H - Short Works
Franco Alfieri is a very rich man, but the best doctors on Earth can't stop the cancer eating at his body. Fortunately, there are other worlds with advanced medicine. Alfieri applies to be sent through the Fold, an interdimensional rift, to a planet where his disease can be cured. But there is a price to be paid for such a privilege, and Alfieri's wealth will do him no good at all.
One of those if-this-goes-on stories, this one sparked by Catholic doctrine regarding the sinfulness of birth control. In 2371, the Earth is dominated by a culture that believes life is sacred, therefore they should make as much of it as possible. All society's resources are geared towards this end. People live in massive pyramidal buildings housing hundreds of thousands each, leaving the majority of land available for farming. The planet's population is 75 billion and climbing. Citizens are expected to start reproducing as soon as their bodies are physically able, and a 17-year-old girl with eleven children is a hero. And they're all very happy (and don't ask what happens if you're not). This story forms Chapter 1 of The World Inside.
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| This novella was later expanded into the short novel of the same name. Political offenders are sentenced to live out their lives in the Cambrian Era. Time travel (developed in the early 21st Century) works one way only--backward--so there is no hope of release. Major themes are time, political intolerance, and personal isolation. Nominee for the best novella Nebula, 1967. |
Another story of Roma Eterna. A Roman nobleman is sent in punishment to a remote corner of the Empire -- the Arabian city we know as Mecca.
Rygor Davison can get by on Earth just fine. Society there is sophisticated and tolerant enough that he can even use his telekinetic power in public. But as the final stage of his Esper Guild training, he must learn how not to use his ability. So he is sent to Mondarran IV, a simple agrarian planet where a display of psychic talent can get a person burned at the stake as a witch.
Peter Martlett travels to the distant colony on Marathon to settle his deceased brother's affairs. But among the loose ends left after the accident are two fiancées. Interstellar travel in this story involves one of the goofiest schemes I've ever encountered. You go to a Deserialization facility, where they prepare you for your journey by "removing you temporarily from contact with your temporal axis and--for convenience of storage--somewhat compressing you along the three spatial axes." Then they put you into a little box and ship you to your destination, which may take hundreds of years objective time. Then you are Reserialized, restoring you to full size and on "your temporal axis at a point only seconds after you left..." In essence, faster than light travel is accomplished by a combination of slower than light ships and time travel.
Nominated for Nebula Award for best novella, 1983.
A man's consciousness travels to the far future and inhabits of one of the strange denizens of the world-to-be--somewhat similar to the "time-travel" scheme in Letters from Atlantis. Also the definitive giant lobster story of all time.
Click here for a more detailed, spoiler-positive commentary.
Quellen is a petty law-enforcement bureaucrat with a big secret: in an overcrowded world, he keeps a private residence he's not entitled to. When he starts investigating a new crime, his life starts to unravel. The crime? Somebody has a time machine, and they're sending people into the past to escape the unpleasant present. Later expanded into The Time Hoppers.
I haven't read this, but it must be related to the novel Hot Sky at Midnight.
A near-future story about an LA plagued by small volcanoes and lava floes. The residents of a halfway house are recruited to help out, but they all have their own problems, of course. Good story, well written, if not earth-shaking (excuse the pun). Alvaro Zinos-Amaro has a more detailed analysis (complete with spoilers). |
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Blurb over story: "Is there any crueler kindness than to pity one's enemy?"
A very good story about a time traveler from the 21st Century who gets stranded in the Pleistocene, sort of the flip side of The Ugly Little Boy. A modern man is forced to learn primitive ways in order to survive, and discover something about what it means to be human in the process.
A loony with a bunch of nifty drugs puts amnesifacients in San Francisco's water supply. The city starts to fall apart as people forget who they are, who they're married to, where they work. The drug effects everyone a little differently, with different memories lost to differing degrees. The story is told in true disaster-movie tradition, with a multitude of characters from different walks of life followed through the crisis. There's the artist so in debt he can't afford the tools of his trade, but doesn't remember his monetary problems or that his wife left him. There's the crooked stock broker with millions worth of illicit transactions kept only in his head. There's the grieving man who lost his family in a plane crash. There's the nightclub performer whose act is that he remembers everything. Quite a fun story, and if some of the practical aspects of such a social catastrophe are glossed over, many of the personal and emotional aspects are handled very well.
A botanist goes to an isolated Chilean village in 1952 to study the rare local cacti, and finds the people who live there a strange lot. Not science fiction, but sort of...well, Twilight Zone-ish.
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Last updated October 21, 2002
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