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Finding obscure books

For perhaps ten years, I have been trying to remember the title and author of a science-fiction novel, in which the protagonist has an artificial hand, which he can easily detach. This is not the current, movable, usable as a tool hand, but rather a thing that merely looks like a hand.

I have a vague, very vague, recollection of the word "rogue" associated with the title, but no search has been successful. I also think I read it in the 1960s, but I could be wrong by as much as +/- 10 years.

This is, as others point out, a great idea for a thread!
 
xterra said:
For perhaps ten years, I have been trying to remember the title and author of a science-fiction novel, in which the protagonist has an artificial hand, which he can easily detach. This is not the current, movable, usable as a tool hand, but rather a thing that merely looks like a hand.

I have a vague, very vague, recollection of the word "rogue" associated with the title, but no search has been successful. I also think I read it in the 1960s, but I could be wrong by as much as +/- 10 years.
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That has to be Rogue in Space by Fredric Brown. 1957, a patch-up of two shorter stories from '49 and '50. Not one of Brown's better novels.

Rogue in Space

Fred
 
Alright, here's a weird SF one. It was initially my impression that it was Harry Harrison, but I no longer am so sure on that as I recently reread one of his that I had read at the same time as this book, so maybe I'm misremembering.

The plot of this had to do with an entire city traveling around the world (probably not Earth) on a train track. For some reason the hero had to go outside the city and walk alongside, and he noticed something very unusual. The women who were outside with him started getting shorter and fatter; IIRC, this was shown on the paperback cover art. BTW, I read it in London in 1976.
 
Brainster said:
Alright, here's a weird SF one. It was initially my impression that it was Harry Harrison, but I no longer am so sure on that as I recently reread one of his that I had read at the same time as this book, so maybe I'm misremembering.

The plot of this had to do with an entire city traveling around the world (probably not Earth) on a train track. For some reason the hero had to go outside the city and walk alongside, and he noticed something very unusual. The women who were outside with him started getting shorter and fatter; IIRC, this was shown on the paperback cover art. BTW, I read it in London in 1976.
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That sounds like Chris Priest's The Inverted World.
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city & carefully removed in its wake. Rivers & mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther & farther behind the optimum & into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they're carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. Yet the city is in crisis. People are growing restive. The population is dwindling. The rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world he's about to discover is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well
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It was published in '74 so it's plausible, though this concept has appeared elsewhere, such Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion writings.

Priest's book was well known at the time (especially the opening line; "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles") and is considered one of his best, if not the best. It's been reprinted as part of the Gollancz SF collection.

Hope this helps.
 
I'd say that it is Christopher Priest's The Inverted World. I like one of his acknowledgments: "Virginia Kidd, who finally convinced me I might be on to something when she told me the physics had a hole so large a city could be driven through."

Fred
 
Another one from me.................. I heard about Lewis Collins' death and that reminded me of my favourite episode of The Professionals, Foxhole on the Roof; this reminded me of an obscure (at least I assume it's obscure as I can't find it) British thriller about a group of criminals who take a hospital hostage by controlling it's emergency generators and cutting of the external power. It featured the son of a British aristocrat worrying about his father (who was on life support there), or rather his father's will.
Not much to go on I'm afraid. Any ideas?
 
bruto said:
I have another one, which I could probably put my hands on if I took hours and hours of searching in my barn, but here goes anyway. It's a British novel from some time in the 1970's or 80's, probably not a terribly well known author, and I have almost no recollection of what it was about,. but one episode has stuck with me: a grandmotherly type during the second world war is doing her part for the effort by obsessively knitting socks for war orphans. Someone points out that they're all tube socks without heels, to which she indignantly replies, "Orphans don't need heels."

I have no recollection of the book that came from, but found it a wonderful capsule characterization of a certain kind of snob. Any takers?
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Don't know the book, but it sounds just like my grandmother!
 
xterra said:
This is, as others point out, a great idea for a thread!
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Thanks! It seemed to me to be the kind of thing which the JREF "community" should be good at doing. After all, it's a world wide collection of ideosyncratic individuals with only one thing in common - an extensive and very catholic (in the sense of "all encompasing", not "a deranged, strangled and rigid") world outlook.

As I said when I started it, someone out there knows the answers. I just hope those someones read the thread!
 
catsmate1 said:
That sounds like Chris Priest's The Inverted World.
It was published in '74 so it's plausible, though this concept has appeared elsewhere, such Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion writings.

Priest's book was well known at the time (especially the opening line; "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles") and is considered one of his best, if not the best. It's been reprinted as part of the Gollancz SF collection.

Hope this helps.
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Da, that is it! Thanks to you and Nowhere Man!
 
catsmate1 said:
That sounds like Chris Priest's The Inverted World.
It was published in '74 so it's plausible, though this concept has appeared elsewhere, such Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion writings.

