Can't remember a book?

This is the thread for when you can't remember the name of a book or story, or who wrote it. The impetus for this thread is a short story I read when I was a kid, in my father's SF collection, that I was going to suggest for the "Dying Earth" thread. It was about a test pilot who accidentally travels through time, testing an antigravity device in an aeroplane. The plane crashes millions of years in the future on a frozen Earth, and his high altitude suit's kerosene heater lasts long enough to let him walk to one of the vast empty cities, full of inert robots, their batteries drained as their heating coils turned to superconductors in the punishing cold as the sun died. He finds a radio telescope with enough power for a last message, and aims it at Neptune, after some deliberation, and is eventually rescued and returned to his own time by surviving robots who had set up a colony on Neptune after the last humans had died. There was a scene I remember where he sees the main beam of his plane, broken in the crash over the delicate helix of the anti-gravity device. Presumably it's an old story, by the kerosene heater and the idea of Neptune being habitable. Another is a paperback novel of more recent vintage, with a swordsman accompanied by his scaled, winged, demonic lover, it opens with the protagonist engaged in a duel on a beach with his rapier against a Tasmanian with a machete, over the other calling his lover a whore, when she actually is a whore, but he's just sick of hearing it. The duel is interrupted by the Tasmanian (who is always referred to as such) being dragged under the sand by some unseen force. Later in the story the couple are inside a hollow Earth, looking up at a second, artificial planet inside ours. The Tasmanian shows up as a prisoner and is released. The books cover is the swordsman and two brightly coloured demon-women in a boat, seen from behind, looking up at the inner planet. I think the name of the book was the name for the type of demon the girlfriend was...

Bump. Next time you forget a book make sure it isn't one about hot demon girls.

There were a few I read back in the 5th/6th grade that I wish I remembered... One was about a kid who was really struggling with school, always in fights and soykaf, his dad was a good man but he was also sick/dying so his back was constantly against the wall. The cover was blue and the title was in red letters. The 2nd I remember was about these girls (and this one guy friend) who went to this special academy. They were like 15-16 and everyone at this academy would go to this abandoned building to party, and then go to class hungover and stuff. The plot was, people were getting kidnapped, and the MCs were trying to figure out who was doing it and stop them. The culprit is this viking-looking guy. This book was part of a series of other stories like this. That's all I remember of these 2. My mom threw them away when I was 12 so I don't remember a whole lot about them. If anyone can confirm to me I didn't dream this up that'd be pretty cool.

There was this one comic book I read when I was like 11 that was really weird and I don't even remember where I got it. It was all black and white, pretty long, and has a lot of adult themes (nudity, death, the whole shebang). Something about a donut?? there was like a donut on the front cover and it was this donut that connected all the stories or something.

OP here. No luck yet on the books I mentioned, but I did find one I'd forgotten that I'd also forgotten to mention here, a futuristic thriller about a world where the martial arts had been debased into street gangs, and a tournament where the hero had to fight a champion who was a master of praying mantis kung fu, who used sai in the fights, and was using qi gong to become a god, so the hero had to behead him at the right moment to stop this happening by killing the astral god-fetus as it travelled up his chakras through his neck before it exited the top of the skull and became immortal... It was Aiki, by John Gilbert. I kept getting it conflated with The Kundalini Equation, by Steven Barnes, and Tengu, by Graham Masterton, and Anvil of the Heart, by Bruce T. Holmes, all of which I had read in the same period, in a frenzy for martial arts trash. I just remembered it had a short, snappy title, and then recently I was researching Aikido for a pacifist friend who is always in trouble, and it hit me. Aiki was the only book Gilbert wrote, and Bruce T Holmes only wrote one book apart from Anvil. >>6998 It wasn't something to do with the Heavy Metal movie, was it? All the stories were tied together by a glowing green ball of evil called the Locnar or something.

I'm looking for a choose-your-own-adventure book from the late '80s or '90s. The cover, IIRC had a UFO on it, and the title was something along the lines of "Kidnappers From Outer Space." I've tried googling the title, but nothing comes up. The story involves a keyboard for a computer, and the keys get taken literally, like by pressing "delete" you could literally delete yourself.

>>8065 If it is literally a CYOA brand book, all that stuff is catalogued for posterity. Try wikipedia. If it's a choose your own adventure type from a different house, you may be out of luck. I read loads of these myself and it doesn't ring a bell.

>>8066 Yeah, I looked through the list of official books and it wasn't there. Thanks, though.

>>8072 >Drawn into a computer and out again into an alien spaceship far away from earth, the reader must figure out a way to get back home Sounds close-ish to what you're talking about

There was this massive scfi-fi compilation book from my childhood town's library that I only picked up for War of the Worlds. Before I turned it back in, I skimmed through summaries of the other included stories and only remember one that had something to do with a humanoid robot living with a human. I can't remember why it was interesting, but I haven't been able to forget about it. My best estimate for its date would be late-1800's to mid-1900's. I almost want to say that the robot was a maidbot, but that might be my degenerate brain rewriting things.

>>6239 >One was about a kid who was really struggling with school, always in fights and soykaf, his dad was a good man but he was also sick/dying so his back was constantly against the wall. The cover was blue and the title was in red letters. Might be "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time".

>>8154 Was it "No Woman Born" from 1944, by C. L. Moore?

I think I've read this too, following this for later