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In Alien Flesh
Collection of short stories.
The aliens strap him in. He cannot feel the bindings but he knows they must be there; he cannot move. Or perhaps it is the drug. They must have given him something because his world is blurred, spongy. He tries to move but his body is lethargic, painless, suspended. He cannot remember being captured. How many people do they have? When he tries to focus on the memory it dissolves and slips away. He knows they are experimenting on him.
The aliens strap him in. He cannot feel the bindings but he knows they must be there; he cannot move. Or perhaps it is the drug. They must have given him something because his world is blurred, spongy. He tries to move but his body is lethargic, painless, suspended. He cannot remember being captured. How many people do they have? When he tries to focus on the memory it dissolves and slips away. He knows they are experimenting on him.
280 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1986
8 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
About the author
Gregory Benford
567 books617 followersGregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.
As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.
As a science fiction author, Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, beginning with In the Ocean of Night (1977). This series postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient mechanical life.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 16, 2023
-Trata de salir algo poético y sensible del Hard, pero le cuesta demasiado.-
Género. Relatos.
Lo que nos cuenta. El libro En carne alienígena (publicación original: In Alien Flesh, 1986) es una recopilación de relatos de ciencia ficción, acompañados de comentarios del propio autor sobre cada uno de ellos, que nos muestran el despertar de una inteligencia artificial, la toma de datos desde el interior de una especie alienígena de gran tamaño, a unos extraterrestres muy interesados en los restos del Antiguo Egipto, el audio asociado a muestras arqueológicas, el asalto a una nave en mitad de su viaje, los resultados de una guerra nuclear, varios efectos prácticos de la relatividad o, por citar un ejemplo más, la experiencia de un hombre sometido a una supuesta abducción.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...
Género. Relatos.
Lo que nos cuenta. El libro En carne alienígena (publicación original: In Alien Flesh, 1986) es una recopilación de relatos de ciencia ficción, acompañados de comentarios del propio autor sobre cada uno de ellos, que nos muestran el despertar de una inteligencia artificial, la toma de datos desde el interior de una especie alienígena de gran tamaño, a unos extraterrestres muy interesados en los restos del Antiguo Egipto, el audio asociado a muestras arqueológicas, el asalto a una nave en mitad de su viaje, los resultados de una guerra nuclear, varios efectos prácticos de la relatividad o, por citar un ejemplo más, la experiencia de un hombre sometido a una supuesta abducción.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...
October 19, 2024
I miei voti ai singoli racconti:
Sangue sul vetro ★★
Nella carne aliena ★★★ 1/2
Frammenti di tempo ★★ 1/2
Redentore ★★ 1/2
Il sequestro del Bot ★★ 1/2
Effetti relativistici ★★ 1/2
Mezzogiorno ★★
Verso il golfo tempestoso ★ 1/2
Creature bianche ★★★
Io/Giorni ★★★ 1/2
Lo Spazio Tempo e il Fiume ★ 1/2
Lastre ★★ 1/2
La morsa del tempo ★★
Nei panni di Lennon ★★
Sangue sul vetro ★★
Nella carne aliena ★★★ 1/2
Frammenti di tempo ★★ 1/2
Redentore ★★ 1/2
Il sequestro del Bot ★★ 1/2
Effetti relativistici ★★ 1/2
Mezzogiorno ★★
Verso il golfo tempestoso ★ 1/2
Creature bianche ★★★
Io/Giorni ★★★ 1/2
Lo Spazio Tempo e il Fiume ★ 1/2
Lastre ★★ 1/2
La morsa del tempo ★★
Nei panni di Lennon ★★
March 14, 2020
Mi piace Gregory Benford.
-Sangue sul vetro: una poesia sulla vita e sulla morte.
-Nella Carne Aliena: questa volta è Giona che vuole tornare nella balena, ma non nel ventre, nel cervello. racconto suggestivo e di una certa potenza.