Priest's book was well known at the time (especially the opening line; "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles") and is considered one of his best, if not the best. It's been reprinted as part of the Gollancz SF collection.

Hope this helps.
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I'm going to have to find that one. I read an Alastair Reynolds book with a similar premise, but I'm addicted to SF from the 60's and 70's.

Great thread.
 
Here's one from me.

It's about a post-apocalyptic North America, humans are gone completely, the dominant sentient species are descended from bears called Gurrow Sapiens, the story centres around one of these bear-men who is an archaeologist/historian.

Any ideas please.
 
Lensman said:
Here's one from me.

It's about a post-apocalyptic North America, humans are gone completely, the dominant sentient species are descended from bears called Gurrow Sapiens, the story centres around one of these bear-men who is an archaeologist/historian.

Any ideas please.
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Google suggests No Connection, by Isaac Asimov.
 
If one has neither the title nor the author, one is liable to be in a predicament. As a poster here mentions: an Internet forum populated by a large variety of individuals, many of them highly knowledgeable about an assortment of matters, is a good bet for thus achieving the very-hard-to-achieve. I've been "rescued" a couple of times in this way, re an only fragmentarily-remembered book, via different Net fora -- these were "fan" ones re particular authors, but with many members who knew about all sorts of things.

I have one slight book-type wish, concerning which I really see no hope -- I have, now, no idea of title or author. It was in the library of my school, where I read it a little over 50 years ago. Was a memoir, written by one of a couple of young Englishwomen who were working in Russia at the time of World War I; they were caught there by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and lived through a spell of that, and resulting events, before they were able to get back home. I recall very few details from the narrative: just remember that I was spellbound, while often horrified, by said narrative. It was the first account that I ever came across, of the travails of ordinary people caught up in events there-and-then. Would like to re-read it; but I really feel, "no chance".
 
bruto said:
Oh, no wonder I remembered it. I've read several of Lillian Beckwith's books, and they're grand fun. Not fiction this one, my memory being faulty.

For those not acquainted with the author, she lived on a Hebridean island, and writes interesting and witty observations of her life and that of her neighbors.

The phrase "a rope in case," has, in fact, become a part of my family vocabulary, but it's obvious I haven't read the book nearly recently enough.
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I too, loved Lillian Beckwith's "Hebridean" books when I read them, a long while ago now. I experience slight qualms, by reason of the humour of the books being largely "at the expense", so to speak, of the author's islander neighbours, and their odd ways and often strange use of English: she writes of them with great affection, but -- one might wonder a little -- from a superior and condescending point of view?

Be that as it may, I delighted in many of the language-related oddities in the books -- with the islanders' birth-speech being Scottish Gaelic; English for them, a second language, with which they often did odd and hilarious things. One bit which I loved (subject-matter such as to be reprehensible to JREFers -- but the wording just cracked me up): a middle-aged neighbour lady was speaking with some scorn, about geologists who were wont to make field-trips to the island. The lady regarded these folk as clever-dicks who imagined that they knew better about the origins of the earth, than what is set out in the book of Genesis; and made rather a botch of the name of their profession, calling them "Jolly Gees".
 
fleabeetle said:
If one has neither the title nor the author, one is liable to be in a predicament. As a poster here mentions: an Internet forum populated by a large variety of individuals, many of them highly knowledgeable about an assortment of matters, is a good bet for thus achieving the very-hard-to-achieve. I've been "rescued" a couple of times in this way, re an only fragmentarily-remembered book, via different Net fora -- these were "fan" ones re particular authors, but with many members who knew about all sorts of things.

I have one slight book-type wish, concerning which I really see no hope -- I have, now, no idea of title or author. It was in the library of my school, where I read it a little over 50 years ago. Was a memoir, written by one of a couple of young Englishwomen who were working in Russia at the time of World War I; they were caught there by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and lived through a spell of that, and resulting events, before they were able to get back home. I recall very few details from the narrative: just remember that I was spellbound, while often horrified, by said narrative. It was the first account that I ever came across, of the travails of ordinary people caught up in events there-and-then. Would like to re-read it; but I really feel, "no chance".
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Might this list be of help?
 
Thanks, catsmate1 -- that's quite some list ! No memory-type bells rung, re the book which I read so long ago. I fear title and author must be totally expunged from the memory banks after five decades-plus. List's content would seem mostly about intellectually "heavier" stuff, than my dimly-recalled book.
 
fleabeetle said:
Thanks, catsmate1 -- that's quite some list ! No memory-type bells rung, re the book which I read so long ago. I fear title and author must be totally expunged from the memory banks after five decades-plus. List's content would seem mostly about intellectually "heavier" stuff, than my dimly-recalled book.
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Abover I think I mentioned a forum on ABEbooks.com. If you negotiate around there, I think you'll find a subforum for children's and young adult books, and I wonder if someone there would be able to remember something.
 
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