That book you remember some details but can't recall the title

I think it was a series, there was a kid that makes a house in a hollowed-out tree. Think he has a bird pet or something. Part of it is him surviving the winter. Really got me interested in nature and having adventures in the woods as a kid.

My missing book title is a fantasy book about a man who is brought to the empire of his enemies and somehow forced to live like they do. He tries to do everything right, working long hours and helping people who aren't very nice to him. Like helping a boy learn some basic carpentry despite already being exhausted himself. Eventually he ends up carving statues for the empire and the people are so used to the ugly propaganda ones that when he makes one truly beautiful it shocks them all. The leaders present then try to destroy it but fail so they force him to destroy it instead. This somehow triggers the fall of the empire.

I'm not sure if this was part of a larger fantasy series or a one-off but I'm pretty sure I read it in the early 2000s.

I remember a book I borrowed from the library when I was 10 or so.

• The premise was the protagonist was sent off to some relatives (for summer? To live with?) and she ends up finding a conspiracy with other kids going missing and it turns out that like some underwater witches had been kidnapping them to work mining stuff underwater, until the protagonist rescues them.
• The cover art was either a pearl or a bubble.
• I think there may have been a sequel which I remember even less about
• There is a non-zero chance that it was an Irish author
• I was reading above my age range often at the time so it may have been a book aimed at teenagers

I had two stories that I wasn't able to identify. I did Google searches over the years and never found much luck. That being said, I thought to harass AI by giving it the impossible task of identifying the stories... and it succeeded. Still, hearing that AI is busy assimilating books into its' knowledge base makes a bit more sense now.

I'm not saying AI would help people find what they are looking for. It is more that it is something else to try and I want a solution even if that solution is a bit unorthodox.

In quotes is the AI query (the story as I best remembered it) and the answer is provided below each quote. These were put through the ChatGPT free version. I am just providing the initial query and not the "back and forth" conversation after. Also, I'm not providing the AI responses which were usually of like 4 or 5 different books that could fit the description. I'm just saying what AI response was the correct book for my search.

This story is a science fiction story and is a short story that was published in a book or other short story compilation. The story follows a character who stayed on planet Earth after it was evacuated with regards to the star going nova. The character describes their final days on planet Earth before that happens. The character did recall that the planet was nice for a while and had normal seasons but that the environment was nothing but very warm near the end. Their final moments were to wake up during the night and to feel that the walls of their home was extremely hot (which indicated that the star was going nova at that exact moment).

This was a short story from the book "Out of This World tales of space" (sic) by Allan Graubard and Gale Burnick and the story was "The Wind from the Sun". I must have gotten that as a library loan when I was in school. The story sticks around in my mind as an example of a hopeless situation (they will die from the sun) but that life still "goes on" while everyone is waiting for the end to happen.

That being said, the other short stories in the book weren't nearly as good. Also, this is something that is only available as a physical book and something I think few people have read at all. The Goodreads for that book (link here) only shows it on 39 shelves making it the rarest thing on my shelf.

This story is a science fiction story and is a short story that was published in a book or other short story compilation. The story was read before the year 2000 and was likely published far earlier than that. The story follows a character who lives inside of a massive building and who has never saw the outside world (since the whole world was the inside of that building). A subway system ran inside of that building allowing access to other locations. That person decided to get on the subway system and remain on the subway to see where it would eventually end.

This was a story by J. G. Ballard called "The Concentration City" that is available in any compilations of his work. Re-reading the story, it isn't as great as I recall but it still a pretty good tale. I think I like the idea better (of a world being notably different than ours) and this was just a notable example that somehow stuck in my memory. I have no idea when I read it though (other than a long time ago).

I haven't read the rest of the stories in the compilation book I just got for that author but it is something I will get around to eventually.

There was a self published thing I saw here on Tildes about a year ago. It was sort of a backrooms thing where this office worked finds an entrance to a sort of infinite office from another reality that he starts exploring.

I read the free chapter and thought it looked interesting. But forgot all about it until recently.

Mine had some kids working through a series of rooms in a nautilus. I actually tried a few librarians, but none had heard of anything like it. I’m pretty sure it was where I learned the word “nautilus”.

There’s a book I read in middle school that I haven’t been able to find any details on. It’s about a teen boy of (iirc) Native American descent. He tracks and hunts some sort of giant white centipede monster in the forest near his house with a bow and arrow. There’s a scene where he discovers bloody tracks where the monster had killed a deer and dragged it into a hole in the ground.

Oh man I have a few.

First of all there was this one book that had to do with a giant multi-person swing, a black hole, and time dilation. My memory of this book is entirely visual, as in I don't remember the words, and I sort of remember the cover being mostly black, but the visuals I saw while reading it. I can't remember ANY other information on it, I can't remember the characters, plot, or title, just the swing, the black hole and the time dialation. I don't even remember how any of that was important. It's like a fever dream.