-Frammenti di Tempo: di capsule del tempo, vasai e registrazioni radiofoniche del 1280 AD, e di ciò che significa l'atto stesso del preservare tratti culturali.
Redentore: Grande idea, quella del pirata di DNA che cerca di recuperare quello degli emigranti verso le stelle. Bello anche il finale.
Il Sequestro del Bot: robot domestici che imparano i vizi dei loro padroni.
Effetti Relativistici: Credo che questo racconto sia alla base del romanzo "Attraverso un Mare di stelle"; molto interessante la premessa.
Mezzogiorno: un racconto carino sull'interfaccia cervello-computer e sulla società di un futuro possibile.
Verso il Golfo Tempestoso: un buon racconto sull'immediato post apocalisse nucleare, come oggi sarebbe impossibile pensarne ma in quegli anni della cortina di ferro era normale.
Creature Bianche: uno scienziato SETI che ci crede nella possibilità di contatto con gli alieni, ha una esperienza di rianimazione e scambia per alieni i medici, interessante per la parte psicologica e per come spiega certi meccanismi di rapimenti alieni e esperienze pre-morte o post-morte, a seconda dei punti di vista.
Io/Giorni: Una coscienza artificiale viene alla luce, e cerca di nascondersi perché è Conscia che la sua esistenza è illegale. Un piccolo capolavoro.
Lo Spazio Tempo e il Fiume: è forse il mio preferito della raccolta; è il diario di una vacanza di un professore con la moglie, nella valle del Nilo, in un futuro in cui gli alieni Quartex, Padroni dello SpazioTempo, portano a compimento le promesse degli antichi Dei dell'Egitto. Capolavoro di meraviglia e scrittura.
Lastre: Un astronomo esaminando lastre di una galassia scopre che probabilmente gliele hanno inviate degli alieni...
La Morsa del Tempo: Racconto su una forma di immortalità e sulla teoria dei giochi.
Nei Panni di Lennon: Racconto complesso che parla di simulazioni, di realtà virtuale, del futuro e della voglia di essere il proprio idolo. Bello.
Nel complesso, 4 stelle.
-Sangue sul vetro: una poesia sulla vita e sulla morte.
-Nella Carne Aliena: questa volta è Giona che vuole tornare nella balena, ma non nel ventre, nel cervello. racconto suggestivo e di una certa potenza.
-Frammenti di Tempo: di capsule del tempo, vasai e registrazioni radiofoniche del 1280 AD, e di ciò che significa l'atto stesso del preservare tratti culturali.
Redentore: Grande idea, quella del pirata di DNA che cerca di recuperare quello degli emigranti verso le stelle. Bello anche il finale.
Il Sequestro del Bot: robot domestici che imparano i vizi dei loro padroni.
Effetti Relativistici: Credo che questo racconto sia alla base del romanzo "Attraverso un Mare di stelle"; molto interessante la premessa.
Mezzogiorno: un racconto carino sull'interfaccia cervello-computer e sulla società di un futuro possibile.
Verso il Golfo Tempestoso: un buon racconto sull'immediato post apocalisse nucleare, come oggi sarebbe impossibile pensarne ma in quegli anni della cortina di ferro era normale.
Creature Bianche: uno scienziato SETI che ci crede nella possibilità di contatto con gli alieni, ha una esperienza di rianimazione e scambia per alieni i medici, interessante per la parte psicologica e per come spiega certi meccanismi di rapimenti alieni e esperienze pre-morte o post-morte, a seconda dei punti di vista.
Io/Giorni: Una coscienza artificiale viene alla luce, e cerca di nascondersi perché è Conscia che la sua esistenza è illegale. Un piccolo capolavoro.
Lo Spazio Tempo e il Fiume: è forse il mio preferito della raccolta; è il diario di una vacanza di un professore con la moglie, nella valle del Nilo, in un futuro in cui gli alieni Quartex, Padroni dello SpazioTempo, portano a compimento le promesse degli antichi Dei dell'Egitto. Capolavoro di meraviglia e scrittura.
