31
Gordon R. Dickson Call Him Lord. The visit to Earth is a kind of "manhood test" to reveal the Prince's suitability (or not) to be the next Emperor.
When the escort meets the Emperor, the latter demands to know how his son failed the test. After going over a few lesser problems, the escort gets to the heart of the matter, saying "Lord. He was a coward," and ...
26
"Life on the Tether", a novelette by Mark Wheeler in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1983, available at the Internet Archive. As far as the ISFDB knows, the story was never reprinted, and the author never published anything else.
The story is narrated by Maura, the female twin. It is definitely science fiction; there is futuristic stuff ...
25
This is "Peter Graves" by William Pene du Bois. The anti-gravity material is called Furloy.
It's a short book though, not a short story. Published in 1950. My copy is from 1972.
The cover image shows the harness you mention (with golf club head covers holding the Furloy balls, and a fishing rod safety tether).
And here's a scan of an interior illustration ...
23
Short story about Nobel Prize winning scientists that drop out when they realise they were incorrect
The story is What Did Tessimond Tell You by Adam Roberts. I read it in the Solaris Rising 1.5 ebook.
The story starts:
THE NOBEL WAS in the bag, and we were only a fortnight from our public announcement, when Niu Jian told he was quitting. I assumed it was a joke. But Niu Jian had never been a practical joker; and of course he wasn’t kidding now. The ...
23
"Doomsday Deferred", a short story by Will F. Jenkins aka Murray Leinster.
The narrator, an American butterfly hunter in Brazil, is visited by a desperate man:
It happened in Milhao, where José Ribiera came to me. Milhao is in Brazil, but from it the Andes can be seen against the sky at sunset. It is a town the jungle unfortunately did not finish burying ...
22
This is Jack Vance's novelette "The World Between" (1953), also known as "Ecological Onslaught".
It has the two competing terraforming crews, from planets called Blue Star and Kay and the interaction of the competing processes results in a wild, but viable world very different (but more interesting) from any of the sterile designs originally intended by the ...
15
"...And All the Stars a Stage" by James Blish.
1086 A.D.: A sudden glare of light in the constellation later called
Taurus. The Chinese astronomer T'ang Yaou-Shun marks it down: A new
and marvelous star, portending miracles.
But the miracle has already
happened. It sleeps inside Yaou-Shun, in twelve of his genes.
At one point, the serial was ...
12
Sounds like the dystopia The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (1953), where a chicken heart of monstrous size, nicknamed Chicken Little, was cultivated for meat that was periodically trimmed off. The novel was originally serialized in Galaxy.
11
This is “Stuffing” by Jerry Oltion, first published in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction in 2006.
To quote from tardigrade's excellent answer elsewhere on the site...
A humorous short story in which people have been modified to be able to acquire their entire calorific requirements via photosynthesis and nobody eats at all, or even remembers ...
10
"Trauma", a novelette by Eric Vinicoff, first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May 1988.
In the present a man with a broken arm gets off his sailboat and goes into town to get medical attention.
It's not the beginning of the story, and his arm isn't broken, but here it is:
Bill was standing at the bow rail as the Trauma eased into its ...
10
This is almost definitely "Trouble with Treaties" by Katherine MacLean & Tom Condit as mentioned in this previous answer. It was originally published in 1959 in the anthology Star Science Fiction Stories No. 5 so it definitely qualifies as "vintage."
It's been a long time since I read it, but as best I recall the (human) telepath figures out that the ...
10
"The Man Who Tasted Ashes", a short story by Algis Budrys, first published in If, February 1959, available at the Internet Archive. Does any of these covers ring a bell?
Short story about an unpleasant character
He gestured toward the bureau top. "Pour me some more of that." Alcohol affected him swiftly but not deeply. Once it had stripped him of the ...
9
This is Override by George R.R. Martin
Science fiction short story about a corpse-handler who's double-crossed while collecting swirlstones in a beautiful off-world grotto. "Override" is the term for the box that his opponent uses to turn the corpses against him.
8
That is Sister Planet, See wiki article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Planet
He notices that Oscar's blood is green.
7
This could be Arthur C. Clarke's novel Islands in the Sky, published in 1952. The main plot concerns a boy's trip to the Inner Station, which he lawyers his way into when his prize for winning an aviation quiz is a trip to "any part of the Earth" as opposed to "any place on Earth".
