Oolite Bulletins

DaddyHoggy wrote:

It sounds like the plot of Farscape, but that's not a novel!

It does ... this novel predates Farscape by more than 20 years, though.

Clue time: the book is available as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series.

That must be The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison?

El Viejo wrote:

That must be The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison?

It must indeed! A fine – if weird and bleak and weirdly bleak – read. It's possibly the originator of the peculiar and inventive spaceship name, though, that later writers like Iain Banks and Alastair Reynolds took up: the Atalanta in Calydon, for example, or the Strange Great Sins.

Over to you!

Hmm. The familiarity I felt was obviously misplaced then...

Okay, an easy one... just a normal day, it seemed... until all the Earth's radar systems went bananas!
Author and title of the novel, please.

El Viejo wrote:

Okay, an easy one... just a normal day, it seemed... until all the Earth's radar systems went bananas!
Author and title of the novel, please.

Is it Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates?

JazHaz wrote:

El Viejo wrote:

Okay, an easy one... just a normal day, it seemed... until all the Earth's radar systems went bananas!
Author and title of the novel, please.

Is it Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates?

Nope!

Clue the first: the cause of the global 'failure' of Earth's radar systems is the arrival in orbit of an alien ship.

El Viejo wrote:

Clue the first: the cause of the global 'failure' of Earth's radar systems is the arrival in orbit of an alien ship.

Whatever it is - I wonder if the script writers for Independence Day read it...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

El Viejo wrote:

Clue the first: the cause of the global 'failure' of Earth's radar systems is the arrival in orbit of an alien ship.

Whatever it is - I wonder if the script writers for Independence Day read it...

Ha... I have a vague inkling that Heinlein may have written something along those lines.
The alien ship in question though, is far more 'enigmatic'.

You know, I'm going to have to go rummage on the shelves, because I'm sure I've read this...

(irrespective of its familiarity to Heinlein/Independence Day)

Sounds a bit like Childhood's End by the mighty A.C. Clarke.

And Independence Day. And "V", actually...

That's what I was going to say, but I thought Childhood's End was the answer to another clue only a week or so ago! (So I didn't offer it up!)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

That's what I was going to say, but I thought Childhood's End was the answer to another clue only a week or so ago! (So I didn't offer it up!)

A little more than a week ago actually... but no, it's not the great Childhood's End.