help me find a book

January 4, 2007 11:12 AM

In the grand ask.mefi tradition I'm looking for the name of a book...

In the book a man comes back from the future but because he is just a regular schmoe can't tell anyone anything useful. 'Yes they cured cancer, you just take some kind of pill' etc etc. I think my headmaster may have read it during assembly when I was maybe 12? in the UK. Anyway it left quite an impression on me so I'd love to be able to read it. Any ideas?

posted by zeoslap to writing & language (17 comments total)

It wasn't this Onion article, was it?

I'm thinking not, because your description really rings a bell with me, but the Onion article isn't pushing quite the right buttons. Still, worth a shot.
posted by chrismear at 11:23 AM on January 4, 2007

Ooh, there's a bit in Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless where Arthur Dent gets stranded on a backwards alien planet, and wants to bring them all the useful technological advances he remembers from Earth, except that he doesn't know how any of them actually work, so he ends up making sandwiches instead.
posted by chrismear at 11:28 AM on January 4, 2007

what year were you 12 in?
posted by jourman2 at 11:40 AM on January 4, 2007

The Twilight Zone episode "Of late I think of Cliffordville" has a similiar motif. A rich man makes a deal with the devil to go back in time and live his life all over again. He figures this time he will become even richer because of everything he knows. It turns out that times were harder than he remembered them and that he himself didn't really know how anything actually worked.
posted by Osmanthus at 12:17 PM on January 4, 2007

I recognize it as a short story, possible by Asimov. I'm digging through here to see if anything rings a bell.
posted by Partial Law at 12:45 PM on January 4, 2007

Argh, I know exactly where the anthology with this short story was on the shelves of my high school library a decade ago. I thought it might have been Jack Finney, but I'm not finding any titles that ring a bell. Scientists retrieve Joe Schmoe from the future, and all he knows how to do is press buttons or call repairmen to fix things.
posted by nonane at 12:56 PM on January 4, 2007

Assuming we're talking about the same story, one key detail I remember is that the experiment is done on a university campus and everyone is excited at first to find that they've retrieved a (physics, maybe?) professor instead of some random person. Of course it ends up making no difference.
posted by Partial Law at 1:07 PM on January 4, 2007

I' was twelve in 1984, so that would predate the 92 release of Mostly Harmless but it does sounds very similar...
posted by zeoslap at 1:07 PM on January 4, 2007

Not the same, but there was a story (Bradbury?) where a man gets a peek into the future (is he teleported into some future attic? I forget) but all he has to read there is Bird Fancier, or some pet magazine. So instead of getting cancer cures and lottery numbers, he's pawing through all these very specific bird articles desperate for anything more general.
posted by GaelFC at 2:52 PM on January 4, 2007

Partial Law that definitely rings some bells, and Asimov sounds like a likely author for a headmaster to be reading in assembly. Keep me posted :)
posted by zeoslap at 3:34 PM on January 4, 2007

The story you are looking for is in the anthology collection MICROCOSMIC TALES, edited by Asimov and Greenberg (and a third editor I do not immediately recall). You can buy a used copy cheap at half.com or amazon. I'm sorry that I don't have the book at hand (it is in my mother-in-law's apartment several hundred miles away) but I know exactly the story you are thinking of. I believe it is one of the first stories in the book (which contains 100 sf short stories). But if you liked that one, you'll like lots of them, so your time reading the book the will hardly be wasted. There are some wonderful stories in there by forgotten sf geniuses like Fredric Brown and Henry Slesar.
posted by Mr. Justice at 6:42 PM on January 4, 2007

I gave up on trying to figure it out on my own and asked a more knowledgeable friend, and he says it's "Renaissance Man" by T. E. D. Klein, 1974, which is, as Mr. Justice says, in the Asimov/Greenberg/Olander short-short collection "Microcosmic Tales".
posted by nonane at 7:01 PM on January 4, 2007

That's it, Mr. Justice. With Google Booksearch and some key words, I found it in that anthology. The story is "Renaissance Man," by T. E. D. Klein.
posted by Partial Law at 7:01 PM on January 4, 2007

Call it a tie, nonane?
And if you enjoy that book, I'd also recommend the earlier 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, which is just like it, also edited by Asimov/Greenberg/Oleander and also containing (obviously) 100 very short science fiction stories by SF geniuses (both forgotten and remembered).
posted by Partial Law at 7:17 PM on January 4, 2007

Give 'em best answers for a job well done!
posted by Alt F4 at 7:29 PM on January 4, 2007

There was also a fantasy companion: 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:20 AM on January 5, 2007

Sorry was away for a bit, awesome job guys, thanks so much!
posted by zeoslap at 9:56 AM on January 7, 2007