Glad to help.
This isn’t Sci Fi, but I read a short story once about a family who moves into a house haunted by a ghost who unsuccessfully tries to scare them off. There was a part about the ghost making a blood stain appear on the carpet, but the family just shrugged and kept cleaning it up. In the end, the ghost reluctantly accepted that the family was there to stay.
[QUOTE=Inna Minnit]
- The main character is some kind of alien (?) and is trying to get accustomed to his human host body. He is puzzled by hunger. He doesn’t know about the need to refuel, and hunger goes from discomfort to pain before he figures out what to do about it. He is terrified of sleep. He thinks he is dying as he loses consciousness.
[/QUOTE]
That sounds like No Word From Gurb.
Which is hilarious and can’t be recommended enough, even if it isn’t right.
Probably The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde.
I can’t remember what it was called but it was part of a series of short movies. It was about an artist to had a demon break into his house and promise never to tell anyone about it.
He goes on to get married and have kids, then one night he tells his wife about the demon.
Then the wife says “YOU PROMISED NOT TO TELL!!!” She turns into a gargoyle-esque demon along with the kids and they leave. The End.
Might have induced some paranoia in me, as well as the book 1984. haha.
“Lover’s Vow” in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
Thanks!
That’s Tales from the Dark Side.
Yeah. The blood stain bit is quite memorable (the ghost eventually tries to make a green blood stain). I remember seeing the 1975 TV version when I was a kid.
Thanks man, I appreciate the info.
Apparently it’s called You Broke Your Vow.
I have two.
The first is about a boy that has fallen through some ice and just as he can’t hold on anymore his dog arrives.
The other is about some aliens waiting on Earth scientist to make contact using a nuclear missile (just go with it). The aliens are about a thousand yards from where the missile is to land. The missile misses its mark and the Earthers are congratulating themselves on only missing by a thousand yards. The aliens are never heard from again.
The second one sounds familiar - I remember a story in which Martians are waiting in their last enclave for a probe from Earth (which they telepathically are expecting) which they hope to welcome for the benefit of both earth and Mars - but the probe lands a bit off, destroying the last Martians without Earth ever knowing. I want to say it’s by Niven, but I’m not quite sure.
The one about the Martians is a Fredric Brown story – “Earthmen Bearing Gifts”
Thank you.
I ask this here every few years.
This was published in one of those crap late-70s anthology titles. Most of the stories in it were “social awareness” type stories. IIRC there was one about a kid who learns that “THEY” are hiding a cancer cure from us because…overpopulation! and is tossed in a prison/gulag as a result (I’m not 100% that this story was in the anthology in question, but it’s the same flavor)
The story in question has a school therapist talking to mommy. LOTS of expository dialogue spews from the shrink as they have a ham-handed “ECOLOGY IS TEH IMPORTANT” discussion. The shrink keeps talking about how we’ve extincted so many animals that the ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM IS NEAR DOOM!!! And her kid murdered an animal. And even though he’s just a little kid (under 10?), he’s got to PAY for his CRIMES! So now he’s going to be lobotomized/reeducated/have his hands chopped off/put in a gulag/executed. As the shrink leaves, mommy wails “But he only stepped on a butterfly” (or something glurgy like that).
I really want to reread the story to see if it’s as bad as my 30+ year old memory of it is.
The story of a bet between human and alien scientists/ engineers. The humans are challenged to duplicate three pieces of alien technology, and vice versa. The humans are first given alien shaving cream - put it on your face, and your beard dissolves, painlessly and with no damage to your skin. (I’d really love some of that stuff.) I don’t remember the second. The third was a perpetual motion machine. The humans manage to build their own physics-defying machine. Then they are told that the alien machine was a fake, drawing power from a concealed battery. They had been tricked into designing the impossible machine. And the kicker: the Earth government had pulled a similar trick on the alien scientists.
“Double Dare” by Bob Silverberg http://www.majipoor.com/work.php?id=251
Wow, that was quick. Thanks.
A group of guys and one or two women in a bar teasing a guy who claims to have written a novel. They get him to tell it by promising to buy him a bottle of booze. It is about a guy who has built a computer (1950s huge computer) to stop a nuclear war that is on the verge of happening. time is almost up. It’s finally finished being programmed with just minutes to spare and he types in the question on how to stop the war…It prints it out and he reads it. "Thou shall not take the name of the Lord in vain. Honor thy father and mother that…and each patron in the bar takes a commandment until all 10 are said. Then a man says, “Hey, those are just the Ten Commandments,” and the author walks out of the bar shaking his head.
I read this in the late '50s so it’s rather vague and simplistic, but this is pretty much the plot.
OK, I read this one in an English sf magazine in the 1970s. A time travel machine is built in the distant future with tyrants. He has determined that the security is so good on all of the tyrants except the first one, he will have to kill him. He goes back and kills the tyrant (who it turns out is Lincoln). It is written in a journal form by the killer while waiting to be hunted down.
I knew I’d heard of that plot, and searche on rec.arts.sf.written to find it.