The punchlines of SF short stories
Joseph Nebus
than about 2,000 words long? A couple of them, I can think of examples. ]
``And we will name this planet, third from its star, Earth.''
``But without our hoax how would humanity have ever built such
a thing?''
``Fortunately, humans are delicious.''
``So it turns out the world is actually a computer simulation.''
``And you'd never know she wasn't a robot!''
``With all that time-travelling we just fixed things back to
the way before we started fiddling with time?''
``Turns out, it's man.''
Further punchlines, of course, quite welcome.
--
Joseph Nebus
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Kurt Busiek
> [ And for bonus points, are any of them tolerable in stories more
> than about 2,000 words long? A couple of them, I can think of examples. ]
>
>
> ``And we will name this planet, third from its star, Earth.''
>
>
> ``But without our hoax how would humanity have ever built such
> a thing?''
>
>
> ``Fortunately, humans are delicious.''
>
>
> ``So it turns out the world is actually a computer simulation.''
>
>
> ``And you'd never know she wasn't a robot!''
>
>
> ``With all that time-travelling we just fixed things back to
> the way before we started fiddling with time?''
>
>
> ``Turns out, it's man.''
>
>
> Further punchlines, of course, quite welcome.
I'm surprised you missed, "That's funny, my name's 'Eve'."
kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!
David Johnston
Gerry Quinn
> On 2009-12-28 11:35:00 -0800, nebusj-@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) said:
> > Further punchlines, of course, quite welcome.
>
> I'm surprised you missed, "That's funny, my name's 'Eve'."
Which reminded me of "She weebled."
Another memorable one was "You don't [have immortal souls]."
- Gerry Quinn
Butch Malahide
> In article <hhb1lg$fm...@solani.org>, k...@busiek.com says...
>
> > On 2009-12-28 11:35:00 -0800, nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) said:
> > > Further punchlines, of course, quite welcome.
>
> > I'm surprised you missed, "That's funny, my name's 'Eve'."
>
> Which reminded me of "She weebled."
>
> Another memorable one was "You don't [have immortal souls]."
But that one's not like the others; it has actually been used in a
real science fiction story.
Butch Malahide
> ``And you'd never know she wasn't a robot!''
A story about a girl impersonating a robot? I've read stories where
the hero (usually a guy) has to impersonate (not quite the right word
but I don't know what else to use) a robot, in order to make an escape
or get behind enemy lines or something, but I don't see how that would
work as a punchline.
Robert Carnegie
For the guy doing it, Woody Allen in _Sleeper_ comes to mind.
Otherwise, I'm thinking of the economy being mainly run on robots so
you have to pass for robot to get a good job. For added zing,
management are robots and humans only work on the production line. Or
maybe we're in the sex industry. Perhaps we're in the sex industry
for robots. "Turning matrix" as they say.
tkma...@yahoo.co.uk
Something like this is the case in one of the Hal Clement's stories. I
don't recall the title, but it's set on one of the moons of Uranus (or
may be Neptune). Alien robots, observing a generalized form of Asimov's
laws where "human" is replaced with "sentient," begin treating human
explorers differently based on sex - women as human, men as robots.
Confusion arising out of different dress colors or something. And it's
used in the form of punchline too - to explain, at the end, the weird
robot behavior through the story.
--
"McNear had responded to the inexplicable as people often do: he had
ignored its existence. An excellent way to maintain sanity."
- "Practice" by Verge Foray
<http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2009/10/howard-l-myers-practice-as-by-verge.html>
David Johnston
wrote:
>You should have been more careful what you wished for!
Wait. You mean I have to be my own grandfather?
Rich Horton
> ``So it turns out the world is actually a computer simulation.''
This, of course, is if not exactly the punchline a key point of quite
a few reasonably well-regarded recent novels, all rather longer than
2000 words of course.
It might be a spoiler to reveal some of them, so, after some space,
I'll mention ...
DARWINIA, by Robert Charles Wilson
BRASYL, by Ian McDonald
PERMUTATION CITY, by Greg Egan
Default User
You don't want to be under the control of tbe brain-spawn, do you?
Brian
--
Day 330 of the "no grouchy usenet posts" project
Joseph Nebus
>On Dec 28, 1:35=A0pm, nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 ``And you'd never know she wasn't a robot!'' =A0
>A story about a girl impersonating a robot? I've read stories where
>the hero (usually a guy) has to impersonate (not quite the right word
>but I don't know what else to use) a robot, in order to make an escape
>or get behind enemy lines or something, but I don't see how that would
>work as a punchline.
Although I'm not surprised to find a couple stories using the
element (and I can think of a couple others, if we loosen up things like
the 'she' part), what really happened there was I glitched the line up
while editing it. ``And you'd never know she was a robot!'' opens up
the stories in which what we're supposed to take as a Real Person turns
out to be a robot in the end. (Read with the correct tone, it also
covers the stories where a robot turns out to be human, too.)
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuk Goodin
>> [ And for bonus points, are any of them tolerable in stories more
>> than about 2,000 words long? A couple of them, I can think of examples. ]
>>
>>
>> ``And we will name this planet, third from its star, Earth.''
>>
>>
>> ``But without our hoax how would humanity have ever built such
>> a thing?''
>>
>>
>> ``Fortunately, humans are delicious.''
>>
>>
>> ``So it turns out the world is actually a computer simulation.''
>>
>>
>> ``And you'd never know she wasn't a robot!''
>>
>>
>> ``With all that time-travelling we just fixed things back to
>> the way before we started fiddling with time?''
>>
>>
>> ``Turns out, it's man.''
>>
>>
>> Further punchlines, of course, quite welcome.
>
>I'm surprised you missed, "That's funny, my name's 'Eve'."
Last summer my teenage son helped make a student film that ended like
that. I haven't asked him who came up with the idea yet.
--
chuk
Tim McDaniel
There's one I read in Asimov's. I finally hit on the title "The News
from D Street", Andrew Weiner (Asimov's Sep 1986), a novelette that
apparently won a Locus award. It starts noir. I think the ending is
that the detective learns that he's in a computer-science experiment
and there's a good chance that the group will lose its grant. Do I
remember the details correctly?
--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com
Michael Stemper
It wasn't a punchline, but van Vogt's short story, "All the Loving
Androids" had a woman impersonating a robot -- a robot made in her
image that her husband had custom-built and was living with because
he couldn't stand her any more.
The husband had already had two robots built to impersonate him, in
order to satisfy her demands on his time. She fobbed her robotic
double off on one (or both?) of them.
--
Michael F. Stemper
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