Can anyone figure out this one - I read it, probably in the early or mid-eighties, so it had to be written before then.
On a future Earth, everyone seems to live in their own large estate and mansion, completely supported by robotic servants. One man is convinced to go and visit a woman nearby by his friend over some Zoom-equivalent, and he brings a massive robot entourage and starts tearing up her place to make it the way he likes it. She kicks him out, and the reader is left to wonder how long the human race can continue without people who are willing to socialize with each other…
No - thanks, but this one definitely took place on Earth, and there was no distant star system or interstellar travel involved; also was definitely a short story in an anthology and not a novel. I’m familiar with the Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw characters and would have remembered if it were The Naked Sun - also, there’s no murders or mystery in this one.
I have a vague recollection of a short story in which a prehistoric man was living all these years in the bushes behind someone’s house. Was that a story?
May or may not count as science fiction, but a young adult book I read in the 80s: A mechanically-skilled young man is enrolled in either a tech high school or community college. When his teachers realize how skilled he is, he’s recruited onto a team making a vehicle to compete in a low-emissions vehicle contest: Their entry is what we would now call a hybrid car. Their main competitor in the race is an old Stanley Steamer converted to run on natural gas. They have lower emissions, and also just barely manage to win the race.
I remember one very like that also, but Stig’s definitely not it. Unfortunately, my memory’s nowhere near clear enough to give more information; except that time travel wasn’t involved, nor were the particular adventures described as part of the Stig book; nor, I think, was a dump.
The Ul Kworn paused in his search for food, extended his eye and considered the thing that blocked his path.
He hadn’t notice the obstacle until he had almost touched it. His attention had been focused upon gleaning every feeder large enough to be edible from the lichens that covered his feeding strip. But the unexpected warmth radiating from the object had startled him. Sundown was at hand. There should be nothing living or non-living that radiated a fraction of the heat that was coming from the gleaming metal wall which lay before him. He expanded his mantle to trap the warmth as he pushed his eye upward to look over the top. It wasn’t high, just high enough to be a nuisance. It curved away from him toward the boundaries of his strip, extending completely across the width of his land.
A dim racial memory told him that this was an artefact, a product of the days when the Folk had leisure to dream and time to build. It had probably been built by his remote ancestors millennia ago and had just recently been uncovered from its hiding place beneath the sand. These metal objects kept appearing and disappearing as the sands shifted to the force of the wind. He had seen them before, but never a piece so large or so well preserved. It shone as though it had been made yesterday, gleaming with a soft silvery luster against the blue-black darkness of the sky.
As his eye cleared the top of the wall, he quivered with shock and astonishment. For it was not a wall as he had thought. Instead, it was the edge of a huge metal disc fifty raads in diameter. And that wasn’t all of it. Three thick columns of metal extended upward from the disc, leaning inward as they rose into the sky. High overhead, almost beyond the range of accurate vision, they converged to support an immense cylinder set vertically to the ground. The cylinder was almost as great in diameter as the disc upon which his eye first rested. It loomed overhead, and he had a queasy feeling that it was about to fall and crush him. Strange jointed excresences studded its surface, and in its side, some two-thirds of the way up, two smaller cylinders projected from the bigger one. They were set a little distance apart, divided by a vertical row of four black designs, and pointed straight down his feeding strip.
I remember this story as well, and also my somewhat puzzled and disturbed reaction when I first read it, because it seemed like it was presented as being somewhat comedic even up to and including the final scene in which it’s more or less stated outright that the protagonist raped the woman he was visiting.
I don’t know if this is sci-fi exactly, there is a supernatural element to it. It’s a short story, not a whole book.
A Civil War veteran is attending an old soldier’s reunion event. These guys are very old, some quite frail. They are provided with good food, nice beds and so on. In the evenings there are speakers and a dance. Young ladies have been recruited to partner them in the dancing, and one girl tells the protagonist she hadn’t thought she’d have such a good time. During the day pictures are taken, and the soldiers review the sights of battles they fought. One night the protagonist goes to bed and is awakened by revielle and gets up to go fight again. Those that are killed show up again in the evening.
Now, if you have seen Ken Burn’s Civil War series, it ends with a quote “Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?” These gentlemen are saying that to each other. The epilogue has a doctor or nurse finding out protagonist has died in his sleep, and he has experienced a sort of Valhalla experience in the afterlife.
I read this in an anthology I believe, but can’t remember the title of the book or the story. It would be perhaps around twenty years back, not much later.
I don’t remember the title, but it’s a book of Harry Turtledove short stories about alternate realities, in roughly chronological order.
I recall three stories other than the Civil War reunion in Depression-era Richmond:
•an Imperial-era Roman small-city (Ravenna?) vigil solves a firearm murder by time-travelers buying lost Roman & Greek books to sell in the present, who kill a Roman to get his rare copy of a lost play.
•a story set in Turtledove’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies universe (Jews hiding in an undefeated Nazi Germany), and
•an alien world with roughly 1700s science & technology (with human traders as the viewpoint characters) with the people split into dominant blues (live in towns, seemingly run things) and seemingly subservient greens (live in shanties outside town, are indispensable assistants to blue “leaders”) who actually use the blues’ oppression as evolutionary pressure to improve their race as a whole. The greens don’t want the traders to sell the blues a book on evolution lest they twig to what the greens are doing.
I remembered another short story from that Turtledove book: in an alternate reality where Islam spread much faster & farther than ours, a pagan leader somewhere in Eastern Europe is having an Islamic and a Christian delegation “audition” for which religion he should pick for his people. No booze and no pork vs. only one wife is one of the prominent points of discussion. One of the monks is a descendant of the last Byzantine emperor, and he commisserates with his Islamic counterpart descended from a conqueror of Constantinople. The Islamic state has much more to offer the pagan leader politically, and the story ends with him choosing Islam.
Okay, here’s one that popped into my brain today, probably in response to a comment about inflation and prices and the like. Anyway, a mad scientist type has figured out time travel, kinda, but all he can manage is to open a portal to the main street of his town, into circa The Great Depression I’m thinking. Can’t go anywhere else but to that where/when. His sister or some other female relative hears him complaining about the uselessness of his invention (and I’m thinking there had been some conversation earlier in the story about the high price of groceries these days) and at the end of the story we read an interaction between the Depression Era butcher and his shop assistant about the crazy lady who came in and just slapped down TWO WHOLE DOLLARS CASH for a huge order of beef.
I find myself very much in want of a portal to a cheaper time, possibly also a time when fruit tasted good.
