I will find that one - it’s very familiar
Am I invisible? For the third time, it’s The Weather Man by Theodore Thomas.
Sorry - I missed that due to my mistake in following the threading
No problem! Glad I’m not accidentally posting into /dev/null or something.
Thanks, all!
I’ve seen talk about the Twilight Zone episode “Third From the Sun” in connection with the new Plur1bus series. I thought I knew what the episode was about until I read the synopsis. And it wasn’t what I remember. I remember what I thought was a Twilight Zone episode that was about some new kids moving into a neighborhood and telling the neighbors that they were from the third planet from the sun and the neighbors got suspicious and thought they were aliens. I don’t remember if the story was funny or tragic but had a “duh, the third planet from the sun is Earth!” ending. Was this storyline from some other anthology series or short story? Or all in my head?
OK, another one I’ve been trying to remember lately. This was a novella-length story I read in a compilation of stories from the golden age of sci-fi.
It starts with a guy going to an old grindhouse theater in New York and watching a silent movie about the Old West which looks surprisingly realistic. He tracks down the filmmaker and finds out that he has a camera that can see into the past - he sets the time and place and he can film exactly what actually happened there. They go into business together and start making war movies that become increasingly popular - they make one about the Civil War and one about the American Revolution to start. Since the camera can’t record sound they hire lip readers and dub the recordings, which becomes increasingly complicated when they make a movie about Alexander the Great and have to find people who can lip-read ancient Greek.
Eventually their films start becoming more and more popular, they get more ambitious, and they decide to make an epic-length film about a highly controversial subject (I can’t remember if it was the Holocaust or the life of Jesus) that winds up pissing off millions of people and lands them in court, where they’re forced to reveal how they’ve been making the movies by showing the judge an accurate recording of exactly what he was doing when the armistice was signed at the end of World War I. I believe the story ends with nuclear war breaking out after the US and the USSR get their hands on the technology and realize they can use it to spy on each other in real time.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Y’all’re good at this. 
OK, one more.
The premise was that Christopher Columbus somehow sails through a time portal on his way west in 1492 and, instead of landing in the Caribbean, winds up in 1980s New York. It’s written in first person as a travelogue, and includes such things as his marveling at the existence of a roundabout named after him, and his bafflement at how theologically liberal a young Catholic man he talks to has become, which leads to him concluding something like “Before we convert this land’s pagans to Christianity, we shall have to convert its Christians to Christianity”.
Similar themes were covered in Asimov’s short “The Dead Past” and Clarke and Baxter’s The Light of Other Days.
I need help identifying a story. In the story most people don’t go out to drive because there are so many other agressive drivers that make the streets a nightmare. They attack ofther cars to rob them. In the story a young man is a delivery driver, being as the money is good. He gets killed and his father is filled with grief and vows to complete his son’s job. I don’t recall if he makes it.
As a kid I picked up a classic SF anthology at a used bookstore and it included a story I’ve always remembered, but can no longer name. An explorer, upon inventing a time machine, returns to the present with a knife featuring a blade of blue metal. He then exits the picture—can’t recall how—leaving behind both the knife and the discovery of time travel. The knife’s blade, which ends up in a museum, has such fantastic metallurgical properties that it becomes the focus of subsequent time travel, as expeditions search the future exhaustively for its source and the technological know-how to produce more of the same material. The story ends with the protagonist finally revealing a paradox, when he discovers that the original explorer had in fact found the knife years later in the museum case in which it exists in the present.
Can anyone ID this tale?
It was “As Never Was”, by P. Schuyler Miller, and here are the anthologies it appeared in:
That’s it. And you are amazingly fast, too! Thank you so much, I look forward to sharing it with my own kids.
I remember reading it and I just happened to click onto the IMDb just as you posted your question.