The spiderlike Mercurians were described in a story within the story ...
7
This may be Ray Bradbury's short story "Night Call, Collect", which centers on an old man on Mars being tormented by messages recorded by his younger self.
"Impossible!" The voice of the young Barton laughed, far away. "I've no way to tell if you ever get this call. This is all mechanical. You're talking to a transcription, no more. This is 2037. Sixty ...
7
As per Short story about humans as beasts of burden for another race, read about 30 years ago, this is "The Silk and the Song" (1956) by Charles L. Fontenay.
It was released in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1956
It's about a group of humans who are enslaved by aliens, generations
after a disastrous landing on their planet. They ...
7
Possibly Light Verse, published in The Saturday Evening Post, September / October, 1973.
If so, the (very) brief mention you're thinking of is:
The very last person anyone would expect to be a murderer was Mrs. Avis Lardner. Widow of the great astronaut-martyr, she was a philanthropist, an art collector, a hostess extraordinary, and, everyone agreed, an ...
7
I've read this—the story is "Black Colossus", and yes it was written by Howard. The country of Khoraja is threatened by an encroaching army of an evil sorcerer, a divine voice tells the Khorajan princess to save her nation she must put at the head of its army the first man she meets on the streets of her city—who happens to be the mercenary Conan. The wall ...
7
The piece is an extract from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was not a standalone piece of literature.
The passage I was trying to remember is as follows:
"There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not
believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as ...
6
It's not a short story but rather a novel, however, Mindblast (1991) by Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, the first book in the Space Cops series seems to match quite well. I can't find a version of the story online and there isn't too much out there on it but the below descriptions give a bit of detail on it.
Officer Lon Salonikis discovered the dark secret ...
6
If you had not mentioned the meeting another time traveler and the recency of the story, I would have sworn it is "Last Rites" by Ray Bradbury.
But it is not only indeed
"about a time traveler (possibly rogue(?)) who meets important historical figures just before their death and informs them of the importance and influence that they have on the future"
...
5
I'll guess that it's a short novel, it's only one kid, and it's The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key. It has an opening at night (looking at shooting stars) and the mean old farmer. (Also, it was issued by Scholastic, so likely to be encountered in school.)
Do the boy's telepathy, his being from a more peaceful society, a kind family that takes him in, and ...
5
Found the book series, it's called the The Woodland Folk series by Tony Wolf.
The particular stories about the dragons come from the The Woodland Folk Meet Dragons book.
I googled for fairy tug of war dragon dwarf and this popped up. The link gave me the information about the author and that was enough for me to search and buy a copy of the book
5
Posting a partially matching answer, "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster matches other than being too old (1909) and not mentioning "McCloo".
The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and ...
5
Bit of a stretch, but...
In Asimov's "Lucky Star and the Big Sun of Mercury" Lucky's sidekick Bigman is attacked by a Mercurian organism described as "a stony octopus composed of nothing but tentacles."
The creatures were indeed "creeping over rocks stalking the astronauts." The scene takes place in a mine.
Ironically for Mercury organisms, they seek heat!...
5
"Totally Camelot", a short story by Esther M. Friesner in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1998, available at the Internet Archive.
Beneath the great elf-mound all was revelry, but joy and wanton merry-making both ceased in an instant at the sound of hard-soled boots upon the stones. Wild song and wilder dance died outright at the coming of the messenger ...
4
1980s or 90s magazine story: girl can read emotions because she sees outside the normal visual range
It could be "The Lesser Magic" by Gregory Kusnick in Analog, April 1987. According to "Fantasy Review" it's about a scientific examination of a psychic's powers.
They fall in love, they get separated, years later they meet again. She's become a successful psychic, he's become a professional debunker.
Houston pivoted and strode upstage to his chair. "On ...
4
I suspect that you are indeed thinking of Esther Friesner's "Wake-up Call". It's Arthurian fiction, published in Asimov's 2000 collection, Camelot, as well as Up the Wall and it does involve modern speaking patterns. It was published in a magazine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1988
Possibly of use to your recollection, Arthur still ...
4
Could this be Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries, more specifically 'The Eleventh Voyage'?
By the way, Lem’s story ends with the protagonist’s discovery that the robot planet contains no real robots, but only human agents dressed up as robots, all sent in disguise to infiltrate the ranks of the Magnificans. Having betrayed their humanity, they all act like ...
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