This one was asked so many times, it was in the FAQ for rec.arts.sf-lovers.written.
Huh, just this past summer, I read a different story narrated by a tree. This one was a fig tree, though, and it was about the heritage of the violence between Greeks and Turks on Cyprus. (The Island of Missing Trees, if anyone’s interested).
Might be the same story: on a starship they have a plant that grows cigarettes, and communicate over impossible distances via the telepathic properties of dog brains.
Ursula leGuin, it was anthologized in The Winds Twelve Quarters and I think the title was The Direction of the Road.
ETA Ninjaed by the questioner himself.
John Kendrick Bangs
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall
Read it here:
That’s it! It was better than I remembered, with an Oscar Wildean humor. Thank you!
[cough] “herself” – but how would you know that, given my name and avatar? No harm, no foul.
My apology anyway. I think I remember that you told in the thread about our avatars, but my brain apparently doesn’t retain that kind of information. It’s used for old SciFi books.
A far superior use of brain cells.
Which IMHO is not very good at all.
Bangs himself appears as a ghost/spirit in Alan Moore’s Promethea series.
Thanks for the link! I seem to recall reading that years ago - reminds me a bit of Wilde’s bittersweet 1887 tale “The Canterville Ghost.”
Right you are! Many thanks. I found it in The Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 20th Series, ed. by Edward L. Ferman (Doubleday & Co. 1973). It was pretty much as schmaltzy as I remembered, but still good. Definitely a ST feel to it, although the starship crew was a bunch of very smart and quirky, even eccentric, civilian scientists rather than the more buttoned-down, quasi-military Starfleet crews we know so well.
Another short story, of comparatively recent vintage. This one is about a time traveler who goes back in time to the early 1960s New York City folk music scene and becomes obsessed with acquiring a rumored-to-exist bootleg recording of an up and coming performer named Bob Dylan. Thank you in advance.
Older one–an old lady dairy farmer’s milk and eggs start the space program?
Bob Dylan, Troy Johnson and the Speed Queen?
Here are places where that story appeared:
Hm. I’d like to read that one! Any more details on the milk/eggs-to-space process?
This sounds familiar to me. If it’s the story I’m thinking about the milk and eggs, when combined, produce a superior rocket fuel.
Unfortunately, I’m drawing a complete blank on author/title, except for a vague recollection of it being in a magazine or anthology. It will most likely keep me up some night while my brain is running through my mental filing system.
Make Mine Homogenized, by Rick Raphael?