I read it around 1977, in a collection of stories voted best in some poll. Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’ was the first place selection. Also included were ‘Arena’ by Frederic Brown and ‘Microcosmic God’ by Theodore Sturgeon.
The story I’m trying to ID drew a parallel between aliens abducting humans and humans putting fish in fishbowls. (In fact, I thought it might have been titled ‘Fishbowl’, but my googling couldn’t turn anything up).
Early in the story, people were observing a water spout in the ocean. I believe a person went missing at the time.
The story ends with one of the characters looking at a fish in a fishbowl. The character says the fish looks like it’s trying to tell him something.
Chandler’s The Cage gets reprinted a lot – in “12 Great Classics of Science Fiction”, and “The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction”, and so on – and is the one that ends with the memorable “only intelligent creatures put other creatures in cages”.
I checked that list out, and nothing sounded like the story I’m thinking of.
That collection includes several others that were in the book I’m referring to. But I’m pretty sure the book I read didn’t include “It’s a Good Life” - I would have remembered.
I’ve been trying to figure out which “collection of stories voted best in some poll” that you read “Goldfish Bowl” in. It’s one of Heinlein’s least known stories. It’s also one of the ones that he originally published under the name “Anson MacDonald” because publishers didn’t like to have too many stories by a single author in a short time. It’s in The Best of Science Fiction, which was edited by Groff Conklin, but that has nothing to do with a poll. It’s in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow . . ., which also includes “Nightfall” and “Arena” but not “Microcosmic God” and has nothing to do with a poll. I suspect you’re confusing several anthologies that you read a long time ago:
Wendell, upon reflection, I think you’re right. This was in a language arts class in high school. We covered the anthology early in the course. “Goldfish Bowl” was covered later.
Although interestingly, the Google search I did was *Nightfall anthology goldfish bowl *and a link to a collection of Heinlein’s short stories was the first hit, despite not having Nightfall in it…
It also appeared under that name because it has John W. Campbell’s jackboot-prints all over it. It’s one of Heinlein’s early swing-for-the-fences works, meant to reference everything Fortean, and Campbell rejected it as a Heinlein story. Heinlein promptly retired from writing, as he said he would do the first time a story was rejected… and JWC got him to make many changes and resubmit it. But even Heinlein didn’t consider it a Robert A. Heinlein-brand-worthy story after that.
Heinlein said that the story is exploring “a much more humiliating possibility - alien intelligences so superior to us and so indifferent to us as to be almost unaware of us”:
That’s straight from Charles Fort’s suppositions - that many of the odd events he collected were reflections of some vastly greater or unknown power. Heinlein’s story originally began with a sampling of Fortean events as “proof” of the power behind the water-pillars. Part of JWC’s changes might have been to mask what a straight… borrowage the idea was.
