ORBIT – Otherworldly Reads, Bold Ideas, and Tales. SF & F Short Stories and Novelettes discussion

This is a YouTube channel with older SF shorter works. One of its pluses: it shows the read text, so you can both listen and eye-read. The selection of the stories is quite solid.

The address: https://www.youtube.com/@futurespast-42

I've started with their latest installment, Subjectivity by Norman Spinrad from Analog, Jan. 1964. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDPLe...

I've read only The Iron Dream and his reviews of SFF in recent Asimov's, this is the first short story by him I've read.

A light piece with some satire (maybe hitting at the recently announced US space program). The Solar gov't spends a lot on space exploration, it attempts interstellar slower-than-light flights, but they all fail - people go mad, ships are lost. The 13th flight gives a crew the most potent hallucinogen to keep them from each other's throats... 3.5*

I finished the classic Cordwainer Smith's story

The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith from Galaxy
This is the world, where faster than light travel is dangerous, because in the 'hyperspace' predators live, which fry people's brains. To overcome this, teams of telepaths and their Partners are created. 4*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrbLw...

Oleksandr wrote: "I finished the classic Cordwainer Smith's story

The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith from Galaxy
This is the world, where faster than light travel is dangerous, because in..."

His very best story, I think. "Meow"

Peter wrote: "His very best story, I think. "Meow""

It is one of the best for me, just a notch below Scanners live in vain

Oleksandr wrote: "Peter wrote: "His very best story, I think. "Meow""

It is one of the best for me, just a notch below Scanners live in vain"

That would be a hard pick, alright. But, cat-SF lover that I am....

I continue to listen a story each day or two.

An update on the finished stories:
Cause of Death by Max Tadlock a man is obsessed with the mystery of death, assuming that a person may will himself to die and then return to life. He successfully experiments on himself but (view spoiler)[was dead for three days, in a warm room, so when he resurrected and called ambulance, the medics could do nothing, the punch-line: cause of death: death (hide spoiler)] 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8auf7...

The Cosmic Snare (1956) by Stephen Marlowe the interstellar transit goes through Sub-space was a vast nothingness used for instantaneous travel between stellar worlds. from one manned station to another. A married couple just started to work on one of such stations, when a condemned killer escaped from Luna prison. He takes the wife hostage, but the husband uses properties of the sub-space to save her... the properties are inconsistent with human life, so only 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsdKj...

The Big Tick (1953) by Ross Rocklynne a man starts behaving erratically after he gets a pocket watch, which bangs like crazy in his mind. He says to his superior that this clock ticks his life out, but isn't believed. He dies and the watch stops. Next, the superior starts hearing the tick... suspenseful 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBH1q...

Today is Forever (1952) by Roger Dee a future where almost no crime because of truth serum + polygraph, where humanity is ruled by a commettee. A man finds out that the aliens, who recently visited Earth, will inject comettee's membvers and only them with something that will notable prolong their lives. He decides to get it, invigorates people from his 7-person marriage, framing his theft as a struggle against the unjust authorities. He gets what he wanted but (view spoiler)[is arrested and jailed for [long] life (hide spoiler)] 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQhu9...

The Artificial Man (1929) by Clare Winger Harris There was a man, George, best in his college and well-proportioned like a Greek god. He was sure that the external beauty shows internal qualities of the soul. Once, he lost a leg at a hip. This was a blow to his ideas, but soon he managed to walk on an artificial one. Then he lost an arm and a kidney... he decides to prove that he is still perfect by having operations removing other organs, while his girlfriend marries his former doctor (who refused to amputate healthy organs). 5 years passed and a strange man comes to the doctor - this is George but more prosthetics than flash. (view spoiler)[he tries to kill the doctor, but is stopped at the last moment. Moreover, his operating/controlling mechanism is broken and he dies, just managing to repent. This final turned it into a morality story and lowered my rating. (hide spoiler)] 3.5*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvA4u...

Interesting recordings. I don’t have time immediately to listen, but I may try to fit some in soon.

Education of a Martian (1952) by Joseph Shallit Joyce is the daughter of Earthmen, and she plans to go to Mars. Her dad is against this; he thinks Martians are only fit to be porters and janitors. She informs him that she plans to marry one and runs away. Mars turns out to be just an arid, colder Earth with thinner air and Martians are Native Americans by description (bronze, with a slightly hooked nose) with antennae. Joyce fills all papers to let her boyfriend to travel to Earth to marry and then decides to marry before leaving (view spoiler)[they are married, by as the Martian enters the ship he hits a Venusian janitor on his way, saying to Joyce, I hope I am now like your dad (hide spoiler)] 3.5*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lstKE...

