Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby

[james_davis_nicoll]

Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby

Comments

[nancylebov]

I'm sure I read "It's a Good Life" in an anthology long before 2014, but damned if I can remember where.

Wikipedia says it was in the Science Fiction Hall of fame, but I read it in a mass market paperback. It's possible I read it in Star Science Fiction 2, where it was first published.

[mikeda]

I believe that by "collection", James is referring to books containing only stories by Bixby.

[james_davis_nicoll]

This! Collection means all the stories are by the same author (s), anthology draws from a variety of sources.

[(Anonymous)]

I had the exact MMP depicted Back In The Day.

[bunsen_h]

Apart from "It's a Good Life", I know Bixby's work primarily from the four ST:TOS episodes that he wrote: "Mirror, Mirror", "By Any Other Name", "Day of the Dove", and "Requiem for Methuselah".

I'm curious about "The Good Dog".

[(Anonymous)]

Bixby also wrote the play/screenplay "The Man from Earth" which is very much a reworking of Requiem

[beamjockey]

But with way less Forbidden Planet* in it. Recommended.**


* Or way less The Tempest, I suppose. Whichever you prefer.

** I was going to say The Man from Earth is a good film, but it came out "It's a Good Film," so I decided to go with a simple "Recommended" instead.

[beamjockey]

By the way, as if the low-budget but thoughtful The Man from Earth weren't quirky enough, its DVD might be the only place you can find a commentary track from scholar Gary Westfahl, film critic for Locus. Teamed up with actor John "Dr. Phlox" Billingsley, no less. I just love commentary tracks.

[carbonel]

I own this collection. I'm pretty sure I bought it because it contained "The Small One," which I'd read in an anthology -- possibly even a school textbook. It was the first time I'd encountered a sympathetic vampire, so it stuck in my memory.

[chrysostom]

I read it in Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I would've bought it for a quarter back in the day, purely on the strength of the cover alone. [1] Though I confess to a certain curiosity about what happened to the dog. And maybe the secret of Buck's quick draw.


1. My golden age is not by date, nor by the number days since I was born. It's by cover art.

[jbwoodford]

Re Buck's quick draw, ur pna gryrcbeg gur tha sebz gur ubyfgre gb uvf unaq.

Re the dog, this was framed as a "what happens next?" after a medieval folk tale: Gur Qrivy ohvyg n oevqtr sbe n gbja, naq gur cevpr jnf gur fbhy bs gur svefg bar gb pebff gur oevqtr nsgre vg'f ohvyg. Gur ybpny ovfubc guerj n ybns bs oernq npebff vg naq n fgenl qbt ena nsgre gur oernq, jurerhcba gur Qrivy unq gb pbyyrpg gur qbt'f fbhy. Nppbeqvat gb gur fgbel, gur gbjafsbyx jrer birewblrq gb frr gur Qrivy gevpxrq yvxr guvf, ohg gur nhgube jbaqrerq jung unccrarq gb gur qbt.

Ovkol unf gur qbt'f fbhy qrcbfvgrq va Uryy, jurer (orpnhfr vg'f n tbbq qbt, naq abg npghnyyl qnzarq) vg'f vzzhar gb gur raivebazrag naq gb gur gbezragf vasyvpgrq ol gur inevbhf erfvqragf. Fb gur ceboyrz trgf chfurq hc guebhtu gur Vasreany uvrenepul, naq riraghnyyl gur qbt vf frag gb Urnira. Vg vf terrgrq ol Fnvag Crgre, jub vaivgrf vg va, ncbybtvmrf sbe vg abg trggvat gur oernq, ohg nffherf vg gung vg unf n Urnirayl fgrnx jnvgvat sbe vg..

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

Yeah, you know, I'm agnostic on the notion of an afterlife of whatever creed or stripe; in fact, I don't particularly care if there's an afterlife for us human types.

But I'm utterly convinced there's a Doggy Heaven.

[armiphlage]

If I were a time-traveler, one thing I would miss would be readable fiction.

[jbwoodford]

In retrospect, Bixby was basically second-string Fredric Brown. My folks had a copy of this, and I remember most of the stories from reading them as a teenager.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

I was thinking that the description of these stories reminded me of Brown and his 'gimmick' shorts. The gunslinger bit in particular conjured up have a vague recollection of a Brown short about a helmet which seemed to instantly grant relatively minor (read, not breaking the laws of physics) wishes to the wearer; in reality, it was the user themselves doing the wish-granting. Or did it ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

That's Brown's The Yehudi Principle, by the way.

[jreynolds197]

A typewriter that only wrote the truth. If I had one of those, I'd have to check out the parameters: how strong is this thing? Winning a lottery: probably easy (so long as you buy a ticket!) Curing illness? Make sure that some COVID researcher goes down the right path to get a safe and effective vaccine? Probably not so easy (since a safe and effective vaccine may not be possible).

Similar to the gods in Leckie's recent The Raven Tower, in that what a god said as a declarative sentence had to be true (or become true if it wasn't already).

The difference is that (1) no god in Leckie's work [that appeared onstage anyway] was interested in non-consensual sex with humans and (2) if they didn't have the power to make what they stated come true, the god died immediately (or became sick and died after prolonged spiritual illness).

[(Anonymous)]

There was a pretty dire story by Bixby, "The Holes Around Mars", that I ran into in the Asimov-edited "Where Do We Go From Here?". Preposterous orbital dynamics are used to set up a tedious pun. So that's another Bixby story that people might have run into...

[ba_munronoe]

It's been reprinted more than once: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?45756

[bunsen_h]

I found a copy on-line. I regret having spent the time reading it. The solution to the big mystery makes no sense, as in "it wouldn't behave that way!", and the story wraps with a pun that even the narrator thinks is really lame. I'll allow that there's a subset of fans who are utterly addicted to really lame puns, but still, I don't think the story was well crafted.

By way of comparison, Fredric Brown's "Placet is a Crazy Place" has similarly implausible orbital dynamics. But that's part of the setup, laid out from the beginning. And if one feels the need, it can be hand-waved as being another weird effect of the "Blakeslee field" between the two suns.

re typewriter story

[oh6]

I was thinking of a typewriter that would only write what was actually true, rather than influencing reality in any way. Possibly a technical writer marvelling at how they never seem to make typos or other mistakes when using this one typewriter (off at their cottage or purchased at a garage sale while their main machine was in the shop), until noticing a discrepancy between the manual as typewritten and the received specs, leading to a discovery likely to be ultimately unfortunate, or existentially disturbing.

[chrysostom]

"Trace" was in the 100 Great Short Short Fantasy Stories anthology, which isn't bad overall (although not as good as the SF one).