Glad to help. Keep the questions coming.
You should try the short story Think Like A Dinosaur. (There seems to be a free audio version online, but no free text–it is found in Galaxy’s Edge issue 1.
This one popped into my head recently. I’m guessing I read it late 70s-early 80s. I think it was a novella in a compilation.
In the future lots of manual labor is performed by reanimated corpses whose brains are somehow controlled by telepaths called “handlers”. One handler can control a number of workers simultaneously.
The main character handler controls a mining crew. In the climax he is attacked by his own crew because the villain somehow overrides his control. He manages to defeat the crew and escape, although I don’t remember how. There’s a subplot where the main character goes to a brothel where the ladies are corpses. Later he comments to his coworkers that he’d like to meet the handler for the brothel because the sex was so great, and they tease him for not knowing about the feedback circuit the hooker-corpses come equipped with - i.e. he was controlling the hooker without realizing it.
Any ideas?
Sounds like George R. R. Martin’s “Corpsehandler” short-story trilogy, of OVERRIDE and MEATHOUSE MAN and NOBODY LEAVES NEW PITTSBURG.
That’s it!
Looks like I conflated multiple stories into one piece. Checking isfdb.org, I know I had the Terry Carr anthology that contained “Meathouse Man”. I found an excerpt on-line and that’s definitely what I thought was a subplot.
“Override” appeared in the Sept 73 issue of Analog, and sometime in the mid 70s I bought a grocery bag full of Analogs at a neighbor’s garage sale. So I probably encountered it there. Looks like the third one hasn’t been collected, so I may not have read it.
I once read a book as a kid that I have no idea what it was called. It was about a boy (and I think a friend and a girl were other main characters) who would find these little metal cubes and when he’d activate them by squeezing, they would give special powers. In the early part of the book, they gave telekinesis or allowed him to read minds, but later in the book he would actually go into people’s minds in a virtual simulation and could alter memories, resolve traumas, discover secrets, stuff like that, kinda like Inception. At the end, he finds the final cube which allows him to go into a new space (his own mind? The afterlife? Not sure) where he meets his long dead father who reveals he has been guiding him to these cubes and powers all along.
It was super weird but reading as a kid it was really engrossing.
Could’ve been Christopher, or Christopher and his Magic Powers.
I recall reading one short story where the protagonist wanted to assassinate the tyrant but could not figure out how to get it done right, and at last he settled on using a laser to blind the tyrant while he is giving a speech, because how can a nation respect and follow a man who cannot see.
In a similar vein, a protagonist visits a planet where the natives take and subject him to a sequence of tortures that each grow more horrific than the last, and after his body is a total wreck, they elevate him to the pinnacle of leadership, because he now has nothing to gain or lose by acting rashly. (I want to say that it was in It Came from Schenectady, but my copy has gone out of hand and I cannot easily find a list of titles.)
On The Uses Of Torture, by Piers Anthony.
The Light of Darkness by Clarke I think
Agreed. The story can be found in the collection “Anthonology” from 1985 - about the same time that “It Came from Schenectady” was published.
William Safire wrote a pretty good political novel, Full Disclosure, about a President blinded in an accident who has to fend off political foes and prove that he can actually still lead the country.
Thanks, guys.
Oh, man, The Nine Billion Names of God collection had one story that was so well written I had to show it to my HS English teacher to prove to him that there was good SF. It was called Death and the Senator
Okay, my turn.
I read every post so far and this one has not been brought up before.
I have only the vaguest recollection of a story that was probably more fantasy than SF. It was a children’s or young adult book, which I would have read in the early 90’s, although I don’t know how old it was at the time.
What I remember:
The protagonist is in an alternate universe or reality, whose analogue in our world is a junk yard.
The junk yard is surrounded by a metal fence, which in the other world is an impassible ocean of metal.
The plot involved the protagonist needing to reach the center of the world. There was an enemy of some sort who wanted to reach the center before he did. I recall the enemy being an animal of some sort, such as a rat.
The protagonist had a mysterious box that he didn’t know how to open. When he reaches the center of the world, he understands that the box opens in threes.
There have been some very impressive answers in this thread already, so I’m hopeful someone will recognize this.
keeping my fingers crossed…
Senor Beef started a thread about the movie Sunshine, and his synopsis of it reminded me of a story I read decades ago but I have, of course, forgotten both name and author. Pretty sure it was a short story, though.
In the story, the sun is no longer giving enough heat and light to keep the Earth warm, and everyone lives underground. Scientists have come up with a means to relight it that requires the delivery of a device to the sun. The mission succeeds, but only after the ship carrying the material needed to reignite the sun falls into the sun along with the device, I think because either the heat or the gravity was too much for the ship. Oddly, the crew members had expected to get back to Earth.
The last line was something like a woman on Earth looking up to the sky to see the sun starting to brighten, and remembering the last thing one of the crew members, her lover (?) saying to her, “I will return to you, in the sun.” That line has stuck with me all these years, so I’m wondering if anyone else recognizes it? I would have read this late 70s to mid 80s, so Alex Garland, writer of the movie Sunshine, is very definitely *not *the writer.
The line is “I will come back to you in the sunlight”: Clark Ashton Smith, Phoenix.
God damn, I love this board.
I’m seriously considering just PMing you and Peter Morris when I have a question like this. You two are bloody amazing.
I remember a story whose name escapes me, where the protagonist was an engineer working on a rocket in his country’s first space program. As the story progresses, we gradually discover that in this story’s world, electricity has never been discovered. The setting seems rather modern, with cities and rockets, etc. but all the technology is based on mechanical or chemical processes, with nothing electric. In the course of the story, I believe there’s a young maverick scientist who discovers or nearly discovers electricity, but is ridiculed by his superiors.