What do you guys believe to be the greatest science fiction short story ever (or what would you consider to be the top 3, 5, or 10 (or 26, for that matter). The criteria I use when judging such weighty matters whilst I sit contemplating my cereal box are:
Timelessness
Relevancy to the human condition
My vote for the top dog: Flowers for Algernon
Some other greats (IMHO): Nightfall - Isaac Asimov (not the atrocious movie) The Quest for Saint Aquin - Anthony Boucher The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C. Clarke
And one that is not a great, but I really enjoy: Microcosmic God - Theodore Sturgeon
Note: IANA English major. Sometimes I have bad taste. That is my right as a 'Merican.
Sticking to the OP’s criterion, I’d say Robert Heinlein’s The Cold Equation. I still remember the first time I read it, and the way it knocked the wind right out of me.
Philip K. Dick’s Oh, to be a Blobel! ranks pretty high, too.
The Persistence of Vision by John Varley. I think it is considered a novella(??), but to me if it’s in a volume with other short works it’s a short story.
There’s the original, vastly superior, short story (about 30 pages long) that appeared in one of the pulps in the '50s, and there’s the bloatware version of the short story where he padded it up to novel size. The short story is one of the best SF stories ever written–the novel? Not so much.
Also, “The Cold Equations” isn’t Heinlein, it’s Tom Godwin (but Heinlein said repeatedly that it was one of his favorite stories which is why it’s associated with him)
I’d add in “The Proud Robot” by Lewis (Kuttner and Moore) Padgett–how often do you find a genuinely side-splittingly funny short story?
The original version (told entirely in Charly Gordon’s journal entries) is certainly a short story. Is there a novelization of the movie, or something, out there?
I’ve often felt that, in terms of what makes a story science fiction, as opposed to “a good story set in a SF venue,” the ideal SF story is Larry Niven’s “Wait It Out.” The entire scenario that makes the telling of the story possible is founded in an unusual fact of physics.
Credit where credit is due: The Cold Equations is by Tom Godwin.
I second I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Ellison.
Other top choices:
The Last Flight of Dr. Ain by James Tiptree, Jr. The Ballad of Lost C’Mell by Cordwainer Smith The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin Sandkings by George R. R. Martin The Pusher by John Varley
Flowers for Algernon was originally a short story. It was later expanded to novel length.
Heinlein certainly had some great short stories. The Man Who Traveled in Elephants is perhaps my favorite, although it probably isn’t SF – it took me the longest time as a kid to figure out what the expression “traveled in” meant.
Other good ones: The aformentioned All You Zombies and the lesser-known By His Bootstraps are both excellent. Any subsequent writer who tries to write a time-travel paradox story has a high standard to live up to.
They is another good one. Even paranoids have enemies…
The Long Watch. If it came down to it, I’d like to think I could do what Johnnie Dahlquist did.
Magic, Incorporated is just plain weird, but a lot of fun.
and, finally:
If This Goes On –, perhaps the best SF story of all time.