Don't need help! No need to ID this SciFi story! Thanks anyhow!

Cafe Society
1

All alone in the north woods, working at a Scout camp for a long middle school summer… nothing to read except one SF anthology. And the story I read over and over was … The Machine Stops by E. M. Forester.

Haunting at the time, and just as evocative when I looked it up forty years later (Yeah, hope you don’t mind that I didn’t need your help, but I figured you get a lot of requests and might appreciate the rare case where you don’t have to rack your brain).

It holds up well, and I was surprised that it was written in 1909… and that other people had read it, too! Found a number of discussions of it, a free e-book, and a fairly decent Librivox recording.

How bout you? Any stories from your dim past that you’ve rediscovered… on your own, without us having to remember anything ourselves?

2

Oookay, if no one has a similar experience of reconnecting with a favorite story years later… feel free to close this. Or let it sink… (until someone replies to it in late 2011, not realizing they’re resurrecting a zombie).

OR, if you think I was making fun of people who post “Need to ID this story” threads, I apologize. I’ve enjoyed helping them in the past (or, usually, just looking up and reading the story when someone else has figured it out).

3

About a year and a half ago, I remembered a story I read in high school. It was Omega by Amelia Reynolds Long. I remembered parts of it very clearly, enough to realize suddenly it was a sci-fi ripoff of Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.