The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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Marvin

04:53

Q: Trying to remember title of Novel(s) about a race of psychics that used to prevent pain on nearby planets

The novel started with a man trying to escape a society where being psychic was illegal. He succeeds and sets up a ranch where he has a lot of children and no blue eyed children can leave. This goes on for generations until one child is born with blue spots in brown eyes whom is allowed to leave ...

story-identification

5 hours later…

John Rennie

10:21

Is there a genre that this type of novel belongs to?

I browse new book lists regularly to look for interesting new reads and I see a lot of books like this.

That is they have manga style covers and rather long titles. It seems to be Japanese style of writing. I'm curious to know if this is a defined genre.

Or this book that just turned up in new books list.

Aha, I found a Wikipedia page for that last book and it describes it as a light novel:

Light novel

A light novel (Japanese: ライトノベル, Hepburn: raito noberu) is a style of young adult fiction in the form of a novel primarily targeting high school and middle school students. The term "light novel" is a wasei-eigo, or a Japanese term formed from words in the English language. Light novels are often called ranobe (ラノベ) or, in English, LN. The average length of a light novel is about 50,000 words, and is published in the bunkobon format (A6, 10.5 cm×14.8 cm or 4.1"x5.8"). Light novels are subject to dense publishing schedules, with new installments being published in 3–9-month intervals. Light novels...

Marvin

Q: Novel most people turn to zombies after eating tainted modified food

I read a book where a woman wakes up on the side of the highway remembering she’d been captured by zombies? who took strips of flesh off her back. Someone saved her then left her on the road. She remembers there was a little girl with her and searched for her. I remember another scene where she’s...

story-identification novel dystopia

AncientSwordRage

11:01

@JohnRennie yeah, that's the one

John Rennie

It's always annoying when after posting a question you decide to do "one last search™" and find the answer :-)

Another question for the panel: in an attempt to identify this long standing story id question I asked Bard and to my surprise it immediately answered with:

The science fiction short story with an alien that has a bell shaped head and a ring of eyes that eats its own young is called "The Feast of St. Januarius" by Theodore Sturgeon. It was first published in 1949 in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The story is set in a future where humans have colonized the moon. A group of scientists are studying a group of aliens that have been found living in a cave. The aliens have bell-shaped heads, a ring of eyes, and long, spindly arms and legs. They are also carnivorous and cannibalistic.

But this appears to be nonsense as I cannot find any trace of the story. If anyone else can find it please post here.

2 hours later…

Marvin

13:03

Q: Why did Avon do this at the end?

Spoilers obviously In the last episode of Blake's 7, entitled "Blake", Avon and the crew discover Blake as a bounty hunter. However, in the climax, Tarrant suggests to Avon that Blake has betrayed their rebellion, but Blake explains that it was all a setup. Avon, then shoots Blake, killing him. A...

blakes-7 plot-explanation

2 hours later…

xkcd

14:38

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fixed a bug that caused some rocks to generate virtually infinite heat while just sitting there.

DavidW

15:09

@JohnRennie There's no story listed in ISFDb with "Januarius" in the title, the closest (time-wise) are "The Feast of the Centaurs" (1934) and "A Feast of Demons" (1958). Sturgeon only published 3 stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories between 1947 and 1951 and none of those match.

It seems like a complete hallucination.

DavidW

15:28

I have also, in the past, text searched the Pulp Magazine Archive (which has most copies of TWS among many others) for "bell-shaped" and similar; I have not yet found a match.

John Rennie

Yes, that's what I feared. The contents pages for the six 1949 editions of Thrilling Wonder Tales are on the ISFDB and none of the story titles they list look promising.

DavidW

I think I've also tried "ring of eyes" and a few other potentially useful terms.

John Rennie

I got a "please try Bard" e-mail from Google and it occurred to me to try it with some of our more stubborn story id questions. When it came back with that answer I thought i had hit the jackpot. Sadly not.

DavidW

15:44

In theory someday it might be able to answer...

Cereal Bot