My favorite SF story is “Nightwings” by Robert Silverberg (assuming you’ll accept something that’s actually a novella).
My mystery story is an alternate history short story that was published in one of the SF digests (probably Analog but maybe Asimov’s or F&SF). It was about Robert E. Lee in the closing days of the Civil War. He receives a visitor to his tent as he’s weighing his options about continuing the war. The visitor reveals himself as a time traveler and offers Lee advanced weaponry from the future. But he also inadvertently reveals how future society will look at slavery and Lee decides it would be better for the South to surrender, so he turns down the offer of the weapons.
There are obvious similarities to The Guns of the South. For a time, I even thought Harry Turtledove had written an alternate-alternate-history version of the opening chapters of his novel and sold it as a short story. But I ended up having a chance to ask Turtledove himself and he said he never wrote any such story. So does anyone have any idea who the author and title was?
I love Niven’s There Is A Tide. It has everything I like most about his early writing: hard sci-fi, trying to relate to a weird alien, humor, and impossible gizmos like translating devices.
Did you ever find the story, Cartooniverse? I just read it a couple of months ago in one of my anthologies I have around the house - I could find which one it was for you if you still need it.
I love me some sci-fi short stories. I have read some stunning ones in my life.
Wow, hope I’m not the only one who thought that was the most wasted 30 minutes of my life? I hope the written story was better than that film. It didn’t even make sense. They’d never seen butterflies or flowers before because you “need sun” for those–then the sun comes out and 3 minutes later there are flowers and butterflies? From where?! They had to have already been there–so, what, they can’t see flowers because it’s raining? It didn’t make sense, it was boring, it was badly acted…
Kuttner and Moore have had a little more attention recently, which is good . . . except that the adaptation of their work turned out to be The Last Mimsy, which was bad.
Probably my favorite is Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”
I’d also include:
“Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” by Cordwainer Smith.
“The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov
“5,271,009” by Alfred Bester
“Understand” by Ted Chiang
“And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side” by James Tiptree, Jr.
“The Pusher” by John Varley
“Stable Strategies for Middle Management” by Eileen Gunn
“In the Specimen Jar” by Daniel Gilbert (Gilbert was a psychologist who dabbled in fiction; this is a story about a man who has an alien parasite in his brain that is making him paranoid. The doctors say it has to be removed, but can he trust them . . . .?)
Another favorite by Ray… “I Sing the Body Electric”, also made into an OK Twilight Zone ep (tho it left off the real ending) & a wonderful 1982 TV-movie unfortunately titled “The Electric Grandmother” with Maureen Stapleton.
Some of my favorite science fiction short stories ever were compiled in a book of sci-fi from the 1930s. It opened with a classic Lovecraft, but I can’t remember the title! It was a fairly long story, in which the main character gets mind-swapped with some other being from “Earth’s long history” and ends up in the body of this conical thing, in a library deep in the bowels of the earth. Or something. Anyone know the title – or the anthology’s title? There was a classic robot on the cover. I used to have the book but it somehow vanished into the mists of time.
What I find mildly creepy is that when I saw the title of this thread, my first thought was of exactly the same story.
I remember, quite vividly, sitting on the floor in the library my mother worked in, in the children’s section, reading the collection of short sci-fi in which I found the OP’s story. I seemed to remember it was Bradbury, making it the only Bradbury I’ve read and finished.
Well, favorite might not be the word I’d use…Summer’s Lease by Joe Halderman, is brutally sad and very well written. Imagine every possible hope for knowledge of the future or the past just not being there…
My favourite SF short stories are Vaster Than Empires And More Slow and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Le Guin, and The Screwfly Solution by Tipptree
Thank you, MrDibble. I decided at some point today (before checking this thread) that the title was Time Out of Mind, so I’m glad for the clarification.
