# Ask the guy who is pretty good at SF Story Identification **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [September 7, 2008, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417 "2008-09-07T00:08:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 96
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2025, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1901 "2025-11-26T23:47:04Z")
I will find that one - it’s very familiar ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1902 "2025-11-27T00:07:07Z")
Am I invisible? For the third time, it’s _The Weather Man_ by Theodore Thomas. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1903 "2025-11-27T00:43:31Z")
Sorry - I missed that due to my mistake in following the threading ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1904 "2025-11-27T00:57:55Z")
No problem! Glad I’m not accidentally posting into /dev/null or something. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1905 "2025-11-27T17:36:38Z")
Thanks, all! ---
**Author:** ![aurora\_maire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aurora_maire/32/328_2.png) [@aurora\_maire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aurora_maire)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1906 "2025-11-28T02:34:14Z")
I’ve seen talk about the Twilight Zone episode “Third From the Sun” in connection with the new Plur1bus series. I thought I knew what the episode was about until I read the synopsis. And it wasn’t what I remember. I remember what I thought was a Twilight Zone episode that was about some new kids moving into a neighborhood and telling the neighbors that they were from the third planet from the sun and the neighbors got suspicious and thought they were aliens. I don’t remember if the story was funny or tragic but had a “duh, the third planet from the sun is Earth!” ending. Was this storyline from some other anthology series or short story? Or all in my head? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1907 "2025-11-28T02:44:32Z")
OK, another one I’ve been trying to remember lately. This was a novella-length story I read in a compilation of stories from the golden age of sci-fi. It starts with a guy going to an old grindhouse theater in New York and watching a silent movie about the Old West which looks surprisingly realistic. He tracks down the filmmaker and finds out that he has a camera that can see into the past - he sets the time and place and he can film exactly what actually happened there. They go into business together and start making war movies that become increasingly popular - they make one about the Civil War and one about the American Revolution to start. Since the camera can’t record sound they hire lip readers and dub the recordings, which becomes increasingly complicated when they make a movie about Alexander the Great and have to find people who can lip-read ancient Greek. Eventually their films start becoming more and more popular, they get more ambitious, and they decide to make an epic-length film about a highly controversial subject (I can’t remember if it was the Holocaust or the life of Jesus) that winds up pissing off millions of people and lands them in court, where they’re forced to reveal how they’ve been making the movies by showing the judge an accurate recording of exactly what he was doing when the armistice was signed at the end of World War I. I believe the story ends with nuclear war breaking out after the US and the USSR get their hands on the technology and realize they can use it to spy on each other in real time. Sound familiar to anyone? ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1908 "2025-11-28T02:51:33Z")
> **[E for Effort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_for_Effort)** > > "E for Effort" is a science fiction novelette by American writer T. L. Sherred, first published in 1947, about the consequences of a time viewer, a machine that projects images of the past. It has been reprinted many times, including in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. > The story was Sherred's first science fiction publication. > According to Algis Budrys, it was contrary to the spirit of Astounding Science Fiction, where it appeared, and it "dismissed" the "bourgeois aspirations" of ASF's ed... ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1909 "2025-11-28T02:53:18Z")
Y’all’re good at this. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1910 "2025-11-28T03:09:12Z")
OK, one more. The premise was that Christopher Columbus somehow sails through a time portal on his way west in 1492 and, instead of landing in the Caribbean, winds up in 1980s New York. It’s written in first person as a travelogue, and includes such things as his marveling at the existence of a roundabout named after him, and his bafflement at how theologically liberal a young Catholic man he talks to has become, which leads to him concluding something like “Before we convert this land’s pagans to Christianity, we shall have to convert its Christians to Christianity”. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1911 "2025-11-28T03:20:19Z")
Similar themes were covered in Asimov’s short “The Dead Past” and Clarke and Baxter’s The Light of Other Days. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1912 "2025-11-28T17:55:04Z")
I need help identifying a story. In the story most people don’t go out to drive because there are so many other agressive drivers that make the streets a nightmare. They attack ofther cars to rob them. In the story a young man is a delivery driver, being as the money is good. He gets killed and his father is filled with grief and vows to complete his son’s job. I don’t recall if he makes it. ---
