Is extensionality for coinductive datatypes consistent with Coq's logic?

Given a coinductive datatype, one can usually (always?) define a bisimulation as the largest equivalence relation over it. I would like to add an axiom stating that if two members of the type are related by the bisimulation, they are equal in the sense of Leibniz equality (`=`). Would this make the logic inconsistent?

* * *

An example for streams:

    CoInductive Stream A :=
    | Cons : A -> Stream A -> Stream A.

    CoInductive Stream_bisim A : Stream A -> Stream A -> Prop :=
    | Stream_bisim_Cons :
        forall x xs ys,
        Stream_bisim A xs ys ->
        Stream_bisim A (Cons A x xs) (Cons A x ys).

    Axiom Stream_bisim_eq :
      forall A xs ys,
      Stream_bisim A xs ys ->
      xs = ys.

* * *

My intuition is that this should be safe by analogy with functional extensionality, since it should not be possible to distinguish bisimilar streams by observation. But of course I'd prefer an actual proof (or at least expert testimony) to such informalities.

The last paragraph of section 2.2.2 of Simon Boulier's PhD thesis "Extending type theory with syntactic models" (tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02007839) states that it is provable in a univalent setting, if you use a well-chosen definition of stream, and gives references.

@paulotorrens No -- I still believe that this is safe, but still don't know for certain. In practice, Coq's generalised rewriting makes using bisim instead of propositional equality bearable, so I would tend not to use the axiom.

One year later; did you manage to find the answer?


Regularity profiles

A standard exercise in formal language theory uses [Lagrange's four-square theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange%27s_four-square_theorem) to construct a language $L$ such that $L$ isn't regular but $L^2$ is regular. (Let $A = \\{ a^{n^2} : n \geq 0 \\}$. Then $A$ isn't regular, but $A^4 = \\{ a^n : n \geq 0 \\}$ is regular, hence either $L = A$ or $L = A^2$ fits the bill; in fact $A^2$ is not regular, so we must pick the latter.)

[This answer](https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/112357/683) generalizes this, constructing for every $m$ a language $L$ such that $L,L^2,\ldots,L^{m-1}$ are not regular, but $L^m,L^{m+1},\ldots$ are regular. This prompts the following definition:

> The _regularity profile_ of a language $L$ is $\rho(L) = \\{ n \in \mathbb{N}_+ : L^n \text{ is regular} \\}$.

My question is:

> Which regularity profiles are achievable?

The answer mentioned above shows that $\\{n : n \geq m \\}$ is a regularity profile for every $m \geq 1$.

It is also easy to construct a language whose regularity profile is empty: $\\{ a^{2^n} : n \geq 0 \\}$.

Clearly every regularity profile is closed under addition: if $L^a,L^b$ are regular then so is $L^{a+b}$.

> Is every subset of $\mathbb{N}_+$ which is closed under addition a regularity profile?

The question is interesting both for a general alphabet and for the special case of a unary alphabet.

@BaderAbuRadi I'm not aware of any progress on these questions, though I'm not sure I would know. Nobody contacted me regarding them.

Yuval, do you have an idea if these questions have been studied yet, or did they remain open?


(Slightly) faster simulation of quantum Fourier transform

Suppose I want to write a classical software simulator of a quantum circuit with $N$ qubits. When it comes time to simulate the quantum Fourier transform I can evaluate all $2^N$ states to determine the probability amplitudes, and then perform a Fast-Fourier Transform on the probability amplitudes in time $o(N 2^N)$. Finally in $o(2^N)$ time I can generate a scan of the partial sums of the probabilities of all the result states. Then I can choose a random number in the range $[0,1]$ and use it to do a binary search of the partial sums.

This results in a simulator that, each time is run outputs a single $N$ bit binary number with the probability distribution predicted by theory.

Can I do better? Of course I can't do exponentially better in general, but perhaps I could reduce the time to simulate a single experiment to $o(2^N)$?

I can do significantly better under some circumstances. For example, [Gilbert, Guha, Indyk, Muthukrishnan, and Strauss, "Near-Optimal Sparse Fourier Representations via Sampling", _ACM Symp Theory Comp_ , STOC-44:152-161, 2002,](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.135.7607) seems to indicate that if there are only $B$ frequencies (or if the $B$ frequencies make up "most" of the power of the signal) then there is a randomized algorithm that will recover all of them (and their amplitudes) in time, space and number of samples polynomial in $B$ and $N$.

I guess I'm hoping for something like that, but only to get one frequency, and to have some guarantee that the probability of getting a particular frequency will be proportional to the amplitude of its coefficient.

suggest migrate to Theoretical Computer Science


Change in the distances in a graph after removal of a node

Given an undirected unweighted graph $G=(V,E)$ and a node $s \in V$, we are looking for a vector $\operatorname{diff}[]$, such that,

$$\operatorname{diff}[v] = \sum_{u \in V \setminus \\{v\\}}{(d^{G \setminus \\{v\\}}_{su}-d^G_{su})}$$

In other words, we are looking for the difference in distances from $s$ to every other nodes after removal of each node $v$.

Now the question: is there an algorithm with time complexity $O(n+m)$ that can calculate the vector $\operatorname{diff}$ for a given graph $G$ and node $s$? If yes, what is the algorithm (or the idea behind that algorithm)?

For a specific node $v$, we can run BFS on $G$ and $G \setminus \\{v\\}$ and find the $\operatorname{diff}[v]$ in $O(n+m)$, but here we want $\operatorname{diff}$ for all of the nodes.

I know that we can determine, whether $\operatorname{diff}[v] >0$ for every node $v$ (using shortest path tree of $s$), in $O(n+m)$, but is there an algorithm to find the exact value of $\operatorname{diff}$ in $O(n+m)$ time complexity?

**Hints.**

There are some properties in the shortest path tree that may help:

  1. If we construct the SPT, and then add the other edges of the graph that are not in the SPT, there will be edges from one level to the next level, or edges among nodes within the same level.

  2. When we remove a node $v$, only the distance between $s$ and the descendants of $v$ can be changed.

  3. For a node $v$, if all the descendants have another neightbour in $G$ that is on the same level as $v$ in the SPT, then $diff[v]=0$.

  4. For every descendant of $v$, if we keep track of the incoming edges whose other endpoint is in another subtree (subtree of siblings of $v$), we can easily update the distances for its children (Suppose that child is $v'$, the change in $diff[v]$ for such $v'$ will be $\min{(diff[v']+1,(d^{new}_{sv'}-d_{sv'})\cdot(\\# \text{children whose endpoint is in the subtree of }v)+(\text{new distance of nodes whose endpoint is outside subtree of v}))}$).

We can assume that the graph is 2-vertex-connected, which means that it will not be disconnected by removing one node (otherwise we can find all the vertex cuts of size of using DFS and check each connected component separately).

@FrankW If that distance goes through a child, then it will be the minimum is the first term $diff[v']+1$.

there are at least 3 papers by Camil on that page, & online paper links are not given so far. the papers generally look at adding/ removing vertices/ edges.

@vzn The paper by Camil investigates edge removal right?

suggest looking into "online algorithms" or "incremental/ decremental". seems like an online version of APSP eg online version of APSP tcs.se


Minimum edge deletion partitioning of a planar graph

I'm interested in the time complexity of the following problem:

Given an undirected _planar_ graph $G=(V,E)$ and a weight function $w:E \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}$ (so weights can be negative, too), color the vertices in such a way that the sum of the weights of the monochromatic edges (i.e. those between same color vertices) is minimized. There is no limit on the number of colors you can use. Note that it is not necessarily optimal to give each vertex a distinct color as negative edge weights are possible.

A version of this problem where $G$ is not restricted to be a planar graph is NP-hard (see [Minimum edge deletion partitioning](https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/45372/minimum-edge-deletion-partitioning)) by a reduction from the vertex coloring problem. However, we cannot use the same reduction for the problem here because $G$ is planar.

Any hints, pointers, comments are welcome.

If you restrict the number of colors to 2, then the problem is equivalent to max-cut (with possibly negative edge weights), which is NP-hard for general graphs but solvable in polynomial time for planar graphs. So maybe planarity could help here as well.

The interesting property of planar graphs in this context seems to be that they are 4-colorable. As D.W. pointed out however, the optimum for your problem doesn't depend on using a minimum number of colors, so intuitively the planar restriction shouldn't affect the complexity. I have a hunch the reduction given by Dennis Kraft would still hold, because you're not considering the planar input graph coloring in isolation, but I might just as well be wrong.

I've edited the question to reflect your comment that the number of colors is unlimited.  In the future, when someone asks a clarification question, please edit the question -- don't just leave clarifications in the comments, as people shouldn't have to read the comments to understand your question.  The source of the confusion might have been: if edge weights are non-negative, and if there's no limit on the number of colors, the problem is trivial: just assign each vertex its own color.  However in this problem edge weights can be negative, so the trivial solution isn't necessarily optimal.


When can you "invert" an equation in the lambda calculus

Suppose that $M$ is a full model of the simply typed lambda calculus. Suppose each base type is infinite.

Now suppose that $f$ and $g$ are two functions in $M$ (not necessarily in the same domain) that are not definable by any pure term, and that $\alpha$ is a pure term of the $\lambda$-calculus such that: $$M(\alpha) g = f $$

My question is: when is it possible to find a pure term $\beta$ such that $$g=M(\beta)f$$

Are there easy to state necessary or sufficient conditions? I have been unable to find counterexamples when gs type complexity is higher than fs, so maybe that is a sufficient condition?

A couple of examples:

if $f$ is the converse of $g$: $$f=M(\lambda xyz. xzy)g$$ then we can find such a $\beta$ -- in this case, letting it also be $\lambda xyz. xzy$.

