29
This does indeed seem to be "The Gun Without a Bang" by Robert Sheckley, originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1958 as by Finn O'Donnevan.
Alfred Dixon is alone on an alien planet, but unafraid of any dangers:
Did a twig snap? Dixon looked back and thought he saw a dark shape melt into the underbrush. Instantly he froze, staring ...
28
And, looking up Asimov's Young Mutants just to be sure that it wasn't the one I was thinking of, it is in the book, Edmond Hamilton's 1938 "He That Hath Wings", summary from here:
The story concerns a boy, David Rand, whose parents were caught in what is only described as an electrical explosion, but they were exposed to some unidentified form of ...
28
This is the novella "The Storms of Windhaven", by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle (later collected with other stories in the same setting as the novel it became part of, Windhaven).
The wings are a scarce resource, made from the solar sail film that brought humans to Windhaven long ago -- and once lost, they can't be replaced. Yet, every year, ...
27
This is The Secret Sense by Isaac Asimov. It's been printed in many anthologies - the one that I read it in was The Early Asimov or, Eleven Years of Trying Volume 1. One detail that I remember is that the name of the instrument was "portwem". Wikipedia has a plot summary:
Lincoln Fields, a rich Earthling from New York City living on Mars, is ...
25
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley
Unlike the others, Emergency was not a competition-type program. It
stressed individual initiative. For the show, Raeder was knocked out with
a non-habit-forming narcotic. He awoke in the cockpit of a small airplane,
cruising on autopilot at ten thousand feet. His fuel gauge showed nearly empty.
He had no ...
18
I immediately recognised this as from the fixup novel Windhaven by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle (previously identified in A novel about humans on a water planet who used iron-wings made from a ruined settler ship) but as DavidW points out in a comment the date range given would make it the novella The Storms of Windhaven published in 1975. The novella ...
18
As per Story about a future of over-production, could this be Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague"?
In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities
enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in
frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant
production, while the upper-class ...
17
Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring by George R. R. Martin. I read it in his collection Night Flyers and Other stories.
The portals are the eponymous Star Rings. The portal with nothing on the other side is called The Hole to Nowhere:
“I’m not. The discovery of the Hole to Nowhere twenty-odd years ago badly shook the space warp theory. If we simply ...
10
This is "The Wonder Horse" by George Byram. I first read it in Isaac Asimov's Young Mutants collection, short description from this review.
When a wonder horse sweeps the racing world no one is prepared for what that could entail, even the horse's owners.
It's borderline sci-fi. Basically, the horse is a mutant that so incredibly outpaces all of ...
9
You may be thinking of Exhalation by Ted Chiang, as per Searching for a short story about metallic lungs:
Perhaps a few of us, in the days before we cease moving, will be able to connect our cerebral regulators directly to the dispensers in the filling stations, in effect replacing our lungs with the mighty lung of the world. If so, those few will be able ...
8
Your description sounds very much like this earlier question.
The answer there was The Portrait of Baron Negay by Barry B. Longyear.
An artist is imprisoned to force him to make a portrait using a special technique. He doesn't know how to use that technique, but a forger imprisoned with him does. Together the two complete the portrait.
They go it one ...
8
It's not Achilles but Enid Blyton had a similar story in one of her Brer Rabbit books. Google suggests the story is "Brer Rabbit Runs a Race", which I read in the collection "Enid Blyton's Brer Rabbit Book".
Brer Rabbit races against Brer Terrapin. Brer Terrapin stationed his family all along the course and he, Brer Terrapin, was at the ...
8
Your story closely resembles Arthur C. Clarke's The Wall of Darkness (1949).
In that story, among the ices of the South lies a Wall, created in one night from a fog of magic in ages long forgotten. If we replace "Wall" for "ice range" in your question, the match is almost perfect:
A man is trying to cross a large ice range, based on ...
7
I found it. The book is called Out of This World: Tales of Space by Allan Graubard and Gale Burnick. The Venus story is called "The Secrets of Venus", and the sun story is called "The Wind from the Sun".
The books reading level is aimed at grade schoolers and there are several large black and white drawing per story.
The stories in the ...
6
I think this story is called "The Wind from the Sun" (not the Arthur C. Clarke story), and the book is called Out of This World: Tales of Space by Allan Graubard and Gale Burnick.
