What's your favorite s/f short story?

For my money, it's either Asimov's Bicentennial Man or Clarke's The Star. Both are remarkable stories regardless of the genre.


Your nominees?

I'll throw one out for consideration though.

"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith

I'm not sure I could really say this is my favorite if I really spent time thinking about all I've read particularly some of Nancy Kress' stories from the 80's or newer work from the likes of Paolo Bacigalupi and Michael Swanwick (http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html)

But Scanners has always fascinated me. Yes it's dated in several ways and the science has since been proven incorrect but there is something very compelling in the story, the struggle to strive forward for the greater good of humanity and the costs on individual lives.

It was the story that pulled me whole-hog into Cordwainer Smith's wider work. A great collection: The Rediscovery of Man.

Another favorite: The Colour out of Space by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

I thinkI Robot and the Foundation series started as short stories, although I've yet to read Forward Foundation and Prelude to Foundation.

For now, I'm going with Heinlein's All You Zombies. But I'm sure there are a dozen others I like as well.

Maybe not my favorite,but it stayed in my mind.

Kinda like Sturgeon's Microcosmic God, only better.

Unfortunately, for about five years running, every time I saw an episode of The Outer Limits, it was either part one or part two of The Sand Kings...


I'll give the story a look, though!

The tv show was ok,but the story was totally different,and a hundred times better.

It's an old story that I read as a kid but for some reason I still remember the plot like I just read it. Though There will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury is a close second.

There are so many of them. One that immediately springs to mind is Stanley Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey. Hell, you could just about pick any story out of The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame Vol. 1 and call it my favorite. Then there's all those Heinlein, Asimov and Pohl shorts... Nope, I can't choose.

Martian Chronicles that definitely is a collection of short stories. The first I ever read as a very young teen and fell in love with the genre.

It was the first sci-fi I remember reading, and even though Bradbury himself is a yobbo, the man can simply write. He has an almost poetic and whimsical quality to his writing that none of the others I've read have.

The M.Cs may not be the best short stories out there, but they were instrumental in my love of the genre.

Is Bradbury really a hooligan? It's funny picturing the old fellow as a thug :rofl: :rofl: Spill it, what do you know?

What do you think of President Bush?

He's wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a shithead and we're glad to be rid of him. And I'm not talking about his sexual exploits. I think we have a chance to do something about education, very important. We should have done it years ago.

That worked out well, Ray. :)

Thanks for filling me in.
Tried responding earlier but it ended up as an OP :crazy:

There's probably plenty of others who I wouldn't agree with politically as well. I'm just reading their books, not hanging out with them, so it's ok. :)

PKD saw that as a hallmark of a truly great talent, to be able to keep the story separate from the author.

I wasn't aware that Bradbury liked Bush so much. That explains his nonsensical ire at Moore's use of Fahrenheit 9-11. Ray complained that it was some kind of intellectual theft, even though Ray himself is hardly above that same sort of allusion in his titles.

his politics disappoint me. Hit a little hard because I had no idea. I'd rather think of him as an old thug than a Bushman :)

:hi:

EDIT: I also like Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale." Quite different than the film Total Recall.

:hi: Thanks for the Dick's book. I had no idea Total Recall was not a movie first.

The Deathbird
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Along the Scenic Route

Although Harlan gets pretty pissed if you call him a Science Fiction writer, he's written some pretty damn good SF over the years.

And he'd still be pissed off! He's not just a science fiction writer; he's one of the grand masters.

Sorry about that, Harlan!

But I can see his point. He doesn't write exclusively in the SF genre. His teleplays for Burke's Law were mysteries, not SF. The Glass Teat was a collection of essays on television criticism. Anyway, a few years ago he walked out in the middle of an on air interview when the interviewer called him a science fiction writer. He probably brags about that to this day.

The 'The Deathbird" collection of Short Stories

And "The City on the Edge of Forever" with Ellison's original version of the story.

There are books I will lend, and books I will give away. Deathbird Stories is neither one of those. It will remain in my library until I die.

by Tom Godwin . . .

and "Let There Be Light" by Asimov

It brought tears to my eyes.

My personal favorite is The Last Question

I musta been about 10 years old when I read it. That story slapped me around a little bit. I was already getting used to imagining alternate universes and "what if" futures. But I was NOT used to imagining that one's perceptions and assumptions of the "normal" world might be mistaken. Of course, I've seen a thousand stories like that since then. But that was my first. Nowadays I'd see the payoff coming a mile away. But at age 10, I was still a sucker for the that kind of thing.

So yeah. That's my favorite.

There's another one that I can't remember the name of that takes place aboard some kind of one-man interstellar supply ship. There's a stowaway. Real good story. I think the Outer Limits show of the late 1990's may have done a version, but I'm not sure.

Reasons to be Cheerful, by Greg Egan
The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin

Considered a classic of the genre, Nightfall has been anthologized no fewer than four dozen times, and has appeared in at least another half-dozen collections of Asimov's older stories. In 1968, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted Nightfall the best science fiction short story ever written prior to the establishment of the Nebula Awards in 1965 and included it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_short_story)