Sounds like “Not In The Literature”, by Christopher Anvil.
That’s it! Thanks.
I should read more Christopher Anvil - I’ve liked the stories and novels of his that I’ve read, but I know there are more out there.
I’m pretty sure this is “The Shadow People” by Margaret St. Clair.
Into the Out Of by Alan Dean Foster.
It’s on my bookshelf along with other favorites from my elementary-school reading days 
OK, here’s a couple I’d like to identify – the first because I’d like to re-read it, the second because I really would not like to re-read it but every once in a while I think of it and when I do it bugs me.
- Longish short story or possibly a novella; I think maybe about fifteen or twenty years old? Researcher – I think a linguist – trips over an isolated group of people who don’t categorize people into male and female. Researcher says something like (not direct quotes) ‘don’t you notice that some people have penises and flat chests and other people have vulvae and large breasts?’ and is answered in effect ‘of course some people have penises and some people have vulvae. But some people with penises have larger breasts than some people with vulvae and why would we categorize people by that anyway?’ Researcher then goes hunting for other unusual gender categorizations or lack of, and comes across a pair of twins with a twin language, which has terms for a lot of, I think several dozen, genders.
Note that I read this significantly before I started seeing common reports of people identifying as anything other than male or female.
- Quite a short story, and I think considerably older. Small boy is sick in bed. He complains that his foot – I think it was his foot – isn’t part of him any longer, but has been taken over by something awful, and begs to have it amputated. Family tries to soothe him, tells him he just has a fever and is hallucinating, of course it’s his own foot. He then starts saying that the something awful is moving up his leg, taking over more and more of him. Family continues in the same attitude. The awful thing continues on upwards. Child, or rather something now looking like the child, wakes up, has developed some sort of destructive power, destroys something in the room I don’t remember what, and then goes off to kill the parents.
The second one is by Bradbury. Stand by…
“Fever Dream” Fever Dream (short story) - Wikipedia
I saw a picture book version of this once, with the infected parts of the kid being phosphorescent!
Corrected link Fever Dream (short story) - Wikipedia
PS: At the end of the story the kid deliberately infects his pet bird with the disease and resolves to shake hands with lots of people, starting with his family.
Yup, that’s it, Andy L. I remembered a lot of details wrong, but that’s certainly the one I was remembering.
– not sure I might not have been around fifteen myself when I read it; it’s certainly old enough. Scared the hell out of me, that’s for sure.
Thanks!
Glad to help. The “glow in the dark” edition https://www.amazon.com/Fever-Dream-Night-Lights-Bradbury/dp/0312572859 is extra creepy.
This sounds familiar to me too. Maybe Le Guin?
You got it. I even recognize some of the characters names in the link.
Man, I could have sworn that was a Mike Resnick story.
I bow to your superior knowledge.
Oh, I think I’ve got a really obscure one for you!
Mind you, I’m not trying to play stump-the-expert here, I really would like to find this tale and read it again.
The story was published in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I think; I read it in an anthology whose title I don’t recall.
PREMISE: Space travelers from Earth visit a planet where the intelligent local entities are some kind of bipedal vegetables or plants, with language and a culture and like that…
Said locals have a tradition of hanging up their children and stretching their bodies out as the kids become adolescents. This rite of passage horrifies the do-gooders among the Earth visitors, who see it as child abuse. Another faction of the traveller group argues for a “Prime Directive” of sorts: Don’t interfere with the indigenous culture!
A local kid named Spet or Splet or something similar befriends the Earthlings; the well meaning don’t-stretch-your-kids faction starts working with Splet-or-Spet’s family, trying to convince them to break tradition by not subjecting their boy Spet-or-Splet to the ritual.
It has an ending which is either very sad indeed or happy in a weird way, depending on the reader’s interpretation.
I read this story like ten, fifteen years ago and it has somewhat stuck with me – but obviously not completely, or even sufficiently. If you could supply me with the title, and the author’s name, and maybe even what magazine or anthology it was published in, I’d really appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
UNHUMAN SACRIFICE, Katherine MacLean. Published in Astounding Science Fiction (March, 1958), reprinted in Damon Knight’s anthology A Century of Science Fiction.
Excellent!
I’m pretty sure it’s not LeGuin; I think I’d have remembered it as LeGuin if it were.
(It’s true that I’ve been sure of things before that turned out not to be so --)
Yeah, that’s it! Thank both of you guys.
Could be THE PEOPLE ON THE PRECIPICE, by Ian Watson.
Thanks for this! The cover is exactly how I remember it.
Another one.
Sci-Fi short story I read in a short story collection that was published in the 90’s. About 50-70 pages long.
Aliens come to Earth and pose us a challenge. Beat them at their version of a board game and if we win we gain the knowledge of how to beat all diseases. Fail and they destroy the Earth. The board game is needlessly complex but a newspaper writer who’s covering this somehow gains an understanding of it and becomes Earth’s champion. He’s sent to challenge the head alien and pretty much instantly loses once the game gets underway. However he’s able to figure out the aliens simply want a fun challenge and don’t care about the medium so he challenges them instead to a game of poker, which he beats them handily at every time. Intrigued they thank him for the fun and give us our prize and go off to another planet to challenge them to a high-stakes poker game.