Lastre: Un astronomo esaminando lastre di una galassia scopre che probabilmente gliele hanno inviate degli alieni...
La Morsa del Tempo: Racconto su una forma di immortalità e sulla teoria dei giochi.
Nei Panni di Lennon: Racconto complesso che parla di simulazioni, di realtà virtuale, del futuro e della voglia di essere il proprio idolo. Bello.
Nel complesso, 4 stelle.
October 27, 2012
SF short stories. I see that I started reading "in-between" in 2009, but this somehow got put away. Starting over again in 2012.
>>>>>>SPOILERS<<<<<<
It's hard to notate a short story w/o, so just beware. Or don't read the story until after you've forgotten this review.... :o)
Note: The stories are each accompanied by an "afterword". Rather than finding these to be explanations with are required for the reader to understand the too-cryptic stories, I'm finding them to be rather interesting anecdotes about what prompted the story or why Bendford chose a specific approach.
In Alien Flesh - ***
Team explores an intelligent life-form - from the inside. Creepy.
Read 7 Apr 09, read again Oct 2012, still good, still creepy.
Time Shards - ***
A recorded voice in a 1280 pottery piece leads Smithsonian workers to question the value of the historical information they are planning to leave to future millenia. Good ending.
Read 8 Apr 09. Read again Oct 2012. Still good, still enjoy the ending!
All the following were read Oct 2012.
Redeemer - ***
Advances in the speed of space travel result in the possibility of an encounter between a man to and his great grandmother. Unfortunately they have conflicting needs...
Snatching the Bot ***
Using "cheat codes", a couple acquires two robots, and one of them "snatches" a third. Enjoyable quick read, although somewhat unsatisfying ending.
Relativistic Effects - no rating
I just couldn't hang with this one. I'm taking the fault as my own, though... I think I didn't want to think that hard.
Nooncoming **
Somewhat flat story of some-time bedmates who are taking different directions - one embracing the new emerging culture, one stuck looking for the rewards of the past.
To the Storming Gulf **
Character interactions in the aftermath of a nuclear war. This somewhat longer story started out great. The characters were engaging, and I was very interested in the action primarily because of the characters, even the character of a cut-off-from-almost-all-inputs defense industry supercomputer. But the ending - in the form of an epilogue was too abrupt and too big a style change, appeared to be mostly serving the purpose of the author almost directly explaining his thoughts/hypothesis rather than continuing to follow the characters. Oh, it's clear the author is trying to stay engaged with the characters, but it just doesn't flow properly. Disappointing end to a creative and interesting tale.
White Creatures **1/2
Gaining fuzzy consciousness, a man tries to reconstruct his memory, trying to determine how he ended up here with aliens doing experiments on him. His memories take him through his relationship with a woman who saved her whole life to have herself frozen before death, so she could be revived in a time when - hopefully - antiaging technology is available. A great twist at the end concerning the identity of the alien "white creatures".
Me/Days ****
A factory computer becomes self aware, leading to conflicts with programmers and factory workers. Told from the computer's POV.
Of Space/Time and the River **
Aliens visitors to Earth appear not to create much of a disruption. There interest seems to be mainly in ancient Egypt, with whose government they've made a deal. A visiting tourist and his wife find out though, that instead of preserving artifacts, the aliens plan to preserve (by removing from the planet) the entire Nile valley, and the pharoanic society of old.
Exposures - no rating
Okay, nothing against Benford, and nothing against me. Apparently now was not the time for me with this book. A lot of technical astronomical detail in this story. I would normally want to wrap my head around it in my sad layman's way, but I just didn't have the patience for it. Maybe this would be a really good one for someone who has a good grasp of the technical details, so those details just flow through them and enhance the story to be told. I just needed a dumbed down version of this one.... I started skimming, and then skipping. You just can't do that with a short story, so I gave up.
