True - the black hole in Earth stays belong the surface, but the efforts to remove/control it cause increasingly bizarre surface effects.
I googled “All Summer in a Day” Textbook, and found a lot of examples of teachers using this story in the classroom, as we suspected.
It also sounds a bit like The Forge of God by Greg Bear. In that, the small black hole is created and released by aliens, it oscillates back and forth for a while, and eventually destroys the Earth. There’s a lot more, of course, but that’s the part that sounds like it might fit your recollection.
This guy is right. I used to be a huge Larry Niven fan and have read about everything he’s written except for what he’s written in the last 5 years or so.
No, it’s not the “Forge of God.” In fact I just reread that one a couple of months ago. In my first post I said it wasn’t “Lucifer’s Hammer” - I actually should have said it wasn’t the “Forge of God.”
I’m absolutely sure the BH continuously exited the Earth’s crust, because that’s what caused a bunch of somebodies to start wondering why all these people and structures were getting holes in them. It’s just one of those burned in memories that will be with me till I croak.
It’s probably a terrible book, but nonetheless I’d love to read it again.
That’s definitely the one. Thanks!
This does sound a lot like “Thrice Upon a Time” (but I’m not familiar with “The Doomsday Effect” so it might fit that too) Thrice Upon a Time - Wikipedia . In this book there were several million primoridial black holes released, some of which exited the earth and caused havoc (people called them bug-o-phants before they figured out what they were, because the effects were like a microbe with the mass of an elephant going through people and other objects)
This may be from a horror anthology rather than sci-fi, but I recall a story about a 19th-century mariner on a sailing ship, following up on an earlier expedition that has gone missing, who discovers a mysterious island covered in thick mold. He anchors offshore, and in the night, the two survivors of the previous expedition row a boat out to the ship to beg for supplies, but refuse to come aboard or to allow themselves to be seen in the light.
The man on the rowboat tells the story of the failure of the previous expedition, and how he and his wife were eventually starving for lack of supplies. They finally resorted to eating the mold on the island, which was grotesque but shamefully delicious. He warns the mariner against coming ashore.
This goes on for a few nights until the mariner is finally preparing to leave. At the end of their final meeting, he dares to shine a light into the rowboat and see that the man and his wife have become nothing more than shambling, vaguely human-shaped piles of mold.
Anyone? 
This is “Voice In the Night” by William Hope Hodgson The Voice in the Night - Wikipedia
It is. I recognized the story and was going say what it was.
I love this thread…now I have to go read every single one of these…
I’m pretty sure I read this in a sci-fi or speculative fiction-type compilation, despite its religious theme:
A guy dies and goes to Heaven, where the souls of the saved live only as long as they wish to. The angel or guide explaining the situation points out that most people can only stomach Paradise for a century or so, before the novelty wears out and they lose the will to continue experiencing [generally sensual] pleasures [like eating, skiing, etc.] Those of a more esthetic bent often persist longer, with the longest-persisting souls generally being those of great scholars and philosophers, who enjoy endless reading, ruminating, discussion, and writing. The guide explains that there used to be a great many more “Old Testament-era types,” but most of them became exhausted long ago.
When someone has had enough of Heaven, they can request [or wish for, I’m not sure of this detail] non-existence – and if they are sincere and sober about it, it’s granted. (Thus in the long, long run, bliss for most people amounts to Nirvana.)
I’m not positive if the following is a part of this story or a different one altogether, but I think it’s the continuation of the same:
Heaven is not the destination of the morally good or theologically correct, so to speak. Rather, it’s an unapologetic collection of the best and brightest of all religions (and none) by God, to solve a heretofore unsolved dilemma. The problem is that God has become exhausted and wants out, but can’t figure out how to annihilate Himself. [I don’t recall if the story addresses whether universal annihilation would be concommitant with God’s cessation, or not.] The man who has just arrived in Heaven is assigned to a committee or task force of minds to address this problem…
I can rule out one candidate: it’s not Stanley Elkin’s The Living End, a religious satire in which God at the end declares he has not found his audience and annihilates all existence.
I’ve got a candidate for the second part. It doesn’t match the first part, though, so I think it’s two different stories
Asimov’s The Last Answer.
(not to be confused with Asimov’s The Last Question)
I think that’s it. Thanks!
I have another one I just thought of. I think I read this in Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction in the early 90s, but I got a bunch of those magazines in a garage sale and it could have been in a much older collection.
The story is told as a flashback/letter from a man to his daughter, who is being kept in a hidden room on life support devices. This guy is investigating a planet where an alien race had, tens of thousands of years before, genetically engineered a new sentient species, and not long after that built a huge fortress and the entire population disappeared into it. Some kind of gangsters were involved in his investigation, but I can’t remember exactly how.
He talks to the enigmatic created alien race that was left behind, and finds out from them that they were specifically designed by their creators to have no souls, because their creators were investigating the existence of an afterlife and they needed a soulless race to help with their experiments.
The main character somehow breaks into this fortress, I believe with the assistance of the gangsters who are somehow forcing him to investigate further, and they find that the disappeared race has put every member of their species in a state of stasis inside the fortress. They manage to wake one up, and the alien says nothing and puts himself back in stasis. They force him out of stasis a second time, and the alien does something that causes all the humans present to feel an intense agony for a couple of seconds, that is so powerful it causes one of the gangsters to drop dead. It then explains that their research discovered that there is a God, and he has high standards that, so far, nothing in the universe lives up to. There is an afterlife, and it is eternal unimaginable suffering (a second of which caused one of the tough guys to die of a heart attack), and everybody (except for the soulless aliens) goes there when they die.
The main character realizes that if this information got out it would mean the collapse of civilization as everybody takes whatever measures they can to minimize their risk of dying - nobody would risk travelling or even going outside. He has a daughter (which he deeply regrets having after making this discovery) and he sets her up with the hidden room with her kept on life-preserving machinery to make sure she lives as long as possible, and devotes his life to keeping others from finding out the secret because the collapse of society could result in the machines keeping his daughter alive no longer working, and he wants to delay her going to Hell as long as possible.
I wish I could help you with this one - it sounds something like Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven” but not quite (that story is online btw http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/cptsf10h.htm). If you think that it’s in the same collection as the Asimov story that Peter identified, the Asimov story is collected in a book called “Microcosmic Tales” (table of contents here Publication: Microcosmic Tales) which seems to have a number of stories about God and Heaven (it has Fred Brown’s “Answer” in which The Computer says “Now there is a God”
With such a detailed description I ought to be able to do something with this - let me take a look through my collection of Asimov’s issues, and see what I come up with. I will note that the basic idea is similar to an idea in Niven’s “The Subject is Closed” in which aliens discover something about Heaven that makes them all want to kill themselves
That was one of the Draco Tavern stories, wasn’t it? I think in that one it was that the afterlife got worse the longer you were alive, but it’s definitely not the one I’m thinking about.
I remembered another couple of details about the story I described above. The created soulless aliens were birdlike in some way, I think. The story also seemed odd to me because it was set tens of thousands of years in the future, yet human society didn’t seem to have changed much and the names were fairly normal.
Yeah, that’s the one I was thinking of - one hypothesis was that that the afterlife got worse the older you were, but no one was really sure, and they were afraid to find out for sure).
Thanks.
I haven’t forgotten you - so far no luck, though - I looked at a dozen or so issues on Saturday; I’ll look at more later, until I find your story.