[Tears] Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby

[James Nicoll]

Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/stumble-blindly


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[Jack Bohn]

James Nicoll wrote:
> Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby
> https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/stumble-blindly

The *other* Bixby story I recognize is "The Holes Around Mars," also not in that collection. Looking at IsfDb, it seems he did not get anthologized a lot, except for... you know. There was a thread a little while back about writers known for only one work. (I don't see any subject header that might be it, may have been a subthread.) I'd say he's not prolific enough that it's a surprise only one work is well known. Are you saying it's not unfair that "It's a _Good_ Life" is his only highly regarded story?

For "Laboratory" you say: "The sexism of the few lines given to the woman is impressive. Even for 1955. It's available on Gutenberg, and I feel cheated to only get lines like:

* Helen frowned. "We were pretty far off-world when we saw them, Johnny. Maybe they were aurorae—or reflections from mineral pockets. Or magnetic phenomena of some kind ... that could be why the ship didn't handle right during landing—"

* "Guess I'm the worrying type, hon. Nothing alive around here."

* "As for the landing ... I was so scared after that meteor hit us, it's a wonder I didn't nail the ship halfway into the planet, instead of just jolting us up."

* Helen nodded, still staring up at the meteor-hole. "You know," she said slowly, "it wouldn't happen again this way in a million years, Johnny. Thank God, this clod was here ... we ought to name it Lifesaver."

* Then suddenly she said, "O-o-o-oof!" and reared back on her knees and clapped both hands to her helmet. Her eyes squeezed shut behind her faceplate, then opened wide and frightened.

* "As-pir-in," she said, deliberately falsetto, and her helmet-valet fed her another pill with a sip of water.

* "Oh, Johnny, Johnny," Helen sobbed. "I tripped when I started to turn around, and fell down the other side, and all of a sudden ... it was horrible ... I thought I was going crazy—"

Johnny Gorman had his arms tight around her. Behind her back, his blaster was pointed straight down the far slope of the ridge, ready to atomize anything that moved.

"What, honey?" he said. "What happened? I didn't see anything near you ... what happened?"

"It was like I was in a hurricane ... I couldn't see anything, but something seemed to be whirling around me, something as big as the universe ... and it seemed to be whirling inside me too! I felt—it felt like ... Johnny, I was crossed!"

"Crossed?" He shook her gently. "What do you mean, you were crossed?"

"It felt like my right side was my left side, and, my heart was beating backwards, and my eyes were looking at each other, and I was just twisted all downside up outside and inside out upside, and ... Johnny," she wailed, "I am going crazy!"

* Helen Gorman faced something that was a cross between a tomcat and an eggplant on stilts. It looked hungry. It bounded toward her in forty foot lopes.

"Johnny ... Johnny, where are you...."

Helen fainted.

* In dodging, Johnny tumbled into another energy-field.

... He stood on his own face, saw before his eyes the hairy mole on the back of his neck, and threw a gray-and-red insideout hand before his eyes in complete terror. Then Pud nudged him gently out of the field, and before Johnny's eyes, in an instantaneous and unfathomable convolution, the hand became normal again.

* Pud reached down and picked one of the aliens off the nose of the ship. It slumped in his grasp immediately. The other alien began firing its popgun frantically at the seemingly empty air through which its mate mysteriously rose.

The thermonuclear bolts tickled Pud's hide. He sighed and relaxed his personal invisibility field and became visible. That didn't matter now.

The alien stared upward. Its face whitened. It dropped its popgun and fell over backward, slid gently off the ship's nose and started a slow light-gravity fall toward the ground.

Pud caught it, and said, "I thought that might happen. Evidently they lose consciousness rather easily at unaccustomed sights. A provincial trait."

He slid the aliens gently into the airlock of their ship.

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-Jack

[Quadibloc]

On Sunday, August 2, 2020 at 7:25:44 AM UTC-6, James Nicoll wrote:
> Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby
> https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/stumble-blindly

Was Anthony Boucher's 1943 story, "We Print the Truth", made into a Twilight Zone
(or possibly Night Gallery) episode?

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

Looking up a description of "We Print the Truth", it seemed like that could be
the case, but instead the Night Gallery episode "Printer's Devil" was based on
Charles Beaumont's "The Devil You Say".

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

Another source says it was a Twilight Zone episode, but an hour-long episode
rather than a half-hour episode. And Boucher's story indeed was not similar.

John Savard

[Juho Julkunen]

In article <rg6esl$kn3$1...@reader1.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...

>
> Space by the Tale by Jerome Bixby
> https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/stumble-blindly

Now, I don't think I've read any stories in this collection, and I don't
think I'm going to any time soon, so a question to someone who has:

Is the car in "One Way Street" an ancestor to the truck-kun from a
million isekais?

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Juho Julkunen