I lived in the US between 1987-1990. I remeber getting a book of SF short stories from the public library.
One of the short stories has stuck in my mind, by not the author’s name. It may have been a woman.
The story’s precis is this:
A couple have lost their young daughter and retire from life. They are in a self sufficient house. No-one cares about them. No-one calls or visits. They while their time away watching a movie of their daughter. Time seems to pass slowly.
Eventually the man ventures out and finds that so much time has passed that the planet has cooled to close to absolute zero.
I really liked this story, and it was very well written.
Any idea of author(ess) and in which anthology the short story was included in?
That’s definitely Bradbury-esque. Remember the story in the Illustrated Man about the automated house that keeps on going after an atomic blast. Problem is, I can’t confirm it either, as I don’t have very much Bradbury on me.
I remember something along those lines by Frederik Pohl. I don’t know exactly what the characters were like, but I definately remember the earth cooling to near absolute zero.
Sorry. Parts of The Martian Chronicles runs together in my mind with The Illustrated Man. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any Bradbury, and I never read much more than the famous stuff to begin with. (Actually, I’m not sure I ever made it past the 1950s with Bradbury’s writing.) Besides, when you get right down to it, The Martian Chronicles really reads more like a short-story collection than a novel, because, of course, a lot had already been printed in various magazines.
Agreed. While it’s depressing enough for Bradbury, I don’t think he ever did anything quite that surreal. He might have had his mourning couple miss a nuclear war, or something of the sort, but not the Heat Death of the Universe.
That said, I don’t know who else it would be, either :(.