This might be Brooklyn Project, by William Tenn.
Ah-hah! Thanks pinkfreud.
I agreed - it sounds a lot like “Brooklyn Project” - this story starts with a very sharp satire on paranoid security practices during the Cold War, then introduces the experiment that sends a ball of metal back in time first to a few billion years in the past, and then to times successively closer to the present day; each time the ball changes the past, but the characters in the present don’t notice that they’ve become slug-like creatures.
Okay, here’s on for ya, seeing as how the thread is still going.
Aliens lland on Earth and proceed to teach us lessons…in one instance a bullfight is taking place, and suddenly every spectator feels the pain of the bull as it is speared. I believe it dates from the '70s, and may have been a short story. I’ve been wondering about it since.
That one’s definitely Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke.
*** Ponder
Damon Knight has a similar story called Rule Golden, btw. 1954, but it’s been reprinted a few times.
Wendell Wagner, yes, that’s it.
pinkfreud and Andy Al, I guess that must be it, although the name didn’t sound familiar, what I’ve found through googling seems to confirm it. Thanks, I’d never have found it on my own.
Another two then:
3. a series of short stories about a spaceship controlled by an in built human brain taken from a girl who was born severely handicapped. The girl is quite happy to be given the chance to actually do something instead of being stuck in her original body.
- a series of short stories about a man with a telekinetic third arm. He lost his arm through an accident and then developed telekinetic ability which worked just like his original arm, then retained the ability after getting a new transplant arm. I think these were detective stories, but am not sure.
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sounds like Anne McCaffery’s “Ship Who Sang” series.
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is definitely Larry Niven’s Gil the ARM series
Angel of Doubt writes:
> Aliens lland on Earth and proceed to teach us lessons…in one instance a
> bullfight is taking place, and suddenly every spectator feels the pain of the bull
> as it is speared. I believe it dates from the '70s, and may have been a short
> story. I’ve been wondering about it since.
Angel of Doubt, the question here has already been answered, but I’d like to know something. How could you only remember this particular piece of the novel? It’s only one page in a 186-page novel. It was published in 1953, not in the 1970’s. It’s not a short story. I’m not asking out of any criticism of you. I’ve read a lot of these sort of “What was this novel or movie?” threads, and I’m fascinated by how things are changed in people’s memories.
At the time I read that portion, I was about 11 years old, and perused bits and pieces of my folks’ SF collection, most of which was contemporary '70s SF. If I was even able to read the whole thing, that scene was the only one that stuck out.
But, yeah, it’s embarrassing not to recognize such a well-known story.
I don’t find it embarrassing. I find it fascinating how memory works. I’d like to work out a general theory from threads like this what people remember.
I once read a story - I believe it was in one of the SF digests like Analog or Asimovs. It was about Robert E. Lee late in the Civil War when he was realizing he couldn’t beat the Union. He received a visitor in the middle of the night who told Lee he was a time traveller and offered to supply Lee with advanced weapons so the Confederacy could win the war. Lee decided not to accept the visitor’s offer (I don’t recall the reason).
There are obvious similarities between this short story and Harry Turtledove’s novel Guns of the South. For a long time, I assumed Turtledove had written the story as an alternate version of his novel. But I later had a chance to ask him and he said it wasn’t his.
Anyone able to identify this story?
“Quarks At Appomattox” if I’m not mistaken Title: Quarks at Appomattox (I remembered the story, and that the time traveller mentioned Cape Canaveral as the location of the first moon flight, googled “Rober E. Lee” and Canaveral, found a reference that mentioned those works associated with Analog in 1983, then skimmed through Tables of Contents until I saw a title that sounded right - easy-peasy!)
A friend of mine and I are in the middle of an IM conversation about SF, and he just sent me a synopsis of a novella he read in college but can’t remember the name or author.
The main character is this Aztec kid, running from the scene of a battle. He gets captured, and he’s going to be sacrificed. When he sleeps, he has a dream of a huge city, men riding on contraptions that sound like giant insects, or inside self-propelled carriages. In the dream, he gets hit by a car and wakes up as his Aztec self. The story goes back and forth as the hour of his execution approaches,
asleep in one world and is awake in the other and vice versa.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Ask your friend for any details he can give, starting with when he was in college. Ask him if he read it in a book or a magazine. Ask for any details about the book or magazine he remembers.
A few months ago, I read “Childhood’s End” with a book group. Several people in the group had read it decades ago, and one remembered absolutely nothing after the first major spoiler The Overlords look like the devil - I suspect that he had never read “Childhood’s End” but that he had read the original short story that was expanded into the novel, since that story (“Guardian Angel”) ends with that revelation
Doesn’t ring a bell for me, but I’ll look into it. If your friend remembers any of the information Wendell asked about, please post it. Sometimes the littlest details help the most.
I have heard of a story about an Aztec boy awaiting sacrifice. It’s called The Glass Knife by John Tully. I’ve not read it, so I can’t tell you if it matches the rest of the description or not. Ask your friend if the hero’s name** Tio** sounds familiar.
Unfortunately, my friend remembers very little detail other than what I provided. He stated that he read it back in college, so around 1990, and that the story included a description of a moped from the point of view of the main character (an Aztec or Incan boy), so that the story had to be relatively recent. He doesn’t remember if it was a stand-alone piece, or a part of a compilation of Latin American writers, or something else.
Peter Morris, I will ask. Thank you, and thanks to anybody else who can provide suggestions!
It reminds me a lot of a YA novel I read by Poul Anderson, but I can’t remember the name of it. It was set in an alternate universe where the Black Plague killed 3/4 of the European population (the point of divergence was that the winter of 1347/1348 was not particularly cold so the rats did not die, and the plague lasted longer). Europe was taken over by the Ottomans, Shakespeares plays were written in Turkish, and North America was not discovered until the 17th or 18th century, by which time the Aztecs were more powerful and were never defeated. The main character is an English crypto-Christian teenager who is travelling on a sailing ship to the Americas in the 1950s, and I think there was an Aztec boy character. The Aztecs in this timeline were more advanced technologically than the Europeans (they had steam-powered automobiles) but the characters kept getting glimpses of our reality in visions. I read it a long time ago though and I’m not sure this is the one that is being talked about.