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

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dont-need-help-no-need-to-id-this-scifi-story-thanks-anyhow/530207>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [February 24, 2010, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dont-need-help-no-need-to-id-this-scifi-story-thanks-anyhow/530207 "2010-02-24T01:04:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2010, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dont-need-help-no-need-to-id-this-scifi-story-thanks-anyhow/530207/1 "2010-02-24T01:04:33Z")

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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](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70021&highlight=machine+stops) of it, a free [e-book](http://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.html), and a fairly decent [Librivox recording](http://librivox.org/the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster/).

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

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**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\
**Post date:** [February 25, 2010, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dont-need-help-no-need-to-id-this-scifi-story-thanks-anyhow/530207/2 "2010-02-25T03:16:55Z")

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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).

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**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\
**Post date:** [February 25, 2010, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dont-need-help-no-need-to-id-this-scifi-story-thanks-anyhow/530207/3 "2010-02-25T04:05:37Z")

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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_.