Similarly If $f$ is application to $a$: $$f = M(\lambda xy.yx)a$$ then $a$ is $f$ applied to $\lambda x.x$: $$a = M(\lambda y.y(\lambda x.x))f$$

Lastly, if $x$ is a variable in some base type and $f=M(\lambda xy.x)a$, then I don't think there is any pure term such that $a=M(\beta)f$.


Novel about an immortal man exposed by world government relates his life through history

I read the book from my local library in the early- to mid- seventies. It was hardcover (library bound) and the dust jacket had a printed burlap or canvas background. The back flap mentioned that the author's name was a pseudonym. The book had lots of conversation, anecdotes and opinions with little to no 'action'. I came away with impression that the author wasn't a professional writer, but rather more like a history professor with an academic reputation to protect.

It begins shortly after the formation of a world government, and the President of Earth is presiding over the trial of Earth's only immortal man, for the crime of withholding the secret of immortality. Much of the book is taken up by his narration of stories of his life, from his birth in prehistoric times to the present. This could almost be the backstory of 'The Man From Earth', but IIRC he was never a famous person.

One anecdote I remember is what he called 'Pavlov's Other Experiment', with the supposed discoveries by the scientist after the surprising results of the 1924 Leningrad flood. The novelist added a vitamin deficiency factor that became an important plot point. There was also a story I recall as being very amusing about a British military steamship in Egypt before or during the occupation in the eighteen hundreds.

And finally, as a major plotline (such as it is), everybody is taught the simple trick to become immortal. When dead people are cloned and become 99.99% similar, their soul and memories are reunited with their bodies and they are taught immortality; time-traveling robots collect DNA from everyone who has ever lived and they become immortal as well.

This is not Bixby's "A Man From Earth", Anderson's "Boat of a Million Years", Heinlein's Lazarus Long, Borges' "The Immortal", Zelanzny's "This Immortal". The main character was not a time traveler or the Wandering Jew. It is possible I'm getting the similarity thing confused with van Vogt's Null-A, but there was something like that.

The immortal man was likely 6000-8000 years old, and the time of the novel in a future not far from now. His prehistoric tribal roots being near the invention of agriculture? (maybe)

The part about the protagonist being thousands of years old eliminates the novel Operation Longlife by E. Hoffmann Price. Doc Brandon, an obvious knockoff of the pulp hero Doc Savage, was less than two centuries old when the government realized he'd somehow stumbled across a method of keeping himself young and fit, indefinitely, and they very much wanted to persuade or coerce him to share his secrets.

@ImaginaryEvents Elements of it do sound hauntingly familiar, but then Time Enough for Love and This Immortal are a couple of my favourites so it's probably just that.

@Ash, no, the book was new and a complete novel, Perhaps I mis-capitalized 'other experiment', it was just how the character referred to it. I'm still hoping someone like yourself will recognize it or discover it.

The description you've given of the condition of the "book" in question actually sounds like you've found a single bound copy of a serial of some sort, it might be worth checking back catalogs from the like of Strange Tales and Omni for particular parts that stand out to you. But given that the title "Pavlov's Other Experiment" returns zero useful hits anywhere I can think of you may be out of luck I'm afraid.

@GorchestopherH Nothing yet. I will update here if I get the answer.

Have there been any updates on this on other sites?

Always worth mentioning what you've tried before so you can eliminate the obvious.

Thanks. There was a second reddit thread as well, but I tried to mention the top guesses above. reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/va9dz/…


Looking for science fiction assassination story with mysterious girl

For years I've been looking for a short science fiction story about a man who was released from a prison planet in order to assassinate a candidate for galactic president. He does this on a space station, and escapes with the help of a mysterious and very attractive girl with silvery hair and multi-colored skin.

I read this short story some 5-6 years ago online.

The assassin was released from the prison planet by some influential people so that he may assassinate the galactic president candidate, whose rule would, according to said people, be bad for the galaxy.

I also remember that the girl, who is actually a young woman is also a prostitute. The first time he sees her she's walking into the bar accompanied by another man. I don't remember why she helps him. She was likely his contact, given to him by those who sent him on the assassination.

They escape together after creating a diversion with an explosion, running off into some corridor that probably leads to a way off the space station.

The story story ends there but in my opinion leaves room for a sequel, even if only to explore the protagonists' developing relationship.

Jupiter Ascending? Which is a 2015 film, and not a short story I read somewhere in the early 2000s. I saw that film, and never even noticed any common plot elements. Sorry.

Sounds like Jupiter Ascending (imdb.com/title/tt1617661).

Aspects remind me of Spinrad's "Agent of Chaos".   But that was a full novel and not a short story.

Hello @Moacir and thanks for trying to help me find this story. I looked up the index of that issue here (archive.org/details/…), but couldn't find a story by that author or by that name in 1983. Moreover, I found no place where a story by that name is attributed to that author.

Hello @Dovid, I've set a bounty on your question. If you remember any additional details, now would be a good time to edit them in.

Novels are often serialized in magazines.

To the best of my knowledge it was a short story, not part of a longer story. Although, as I said, it asks for a continuation. So I am not 100% sure. I read it online.

Are you sure it was a short story? Could it have been an excerpt from a longer story? Also do you remember if you read it in a magazine, book or online?


Story about man unable to wake up from dream

I am looking for a story which I read a long time back but cannot recall the name. The plot line was:

In a futuristic world, there are dream parlors which provide sleep with dream services. The protagonist is a frequenter of them.

One day, it was found that he is unable to wake up after slipping into a dream. All efforts to wake him up fail, and he keeps on dreaming and sleeping but is medically fit otherwise.

He became a medical case study and was kept alive for centuries. By studying him a lot was learnt about hibernation and the code to interstellar travel in hibernation was cracked through that knowledge.

Eventually after a few centuries the government asked his custodians for justification for spending billions per century to keep him alive.

His custodians revealed that:

> he is the last person alive who is capable of dreaming. The entire human race has lost the capability to dream. So he should be kept alive as long as possible as a rare treasure to humanity.

Sounds like a good story...  Were there aliens/robots or anything?

Damn, I have read this before, but I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the story. I think it was a short story from an anthology by Heinlein, but I can't say for sure.

When was "a long time ago"? You may not remember exactly, but can you give a ballpark? What is a long time ago to one person may only be a handful of years to another.


A space story about a desert planet and a cup of water

I read this story over 15 years ago. It is probably a lot older. I read it in Serbian magazine (Politikin Zabavnik) but I think that the language of the original is in English. It's a short story, less than two A4 formats long.

The story as I remember it is as follows:

A young man/boy (crash)lands on a desert planet. His only possessions are clothes on his back and a cup. Maybe a gold necklace, too, I am not sure about that. He reaches the biggest city on the planet.

The main trade and commodity on the planet is water. The richest families are those that have wells, people work for water, trade deals are made for water etc. The youth comes to the town and says to one of the smaller traders in water that he is thirsty and would like to buy a cup of water. There might be some flying robots that ensure that all the contracts are obeyed by killing anyone who tries to renege on the deal, I am not sure.

Anyway, the youth is not allowed to drink, not right now. Trader thinks he has nothing of value or something. A bigger water trader, as a joke, offers to sell the youth a cup of water. His fellow traders joke with him, tell him they would loan him a cup or something, because the youth doesn't have anything of value and would have to sell himself into slavery to survive on the planet.

I do not remember what exactly happened, but the end result is that all the biggest traders on the planet sign a contract with the boy. And it goes like this: a boy's necklace for one cupful of water. One cupful, nothing more. The arc words are: _What is the value of one cup of water?_

The end of story is this: the boy puts a drop of water into the cup. The cup opens up a bit then starts transforming, in fractal designs. It sucks all of the water in the city, maybe even in the whole world and that giant form of cup is floating in the air now, blotting the sun. Some of the traders get worried halfway, try to renege on the deal and are zapped by the robots. Once there is no more water and the cup stops filling, the boy laughs at now poor traders and asks them, "What is the value of one cup of water?"

It is very similar to the story about king that would give half of his kingdom for a cup of water and another half for some bread.

It was a kid's story-they read it to us in class back in the 2nd or 3rd grade-so this would put the book at least before 1990, if that helps anyone


Futuristic world where reality is humanity's plaything and God is in a zoo

This is a novel I read in 2015. It was an older book. The cover was black and hardcover. Don't remember any specific details. The book was in English. I believe it was from the 1980s or ‘90s.

It was set in the future where the world is united as one.

I'll try to outline all the major events that I remember, in as much detail as possible.

The story begins with a prologue of how a mutant gene called "The God Factor" was isolated and subsequently researched to reveal it gave humans reality-bending powers.

The first few test tube babies born with the gene were horribly deformed and could only lift light objects with their mind. However, with every subsequent generation they grew stronger until they could manipulate events on a universal scale. They were fitted with microchips which gave scientists complete control over them.

Using these people humanity became an interstellar civilization. Thoughts and ideas are no longer abstract as people with the God Factor can bring them into existence. The world government brings into existence "God", a manifestation of the collective faith of people, and places him in a zoo.

To mock death itself, the human race increases the biological lifespan of all humans by a trillion years, reasoning that, with unlimited resources and a universe too vast, they need as many people as possible. And that's where everything starts going wrong.

The protagonist is a scientist who works under the guidance of the scientist who was a part of the team that originally created the God Factor babies. He gets involved in a riot where 50 people immolate themselves, seemingly for no reason. Similar riots spread globally and on human colonized planets. The protagonist discovers that the reality benders have been siphoning energy from other universes to provide to their own and the continuous transfer of energy has caused the membrane separating different universes to weaken which causes severe suicidal tendencies in exposed people. Over 75% of the world population dies in a week as even the GF people are affected causing them to go supernova when dying.

