Aaargh! I’m going insane. I have the synopsis for a story I read several years back. I thought it was by Roger Zelazny, but can’t seem to find it. It was a short story about a prison planet. The planet was created by a “planet maker” hired by Earth government, and he was never paid for his services. As it turns out, the planet maker’s son is on this prison planet and the father tries to evacuate him before the world is destroyed. I have tried all combinations of word searches on Google to try and find it.
ANYONE EVER READ THIS STORY??? What resources are available for me to find it?
Sounds to me like Isle of the Dead.
No, not Isle of the Dead. It’s been a while since I read it but I don’t remember a son. The main character was a planet designer but IIRC he was trying to find his dead wife on the planet. (She was dead but had been revived by his rival, who was on the planet.)
No… it was just a short story. Several pages or so. The story just covered the final moments of the evacuation. The main character (the son) is talking with a fellow prisoner about the creator of the planets. The creator was never paid for his work and was angry with the government. You don’t find out that the main character is the planet maker’s son until the final page, when he shows up to try and convince his son to evacuate with the rest. It was in a book of short stories, and I don’t think it was very obscure. Does anyone know of resources to look up books by synopsis description?
Yes, it was Zelazy, and I have it somewhere in my collection. It was in a collection of short stories and the introduction by Zelazny explains that he was in the habit of creating a “back story” for characters in his novels, to give them a richer feel. This was the back story for Francis Sandow, the lead character for Isle of the Dead. It became so detailed that he published it as a short story, and it is a damn good one. I will try to scare it up tonight and give you a cite tomorrow. Wish me luck.
A Google search for “Francis Sandow” gave this site which listed these three stories in which the character appeared:
-Isle of the Dead
-To Die in Italbar
-Dismal Light
This site also listed this story:
-Standing in My Shadow
Hope one of these is it, and all credit to ** Hometownboy ** for coming up with the recurrring character’s name.
Hmmm… maybe it was “Dismal Light”.
That one is listed as being in Unicorn Variations, and I do recall reading that one. Guess I’ll have to scare up a copy. Thanks guys!!!
Thanks, cmburns for the credit. Wish I’d thought to take the next step and do the Google search. From the list provided, I thought it was probably the one in Unicorn Variations (which, by the way, has a killer title story) and discovered it misssing. My Zelazny shelf is a long one, all the way back to “…And Call Me Conrad,” so it took a while to search. Now I’ll have to figure out what godforsaken cranny I tucked it into last time I was reading it…