points by dang 1 year ago

I've got one of these too. When I was 6 or 7 I read a book in the school library in which the villains were "bone people" and the heroes were space explorers. The bone people could read minds, so they could tell everything the heroes were planning and thwart them.

Eventually the heroes learn to keep their true thoughts in the back of their minds, where the bone people can't access them, and with this technique they defeat the bone people. It was the best book I'd ever read (up till then!) and I remember practicing keeping my thoughts in the back of my mind.

I've been trying for years to find this book again. Anybody have ideas?

Edit: it occurred to me that I should try an LLM, so I pasted the above text into O1 and, in a combination of anticlimactic and thrilling, it gave the answer straightaway. The book is https://www.amazon.com/Bone-People-Space-Science-Fiction/dp/... and the title is, er, "Bone People". Thanks ChatGPT!

Edit 2: having now read the OP (and it's great), I see that the ChatGPT angle was already in there. But it produced an opposite result in my case.

ddoeth 1 year ago

Maybe the difference is that you used O1 that has access to the internet, and the other users might not have.

  • pvg 1 year ago

    It seems like the biggest difference is that the book is about bone people and is actually called Bone People.

    • dang 1 year ago

      A triumph of LLM literalism. It never have occurred to me that that might literally have been the title. Googling "bone people" or "bone people children's book" doesn't work; the SERPs are flooded by a different novel that won the Booker in 1986, interesting zero six-year-olds. But "bone people science fiction" does work!

      I read (er, reread) it last night using the book-borrowing feature of archive.org which got them existentially sued: https://archive.org/details/bonepeople0000unse/. The mind-reading business hardly figures in the action; it's there, but marginal. The humans actually defeat the bone people by kicking one of them in the head (er, skull) and then blasting them with an air gun. Literally an air gun: it shoots air, and it turns out that air kills bone people. That was lucky!

      I remain of the opinion that defeating mind-readers by keeping one's thoughts in the back of one's mind is the most interesting thing about the book, so it's not surprising that was what stuck in my mind, though not so much in the back. It's been in a trunk in the middle somewhere.

      • tptacek 1 year ago

        For anybody else playing the home game like I am, this is an easier read than Bruno Schulz "Street Of Crocodiles".

        Later

        No, that's not quite fair; you get halfway into this and it starts to be written like the Hadiths. "The Bone People do not think about a thing but what it is an evil thought." I'm always saying!

        • dang 1 year ago

          I also found it strangely written and hard to read (as an adult). At the very end, on p. 72, there is a sort of appendix for teachers which says:

            The total vocabulary of this book is 280 words, excluding proper names 
  and sound words. The 15 words in roman type should be familiar to 
  children reading on a third-grade level. The 20 words above third-grade 
  level are shown in italic type.

          280 words seems rather few! That's probably why it reads like Gertrude Stein.

          • selimthegrim 1 year ago

            I’m surprised this hasn’t shown up on Reddit terrible sci-fi covers