The protagonist rushes to try and build a "reality anchor". It had a fancy name but I can't remember it for the life of me. As the world delves into anarchy, he used "God" to power it and restore the world's reality to it's original state. Then he discovers that he is in the lab which his mentor used to work in while they were working on isolating the God Factor gene. The book ends with him in a dilemma of whether to destroy the project once and for all or let it proceed and try to influence events in the future.

It's an amazing book and much deeper than I outlined here. It's very long and very thrilling.

@NeoDarwin Does anything in this question of mine sound familiar? scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/14510/…

Reality anchor is in quotes because it had a complicated name. It's purpose was to anchor reality.

Very confident. I read it only 3 years ago and have searched for it myself for the past week. Only upon failing did I decide to ask here @John Rennie .

It seems this should be an easy find with such easily Googlable terms as the god factor, but I have to confess I've drawn a complete blank. How confident are you that you've remembered the phrase correctly?

@Broklynite His mentor used to work in a different lab and it's there they discovered the God Factor. I think the author mentioned that it's since being converted into an museum.

“Then he discovers that he is in the lab which his mentor while they were working on isolating the god factor gene” I think there is a bit missing from the middle of that sentence. And how do you mean that he discovers that he is in a lab he presumably used to work in? Was this hidden from him in some way? And is the idea that reality has been restabilized but questioning if it should go on, or that the restabilization is possible but should it be? Sorry, just trying to get some clarifications.


Old SF novel, set on a military ship, one character can't order spaghetti and meatballs because of sudden mid-voyage rationing?

This one is a real longshot. I won't be surprised if nobody can identify it. I read this book sometime in the early-to-mid-1980s. Science fiction novel, checked out from a public library, written in English, and I am pretty sure it was in hardback. Told in the third person, with multiple viewpoint characters, and a fairly serious tone -- not any sort of parody or satire, for instance. The problem is that I only remember _one short scene_ clearly. Here's how it went:

  1. This part of the story -- perhaps most of the story -- is taking place aboard a large spaceship with interstellar range (military, I'm nearly sure) which is large enough to require a great many crew members (probably hundreds). I think there is some sort of interstellar war going on, or else one seems likely to break out at any minute, but I can't remember details of the larger plot. I'm _sure_ the crew of _this_ ship were all human -- but I don't remember if their enemies (or prospective enemies) were equally human, or if this was set in one of those futures where there are other sentient alien races with their own battle fleets.

  2. In the one scene that I still remember pretty well, which I believe comes near the middle of the book (definitely not in the first chapter!), the viewpoint character -- who was not a major figure in the early chapters -- has just completed a long shift. I believe he's part of the Engineering Department. Now he wants to relax by eating a nice hot dinner.

  3. He decides to splurge. Instead of taking whatever is standard-issue food aboard that ship, he is willing to spend extra to get one of his favorite dishes. I don't think it was regular money he would be spending, though. The implication was that, in order to keep the ship's galley from running out of all the best items too fast during a long cruise, the rules were set up so that you had to accumulate "ration points," or something similar, for the _occasional_ special treat. The rest of the time, you just ate something much simpler and cheaper, three times a day, as a way to keep your body adequately nourished. For the sake of argument, let's say that what this guy wanted was a big plateful of spaghetti and meatballs, with a certain type of salad on the side. (I don't swear that this is accurate, but I _think_ he was looking forward to spaghetti and meatballs.)

  4. He punches his order into a computer terminal, knowing full well that his account has more than enough "ration points" (or whatever they are called in the ship's economy) to cover the special dinner he's been promising himself.

  5. Nonetheless, despite how hard he has worked to accumulate those points which are supposed to be redeemable whenever you like, he gets an error message telling him his order _cannot_ be filled today because of some change in ship's policies. He throws a fit! (I don't mean literally going berserk, but he does complain loudly.)

  6. I just _vaguely_ remember that there was some sort of problem with the ship which had caused the Captain, earlier that day, to approve some new rationing restrictions on various things as a reaction to "a state of emergency" (or words to that effect). I don't remember if this was because of lack of energy to make nonessential things happen, or because they were carrying too many people and couldn't create special meals on demand for everyone, or what. Apparently the character I was just mentioning had not gotten the word yet when he sat down to eat dinner. I think the scene I described was followed by another scene showing the Captain (and/or some of the other senior officers) talking about how a flood of complaints was already coming in from sailors who didn't know all the facts about the problems the ship was currently facing (or was expected to face in the near future?).

  7. I don't remember a thing about the cover art or the author, but I can say that if this novel had been written by any of the Really Big Names of 20th Century SF who sometimes wrote stuff with a military-style setting -- such as Poul Anderson or Gordon R. Dickson -- then I would have expected to run across the book again, sometime in the last couple of decades, and I haven't. (And it _certainly_ wasn't written by Heinlein; I'm familiar with everything he published.) I'm also sure it _wasn't_ a "licensed novel" set in a preexisting SF universe, such as _Star Wars_ or _Star Trek_.

Seems similar enough that it might be a duplication of this answered question.scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/286709/…

This makes me think of a story I read in which garlic has been restricted onboard a spaceship, not due to a shortage, but because the aliens who have infiltrated the ship are allergic to it.  Our hero, in tracking down why he can't get spaghetti, uncovers the plot.

I wonder if this couls be part of the Fixup The Great Explosion  by Eric Frank Russel, the last part of which is better known as "...and then there were none"?

Hmm, for some reason it makes me think of Tau Zero by Poul Anderson, but you say it's definitely not by him.

@Iolrus I have read Tactics of Mistake several times (although not in the last few years). I don't remember ever noticing a scene such as I described above, with a member of a starship's crew getting frustrated over his inability to redeem his "food ration points." I think the story I asked about, two years ago, was mostly set aboard a starship during a long voyage. Cletus Graeme was the main POV character in Tactics, and spent most of his time down on the ground as a soldier outsmarting his enemies during campaigns on various planets. Hope you can find what I'm looking for, though!

I'm sure I have read this in the last year or two, in which case I think it might be "Tactics of Mistake" by the aforementioned Gordon R. Dickson. It's the only book that fits the bill and is on my goodreads list.

@Danny3414 -- I'm sure those are two different things. I first read a Seafort book (#3) in paperback in the mid-1990s. Since then, I've read most of the others. The story I'm asking about is something I'd read at least a decade earlier, in a hardback I had checked out from a public library. Of course, stories of people in spaceships having to carefully ration their food in emergency conditions have probably been done dozens of other times in the history of SF.

Are you certain about the dates you read this? It reminds me of one of the Seafort saga books by David Feintuch but they were in the nineties. In one of them a batch of their ship's stores have been contaminated by Fish like aliens and the ship has to go onto emergency ration reductions

Hm, okay, then you might try the Humanx Commonwealth series, by Alan Dean Foster. I mostly only read the Flinx and Pip story arch, but I did pick up another book or two from the rest of the series, so it might have been one of those.

Interesting suggestion. Way back around 1983 or 1984 (roughly), I read the original Foundation Trilogy, and then the recently-released Foundation's Edge. I've reread those stories at various times, but not for some years now. Off the top of my head, I'm not remembering a scene such I described in my original post, though -- not in one of the first 4 Foundation books. It wouldn't be in any later "Foundation" book; I'm sure they weren't even in print when I first read the scene I've described about getting an error message when trying to order a special meal aboard a starship.

I very, very vaguely remember something like this, and I think it was part of the Foundation cycle by Isaac Asimov. However, not 100% sure, and there are a lot of books in that series, so only a comment, but you might want to look into it. Most of the books are great reads!

It's funny, I was also thinking Stainless Steel Rat or Bill the Galactic Hero. But the scene I think you folks are thinking of was when the titular character gets on board a ship and is forced to eat (I think it was called) rat-puppies the entire voyage. A rat-puppy was a ration sausage that got poked with a knife and blew up large and self cooked. It was tasty enough the first time, but it was the only food available the entire way. While it does have a similar feel to the OPs question, I don't think it matches.

I did read The Forever War back around the mid-1980s, but I've read it again since, and it wasn't this. One reason I'm sure is that "The Forever War" was very much a first-person narrative focused on one character's experiences. The book I'm vaguely remembering was third-person, with multiple viewpoint characters.

I doubt it's The Forever War by Aldeman, but that book does have some scenes with food rationing and kilocalorie equivalences being used to purchase goods and food.

Regarding the Harry Harrison suggestion: I'm sure the book in question was not written as comedy/parody; it was more serious. That eliminates the first Bill, the Galactic Hero book (although I did check it out from the same library in the 1980s, and enjoyed it). Also, the book I want was written in third person, with multiple viewpoints -- that would help eliminate the Stainless Steel Rat books. (Besides, I'm positive I didn't read anything about Slippery Jim diGriz until years later! The library near where I lived in the mid-1980s didn't have any of his stuff.)

@Longspeak found the first one online, searched through it, no joy.

@SQB I was just going to suggest Bill the Galactic Hero, too. Pretty sure it is, but have to wait until I get home to confirm.

Rings a bell, vaguely. Could it be something by Harrison, either in his Bill, the Galactic Hero series or his Stainless Steel Rat series?


Short story about a man in a madhouse who asks the guard for a cigarette and tells him his story about having swapped bodies before

I am searching for a short story about a man locked in a madhouse who swaps his body with the guard/doctor while he tells him the story about his own body being swapped.

I remember the following:

  * The madman asks the guard for a cigarette and starts telling him his own story.
  * There was some relative of the madman who had a miserable life and one day he took the madman for a chat to a gloomy place where he would perform the conjuring to swap bodies.
  * When the madman reaches the end of the story, he has already swapped his body with the guard's and starts speaking as if he is in the corridor of the hospital and not in a cell.
  * The madman, who is now the guard, tells his victim not to yell nor to despair for nobody will believe him. He tells him of the importance of the burnt offering which, in this case, was the cigarette and not to forget 'the words'. Then he takes the guard's car keys and drives away, leaving the guard locked in his cell.

I read this story in 2006. I searched google but the keywords hospital/madhouse take me to news and the keywords cigarette/burnt offering take me to religious content. I have no clue as to where was this story published.

Thanks in advance.

I, too, remember this story. I've been trying to recall the title for years now. I first read it sometime in the early 90s in a short story anthology I picked up while living in Brazil. I'm pretty sure the collection was published for ESL students, as I remember it was in the library of the language school "Associacao Brasil-America" where I taught for several years. For a while now I had been thinking I only imagined this story, until I saw your post! Just wish someone out there could remember the title . . .

The concept sounds similar to the A.E Van Vogt short story "Dear Pen Pal".  In that one the story is a series of letters from an alien to an earth man.  During the correspondence the alien performs a mind swap with the man, the last letter being written by the man (now in the alien's body).  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Pen_Pal

I read this probably before 1986 and certainly before 1992.  Maybe something by Zelazny or Harlan Ellison or something in one of the Campbell awards books.

Sounds similiar in concept to the movie 'Fallen' (1998) link - but checking that I can't see anywhere that it was based on a novel...

I recall this story too. It trigger something... will try to remember. In the meanwhile I suggest you, with a very similar plot, the short story by Julio Cortazar, "Lejana" in his great "Bestiario": es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiario_(libro)#Lejana

Can you remember when you read this? If it was new at the time? What anthology/magazine it may have been in if one of the reoccurring ones? etc. If so you can edit your question with this information.


A story about a doctor who travels to a parallel universe to seek a cure for bubonic plague

Recent news has been reminding me of various things I've read about the black death, including a story I believe I only saw once, and never stumbled across again. I encountered it over 30 years ago, so I remember nothing of such details as character names. (Not even what city, in what country, it was set within.) I know it was a shorter piece of fiction, rather than a complete novel. I found it in an anthology I checked out from a library, probably no later than 1988. English language. I can't remember what else was in the anthology, nor what the overall theme may have been, but I'm sure it was **not** a collection of several stories by the same author.

* * *

**Plot Points**

  1. The main character, whose viewpoint is presented to us in the third person, lives in the twentieth century, but not _our_ twentieth century. The history of western civilization veered off in a different direction some centuries earlier. (I can't remember just when the divergence was stated or implied to have occurred, but at least one language spoken by the protagonist is still comprehensible over here, on our side of the divide.) As we meet him, he is already an example of his world's version of a fully trained physician who is dedicated to his work. I _think_ he is called "doctor" as a result of his education at a reputable university, but he doesn't use the methods we normally expect of a modern doctor – no immunization shots, no antibiotics, no X-rays or other imaging equipment, and I don't think he has ever touched a microscope in his life – because all those things, and the theories behind them, don't seem to exist in his world.

  2. In the protagonist's culture, the preferred method of treating the sick is the sort of thing I would associate with "witch doctors." Elaborate magical rituals involving chants and dances and so forth, I think. In some cases, dealing with some types of ailments, these methods have delivered a comfortably high success rate, which, presumably, is why these methods are now considered the correct way to practice medicine, and anything else is widely viewed (by physicians, anyway) as a complete waste of time.

  3. Our hero is a maverick. When the bubonic plague hits the city in which he resides, and hits it _hard,_ he becomes convinced that it is caused by something which his magic spells are completely unable to cure – and he doesn't think any of his professional colleagues in the area are doing much better. He wants to use some "experimental" and "alternative" methods which are radically different from the "proper" procedures he had diligently studied in school. I can't remember exactly what his methods were, but I know that my teenage self thought they at least _resembled_ some of the measures which a real-world modern doctor might recommend if he were on the scene – assuming the modern doctor lacked access to antibiotics and other modern tools of the trade, such as I mentioned in point #1, but wanted to help as best he could, based on his knowledge of the germ theory of disease and other useful points.

  4. There is an argument in front of some sort of authority regarding whether the protagonist should be allowed to inflict such time-wasting and unproven techniques upon his trusting patients. (I think the authority in question was a committee which was either partially or entirely composed of senior medical men.) He gets a partial victory – he is allowed to take responsibility for treating any plague victims residing in one sector on the city map. Public health statistics will be gathered from each sector, day by day over the next several weeks, to see if his methods appear to be making any difference at all.

  5. That decision _sounds_ fair and reasonable – except that, in practice, one or more of our hero's "competitors" (other doctors, using the time-honored methods of treatment within their assigned sectors) start _cheating._ Some weeks after that policy decision was made, the protagonist is told by one of his loyal assistants that a lot of dead bodies of plague victims are turning up _just inside_ the boundaries of the hero's assigned sector, and it's pretty obvious that at least one other doctor is having fresh corpses loaded onto wagons and dumped along the fringes of that sector in the middle of the night so that their fatality rates look lower, and his look higher.

  6. The protagonist finally tries something completely new. This is another area where my memory fails. _Somehow,_ he has gained access to a magic spell that could let him travel from his world to a parallel world where history followed a different path. I think he needs other people to help by chanting portions of the spell, making certain gestures or dance steps, etc., to make it work properly. He can't just cast it on himself. I don't remember where this spell came from, nor why it had rarely (if ever) been used before. The doctor puts it into effect and vanishes into thin air.

  7. At this point, the story stops showing us his viewpoint, and we start reading a formal report written by a professional medical man in what appears to be _our_ world. The report tells us that a strangely-garbed man was found in the streets of their city (our world's equivalent of the setting of the previous scenes, I believe) and was quickly diagnosed as being feverish from a serious case of bubonic plague. He was taken to a hospital and pumped full of antibiotics. Physically, he made an excellent recovery, but he kept saying nonsensical things about world history, about his own alleged medical training and preferred techniques, etc., which made no sense to anyone else, and so he was placed in the psych ward for a while. The plan was to figure out how deep his mental problems ran – was he delusional as a regular thing, or just temporarily having trouble distinguishing between "reliable memories" and some elaborate hallucinations which he might have experienced while delirious with that fever, or what?

  8. The author of the report notes that after landing in the psych ward, this mystery patient became acquainted with the other mental patients and then started doing some "magic" nonsense, with ritual gestures and chants and so forth, which he loudly claimed could "cure" the afflictions with which they had been cursed. (I don't remember for sure, but _he_ may have claimed he was "casting out demons" or something along those lines.) The report-writer assures his intended readers that while several of the mental patients do, in fact, appear to have been acting much more lucid and well-adjusted since then, it must be a coincidence. The painfully obvious implication (to us, knowing what we know) is that the protagonist does, in fact, know some "magical" techniques which somehow can make a huge difference in treating cases of paranoia, schizophrenia, etc. In other words, _both_ worlds could benefit enormously by having the members of their respective medical communities compare notes and maintain an open mind about anything that seems "crazy" at first glance.

  9. Again, my memory fails: I can't remember how the story ends. Specifically, I don't know whether the protagonist finally managed to get hold of a stash of antibiotics, etc. which would allow him to make a huge difference in treating plague victims after he carried those modern assets back home via another use of the same spell. (Note: As I was about to post this, it suddenly occurred to me – but I'm not sure if this is a genuine memory or a wild guess – that the protagonist _may_ have somehow persuaded several of his fellow mental patients to each perform one role within the coordinated team effort that is required to reverse the travel spell and send him right back to his native timeline with his new knowledge and medical supplies. _Maybe._)

* * *

Does anyone else remember reading this?

I did a little Googling before I took the trouble to type out all of the above, as well as searching through previous questions on this very site. I kept coming up with references to various full-length SF novels that gave lots of attention to the historical black death, and/or alternate-timeline variations and their aftermaths, but these novels definitely are not related to the much shorter story I had in mind.

So the reject pile – the list of things not to bother offering as "answers" – includes all of the following:

  * _The Years of Rice and Salt,_ by **Kim Stanley Robinson.**

  * _Doomsday Book,_ by **Connie Willis.**

  * _The Plague Tales,_ by **Ann Benson.**

  * _The Crystal Empire,_ by **L. Neil Smith.**

  * _In High Places,_ by **Harry Turtledove.**

  * _Any_ of the novels and shorter stories that were ever published as part of **Randall Garrett's** "Lord Darcy" series. (Not all of them written by Garrett.) Those tales were set in a parallel universe where most technology is lagging a century or more behind ours, but medical treatment is largely a matter of using psychic healing techniques which _frequently_ succeed. At one point, a sorcerer spoke disparagingly of the superstitious fools who think applying some moldy old bread to a fresh wound can somehow keep it from getting a nasty infection. (After all, what good did mold ever do anybody?)

Nourse did write at least one story about the plague but it has a very different plot.

0  I have read this story and remember it. I am 80% certain it was a short story written by Alan E Nourse, who wrote lots of medical sci fi stories. Hunted through my collection to see if I can locate it but annoyingly, I cannot find it in any Nourse collection. If not him, it was a contemporary like Blish...but I still think it was Nourse. I recall the story very clearly.It doesn't seem to be JAmes white either.

S/what related to The Hertford Manuscript, a sequel to H. G. Wells' The Time Machine by Richard Cowper: the protagonist gets stuck in 1665 London and attempts to direct public health measures against rats, eventually getting infected.

@user888379 I'm very familiar with all three, but I hadn't really thought of connecting them to this one. "Wheels of If" probably comes closest -- it deals with going "sideways in time" to where it is still "the same year," but history took a different turn centuries ago, instead of just people or artifacts from a better future coming back to the 20th Century. Also, the other two had tragic endings. Although in "Wheels of If" I was never convinced that it was perfectly all right for the main character to deliberately leave his analogs stranded in each other's bodies in other timelines.

This feels familiar, but it may just be that I'm reminded of aspects of de Camp's "Wheels of If", Moore's "Vintage Season" and Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag" - I could imagine it having been published in "Unknown Worlds" or "Astounding" in the '40s.


SciFi Short Story about an immortal man digging through an asteroid to meet a woman

Short story from the 80's or 90's, I saw someone asking about this on another forum but never got an answer. I've been curious ever since.

The story is set in a decadent future where everyone lives forever and mostly they go to parties. Guy meets a girl at a party, suggest he start at one side of an asteroid and digs a tunnel by hand to her, while she waits in a hollowed out space and creates a beautiful garden while waiting (robots take care of all mundane life support stuff).

So he digs for 100 years, makes it through to her chamber, they have a long romance, and when they've had enough they go back to civilization. The robots bury everything and return the asteroid to the way it was. Then they run into each other at a party and she overhears him proposing it to a different girl. That's when she says, "You've done this before."

This is the original post, for those curious (though I've reposted all relevant info): <https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/21004u/tomtscifi_short_storyeveryone_lives_forever_man/>


A man sent to a parallel Earth to save someone important

This is not a novel, but "longish" short fiction, novelette or novella. I read it around 1984, in English, in an already used collection containing half a dozen or so stories.

A man, on our Earth, is contacted by a bizarre agency that offers him to get his mind transferred to a body in an alternate Earth, in order to save, either some polity from an external enemy, or the queen of some polity threatened by an "internal" cabal. Why he accepts is not clear, since when will he be able to use the money he is offered? No return seems promised.

He gets there, and meets several species of humanoid beings. They all have names that contain the word "man" in the local language, but I forgot how that sounds. Somehow, the agency that hired him managed for him to understand the language of the species he was supposed to help (otherwise, he would have been useless!) When he finally meets them, they tell him the names of all the other species, from his descriptions. And the names were translated into English for the benefit of the reader. This is how I found out that the second part of the name, common to all species, meant "man". Note that this is a "reconstructed" answer to Valorum's question in a comment, not a direct memory. An alternate possibility is that the language capabilities he must have received from the agency that hired him included the words for man, snow, cave and water and he invented the name of the species in the local language himself, but it is rather unlikely.

  * One species is a "Snow-man", a huge and frightening Yeti (but not the most aggressive species in that world) who lives in the eternal snows of a high mountain range (or polar cap?).

  * Another is a "Cave-man", without eyes because they live in deep caves with no light.

  * A third one is amphibious, "Water-man" or "Sea-man" or "River-man", I forget which.

  * One species practices cannibalism, and they file their teeth better to tear flesh. I forgot if it is one of the latter two, or still a fourth one.

  * Finally, the ones he is supposed to help are essentially like us.

Our hero crosses all these obstacles, reaches the polity he has been hired to help, and saves the queen from the cabal, or possibly the entire polity from the enemy. I don't remember the end well, but he never goes back to our Earth.

@MadPhysicist Very funny. I was referring to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_violence IIRC  the scenes with the cannibals did involve some violence and some blood, but well within the very moderate criteria of SF at that time. So as I understand this wiki page, they was no "gore".

@Valorum If by "gore" you just mean a lot of blood, well, when he met the cannibal species, there were maybe some scenes with a lot of blood. But not "gore" in a sense of something really offensive, disgusting. As a Frenchman, I am not completely clear about the meaning of "gore".

Re: phrases : no, alas, I don't remember any phrases.

@Valorum Re: sexual content. I cannot vouch that no discrete allusion to sexual contact was mentioned. But if it was, it would have been in the very, very subtle way such topics were treated in SF of before 1990.

@Alfred - That needs editing in. Also, can you recall any specific phrases used in the story?

@Valorum When he meets the final species, the one closest to us, and understands their language (the agency that sent him probably arranged this, otherwise how could he be of any use ?) they tell him the names of the others species and also their meanings. That's when the reader finds out.

@Alfred - I don't understand the man part. If it was in the local language, how do you know it meant man?

Re: "Cave-man", "Snow-man", "polity" No, the words were definitely not there. I used "polity" since I  did nor remember whether it was a realm, an Empire, a republic... As for the words in "man" I wrote that all the species names contained the same word which meant "man" in the local language, and the other half of the name was "snow," "cave", "water" or "sea" also in the local language.

@Valorum No, not at all. It was in a collection of SF and Fantasy, very typical of the genre.  Until I had checked all the collections containing Nightwings before 1985 that Jenaya suggested, I did consider the possibility both were in the same collection

You've put a bunch of words in quote marks ("Cave-man", "Snow-man", "polity"). Are these words that you recall as definitely being in the novella?

@Alfred - Did the story contain explicit language/gore/sexual content?

@Valorum  I read it in English. As I have written, I found those two collections in a hotel in the US. And I am sure that it was not in the same collection as Nightwings. Well, it does not hurt to make the language explicit !

@Valorum I tried to remember more, but that was very long ago, and rereading my question, I was unable to add anything more.

Instead of just sticking bounties on, why don't you go through the the checklists here and improve the question? I'm sure  you can add at least one extra piece of detail that's not already been mentioned.

@Pastychomper thanks Monica  Thanks for your help, but I listened to a few chapters of "Quest of the Golden Ape" and it is definitely not my book.

This sounds a bit like "Quest of the Golden Ape" by Randall Garrett, Paul Warren Fairman and Adam Chase.  That had a man transferred to an alternate Earth with several divergent human species, I think one was cold-adapted, and his mission was to save one of the races (including a Fair Maiden™) from a brutal conqueror.  He was an exile raised secretly on Earth though, and took his body with him.  Might be worth trying those authors in case what you read was a sequel.

@Alfred The thing about old memories is that they can get mixed up. Look up the other stories in that Galaxy anthology and maybe other details will pop out.

@Spencer a) the stories in the collection containing "Nightwings" were by several authors, but I checked the entire list of publications of "Nightwings", thanks to Jenayah and did not find my story; it had to be in a completely different collection, that happened to be on the same bookshelf in that hotel b) the details of "The Sharing of the Flesh" do not match my memories at all

There is cannibalism in "The Sharing of the Flesh" by Poul Anderson, which was in The Eleventh Galaxy Reader along with "Nightwings".

Do you remember whether the stories were by different authors, or were they all by Robert Silverberg?

@Jenayah Thanks so much for the list you sent me. Alas, I tried all the different books (I did not yet check every single one of the lines that had the same title but different editors or publishers). None of the novellas and novelettes (it is clearly not a short story) in those collections seemed to be the right one. In fact I now believe that there were at least two different collections in that hotel, probably both of the 70's, Nightwings being in a different one than the one I am looking for.

For what it's worth, here is a list of the publications "Nightwings" appears in. If you can take a look, see if jogs any memory :-) and if you find it, don't hesitate to post it as a self-answer in the field below.

@Stormblessed  Thanks for the guide (and your own edit !). Where did my comment disappear ? Well, once more. There is really nothing more that I remember about the story itself. But the connection with "Nightwings" is a time indication even if there were in two different collections, I really don't remember. It is the first time I ask about it on a forum, I did try to find it by myself by looking for it with keywords, but to no avail.

Hi, Alfred! If you want to improve this (already very nice) question, see this awesome guide!


Short story about an elite that has mentally regressed due to assistive AI technologies

I came upon a comment describing a scifi short story where reliance on technology meant to improve appearance and demeanor has led to mental regression and AI control of the upper class that employs it. Unfortunately, I only have the following description to go on:

> I'm reminded of a Nebula(?) Award winning short story about hive-rats interacting with nobility in the 'future'. The nobility is shrouded in apperance/voice/stim tech such that the AIs are more the person than anything. A princess is brought to the under-city by her father to a shop that can fix the princess' tech, as it is malfunctioning. The daughter of the shop owner tries to peer into the princess' life and psyche as the shop owner tries to fix the princess. The princess has implants that stimulate her face, voice, and body to say the right things at the right times, to move the right way, that changes her face via lightsheets to be most beautiful to the observer she is with, that causes her to say just the right thing at just the right time and be increbily witty. But the daughter of the shop owner tries to peer through the tech to see the woman behind the veil. She discovers that the person behind it all is nearly mute and has the intelligence of an infant. The tech had been installed before ego formation and the person behind it all didn't really exist. She discovers it is also true of the man that brought the princess down to them too. The entire nobility is essentially faking it.

"The Girl-Thing who went out for Sushi"? Pat Cadigan, won the Hugo award for best novelette in 2013. Doesn't match all the details perfectly though.

You've rekindled a memory - I have definitely read this story! But I can't for the life of me remember the name nor author. I hope you find the answer. I'll have to look through my past readings, but unfortunately I'm better at remembering novels than short stories . . .

I've taken a look at the nebula winning list, but haven't seen nothing about it :(

That's the one, but here's a link to the comment directly. I wasn't sure if I could use links on a brand new account.

Presumably this is the original source - about a fifth of the way down the thread.


Old sci-fi short story about buying an android?

Long, long time ago I came upon a collection of old (pre 1980s?) short sci-fi stories. I'm not 100% sure, but something makes me think they were by Russian authors.

One of them was about a woman, who lives a lonely life in her flat. She decides to buy a male android. There's an android factory where you can choose your android's characteristic. First she chooses the 'basic' version, but is unhappy, because it lacks any specific character. She sends him to a factory so that they can improve his character. She's happy for some time, but soon she finds out he doesn't have his own opinion. She resends him to a factory and they improve him again. Again, she's happy for some time, but she finds out that the android doesn't have a free will and his feelings to her are programmed, not 'true'. Again, she sends him to the factory. They warn her that the android having a free will can do anything and might as well not return to her at all. She's determined to do that anyway. She sends him to the factory and waits in her flat for his return. At this point the story ends; we never find out whether the android came back to her.

I can't remember neither the title nor the author and I'm not able to google it. Can someone help, please?

this may help you  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_robots_and_androids


Aliens secretly use video game to get humans to solve their problems

I recall a story probably 20-30 years ago (pretty sure it was a short story) in which a top gamer hears about a new computer game out that no one can beat. So he gets it and starts playing it. (Pretty sure it was before the age of playstation & x-box so it might be even older)

IIRC the game had little or no intro or rules explained. You start the game and have to figure it out.

It was an astronomical space battle puzzle. You launch your ship from a planet orbiting a sun in a binary (trinary?) system, and have to leave the system. But he finds if you boost to long, or to hard, ships from other planets (around the other stars?) will detect you, intercept, and destroy your ship.

So he starts playing and trying different things, and then goes power gamer mode, playing non-stop on caffeinated drinks and snacks for a couple days and finally solves it. I think it was by doing low powered gravity assists on a couple planets and looping around the suns a couple times until he builds up enough speed to escape the solar system.

At which point the perspective pulls back to that of a few aliens in their ship who are viewing his solution. They are amazed at his solution and how fast he solved it. They reveal that this is an actual problem they have been working on for months(?) and one of them races off to tell the crew of the real ship (a spy ship?) how to escape detection by the enemies and leave the system.

Then one of the aliens says something like, "You know, we have been having trouble planning the ground assault on xxxx planet, Maybe we should make another new computer game for the humans."

EDIT: Thinking about it now, I think I can vaguely recall an illustration of a figure-eight path the ship makes around the suns. Making me think, it might have been published in a Games or Computer Games magazine. Which would make me think it might be as old as the 1980s. (I read a lot of these in the 80s)

Its also possible it might have been in a SF&F stories magazine, although I did not read many of those except for OMNI.

Vinge's The Peace War has an orbital mechanics game , but no aliens

Last Starfighter had a weaker variant of this.

While Pegman is a similar story (Aliens use humans to solve their problems by playing a video game) it is not the story I was thinking of. And a glance through Peace War it did not involve Aliens that I saw.

This almost sounds like a combination of Rudy Rucker's "Pegman" (aka "Pacman") about humans and aliens using video games to get clever solutions to problems rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_Toc15 and Vernor Vinge's "The Peace War" in which there is a video game about orbital maneuvers

Oh ok, sorry for the confusion, I wrongly assumed it was a video you were looking for :)

But I am looking for a Short Story (or maybe novel) not a Movie.

That’s what I originally thought when I started to read your description, but I remember another one: “the bishop of battle” where a kid is managing to go through a level no one else managed to beat in an arcade, check that one out

Nope not it, though that sounds very similar to "The Last Starfighter".

I remember a movie with an arcade game where the character was in wireframe and the human managed to beat it, bringing some solution. It was a blue/cyan wireframe face talking. Does that ring a bell?


70s book/short story, Man wakes up from suspend animation or cryo and world has collapsed

In the book, the protagonist wakes up from either suspended animation or cryo (Probably supposed to be a short test), After 10-20 years have passed.

He finds the facility abandoned (and looted?), gets to the surface and it looks like a war zone. Wreckage everywhere, smashed buildings, bullet holes everywhere. (I think he gets some gear from the facility, MREs, Water, First Aid kit, Weapons) and goes exploring to find out what happened.

He comes across a (young kid?) who is terrified of him, (maybe trapped or pinned under debris), gives him food and water and digs him out or helps him so the kid trusts him. Eventually the kid leads him to his family (mother & other siblings) who are equally terrified when they see him, but the kid convinces them the protagonist is OK, that he saved his life.

None of the children are really old enough to remember anything from before the protagonist enter the cryo test, but the mother is. He starts questioning her about what happened while he was asleep. She tells him it was NOT another country invading, it was all internal (society collapsed, food shortages, massive riots).

Later, I think they hear a large group of people approaching the (town? city? area?) where the family has been living, and the family becomes frightened again, saying the enemy is coming back.

He says he will help defend them and asks what the enemy looks like. She looks at him and says "They look just like you." He is African American, the implication being that African-American uprisings are what caused the riots and collapse of society.

This might have been a short story/novella. It probably was a paperback in English published in the USA.

I may be misremembering, maybe she did not tell him they look like you, he just went and got into a position to defend against the enemy, and when they approached, realized they were all African-American.

I wonder if this is one of Octavia Butler’s novels? Or a confused misremembering, perhaps of the Clay’s Ark series?

@AcePL Your probably right, I maybe miss remembering tYotQS.

@OrganicMarble - I vote for your proposition. Except for suspended animation it all adds up. And description of the device to travel in time, in the book, can be misleading. I will lay this on OP misremembering some details. I red the book, pretty sure this is it. Otherwise plagiarism...

Sounds very similar to the starting scenario of the RPG - Aftermath! addon - Operation Morphus:  Operation Morpheus is designed as a campaign introduction to an Aftermath! world. The setting is a major university in an important city. The players take the parts of people having volunteered to take part in a ‘short-term’ experiment in cryogenic suspension, only to awaken many long years after the planned time. They find the world in ruins and have no idea of the cause of, reans for, or history of this disaster. Naked and unarmed, they must face a strange new world.

Your right it is very close. But I don't think its the book I was thinking of. In "tYotQS" when the woman tells him everyone is afraid of black men, he hardly reacts to it. (Cause he still thinks he will go back to his own time soon)  I am sure in the book I was thinking of, it was a big shock to the protagonist when he found out why everyone was afraid of him.

This is somewhat reminiscent of "The Year of the Quiet Sun" but it's a time machine instead of suspended animation. The near-future race war in the USA matches.


Old SF novel about Earth as a prison planet; newly arrived convict has a secret agenda

I think I read this no later than the year 1986. English language, hardback, available in a public library in Indiana in the mid-1980s. I don't think it was by any of the Big Names of 20th Century science fiction, or else I would have run across it again by now. It was a stand-alone novel; no cliffhanger ending, and no indication it was intended as part of a series.

The novel is written in the third person, with the emphasis on the thoughts and actions of the male protagonist. I _think_ his thoughts were the only ones we saw throughout the entire book, but I could be forgetting something. Here's what I remember about the plot.

## Plot Points

  1. As the novel starts, we are seeing Protagonist (as I call him) arriving by spaceship to begin his prison sentence -- which I believe is meant to be the rest of his life, however many years that may be. I don't recall him thinking anything along the lines of "if I just keep my nose clean for the next ten years, I can get parole!" I can't remember what Protagonist was supposed to have done. I seem to recall that this prison planet is a future version of Earth. If I'm right, then the planet is no longer densely populated with billions of people cluttering the place up. More of a sparsely populated "wild frontier" area. But I don't recall what reasons were given for the fact that the prisoners were basically the only people in sight, such as a nuclear war a few centuries earlier, or some other catastrophe.

  2. Most of the novel is set near where Protagonist is dropped off. I think it may have been stated or implied that the area where the ship landed was the only functioning spaceport on the entire planet. I think the spaceport and the nearby town are in the foothills near the base of a mountain range (and I keep thinking of Colorado in particular, but that may just be because my family moved to the Denver area not long after I read this book). I think a lot of the local prisoners work at some sort of mining activity in the neighborhood -- although I'm pretty sure that they are not "prisoners" in the sense of being locked up in cells every night; just in the sense of being stuck on Earth and not allowed to leave. I don't clearly remember this, but I suspect that there was some economic incentive, such as: "We will trade you consumer luxuries from offworld in exchange for how much of Substance X" -- meaning whatever the heck they were mining -- "you have to offer when we make our monthly visits in a starship." (I don't swear the visits happened each month; that's just an example.)

  3. Soon after arriving, Protagonist meets a girl. I am almost certain that she is no more than 14 years old -- not prepubescent, but younger than a leading man's girlfriend/love interest/etc. would normally be in modern literature. (No, they don't end up sleeping together.) She seems to be going out of her way to get his attention -- she is intelligent, headstrong, aggressive in the way she speaks to him, and I _think_ she comes across as a something of a smug know-it-all. (Granted, if she's been here for years, whereas Protagonist has just arrived, then she has considerable justification for feeling that she knows a great deal more about local conditions than he does.) I don't remember if the girl is stated to have been born on the prison planet, or if she was brought here with her parents, or what. (I strongly suspect that she had not committed some terrible crime at, let's say, the age of 10 or 11, and been sentenced to spend the rest of her life on Earth as punishment for her own sins. I don't remember getting a "hardened criminal" vibe from her, but these memories are at least a third of a century old.)

  4. At some point, it is hinted and then stated that the girl has some unusual ability. I'm thinking something "psychic," but not necessarily being able to telepathically peek into protagonist's mind and know exactly what he is thinking.

  5. It also becomes clear, somewhere along the line (not in the first few chapters, I'm pretty sure), that Protagonist has a hidden agenda. Perhaps his conviction of a major felony was a fraud, and he's actually the future equivalent of "an FBI agent going deep undercover." Perhaps he really did do whatever he was accused of, but he wanted to get caught and convicted as part of a deeper plan. (Similar to the starting premise of the much later TV series _Prison Break,_ but that's just a guess.) Perhaps someone has offered a convicted man "a deal you can't refuse." But at any rate, he's not just another thug hoping to find a way to "settle in for the long haul" as part of the local society; as I recall, he hopes to someday get off Earth and be a free man again, if he plays his cards right. Protagonist appears to be sneaky, determined, an excellent fighter, and so forth. (Sort of like what you'd expect from a military commando type, although I don't remember if he had any formal military training from his pre-prisoner days.)

  6. Protagonist comes to realize that a big shot in the prison colony has some sort of secret deal going on. I _think_ with some non-government faction that has its own starship for making covert visits to the prison planet as part of some high-stakes plan. Somehow, Protagonist (probably with the help of the girl) foils their diabolical scheme -- whatever it was.

  7. The story was written in the fast-paced style of an adventure novel. We didn't have anyone holding up the plot for several pages at a time to give lengthy lectures on sociopolitical theory or economic strategy or anything similar; we followed a "lone wolf" from one interesting scene to another. I think this book was pretty short; i.e. not much more than 200 pages (or maybe even less).

  8. In the last few pages, there's a scene where Protagonist and the girl are having another conversation, and she deliberately says something to tease him, taunt him, or something like that. I don't remember the wording, but it was obviously meant to get under his skin. He suddenly gives in to an impulse and grabs hold of her and pins her down on the ground, and she suddenly seems scared. He may or may not give her one quick kiss before he suddenly lets go of her, backs off, and says dryly: "Try that approach again in another five years, and you might manage to seduce me." I don't remember what she says or does then, but the implication is that him grabbing hold of her for a moment is, in fact, something she was kinda hoping he would do; since she doesn't say a thing to contradict him on that point. (I think she may even laugh at the realization that he had seen right through her.)

  9. My impression is that Protagonist is about to leave Earth on a ship during the scene I mentioned in the previous paragraph -- he is in a very good mood because, somehow, he has "earned a pardon" or "is being brought in for debriefing" or "has gained access to a starship" or in some other way is heading offworld for a while. I don't remember if the girl is staying behind by choice, or if she'll be sent off to a nice school for a few years, or what. But his remark about "seducing me" indicates at least the possibility of a romantic happy ending for both of them at some future time.

So! Does anyone think all this sounds familiar? I'd like to refresh my memory of it and see what I think of the writing style after all these years.

* * *

P.S. To save you some time, here are a few "prison planet" or "prison colony" stories which this book definitely was **not.** (Although I read most of them around the mid-to-late 1980s.)

  * "Coventry," by **Robert A. Heinlein**.

  * _The Status Civilization,_ by **Robert Sheckley**.

  * _Police Your Planet,_ by **Lester Del Rey**.

  * _The Escape Orbit,_ by **James White**.

  * _The Beyond,_ by **Jean** and **Jeff Sutton**.

  * _Escape Velocity,_ by **Christopher Stasheff**.

  * The _Four Lords of the Diamond_ series by **Jack L. Chalker.** (Four novels; each set on a different prison planet within the same solar system. Answering [a recent question](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/214489/mind-transfer-to-prisoners-on-moons-of-jupiter/214493) about that series was what reminded me of this prison planet novel which I'd never managed to track down.)

Heh, thanks for the help. You solved mine but I didn't solve yours. I never heard of some of these others but thought the other forums might trigger ideas. ..  Ah, yas... "the boredom of a too-civilized society". . .  as if Heinlein hadn't harped on that enough. thanks for the story reminder.

@OccamShave "Fader" was a nickname for a character in Robert A. Heinlein's story "Coventry" (first on my list of old SF prison planet/prison colony stories which my own question was not asking about). "Coventry" was a huge area, here on Earth, which was surrounded by a force field. If people didn't want to play by the rules of the futuristic civilization of the story, then they were exiled to Coventry and left there to fend for themselves. Here's the Wikipedia link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_(short_story)

Any of these? I'm trying to remember a Prison Planet story with a character named Fader in it who was the organizer with a hidden (but good) motive. So my search found even more things of what it's not than your search. Would you even believe how many stories are called "Prison Planet"?  isfdb.org/cgi-bin/…. And did you find that others were fascinated with that enough to start forums on it? ..  librarything.com/topic/136948.  And librarything.com/list/333/all/Life-on-the-Prison-Planet And still no Fader!

@Spencer The way I remember it, Slippery Jim grew up on a planet that appeared to have a lot in common with 20th Century USA, except with almost nothing in the way of "well-organized crime conducted by intelligent people." He has to really work at it to get caught robbing a bank and then sent to a local prison. After he realizes there are no intelligent criminals with a professional attitude towards their work inside the prison, he breaks out easily -- still on his home planet. But he has gotten a lead on an oldtime robber called "the Bishop" and manages to attract his attention.

@Lorendiac Hmmm...I could have sworn that the prison DiGriz gets himself sent to at the beginning was a prison planet...

@Spencer Did that one even have a prison planet in it? I seem to recall that the narrator and his mentor ("The Bishop") get double-crossed by a starship captain who sells them into slavery on a "medieval feudalism" planet, but I don't think that world was officially used as a prison by the rest of the human-colonized planets, was it?

Another one to add to your not-the-answer list is A Stainless Steel Rat is Born by Harry Harrison.

@DavidW Exporting lizard hides reminds me of a story (in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in the 1980s?).  The down on his luck protagonist had to sign a giant lizard hunter's contract on an extra solar planet.  The owner of the planet ran it like a company town charging high prices for everything and paying little for hides, so while it was theoretically possible for a hunter to pay off his debts and leave, most got deeper in debt and were eventually killed by a lizard. The protagonist ran away with the planet owner's mistress and artificial substitutes ended the hide market.

I have heard of a movie, Doin' Time on Planet Earth (1988), and a TV series Hard Time on Planet Earth (1989), whose protagonists believed they were in one case, and actually were in the other case, sentenced to exile on Earth.  But I don't know if there was a novelization of either published.

@DavidW: Are you thinking of Cordwainer Smith's novella A Planet Names Shayol?

@DavidW Maybe 98 percent positive it was Earth. (Don't ask me why the author felt it necessary to do it that way, having most of the human race live elsewhere in the future, instead of simply setting this on some newly-discovered wild frontier planet that only had, say, a few thousand hardcase convicts on it, or whatever.) I'm also "mostly sure" about the mining -- the idea of "farming animals for gland extracts" rings no bells at all, but if you track down the story you're thinking of, let me know and I'll take a look.

Just checking, but you're 100% positive it was Earth?  There's another story scratching at my head that fits many of the points listed, except it definitely wasn't Earth; the resource they were exporting was a gland extract (and maybe the hides too) of dinosauroid native animals.


Story about a rainstorm that only the blind can see

I would have read this some time probably in the early 1990s. I don't remember how old it was at the time.

I only remember the beginning, and a snatch of details from it:

  * Several blind characters

  * One of the blind characters told his mother to take her umbrella with her, because it was raining. She looked but didn't see any rain.

  * One blind boy, possibly named Chris or similar, described the rain as being of different colours; he described the colours in terms of emotion. He described one colour as 'looking like when you feel angry', which his mother interpreted as red.

  * I think the other blind characters also saw the rain, but I can't remember enough detail to be sure.

  * The mother did go outside, but took her umbrella. I think there were a few people carrying umbrellas, but not everyone. After she got back, the mother saw small holes all over the umbrella.

I don't remember the author, but I think it was an oldish book at the time. I don't remember if it was a novel or part of a short story collection.

Any suggestions?

synesthesia is the name of the phenomenona where the senses get cross wired and the subject sees sounds and hears colors and so on.  In case it helps someone.     en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia_in_fiction

I don't understand. What good were the umbrellas if the raindrops were making holes in them? Why didn't the mother feel the raindrops that were coming through the umbrella? What happened to the people who were out in the rain without umbrellas?

The story "about a guy and his typewriter during a machine uprising" sounds a lot like "Skirmish" by Clifford Simak. Can you remember anything else about any stories in the same collection?

I have read the story and the collection -also in about the 1990s and that story did stick in my memory but can't find out what it was. Think it was a collection aimed at teenagers in the local library.

It was part of a short story collection. Also in the same book was a story about a guy and his typewriter during a machine uprising.

Did the child pursuade his mother the rain was a threat and get them drinking orange juice to stay away from the influence the rain was having? It rings a vague bell if so.

There does not seem to be anything in this question that would lead one to believe that the characters involved were fantasizing. Couldn't we suppose this to  be the case for a lot of short story identifications?

@Werrf - In which case, you definitely need to edit that into the question.

@Valorum I don't see that there's any way to gauge that with almost any story identification question unless we find a match, and I can't see anything in my description that would suggest it was not sci-fi or fantasy. As best I can remember, the story was sci-fi; there was a vague implication, which I cannot describe in enough detail to be helpful, that the rain was coming from space. It was not all in the boy's imagination, or if it was it wasn't even implied in the part that I can remember.

@Werrf - I'm trying to gauge whether this question is an appropriate fit for the site. If it's not about scifi or fantasy, the community wastes its collective time.

@Valorum I don't remember enough of the book to say for certain that it was the rain that made the holes in the umbrellas; I also don't remember what happened to everyone else. That's why I'm looking for the book. Sci-fi is the closest match I can find for it. How is nitpicking productive?

@Werrf - You didn't say that it was the invisible rain that made the holes in the umbrella. Also, what happened to the people who weren't carrying umbrellas?

@Valorum An invisible rain that blind people can see and ascribe colours to, which leaves holes in umbrellas, is not the blind person fantasizing.

@Paul - It reads like the blind person is fantasising, which doesn't make it a fantasy, any more than Scrubs or Ally McBeal are fantasies.

@Valorum I think an invisible rainstorm that blind people can see qualifies somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, depending on why it's happening...

What about this story is scifi or fantasy?


Aliens try to liberate "enslaved" dogs from humans

I saw this story in an anthology in a used bookstore in 2009.

When the aliens came, we negotiated a peace treaty with them. Everything was going fine until they said "oh, and you'll have to stop keeping dogs as slaves, of course."

Humans said "what? No, they're not slaves, they're pets. They're not sapient!"

Aliens said "THEN IT IS WAR."

This is backstory, told as man and little girl and small dog run through the remains of a city while trying to escape an Alien Death Machine. The machine traps them under flaming wreckage, then tenderly extracts the dog, apparently to bring it to a re-education facility.

As the man's life ebbs, he thinks "at least they didn't find out about the pigs."

Hi! Welcome to sci-fi. For some help improving your question, see this awesome guide.