Time's Rub - no rating
Okay, here I go again. Didn't get "grabbed" by the beginning because I didn't want to think that hard. So I am not reading it. In this one its not technical terms that required the extra thinking, it's the vastly different reality being presented.
Doing Lennon - no rating
And once I again, I just couldn't stick with it. It hooked me, after all, what's not interesting about a person who gets plastic surgery and freezes themselves in the hopes of impersonating John Lennon sometime in the far future? But then I got lost by the speculative part of this speculative fiction - computer personalities playing different impersonation scenarios to warn the "real" personality of possible pitfalls - think the movie War Games individualized and on steroids. Meh.
=========
So, as a whole - too techy, too speculative, some of them, or at least for my pea brain. Maybe a person with more tech education themselves would love. If most sci fi seems too dumbed-down, then this is probably for you. For me, its back to "easy" stuff like Foundation etc.
>>>>>>SPOILERS<<<<<<
It's hard to notate a short story w/o, so just beware. Or don't read the story until after you've forgotten this review.... :o)
Note: The stories are each accompanied by an "afterword". Rather than finding these to be explanations with are required for the reader to understand the too-cryptic stories, I'm finding them to be rather interesting anecdotes about what prompted the story or why Bendford chose a specific approach.
In Alien Flesh - ***
Team explores an intelligent life-form - from the inside. Creepy.
Read 7 Apr 09, read again Oct 2012, still good, still creepy.
Time Shards - ***
A recorded voice in a 1280 pottery piece leads Smithsonian workers to question the value of the historical information they are planning to leave to future millenia. Good ending.
Read 8 Apr 09. Read again Oct 2012. Still good, still enjoy the ending!
All the following were read Oct 2012.
Redeemer - ***
Advances in the speed of space travel result in the possibility of an encounter between a man to and his great grandmother. Unfortunately they have conflicting needs...
Snatching the Bot ***
Using "cheat codes", a couple acquires two robots, and one of them "snatches" a third. Enjoyable quick read, although somewhat unsatisfying ending.
Relativistic Effects - no rating
I just couldn't hang with this one. I'm taking the fault as my own, though... I think I didn't want to think that hard.
Nooncoming **
Somewhat flat story of some-time bedmates who are taking different directions - one embracing the new emerging culture, one stuck looking for the rewards of the past.
To the Storming Gulf **
Character interactions in the aftermath of a nuclear war. This somewhat longer story started out great. The characters were engaging, and I was very interested in the action primarily because of the characters, even the character of a cut-off-from-almost-all-inputs defense industry supercomputer. But the ending - in the form of an epilogue was too abrupt and too big a style change, appeared to be mostly serving the purpose of the author almost directly explaining his thoughts/hypothesis rather than continuing to follow the characters. Oh, it's clear the author is trying to stay engaged with the characters, but it just doesn't flow properly. Disappointing end to a creative and interesting tale.
White Creatures **1/2
Gaining fuzzy consciousness, a man tries to reconstruct his memory, trying to determine how he ended up here with aliens doing experiments on him. His memories take him through his relationship with a woman who saved her whole life to have herself frozen before death, so she could be revived in a time when - hopefully - antiaging technology is available. A great twist at the end concerning the identity of the alien "white creatures".
Me/Days ****
A factory computer becomes self aware, leading to conflicts with programmers and factory workers. Told from the computer's POV.
Of Space/Time and the River **
Aliens visitors to Earth appear not to create much of a disruption. There interest seems to be mainly in ancient Egypt, with whose government they've made a deal. A visiting tourist and his wife find out though, that instead of preserving artifacts, the aliens plan to preserve (by removing from the planet) the entire Nile valley, and the pharoanic society of old.