Sales Talk (1953) by Ross Rocklynne a humorous SF story. A seller of sewing machines leaves his work for his uncle Unk bequeathed him a time machine, so he plans to move up to a better future. He, his wife and their two dogs, named Is and Was, fill the machine with their meagre belongings and enough food and start. Some bulbs blow and they uncontrollably go at maximum speed. A voice tries to talk to them from outside and what follows is a dialogue with old, crunky and not too bright god. 3.75*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsuRS...

The Defenders (1953) by Philip K. Dick a novelette, eight years ago Cold War turned hot, and now the protagonist lives with his wife and all survivors deep underground, working hard for victory, while on a surface leadies (protected from radiation robots) fight. Now he is taken on a case, a robot from the surface is rad-free. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzc7x...

Find the Happy Children (1953) by Benjamin Ferris black bricks appear and people first feel an urge to get to them and then sit there, blissfully smiling and not reacting to outside stimuli. A journalist starts an investigation and accidentally finds a cure (view spoiler)[happy people, chiefly kids make the bricks inert, for the bricks enthrall people by happiness, so don't work for happy (hide spoiler)] 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS1Kd...

Murderer's Base (1948) by William J. Brittain two guys, younger and older, are prospectors in the asteroid belt. They find a highly radioactive vein, which can make them rich. However, the younger doesn't want to share and decides to kill his partner, but the latter escapes... 2.75*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn-RY...

Summer Guests (1959) by James H. Schmitz a man, Mel Armstong, has a flat near a beach. One floor above him lives a drinking woman painter. One day, he tries to protect a bird nest from cats, but turns out there aren't birds but fairies (small female-looking with butterfly wings). He takes them to his flat, somehow assuming there are Venusians stranded on Earth, waiting for a rescue. (view spoiler)[they mostly communicate via dream-like images, so it is easier to work with the woman painter. Also the final is interesting because the aliens try to kill the protagonist as a potential witness (hide spoiler)] 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9dQ7...

The Reluctant Weapon (1952) by Howard L. Myers a humorous piece. An alien empire assumes that humans one day may be dangerous, so they wake up an ancient sentient weapon and give it a redneck farmer to show that mankind should be destroyed. A light piece. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfhPX...

There Is a Reaper... (1953) by Charles V. de Vet a horror story (according to the description) starting with a third-person narrator poisoning a man. It turns out that the protagonist is a millionaire and is about to die (some kind of unnamed illness). He likes to know everything before he makes a move, so when he found that some tribal shamans have a special poison that kills a victim, but still allows communicating with him a few more minutes, and this the protagonist uses to find what happens after death. From the title, I to some extent predicted a final twist, but it was still good 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoclE...

All That Goes Up (1953) by Kirby Brooks a humorous piece; a narrator in his 50s visits his son, a MIT student, who tinkers with something in his room. There, he sees their dog lying (?) at ceiling. When he tries to bring the dog down, he goes over son's equipment and falls on the ceiling. This anti-grav story is peculiar because when the son turns the equipment off, everything that went up stays up. Now he has to eat remaining upside down and as usual for the time, problems with excretion are 'forgotten'... ok, but nothing special. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgG8d...

Cost of Living (1952) by Robert Sheckley a satire of Western consumerism. The protagonist waits for a company representative while thinking about his colleague, who committed suicide (the plainest looking Chekhov gun). The representative marvels about all high-tech gizmos made by his firm already in the house and suggests more. However, to pay for it, the protagonist's life-debt isn't enough, he should pledge 30 years of his son's earnings. The son wants to be a pilot and go to Mars, but this can wait... 5*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPpVc...

An Ounce of Cure (1963) by Alan E. Nourse a homorous piece set in the near future (1973). A man comes to a doctor because his toe sometimes hurts. The doctor instead of looking into the problem, orders multiple checks by unrelated specialists, who in turn send for even more tests and doctors... 3.5*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ddv...

A Bottle of Old Wine (1953) by Richard O. Lewis a man married for money, but his wife gives him only a little. When she is engrossed in her televis (VR-gogles), he uses an illegal personal teleport located on his body to visit a den of vices, thinking meanwhile how to kill his wife and get her money. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0Z6t...

Shatter the Wall (1962) by Sydney van Scyoc a future, where everyone spands their days watching a soap opera on their wall screens. A mom talk to her daughter, who is 19, saying stop watching, you are the last kid born on Earth, you have to marry (and start popping babies) to save mankind. The daughter doesn't want to listen, instead she insists to be addressed as a girl in the show and says no one can be as good as Bass, a man from the show. The mom shatters the wall, only to be accused of jealousy. She packs a gun and goes to a restaurant to meet actors. 4*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm2Qz...

Les Machines (1954) by Joe Love a story takes place in a court in the future. A woman is accused of killing her much older husband, bludgeoning him to death with a statue of Venus. It turns out that she doesn't agree with the modern idea that everyone is equally talented and can be an artist. She visited a museum to appreciate the works of old artists, a behavior most spectators find abnormal. Moreover, after the visits, she sat in the park, ruminating, first alone, and later visited by a man. The final is a bit weak but the setting is unusual. 3.5*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3q5x...

Muscle Man (1953) by Frank M. Robinson a story starts quite interesting, a thin high man wants to be muscular, and his friend a pharmacist, makes a placebo for him to stimulate training. Everything goes better than expected, up to the point that the man has to buy a tailored suit to fit in. However, the final pun spoils the story (view spoiler)[overgrown muscles break all his bones. (hide spoiler)] 2*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWixK...

Nine Men in Time (1953) by Noel Loomis the narrator is a print-shop manager. He is warned that if he doesn't increase profits in three months, the shop will be closed and sold as part of a larger real estate deal. He hires a man, who optimized production, and here comes a humorous SF element, for among other things (like remote surveillance of the work floor), he sets a time machine to remove errors. A local printer's trade union guy comes to check whether new procedures harm union members (view spoiler)[ He clones himself with a time machine and helps deliver an order in time (hide spoiler)]. While the SF trope has been used before, I was impressed by an attitude - often it is plain Marxism with workers vs capitalists. Here the manager cares for workers and the trade union activist helps the manager... 4*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG7Za...

Point of Departure (1956) by Vaughan Shelton a story within a story with a Gothic lit feel. A man is called to his superiors to answer how he wasted $300'000 of company's money. He tells a story of ancient tablets discovered below the Sphinx, where a solar electric power and a spaceship design are discussed. The money were spent on testing these claims... I love the feel of the story, like a 19th-century but SF 3.5*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfOc...

The Very Secret Agent (1954) by Mari Wolf aliens are in war with Earth and they send their agent, Riuku to find out about Earth's secret weapon. The alien uses a weak spot in a shield to join minds with a factory girl Alice. She works on the weapon, but all her thoughts are about her married lover, Pete, frustrating Riuku to no end. 4*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW7uM...

Quickie (1954) by Stephen Marlowe a man does heroic fits to get into the Marriage Building which is a legal sanctuary. There, he as a transient can choose a quickie: A Transient—man or woman—gets married and provides for one spouse, one family, but has the pick of the nation to choose from. Even a Quickie like myself is stimulated by constant variety and change. No one is ever bored. You don't have to see your original mate ever again, as long as you, as a Transient, provide for her. The Quickies, in their turn, will provide for you in all your subsequent marriages. However, this man has a dark secret. 4*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdkg1...

Way of a Rebel (1954) by Walter M. Miller, Jr. a pilot of a one-man nuclear submarine, goes AWOL because he is sure that nuclear war is too destructive for material (!) civilization, unlike earlier wars which just killed people... a strange approach, a strange setup (a pilot making a final decision whether to launch) and a final twist I haven't expected... there are a lot of holes, nevertheless, 4*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEPym...

Decision Final (1958) by Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg a city, where every decision is made and enforced my a machine and its robots. A couple planning to get married, but the machine says they are incompatible, instead calling the husband-to-be a criminal and planning to marry a woman to a computer scientist (I guess you can already guess about the impartiality of the machine). Some heroic stunts follow. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WgN6...

The Cosmic Express (1930) by Jack Williamson a light piece - a man lives in 26th century, were everything is too comfy and uneventful. He is a writer, specializing in writing stories set in the heroic past, were everything was so much better. He with his wife (a poet, who also thinks that the civilization destroyed the nature) uses a newly invented teleport to visit Venus, which is like the Jurassic Earth. They see that their comfy lives weren't that bad... predictable but nice. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkPlA...

Night Court (1956) by Norman Arkawy a woman is taken by her lover to a hip attraction in old New York - a court. She is there for the first time and she hates how watchers gleefully enjoy the misery of bums, who are judged. There are two Old Testament and New Testament sayings in the court's ' theatre programs' and they come true. 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RabQp...

Freeway (1955) by Bryce Walton a man with his wife are on a road, driving a special car. As the story progresses, we find out that [1] he is a nuclear physicist, [2] his wife is ill, [3] after political changes in the USA (1960 elections won by Independents), some people (like the protagonist) were tagged as crime risks and sent from urban centers. Now they have to roam the roads, never stopping for more than a few hours... the idea has a potential plus tension of the protagonist, who tries to get a medic to his wife is well-done, but the final is so-so (view spoiler)[there is a hidden settlement of men like he and they help plus make a new life for the couple (hide spoiler)] 3.5*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zazlW...

Runaway (1952) by Joseph Samachson a boy is loving his pulp stories and hates to go to school. it is double entende for the story he reads is a classic 'cowboy in space' and this story is from Galaxy magazine, which advertised that you'll never see such a story on its pages. He decides to run away (see title), sells his possessions, buys a ticket and tries to lead pursuers the wrong way. Finally, he is caught, all for a punchline (view spoiler)[he is an android, who thought that he is a real boy (hide spoiler)] 3*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sgaw4...