example of a species of megafauna. They have a native guide who is on this hunt because (IIRC) he grew up offworld, and never had the opportunity to kill this megafauna. (Which normally would have been a rite of passage for his people.) There may have been some asides about colonialism. I don’t know.
- I read this story around or near the time I read “You’re Another.” (To the point where I thought the title of the story was “You’re Another.” This is not the case. ) Anyway! The situation is that there is a new “god” and someone has been chosen as that god’s representative. However, the god doesn’t seem willing to do anything. In the end, it turns out that this was some kind of simulation/test for the person who was playing the simulation.
- This novel was a far-future novel with high biotech. The protagonist character turns out to be an example of the aforementioned high biotech. (She was never told by her adoptive father.) It was extremely weird, and the main character had four arms. (How did her father manage to hide the part where she wasn’t baseline human? I have no clue!” I don’t remember it that well.
- This novel (Which is NOT LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS) is about a failing colony on a planet chockful of nasty mutagenic factors that result in birth defects and stillborn babies. Our Heroine (she was socialized as a woman) is an intersex character who accidentally discovers that they are not intersex, but a kind of intermediate sex with specialized organs that can separate healthy gametes from unhealthy ones. Meanwhile, it turns out that the native sentient species USED to have a similar intermediate sex (referred to as “midmale”) but they don’t anymore due to an incident that led to the collapse of their civilization.) There’s a Significant scene where the usually hostile natives are protective of another “midmale” human character, a young child.
- This was definitely a Harry Harrison story (I think). It basically involved the discovery of a world where the population was underground due to a combination of defense from slavers and generational trauma as a result of said slavers. A group tries to make contact with them and it goes really, really poorly!
Do any of these stories look familiar?
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