The story is about a couple, John and Tandy, who choose to stay behind on Earth even though they know the sun is going to explode. It mentions that years before millions ...
6
I believe the story in question is "Helbent 4" by Steven Robinet "I was programmed by the NASA contingent. They speak English, I speak English. Never did get along with those Ruskie-speaking ships."
Here are the covers: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?51699
5
I believe this is the short story "Spaghetti Pig-Out", originally published within Paul Jennings' Uncanny! collection in 1988, which was reprinted several times in the 1990s.
A boy receives an odd looking video player as a gift from his dad, who "bought it off a bloke in a pub" for fity dollars. The player is described as being green and ...
5
This is "The Subliminal Man" by J. G. Ballard, from 1963. It appeared in New Worlds Science Fiction, in January 1963. (Unfortunately archive.org is missing this issue.) It has been collected in lots of places.
The first line of the story is
"The signs, Doctor! Have you seen the signs?"
The first two pages are all about the signs ...
3
I remember the same or a similar story. A similar question is asked here.
There are several answers to that question. The answer (by FuzzyBoots) that sounds most like the story I remember, and a lot like your story, is "Pictures don't Lie" by Katherine MacLean. That story is online at Project Gutenberg.
Excerpt
"A half circle of cliffs ...
3
"Gunner" reminds a fellow employee how that employee messed up an election back in the 1980s.
"We met before," I told Haber. "In 1988, when you were running the Des Moines office."
He beamed and held out his hand. "Why, darn it, so we did! I remember now, Odin."
"I don't like to be called Odin."
"No? ...
3
It's probably not this one, but I'll put it out there all the same: is it possibly Larry Niven's 1971 short story Inconstant Moon?
Most of this story takes place at night; it is narrated by a man living in Los Angeles. During the story, the man notices that the moon is unusually bright. He reasons that it is due to a solar cataclysm, and that the day ...
3
There is a story called “They’re Made out of Meat” which is somewhat similar to the story described. It does not describe the beginning of the solar system or the evolution of humans, but it is from an alien viewpoint, where aliens discuss the existence of thinking creatures made entirely out of meat.
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These ...
3
Thanks for all the suggestions, but I've found it.
It was Unknown Quantitity by Peter Phillips (aka "At No Extra Cost") first published 1949 in New Worlds #5 and anthologised elsewhere.
3
This is "Down Among the Dead Men" (1954) by William Tenn. There is a previous question about it: Short story about dead soldiers bodies being reused
3
I know this was asked several years ago, but the third story in the question is likely to be "It's such a beautiful day" by Isaac Asimov. The story is about a boy who sees a teleporter break down/fail and starts to wonder what would happen if he were entering or being teleported when the failure occurred. He then takes to walking home in preference....
3
A fellow over at "The Straight Dope" who calls himself "The Other Waldo Pepper" has ID'd this story as "Castaway" by Edmond Hamilton, having given it a quick perusal, I concur. Here are the covers of the books containing this story. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?63159 "So, I came from Aarn, did I? Then why ...
2
Is it Death's Door: An Edgar Allan Poe Time Travel Novella by April White?
In the fall of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe disappeared. He was missing for five days, and was then found wandering near Gunnar's Hall in Baltimore, delirious and possibly drunk, wearing strange clothes and carrying a cane. Poe died four days later in a Baltimore hospital, never having ...
2
Could you be thinking of Nicholas Fisk's "Sweets From a Stranger", which I got identified for me on Literature Stack Exchange a few months ago?
The opening scene of the story, the heroine (a girl called Tina Halliday) sees a strange man in a car asking her to get in, and offering her sweets. She's been well taught by her parents not to get into ...
1
Not sure, but try Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud. It's from much earlier (like maybe the 1960's), but, if I remember rightly, the Cloud is a periodic thing that stops between the Earth and the Sun, and almost destroys life on Earth.
Plot summary from Wikipedia:
In 1964, astrophysicists on Earth become aware of a cloud of gas and dust, initially thought to be ...
1
There is a story called "Unscheduled Flight" by Juanita Coulson that has some of these elements. It's not on a spaceship but a regular airplane, but does have the Bermuda Triangle serving as a (one-way) gateway to an alternate Earth. There were so many of them that they formed a rebel group called "The Triangulans". http://www.isfdb....
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