Exposures - no rating
Okay, nothing against Benford, and nothing against me. Apparently now was not the time for me with this book. A lot of technical astronomical detail in this story. I would normally want to wrap my head around it in my sad layman's way, but I just didn't have the patience for it. Maybe this would be a really good one for someone who has a good grasp of the technical details, so those details just flow through them and enhance the story to be told. I just needed a dumbed down version of this one.... I started skimming, and then skipping. You just can't do that with a short story, so I gave up.
Time's Rub - no rating
Okay, here I go again. Didn't get "grabbed" by the beginning because I didn't want to think that hard. So I am not reading it. In this one its not technical terms that required the extra thinking, it's the vastly different reality being presented.
Doing Lennon - no rating
And once I again, I just couldn't stick with it. It hooked me, after all, what's not interesting about a person who gets plastic surgery and freezes themselves in the hopes of impersonating John Lennon sometime in the far future? But then I got lost by the speculative part of this speculative fiction - computer personalities playing different impersonation scenarios to warn the "real" personality of possible pitfalls - think the movie War Games individualized and on steroids. Meh.
=========
So, as a whole - too techy, too speculative, some of them, or at least for my pea brain. Maybe a person with more tech education themselves would love. If most sci fi seems too dumbed-down, then this is probably for you. For me, its back to "easy" stuff like Foundation etc.
February 28, 2015
It's hard to review a book of short fiction when every story is so different. I can only summarise how I felt about the book as a whole (unless I go into every story individually). So, with many of the stories I found myself getting lost as the story submerged into more technical detail. I don't mind hard sci-fi, but sometimes it seems that stories can suffer as if they are merely vessels for scientific pondering. When that happens, if you don't have the scientific grounding to appreciate those musings, you can end up getting lost. I think that is what happened to me here, and perhaps why I found the less 'hard' stories more entertaining (such as the last story, "Doing Lennon", which I felt was one of the best of the lot, along with "Of Space/Time and the River" which was like a detailed delirium after drinking the wrong water on a Nile cruise).
The other stories - I found myself skipping through at places, which is something I rarely do and a sign that I'm really not enjoying it as much as I'm trying to. I lost the stream of the story too often, and found that I wasn't interested in the characters, or that the interesting characters did not stick around long enough. I guess that these stories were a great way to play with concepts, but as stories in themselves, I just couldn't keep a grasp on many of them.
The other stories - I found myself skipping through at places, which is something I rarely do and a sign that I'm really not enjoying it as much as I'm trying to. I lost the stream of the story too often, and found that I wasn't interested in the characters, or that the interesting characters did not stick around long enough. I guess that these stories were a great way to play with concepts, but as stories in themselves, I just couldn't keep a grasp on many of them.
December 17, 2021
Short stories. Reads somewhat like a Twilight Zone where you get the story and an authors breakdown afterwords.
Some of the stories were a bit heavy on the science but the majority were enjoyable,
I like older science fiction in that it takes ideas and the science of the time and extrapolates it into the future. It can be compared with current society and science although sometimes it can cut a bit close to the mark as in the Author's closing story "Doing Lennon".
All in all a Good Read.
Some of the stories were a bit heavy on the science but the majority were enjoyable,
I like older science fiction in that it takes ideas and the science of the time and extrapolates it into the future. It can be compared with current society and science although sometimes it can cut a bit close to the mark as in the Author's closing story "Doing Lennon".
All in all a Good Read.
June 25, 2018
Un conjunto de historias cortas de calidad muy dispar, y con finales en general pobres comparados con los desarrollos. Bendford me gusta más cuando escribe novelas.
January 3, 2019
5/10. Media de los 8 libros leídos del autor: 6/10.
Su aclamada saga del “Centro Galáctico” está bien (solo bien, para mí. Los mejores el 3 y el 4)
Su aclamada saga del “Centro Galáctico” está bien (solo bien, para mí. Los mejores el 3 y el 4)
October 2, 2022
Verboso, tanti spunti interessanti ma risolti in modo vecchio, stantìo, senza alcun mordente.
March 17, 2016
It's a good collection, but nothing special. Weird to think how old it is.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews