From: "Ernest Lilley" <elilley at mindspring.com>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Poul Anderson - Epilogue was: RE: [WSFA] Re: Expedition to Earth?
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 09:21:38 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

Thanks to Mark Fischer and everyone who looked into this for me.

It turns out that it wasn't Clarke, but Poul Anderson - Epilogue.

As I said to Mark, I thought it had too much action for Arthur.

Someone on Rec.Arts.SF.Written came up with it.

I was so pleased with this success that I let them track down another
favorite of mine which I misremembered as having been written by William
Tenn, in fact, the first time I met Phillip Klaus, I told him how much I
enjoyed it. He's a gracious guy. It runs out that it was Cordle To Onion To
Carrot by Robert Scheckley, and within it these brilliant lines still leap
off the page at one:

"I'm talking about those types who get you uptight," Thoth-Hermes explained.
"They gotta act that way, baby, on account of they're carrots, and that's
how carrots are."

"If they are carrots," Cordle said, feeling his way, "then I-"

"You, of course, are a little pearly-white onion."

"Yes! My God, yes!" Cordle cried, dazzled by the blinding light of satori.

"And, naturally, you and all the other pearly-white onions think that
carrots are just bad news, merely some kind of misshapen orangey onion;
whereas the carrots look at you and rap about freaky round white carrots,
wow! I mean, you're just too much for each other, whereas, in actuality-"

"Yes, go on!" cried Cordle.

"In actuality," Thoth-Hermes declared, "everything's got a place in The
Stew!"

And can be found online, thanks to Ellen Datlow and the SCIFICTION at:
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheckley3/

Ernest Lilley

Home/Office: 703 371 0226
EJ: 757 581 4146
email: elilley at mindspring.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Lynch [mailto:rw_lynch at yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2005 11:23 PM
To: WSFA members
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Expedition to Earth?

--- Ernest Lilley <elilley at mindspring.com> wrote:

> I need to quote a short story, which I think was in
> Clarke's Expedition to
> Earth, in fact was that story itself. Can anyone confirm
> that I've got the
> right story?
>
> In it, explorers return to Earth after some millennia and
> find it inhabited
> by robots which have evolved to about the level of well,
> Moonwatcher in
> 2001. Ah. Actually, that pretty well confirms it for me
> since there are
> quite a few 2001 parallels in the story.
>
> If anyone has a copy handy and can come up with the
> sentence early on where
> the landscape is too weird for the explorers to
> understand, I'd appreciate
> it.
>

I just checked all the stories in that collection.  None
match your description, though it does contain one of my
top 5 SF stories of all time, "The Sentinel".

=====
Rich Lynch
==========
MIMOSA web site: http://jophan.org/mimosa/
1960s Fan History Site: http://jophan.org/1960s/
http://www.livejournal.com/~rwl

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