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Help, my mind has fallen and can't get up...I need help identifying a science fiction short story by title
Submitted by Anonymous on March 17, 2008 - 1:15am.
Long ago I read a story in a collection of short stories, and the lender of the book had the bald-faced temerity to demand the book back, so I've subsequently forgotten the book's title as well as the story's title. I'll probably be embarrassed to find the answer that should have easily occurred to me with a bit of memory jogging, but as it rests I have to ask for help. Here's all I can remember...a man travels in a jet airplane to the far future of Earth, through no fault of his own, and arrives at the end of the planet's life. The Earth had come to a standstill as far as its orbit around the Sun was concerned. The Sun was a mere speck of its former brightness and Earth was desolate in every direction he looked. After a while, alien beings arrived to escort him back to their home (I think it was Saturn), and he was to become a scientific curiosity there as the last surviving human. Sounds simple enough, right? Either I don't have the right keywords to enter, or I imagined I read the story, but I can't find any hints to my quest on the web. If you know which story this is, please let me know, and be kind to my feeble brain, which is crammed to overflowing with so much other useless info! THANKS!!
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I don't know it
The story doesn't ring any bells for me. Do you have any other clues such as the approximate decade it was written? Was it an anthology of one writer's stories or of many authors? Was the anthology part of a series? If you had some of those clues, there's a possibility you could track it down via the ISFDB.
That's the problem...
Thanks for the interest, Capt. Xerox. I'm not sure what the collection was, but it was definitely something by various authors, like an annual "Best of..." volume. It also had to predate 1985 because that was the time period when I read it. I even remember writing down the title because my friend wouldn't sell the book to me, but alas, it was all for naught. My situation has changed since the days of my youth, and my current wife has erased any and all evidence of my first marriage, so many of my old notes have long since been incinerated by the county (sigh). But I will try the resource you have pointed out. Thanks!
Try Asimov's Before the Golden Age
There's a number of time travel/end of the world stories in Asimov's Before the Golden Age. My first thought was it might be Clifford Simak's World of the Red Sun but your description doesn't quite match.
I can't remember the titles
I can't remember the titles either, but I think it was one of Asimov's. You might go to flickr.com, run a search for science fiction and ask some of the collectors that post the old magazine and book covers there... they might know or you might see it. You also might try running a search on google images for Asimov science fiction book and should get tons of covers that might trigger your memory.
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