YASID: Symbiont in space
Chris Kuan
===== BEGIN
There was a book I read quite some time ago (probably mid-90s) that I want
to read again but I have no idea of the author or title. I'm not even sure
what dredged it up from the depths of my memory but it's been bugging me on
and off for the last couple of months. Unfortunately though I remember
little of the book itself.
The following may or may not be accurate.
* Genre was SF. It may have been a YA book.
* I think it was part of a series, possibly the second but may have
been later.
* It involved the crew of a human space craft, possibly an exploratory
vessel, and I have a vague feeling they couldn't find their way home.
* One of the crew was host to an alien symbiont he acquired from, I
think, a corpse in a derelict alien vessel. I'm not really sure how he
became the host as I think it was only mentioned in passing.
* At some point they made contact with people of the same race that the
symbiont was originally bonded to and discovered that the symbiont should
have been removed from it's host after a period of time and then
reintroduced. The person hosting the symbiont had carried it for a
dangerous length of time.
===== END
Currently the OP has rejected _Symbiont_ by Silverberg and _Martian Blues_
by Twombly as potential matches.
--
Chris
Concatenate for e-mail: mr gazpacho @ hotmail . com
Marcus L. Rowland
Kuan <lo...@sig.please.because.this.is.invalid> writes
This sounds like the sequel to Hal Clement's "Needle," "Through the Eye
of a Needle" - that has symbiotic aliens, and a hero who has carried one
for too long and is now suffering from immunity deficiency as a result.
But both books are set on Earth, with the aliens in the first story a
shipwrecked "cop," and in the second a scientific team exploring the
primitive Earth.
--
Marcus L. Rowland www.forgottenfutures.com
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Ted Nolan <tednolan>
There's a lot that *doesn't* match this, but could it possibly be
Brian M. Stableford's "Grainger of The Hooded Swan" series? Very 1970-ish
series. Grainger is an *almost* anti-hero who nevertheless usually tries
to do the right thing, but the resolutions are usually messy and somewhat
downbeat. He called his symbiont "The Wind".
Ted
--
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seagu...@mailandnews.com
<tednolan>) wrote:
The description is a mix of the two Hal Clement Needle books and the
Star-Pilot Grainger series by Stableford. The third and fourth points
are close for "The Fenris Device" which was fifth of six books. The
last point mixes the two series, in The Fenris Device they make
contact with the race that The Wind was once symbiont to and that lets
them communicate, and the second Needle book the sybiont was the
stranded traveler and was causing physical problems for it's host,
when they finally made contact with the symbionts race they were able
to start corrective action for the human host.
Here is a list of the Star-Pilot Grainger or aka The Hooded Swan
series;
1 The Halcyon Drift (1972)
2 Rhapsody in Black (1973)
3 Promised Land (1974)
4 The Paradise Game (1974)
5 The Fenris Device (1974)
6 Swan Song (1975)
Here are two links to wikipedia sites;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stableford
and specifically for the Grainger series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooded_Swan_(series)
The link above needs _(series) after Swan to work correctly.
I also read both series in the 80's and I rather liked the Stableford
series best, but I was no longer a youth which the Needle books were
more for the youth audience.
Jonathan
Chris Kuan
forum.