Sure sounds like PK Dick. I’ll look around
Asuka, do you mean that you read this story in the 90s? Where did you read it, in a magazine or in a book? When was the magazine or the book published?
Wendell, was I right about the Egan story, btw?
I think so. It doesn’t quite match my memory of it. That could be because my memory of it isn’t good.
Thanks
Bears some resemblance to PK Dick’s The Defenders (available here The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Defenders, by Philip K. Dick) but the details don’t quite match
I know this one! “Backward, Turn Backward” by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
With some extra resonance if you remember that it was written shortly before Sheldon killed her husband, who was blind, and then herself. There’s a plot point in the story that’s quite similar, only the person in question is not blind and has no issues aside from acne (which is cleared up quickly by future!medication). I will never not believe that this story wasn’t a cry for help from Sheldon, only no one ever saw it (I believe it was published posthumously).
Another of her last stories was In Midst of Life, about the afterlife of a man who committed suicide.
The Hole Truth, by Lois McMaster Bujold. One of her very early stories; can be found in Proto Zoa.
A pothole appeared in the middle of a street. Someone discovered that it appeared to be bottomless, by tossing in a little yard waste. Over the next few days / weeks, the hole enlarged, and everyone threw in all their household junk that they couldn’t get rid of any other way. Word got around, and people started coming from all around; the town started talking about using it for all their waste disposal.
Then one day it started shrinking. At the very last, all their old crap was flung out of the hole, in LIFO order.
Then alien stuff started showing up.
(I recognized the description, grabbed my Kindle, and reread it just now).
…I did not know that. Whoa.
The more you learn about SF/F writers’ real lives the more often that “Whoa!” reaction occurs. Seriously.
There was also Machine of Death along similar lines (the Machine can tell you things from the future, like how you die), that was in 2010 though.
Thanks, I’ll check it out!
My problem has always been I’ll read stuff so long ago I’ll combine plots inadvertently which I try to think back about them decades later.
Ah, collected in “Crown of Stars”. Thank you.
It may have been his intention as well as hers.
Problem is, there’s no way to tell. If he wanted to die (it wasn’t just blindness, IIRC) she had no legal way to help him, and no procedure set up for anyone else to ascertain whether that was what he wanted.
I read that! Clever concept. Often the answer was entertainingly cryptic and/or misleading.
Yeah, I agree: no one knows at this point. This take on it by the person who wrote Tiptree’s biography is pretty reasonable, I think. I seem to remember from Phillips’ biography that there was some evidence on both sides (that is, maybe her husband wanted to die, and maybe he didn’t), which is also what the link says; it seems very probable that at least at some time in their life they had some sort of pact about both of them dying at the same time. (Though I think in general that although Phillips does present the evidence on both sides, she is more reluctant to consider the possibilities that don’t reflect as well on Alice Sheldon.) I do think that it’s clear AS was not in a mentally healthy place, either way.
Honestly, the story “Backward, Turn Backward,” with its own set of traumatic events, is for me also evidence that it was AS driving here. I suppose one must guard against too much identification of a story/main character with an author, but here the parallels are enough for me to do it anyway…
An Isaac Asimov short story. First person narrator, but the featured actors in the story are a theoretical physicist with two Nobel prizes and his billiards buddy/rival, who’s made billions by turning his scientific discoveries into profitable technology.
At the climax, the billionaire has done it again, to the scientist’s chagrin (an anti-gravity device, maybe). In a somewhat mean-spirited display, he arranges a demonstration for the press, where he sets up the invention on a pool table, switches it on, and invites the physicist to shoot a cue ball into the beam of light that’s been produced. As soon as the ball enters the beam, it is accelerated to the speed of light, and travels through the billionaire’s heart (and on out through the wall, several buildings, and out into the countryside).
The narrator wonders if it was an unpredictable accident, or murder.
The Billiard Ball (also known as Dirty Pool)The Billiard Ball - Wikipedia
Thanks. I remember reading Randal Munroe’s essay about a baseball traveling at relativistic velocity, and wonder what he would make of that billiard ball’s behavior.