Skip to main content

story identification - Trying to remember the title of a sci-fi book I read in the 80's?




I read this sci-fi book back around 1987 that my father had finished. My memory of the book is sadly very limited, but the emotion of enjoying it string prompting me to try and remember it. My clear memories are it is set in a spaceship, there is a crew (or team) that might have been space pirates or thieves of some sort. The encounter an alien of some type that I believe was described as spider-like with ultrathin (practically invisible to the human eye) legs that could slice through the members of the crew.


I know this is very little to go on, but does this ring a bell with anyone? I'd love to re-read it now that I'm older.



Answer



I think this may be George R. R. Martin's "Tuf Voyaging".


enter image description here


In the first part of the book, a team of archeologists and mercenaries discover the Ark, a huge and powerful ecological war ship dating from a long-past interstellar war. The team falls apart quickly as everyone tries to gain control of the ship for themself. One of the mercenaries gets control of the Ark's biological weapons system (monsters from hundreds of different worlds) and starts using it against the others.


Here's the spider-like alien with ultra-thin legs:



A spi­der, then. A weird one. The rocky ap­pear­ance made him think it was some kind of sil­i­con-based life. He’d heard of that, here and there. It was real god­damned rare. So he had some kind of sil­i­con-spi­der here. Big deal. Kaj Nevis moved closer. Damn, he thought. The web, or what he thought was the web … hell, the damned thing wasn’t sit­ting on the web, it was part of the web. Those fine, thin, shiny web strands grew out of its body, he saw. He could barely make out the join­ings. And there were more than he thought—hun­dreds of them, maybe thou­sands, most of them too thin to be seen from any kind of dis­tance at all, but when you looked at them from the right angle, you could see the light gleam­ing off them, all sil­very-faint.




And yes, the ultra-thin legs are shown to slice-and-dice very nicely.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

futurama - How much time is lost in 'Time Keeps on Slippin''

In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.
Post a Comment
Read more

harry potter - Did Dolores Umbridge Have Any Association with Voldemort (or Death Eaters) before His Return?

I noticed that Dolores Umbridge was born during the first Wizarding War, so it's very likely she wasn't a Death Eater then (but she is pretty evil -- who knows?). After that Voldemort was not around in a way that could affect many people, and most wouldn't know he was planning to rise again. During that time, and up through Voldemort's return (in Goblet of Fire ), did Umbridge have any connection with the Death Eaters or with Voldemort? Was she doing what she did on her own, or was it because of an association with Voldemort or his allies? Answer Dolores Umbridge was definitely not a good person. However, as Sirius points out, "the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters". Remember that he also says that he doesn't believe Umbridge to be a Death Eater, but that she's evil enough (or something like that). I think there are two strong reasons to believe that: Umbridge was proud to do everything according to the law, except when she trie...
Post a Comment
Read more

aliens - Interstellar Zoo story

I vaguely remember this story from my childhood: it was about an interstellar zoo that came to Earth with lots of bizarre and unusual species, and humans would file through and gape at all the crazy looking creatures from other planets. The twist came at the end when the perspective shifted to the other side of the bars and we discovered that the "creatures" were traveling through space on a kind of safari. They thought they were the visitors and we were the animals. Neither side knew that the other side thought they were the zoo creatures. Answer Got it. Zoo, by Edward D. Hoch. Published in 1958. Link to Publication History Link to PDF
Post a Comment
Read more

Which Doctor Who works are canon?

I have been watching a Doctor Who documentary and they mentioned that Paul McGann did audio stories so he wasn't just a one-hit Doctor (and that there are novels featuring his Doctor as well). My question is: is Doctor Who canon just the show, or is it like Star Wars where some books and audios are canon and some are not? The documentary also shows that before 2005 they did audio stories where the Doctor is female and obviously that cannot be — not the female part, but the show doesn't count any female Doctors in episodes like The Day of the Doctor . Answer Nothing, and also everything The definitive piece of writing on Doctor Who canon is this blog post by writer Paul Cornell . I'm essentially going to be summarizing his post here, much less eloquently, but one section I want to quote directly is this: Nobody at the BBC has ever uttered a pronouncement about what is and isn't canonical. (As I'm sure they'd put it, being such enthusiasts for good grammar.) Be...
Post a Comment
Read more