Spanish-language comic book story about time-traveling Jewish kids becoming the legendary Adam and Eve?

Around 1992 or 1993, I borrowed a comic-book-format magazine from someone. It was a pretty thick publication (well over 100 pages, I'm thinking; maybe over 200?) and was printed in **Spanish.** I _think_ I noticed this particular magazine had been published in Argentina, but I won't swear to that. The contents of this magazine were several "short stories" in comics format, and/or some installments of ongoing serials. (I'm not sure, because I borrowed more than one publication, and I'm not sure which stories were all clumped together in the same magazine.)

Today, I suddenly remembered one story in particular, and started wondering if it would be possible to identify it and track it down after all these years. Here's what I think I remember:

  1. The opening sequence is set during World War II, in one of the European cities which is currently under the control of the Third Reich. I _think_ it was a Polish city (such as Warsaw or Krakow).

  2. We quickly meet two cute kids, prepubescent, who are a boy and a girl. They are also Jewish. They do not appear to be closely related -- definitely not siblings. I think one of them has a "mad scientist" relative (such as an uncle or great-uncle -- I'm virtually certain he was not the father or grandfather of either kid) who secretly has been building a time machine in his home.

  3. I think some Gestapo types -- nasty characters in Nazi uniforms, anyway -- are coming to arrest this scientist. There was probably some sort of fight scene that I don't clearly remember. But the upshot is that the time machine is used by the scientist, perhaps before it was quite ready. The following individuals are catapulted back in time: The scientist, the two cute kids, and one German -- whom I think was a military pilot who somehow got caught up in the middle of things. (In fact, I think his entire plane may have somehow "gone along for the ride" and then crashed into a prehistoric jungle . . . unless I'm confusing this with some other story.)

  4. Those four characters end up thousands, if not millions, of years in the past, apparently in a warm jungle setting. I can't remember if any exact figures were given, but there seemed to be no other human beings around in that era -- or at least not anywhere near the spot where the time travelers were stranded. (I really couldn't say what might have been happening a thousand miles away.) I can't recall any details about the prehistoric wildlife -- for instance, I don't remember if the artwork included anything resembling a dinosaur.

  5. Something is wrong with the time machine after that emergency jump to elude the clutches of the Nazis. The scientist spends _several years_ working to get it up and running again. The German pilot claims to not be prejudiced against Jews, and this seems to be _true,_ since he evidently gets along well with the other three, without trying to boss them around as if he were in charge of their tiny community.

  6. Soon we have fast-forwarded to a point where the boy and girl both look to be well into their teens, with him walking around looking like Tarzan, more or less (excellent muscular development, and we know this for a fact because he's now wearing not much more than a loincloth), and with her looking like a gorgeous actress wearing a fur bikini or something similar. It now occurs to the German pilot (after he's been getting drunk on fermented apple juice, I think) that these two kids love and trust each other, but literally _don't know a thing_ about sex, and maybe it's time for him to give them a fatherly lecture about the birds and the bees. In his defense, I should make one thing clear: It appears that he does _not_ use this lecture as an excuse to offer to give the beautiful girl "a hands-on demonstration of the technical details" or anything like that. The story tactfully skips over the gist of his talk with the youngsters, but the implication is that the pilot simply _describes_ how the physical stuff is supposed to work . . . so that the youngsters can practice with each other if they want to.

  7. The scientist comes along and -- if I remember this right -- spots the German pilot playing Peeping Tom as, concealed behind some foliage, he _watches_ the kids going into a clinch. The scientist is _very unhappy_ about this situation. I believe he does something along these lines: Makes a speech about immoral behavior, then drags the pilot back to his time machine, and says they two are going to test-drive it to see if it's finally back in acceptable working condition. So the time machine vanishes from this prehistoric setting, and -- as far as we know -- the scientist and the pilot never actually come back. (I _can't recall_ if we were told exactly what became of them. Perhaps they emerged in the middle of a battlefield or something, and got blown up?)

  8. In a big panel toward the bottom of the last page of the story, the dialogue goes something along these lines -- _loosely paraphrased_ from my memory of how I _mentally translated_ the Spanish phrases into English when I was reading this, way back when. The girl says, "Oh, **Adam,** what will we do now?" and the boy replies, "Well, **Evie,** I guess we'll just have to learn to fend for ourselves." I'm sure that until that moment, readers had never been told the boy's first name was Adam. We _may_ have been told that the girl, back in the opening scene, was "Evie" or something similar. (And yes, I'm aware that this is a famous cliche in science fiction! Even 23 or 24 years ago, I had already heard of that cliche!)

  9. In the final panel, a narrator spells it all out for us, in case anyone hadn't fully grasped the ramifications of the "surprise twist" with the "Adam and Evie" dialogue. This, we are assured, was how things "really" happened, inspiring the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, with "the Serpent in the Garden tempting them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge" being a case of a pilot who was drunk on fermented apple juice and decided to tell the kids the facts of life. Then they were fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the Earth.

  10. A note about the language issue: I know I read this comic book story in Spanish, but I cannot swear that I wasn't reading a translation of a story originally published in some other language! (Over in Europe, perhaps?) So if you remember something similar which was first published in German, or Italian, or any other language, please let me know!

@RobertColumbia I don't think I've ever read anything by Borges, so I have no idea whether he ever did an "Adam and Eve" story or not. For all I know, it's possible that what I saw was a comic book adaptation based on the plot of a prose story written many years earlier by Borges (or by someone else).

I seem to recall a story story by Jorge Luis Borges along these lines, but you are asking for a comic instead.

I remember reading this story. I'm pretty sure it was published in the Argentine magazine "Skorpio",

No. No. No! This might be the perfect excuse to relive the travels you undertook when you were younger.

I kinda thought the whole point of this site was to save me the trouble of running all over the world trying to track things down myself! ;)

It sounds like someone needs to treat themselves to a plane ticket.

It was a very long time ago, and he was someone I met in South America. I'm now thousands of miles away from where I last saw him, and have no contact information. (Afterthought: It's quite likely that he wouldn't remember any further details, either. Who knows if he still has that magazine?)

An incredibly well described story-ID. Not to point out the obvious, but couldn't you simply ask your friend?


Car crash leaves man in a world devoid of animal and human life. Sees red flashes with demons and voices

It was a movie from the late '80's to the early '90's.

A man and his girlfriend/wife are in a car arguing, driving down a road on a stormy night. They wreck, and she is gone, and he has a bad headache. He suffers headaches throughout the movie I think.

During the day there is nobody on the planet (no animals either), but at night there are these red(?) flashes with demons and voices scaring him.

It is not the movie _The Quiet Earth_.

He lives for months (years?) going crazy until somehow he wakes up in the car with the girl in the end and only a few hours have gone by. It changes his life the end.

This one I have been looking for since I was a teen.

I saw this movie some time between 1987-1992 and was from that timeline.

It was in English. I saw this on VHS

I had a family member that owned a video rental store at the time. I think I may have seen a limited release sample that was sent to them to preview to decide if they wanted to carry it. If I remember correctly it was sent back because the royalties where too high.

Towards the end of the movie while he was alone the power went out.

He went paranoid and started raiding stores for food guns generators etc.

The things I remember the most is the empty earth and the fear of the night terrors. Also the psychological effects of long term isolation.

And the fact he never stopped looking for the girlfriend.

At the beginning I think they where arguing about their relationship, and she started to cry. I think she was driving, but I cant be sure. But that led to the car wreck due to poor visibility with heavy rain and the distraction of the argument.

A really long shot, but any chance that this was the man and this was the woman? I fed some of the keywords you mentioned to IMDb and it came up with something called Cumulus 9 from 1992, though it's doubtful this film was even officially released.

I recommend you to check this website, it might help you remember the movie poster or cover of yhe vhs. You can change the genre of the movie and search in the years.  I looked for the movie but nothing. Maybe the movie is older, or from another country that was dubbed to English. movieweb.com/movies/1981/mystery/?page=2


Short story involving a lost-tech green glass highway in Australia

My mom's been wondering if I could find this story but I really can't without more specific details than she can give me. It's rather old, she guessed somewhere in the 1960s or 70s. The story wasn't centered about the science fiction aspects from what she remembers, it was more of a murder mystery or detective story that involved a lot of science fiction elements.

There was a highway that was made of a heavy, green glass that was uncovered in the sand in Australia after the technology to create it has been long lost. People use it to get from place to place extremely fast, e.g. going from Perth to Sydney would only take an hour. The author described Australia in great detail, and she recalls that the descriptions were rather awe-inspiring and made her want to visit because of how beautiful it sounded.

More on the highway was that they could repair it but couldn't build more of it due to the loss of technology. The main character (some sort of detective?) spent a lot of time on this green glass road going places. They also had taken - chipped off - hard chunks and studied them but couldn't reverse-engineer the highway or something like that. The highway worked off of something like magnetism, like having the glass somehow be magnetic.

It's not the answer, but my first thought was Terry Dowling's shatterwrack (but that comes from the vehicles not the road)

Although it was published in 2005, Sean Williams's "The Resurrected Man" has some elements in common with this. It stars a private detective in a future Australia. There's a bit where a character mentions it taking "only a few hours to get to Perth or Darwin" - though this might have been by air. Roads are abandoned and in disrepair - though this is due to the discovery of teleportation. The teleport booths have green strips of light on them.

Kerry Greenwood (of Phryne Fisher fame) write some Australian post-apocalyptic SF in the 90s.

Sounds like something Terry Dowling might write... (but that would be the 80s)

A Google search for "green glass highway" yields results from only one author, Julia Buckley. Her mystery novels, A Dark and Stormy Murder (2016), A Dark and Twisting Path (2018), and Death Waits in the Dark (2019), each contain a Green Glass Highway. These novels are much too late to be the object of your search, but maybe Buckley was inspired by the same story. Maybe you can ask her!