Looking for a collection of SCIFI short stories, that was used as text book in a high school literature class. I don't remember what was on the cover other than it being a tan and yellow soft cover book with "Science Fiction" in big letters on the cover.
I can remember only a few stories in the book clearly. One was called (I believe) Short Stacks: it starts out with a little boy asking his father why they are called Short Stacks and the Father starts to explain the story of Mr. Short who was very creative, bought some land in the desert and made a house out of plastic sheet and some telephone poles dug into the earth, but one of the plastic sheets was actually a large tube and he stood it up and the difference in air pressure causes an air flow that the man harnesses with wind turbines to generate electricity and the condensation of water is collected and used, the air flow causes the area around it to cool off and then is farmed. Then somehow they attempt this in LA and it clears up the smog issue.
Another was (I don't remember the name) about a movie production that was similar to 3D but the glasses let you see it from the male or female Point of View (it was an adult movie type), anyway at the grand opening the author of the story leans up to talk to the lead actors and they have swapped the glasses.
Another was about (might have been called The Star Chamber) about a slave that was (several generations a slave) very uneducated, they were enslaved by a race that the description was that of a horse, and the humans were treated like we treat horses (ride them for transportation, working the fields), anyway there were these things the main character called 'zirds' (reminded me of a robotic bird), would fly around and would call to the humans a try to get them to free themselves, the MC would remember a nursery rhyme that was something about feeding a brown worm with a red bands to the machine at this star chamber, the MC finally gets to the Star Chamber and finds the worm and feeds it to the machine (a data tape) that causes the Star Chamber (rocket ship) to start it's prelaunch sequence and return the MC to earth.
One of the other stories was Random Sample by T.P. Caravan
I would like to buy the book to read the other stories that I wasn't able to read. I have searched, even asked about it at the school and the teacher that taught that class had left sometime ago.
Thank you for you help.
