Even today, very few people know who made the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic in a plane
You’re probably thinking of the first solo transatlantic pilot. You forgot these guys:
I’ve read some far future SF where the details of Apollo are not widely known, and one poem about how future people believe that Louie Armstrong was the first man on the moon.
And of course that wasn’t the first flight to cross the Atlantic, just the first non-stop flight.
I looked it up and apparently it’s mentioned in the film Dead Poets Society (though in that one it’s a crazed killer not a monster) but the 1998 short film Puzzle DOES have a monster, so I’m guessing this is just a very old story that’s been done and redone numerous times.
Here’s another one.
It’s a short bit out of a longer Sci-Fi story. A massive war has ended (World War 3 I think) and a museum is given an old enemy cruise missile in its launcher to display from the war that was taken as a war trophy. The museum has it for several years until a visitor who fought for the other side sees the display and realized the warhead is still armed (nuclear I think) so he alerts the museum staff and the entire city is evacuated while American military bomb disposal experts successfully disarm it.
It sounds like something out of The Ayes of Texas but I can’t find mention of it online.
The Whirligig of Time by Vernor Vinge is similar, but not quite what you’re looking for
The story opens with a description of an attack on the unidentified losing side of a nuclear exchange. Ballistic missiles rain down on military installations, while smuggled bombs destroy cities. Over the next centuries the winning side of this conflict forms an oppressive Solar System wide empire. The rest of the story is set in space on the occasion of the imperial heir’s 18th birthday celebration, at which the emperor and most of the aristocracy is present. During the party, a descendant of the losing side (who is employed as a “pet” slave/jester by the prince) alerts the ship’s captain to an interesting object orbiting Earth, knowing the prince’s penchant for collecting space debris. The captain is instructed to divert towards the object, and soon realizes that the object is a nuclear weapon from the original war. He decides not to change his course or inform others of this, believing that his death in the collision will be worth the elimination of the empire’s elite to free the Solar System from its tyranny.
I may have asked this before but I haven’t found it, my apologies if I’m asking again.
This was a short story I read quite a few years back. It’s about society breaking down because folks think if you are different you are bad. It isn’t just skin color or ethnicity, folks are fighting each other over eye and hair color. Towards the end of the story two survivors are exhausted and wondering if this has been worth it, and are about ready to be at peace until they are confronted by a young woman who thinks “we haven’t won the war against ourselves” She is passing out little suicide kits with matches and gasoline, and the two survivors are looking out into the night and seeing little fires all over.
I recall that story; I think it was by Zenna Henderson but can’t find it if I’m right.
Asked before and answered before, I think - this is “All the Last Wars at Once” by George Alec Effinger
Previously asked and answered here ID a short story please?
Doesn’t sound like Zenna Henderson, her stories are usually positive aren’t they?
This time I’m going to write it down as I keep forgetting the answer. Thanks!
All right–I’m gonna try out the services in this thread.
Recently, someone linked to a great story based on John Carpenter’s The Thing, called The Things:
It’s told from the viewpoint of the alien, and is all about how it wants to merge with other life.
Thing is, I’m almost certain I read a story with an identical premise some decades back. It affected me so strongly that I based a Big Bad in a D&D game on it. It may have been in one of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies, edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow; but I’m not sure. It definitely would have been before 2010, when The Things was published.
Has anyone encountered a story like this (based on The Thing, told from the monster’s viewpoint, and NOT Watts’s story)?
Just to get this out of the way: it’s not Asimov’s “Green Patches” (aka “Misbegotten Missionary”), right?
Almost certainly not–I remember it being more horror in tone, and better (or at least more flowery) prose, than Asimov.
Edit: and reading a summary of Green Patches, definitely not: it was definitely told from the monster’s point of view, and was overtly a retelling of The Thing.
There’s a collection of short stories responding to Who Goes There, called “Short Things”
Do any of the titles listed here look familiar
Annoyingly, the story I think it might be is “The”, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. I have absolutely no idea how to Google that fucking title.
Edit: actually, it looks like that book was published in 2019, and it claims the stories are never before published, so if both of those things are true, it wouldn’t be any of those stories.
Wild shot in the dark “Vault of the Beast” by Van Vogt
Not that–again, it was an overt retelling of The Thing, not an adjacent story. I’m almost wondering if the “all-new stories” line is incorrect on that anthology, as it feels like the sort of story that Yarbro (or Tanith Lee, or someone like that) would’ve written.
She has a Wikipedia page, but no such title in the bibliography.
Andy L above linked to a collection of stories based on The Thing, or rather based on the original story Who Goes There?
Here’s the link again.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?759549
Collection contains The by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
This earlier thread on Carpenter’s movie The Thing is worth a look; it includes some discussion of Peter Watts’s very good 2010 short story “The Things,” mentioned above: The Thread about The Thing (1982)