Paste a passage from your favourite speculative fiction, replacing all the proper nouns with “Lemmy”. Then I’ll try to guess where it came from without using google :)
“Long ago, Lemmy had stood at the void edge of Mount Lemmy. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Lemmy’s eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Lemmy, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to see? Now he reaffirmed that decision.”
I do not know this one. So I begin meandering, like a river ;)
It feels space opera. “void edge” and “void space” evoke megaconstructions, but the void here is white, not black. So it could also be some sort of different physics, like in Baxter’s Raft. Or it could be something like the shell world in Banks’s Matter. Could be something like Hamilton’s Void Trilogy – but I don’t remember the void being white.
Hopefully someone else can guess it :)
Hopefully someone else can guess it :)
I won’t give the answer just yet, then. :)
Someone guessed my example, so here’s another:
For instance, on the planet Lemmy, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, Lemmy, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
Hahah, that one was easy for me! I love that book. The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Winner! Here’s your prize.
🐬
either Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy or
World of Ptavvs, probably the former/u/Zamboniman beat you by five minutes, but you can have a prize too 🐁
Example:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Lemmy.
1984 of course, that last sentence is iconic even with the name replaced
Winner! Here’s your prize.
🐀
The outlook through the window was really a digital view port that showed the outside in real-time, and the curvature of Lemmy’s moon Lemmy was clearly visible from their high vantage point, at the end of the elevator. Lemmy stared at the drifting clouds, barely able to make out more than vague signs of movement, yellow against a yellow background. Neither his eyes nor the external cameras penetrated the thick layer of gas, more similar to a soup than to Lemmy’s atmosphere. When the signal flared up in the comm module of his system, he grabbed the handlebars attached to the wall. Still, ten seconds until the car would detach from the station’s airlock, an eternity. How many of these eternities had he experienced in the past five years? This would be his last trip to the underground complex deep inside the ice of the moon. One last mission.
Haha, sounds like Mass Effect and DOOM had a baby. Is he launching with a chainsaw? Feels like military sci fi anyway – there’s a tone to it, and an action action action pace. Like it’s just another day in the coal mines, but today is the day Lemmy will wake up a space monster. But also there’s a hint that the writer has some grounding in the real – like the fact that it’s monitors rather than windows. Feels like Scalzi maybe? How far off the mark am I?
I’m just recalling the first chapter of Children of Time, and it took a whole chapter to launch an emergency capsule from a space station. Admittedly, the chapter was scene setting for the rest of the story, but there is almost the same amount of action in that whole first chapter as there is in this paragraph.
It’s “Synthesis” by A. Omukai, but you’d want to read “Emergent” first. It’s kind of a Cyberpunk/Urban Fantasy crossover, cloak and dagger style.
Scalzi is awesome. I got introduced to him with Old Man’s War, was a fun series (still need to read Zoe some day).
Hard mode activated:
“Because it wasn’t in the news. A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Lemmy, for the managers . . . and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’ Do you know what Lemmy needs most?”
“More ice.”
“A new system that does not bottleneck through one channel. Our friend Lemmy is our greatest danger.”
“Huh? Don’t you trust Lemmy?”
Kind of sounds like 1984 again.
It’s definitely political science fiction. But perhaps it would help if I told you one of the “Lemmy” replacements was the proper noun “Luna” --> Do you know what Luna needs most?
Given the moon is involved, possibly something by Asimov?
It is not Asimov, but it is one of his peers – another giant of science fiction of the era.
Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Heinlein?
Winner! Here have some rice. I launched it by railgun. Maybe, uh, don’t stand there when it lands.
🌾
The east lemmy remained plentiful—alarmingly, it became more nutritious, another mystery I should have been able to explain but could not. The west lemmy rotted on reddit. Uri toiled in the fields as if he could work out his grief through his hands and his tears through irrigation water from a spring between our fields and the west lemmy. We had planted a second crop, a yamlike tuber, and I prayed it would remain safe to eat.
Sounds post-apocaplytic - like radioactive wastelands. Something like The Crysalids (which I haven’t read in 30+ years and cannot remember most details of now). Could also be something more speculative biology – like the latter parts of the Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, or one of the later books in Bulter’s Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis) series. There’s a couple of writers with biology backgrounds (Brin, Tchaikovsky, etc.) that would naturally gravitate towards having biologists or ecologists as POV characters. Requesting a hint: is it on Earth?
Not on Earth, though the person talking here is a human colonist from Earth (though they aren’t in contact with Earth, given the distance and time they traveled).
Okay, so I still don’t know what it is, but I have “To Be Taught, if Fortunate” by Becky Chambers in my to-read queue, and I suspect this might be it. It has that letters written back to earth vibe that I’m expecting once I start reading it.
Nope. Let me find a different excerpt:
Intelligence wastes itself on animals and their trammeled, repetitive lives. They mature, reproduce, and die faster than pines, each animal equivalent to its forebearer, never smarter, never different, always reprising their ancestors, never unique. Yet with more intelligence, less control. The mindless root fungus never fails, but moth messengers come and go with seasons, larger animals grow immune to addictions, and the first foreigners, who built the city, abandoned it and me without explanation or motive just as we had begun to communicate. Did they discover my nature and flee, or was their nature renegade?
[…]
I would have died without these new foreigners, I will die without them, but I have seen that intelligence makes animals unstable.
I must communicate with them and finally I have the strength. I am growing a root to store what I learn, but it now contains little more than pith. I have not tapped their intellect and used it like phosphates.
Okay, I still don’t have an answer. But I know for certain that, had I read this book, I would remember it haha. It does remind me of Vandermeer somewhat, but all of his books that I’ve read were on Earth. It also evokes the Pequeninos from Orson Scott Cards “Speaker for the Dead”, a species that ends their life as a tree. But in the latter case, they begin their life as an animal, so the plant POV here doesn’t match, in particular the disdain it shows for animals.
But it sounds amazing! It’s like a first contact story where the alien is intelligent and alien. Tchaikovsky would be proud.
It is a first contact story in a way, though it’s the humans who are the aliens arriving on the planet.
Also, the speaker (“bamboo”) in the second quote may be a “plant”, but other than being RNA-based (like some simple life forms on Earth; the book/series assumes panspermia on a building blocks of life level), life on that planet isn’t in any way related to Earth life (well, except for the humans themselves once they arrive). The “bamboo” might mention “pines” in that excerpt, but both “bamboo” and “pines” are just what the humans would come to call those species opon their discovery, because they remind them of the respectively named plant species back on Earth.
@troyunrau Do you want me to resolve it or are you hoping someone else will guess it?
Let’s leave it for now, and resolve in the future. It sounds like a great book and should be in my queue haha, but the point of the thread was to create some self-starter content for the community. And there’s still a chance someone else will know ;)