**Author:** ![professed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/professed/32/20311_2.png) [@professed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/professed)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1913 "2025-11-28T19:39:56Z")
As a kid I picked up a classic SF anthology at a used bookstore and it included a story I’ve always remembered, but can no longer name. An explorer, upon inventing a time machine, returns to the present with a knife featuring a blade of blue metal. He then exits the picture—can’t recall how—leaving behind both the knife and the discovery of time travel. The knife’s blade, which ends up in a museum, has such fantastic metallurgical properties that it becomes the focus of subsequent time travel, as expeditions search the future exhaustively for its source and the technological know-how to produce more of the same material. The story ends with the protagonist finally revealing a paradox, when he discovers that the original explorer had in fact found the knife years later in the museum case in which it exists in the present. Can anyone ID this tale? ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1914 "2025-11-28T19:44:54Z")
It was “As Never Was”, by P. Schuyler Miller, and here are the anthologies it appeared in: > **[Title: As Never Was](https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41649)** ---
**Author:** ![professed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/professed/32/20311_2.png) [@professed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/professed)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1915 "2025-11-28T20:00:19Z")
That’s it. And you are amazingly fast, too! Thank you so much, I look forward to sharing it with my own kids. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1916 "2025-11-28T20:06:38Z")
I remember reading it and I just happened to click onto the IMDb just as you posted your question. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2025, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1917 "2025-11-29T11:07:39Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > I need help identifying a story. In the story most people don’t go out to drive because there are so many other agressive drivers that make the streets a nightmare. They attack ofther cars to rob them. In the story a young man is a delivery driver, being as the money is good. He gets killed and his father is filled with grief and vows to complete his son’s job. Why Johnny Can’t Speed? ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2025, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1918 "2025-11-29T15:06:42Z")
> [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](#): > > Why Johnny Can’t Speed? As far as I can recall, that didn’t involve being a delivery driver or the road duels involving robbery. Upon review the story mentions “Bob was taking that gift to a friend in Diego. I’m bound to see that it’s delivered”. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2025, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1919 "2025-12-04T22:20:56Z")
Not sure if my request would be on-topic, because this is a hypothetical plot that I just thought up, not one from my distant past that actually existed that I am having trouble recalling. Was perusing a couple of the AI threads here, and wondered if there is a story where aliens in our fairly distant future come to explore earth-and find it overrun by mindless and insane robots of various sorts, with biological humans long extinct, turning the surface of the planet into a dadaist phantamasgoria of surreal nonsense. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2025, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417/1920 "2025-12-04T22:23:59Z")
Sounds like Poul Anderson’s Epilogue > **[Review: Poul Anderson's "Epilogue"](https://polaris93.livejournal.com/2745134.html)** > > Poul Anderson's "Epilogue" was first published in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction in March 1962, and is included in the anthology Going for Infinity , a collection of some of Anderson's best fiction and essays, which was first published in 1990.... > Somehow, after all organic Earthly life died, the result of what was almost surely the last, ultimate human war, it evolved again – from self-replicating, autonomous machines that had been the only survivors of that war, probaby sea-rafts, motorized floating boxes containg metallurgic processing plants, powered by solar batteries that took dissolved minerals or various elements out of sea water and, when they had full cargos, went to a point on shore where depots received their loads. Once empty, they returned to the sea for more. They had inertial navigation devices, electronic sensors, and various homeostatic systems, so that they could cope with normal changes in their environment. On top of everything else, they had electronic templates which carried complete information on their own design. These controlled mechanisms aboard the sea-rafts which made any spare parts that were needed by them. Those same mechanisms also kept producing amd assembling complete duplicate rafts. > > Once humanity and all other organic life was gone from the Earth, the sea rafts were still there, patiently bringing their cargoes to crumbling depots on empty shores year after year after year. And then they began to mutate . . . > > And from those humble beginnngs, a brand-new biota began to evolve, eventually filling the Earth with new analogs of plants, animals, and fungi, and peraps even bacteria and viruses, as well. And now, stunned and amazed, the three moon-suited humans find themselves in a Wonderland of such life, strange and alien and beautiful. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417.md?page=95) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ask-the-guy-who-is-pretty-good-at-sf-story-identification/462417.md?page=97)