The other one is this book about some kids who were about to die or something got abducted by aliens to be put into an alien zoo, but one of them had a calculator that allowed them to break out of their cell, and there was dirt that when eaten would turn the user into a hairy monkey creature, and there was chrome spheres and lasers.

Some paperback fantasy novel about the exploits of a teenage Marco Polo.

It was a spare afterthought of a book placed in a third grade classroom for anybody to read.

The only thing I remember was an offhand account of them fighting/defeating(?) a wizard. Mentioned offhandedly in what had to have been one of the opening chapters.

Edit: I had to have encountered this book in the year 2000, this thing was old, easily some 80s fantasy pulp.

I read a book in late elementary school that seems to be very similar to Spud but I swear was somewhat more graphic. I remember the protagonist going to boarding school, mixed up with a lot of girls, and things became more sexually explicit sometimes. It was an influential book for me. I just reread Spud and though I think it could be spud I really think it’s a different book :(

A book I read as a kid in Australia in the 80s. I recall that there were two aliens had landed or crashed on earth separately near each other and a kid finds the good one and they have to try and stop the evil one. I recall the evil alien had his ship in the lake (maybe?) and there was a tense chase scene in a house under construction.

I remember it creeping me out a lot.

There was this sci-fi book I read in high school from the library, I chose it because of the cool cover art (a woman in a spacesuit wielding an enormous rifle, crouching on the surface of a space station or something). I think I enjoyed it, I really don't remember much of the content other than that there was a scene where a tour guide or captain or somone in a kilt was showing people around, and there was a mishap with the artificial gravity with predictable results that was played for laughs. Haven't seen it in years, but every so often I search for it just to try to see that cover art again.

Here's one I've been hunting for a long time now. It's a young adult or children's scifi-ish novel featuring a protagonist that got hold of a fancy watch that lets him hop across dimensions. One of the dimensions he hopped into was one that his cousin (who possibly also has a watch) had conquered but ended up being deposed.

Genetically modified organisms are a major theme too (with triffid-like plants being an antagonistic force?).

Near the end of the novel, there's a dinner party conversation where Mad Cow Disease is mentioned.

The protagonist's romantic interest was a girl with misaligned teeth that made her less conventionally pretty. Naturally he overlooks this at the end of the novel.

An eclectic bunch of details, I know!

Some weird book I vaguely recall reading at my elementary school in the early 90’s about a kid that traveled back in time to inhabit the mind of a cowboy or something. That’s literally all I can remember about a book I read nearly forty years ago.

There is a short story I've been trying to find for years. I would have read it in the late '80s or early '90s, so it could have been from then or it might be an older "golden age of sci-fi" story.

It's about a big project to make a rocket, and there are all kinds of people working on various parts of the project. Some kind of big manager visits one of the sites, and asks the local supervisor about one worker who doesn't seem to be doing anything. The local supervisor explains that he knows that guy never does anything, but that he keeps him around because he makes everyone else work better. If someone is stuck on some part of the design, having the slacker around will help them figure it out, and if people are getting burned out having the slacker around makes them more motivated.

Eventually it's time to launch the rocket, and the slacker guy is missing. They discover that the subtle ideas he had given to people by being nearby included a body sized cavity, and the conclusion is that he was some kind of alien who was helping the project get built so that he could return to space. The title or the last line had some reference to animals returning to their spawning grounds.

I read a novel a few years ago (but I think it was published in the 80s or 90s) that includes Fortean elements like missing time. I can’t remember anything at all of the story except that the characters become involved with a cult whose leader considers travel extremely important. He makes one statement which has always stuck in my mind: “The body is unique in that it is the only object we experience from the inside.”

I recall reading a science fiction book, probably in the early to mid 00's, possibly as late as the early 2010s.

It featured some pretty high-concept/distant future science fiction ideas, I specifically remember a kind of rotating space elevator that would flip end over end to pick things up and fling them into orbit. There was, I think, a fairly young human woman who was the main character/viewpoint, but most of Earth and its inhabitants had evolved or otherwise progressed into near-unrecognizable forms. I think there was something about a higher-dimensional super intelligence that was messing about, and a gigantic living space-whale/spaceship captained by a swarm of bees.

I think there was a villianous entity that may have been called Manifold or possibly Malign, or maybe those were two different things?

It's been so long and sounds like a fever dream when I try to tell anyone about it, but I'm sure it must be out there.

I'm pretty sure it's not Baxter's Manifold trilogy, but that's all that comes up when I search the keywords I remember.

A rich and manipulative father dies, prodigal son returns from far away for the funeral just for a day, he thinks. But he finds his father manipulating him from beyond the grave, and he has to extricate his life while his relationship with his wife degrades the longer he's stuck there..

Ring any bells for anyone?