It’s been a couple years – might as well try again.
There was a paperback anthology of horror stories circa 1968 in which one of the stories was about someone buying a can with no label at a supermarket at discount and then horror ensued. I’ve never been able to track the book down.
There’s a Brin short story about a mysterious plague of paralysis, but it’s from 1980 or so, and doesn’t fit otherwise. Do you remember what the real cause is?
No. I have a vague feeling it might have been an Ace Double, though I looked at a list of those and none seemed to fit. And to narrow it down a bit, I think I read it around 1964.
This is a short story I read about 30 years ago. A nice couple are living in a nice small American town. One day a new family with a little boy move in next door, they seem very pleasant and friendly and the wives make friends. The first wife does notice however that the new friend seems very scared of water. When the first wife is in her house and asks for a glass of water, the new friend fills it from the tap like it is dangerous. One day the neighbours go out in the car, the first wife is watching when they come back, just as it starts to rain. The family start to run frantically from the car to the house, the rain suddenly intensifies … and the family melt like they are being dissolved.
Thanks!
Odd but memorable story. After all these years, I still remember the line about their despairing look upwards as the heavens open.
Kinda weird that Asimov felt that he needed to describe in detail what cotton candy is.
I’m British, and over here we call it candyfloss. Without his explanation I might not have known that cotton candy meant the same.
I read a story probably in the 80s or early 90s where a group succeeded in bringing a man to the present from the future for a short time, like half an hour or two hours or so. They were excited that he was an educated man, but his specialty turned out to be something weird and narrow and meaningless and maybe not even technical. He mentioned a teaching machine for his kids, but knew no more than the general appearance of its innards from when he’d looked over the repairman’s shoulder when it was being worked on. He had zero practical knowledge of his world that they could use.
Sounds like one of the two stories from here
Wow! Thank you! I’d tried to find the answer now and then over the years and never got anywhere, and you found it in a second!
So it was T. E. D. Klein’s Renaissance Man, which the Internet Archive has in Microcosmic Tales. And I was wrong about the teaching machine — it was his son’s antigravity belt. Now I just need to figure out my time belt one…
Glad to help.
I’m going to cross-post in this epic thread because my dedicated OP several months ago got no replies. The story is not quite sci-fi, but involves telepathy and I was once positive it was Ray Bradbury. Here goes, fwiw:
- I read this as a kid in the early 1970s; it was a book of my mom’s which I assumed was at least 10 or 20 years old at the time.
- Short story length; not a novel; part of a collection of short stories.
- I always had an idea it was Ray Bradbury, but no longer think that.
- The story is about telepathy, and may have a reference to telepathy in the title.
- In it, an accused wife-killer is brought to trial. He’s pretty obviously guilty, but one woman juror has doubts. She stares into his handsome, handsome face and feels they have a telepathic connection – he is pleading with her to believe in his innocence.
- She is the holdout juror for acquittal, and successfully brings the rest of the jury around.
- She and the acquitted man marry. She is proud of herself when she reveals, after their marriage, that she has a fair amount of money, which she has carefully saved up despite a modest income. He is pleased but not surprised, because she is clearly frugal and prudent, which is why he loves her.
- In a moment of tenderness he accidentally, telepathically reveals that he murdered his first wife for her money, and is now about to do the same thing again.
It’s the kind of think that Fredric Brown would write - but I read a complete collection of his short works recently, and don’t recall this one. I’ll keep thinking
wow, I definitely got that wrong. I was so sure it was Bradbury. Thanks for setting me straight.
Strange thing is that I have never before heard of Fritz Leiber. I definitely didn’t have any of his books. I wonder how I came across that story. It doesn’t seem like the sort of story they would assign in school…
Did you try looking up the story in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)?:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?78249
This is the standard place to look up all the places where a particular science fiction, fantasy, or horror story has appeared. It’s appeared in a few anthologies. I don’t know whether the ISFDb lists the school textbook anthologies that stories have appeared in.
I don’t think it does… I just checked by looking up Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”, which I know I read in a school textbook, but I don’t think the textbook was listed (there was one anthology that might have been a textbook, but it also contained multiple Clarke stories, and I’m sure I would have remembered if a textbook I’d read had had multiple SF stories).
I’m almost positive I read “Arena” (by Fred Brown, and later adapted into the ST episode) in “The Weekly Reader” but that’s not listed in the ISFDB either.