[PW] Re: looking for a short sci fi story

Thu Dec 7 07:27:29 PST 2006

As far as I know, I'm the world authority on permutations of this
short-short-short story, such as I am and such as it is.  (Translation:
I had a letter about it published in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE
FICTION a few years ago.)

I don't seem to have saved an electronic copy of that letter, but
elements that went into it were cobbled together from various emails
and postings which I did save, and which in turn I cobbled together a
couple of years ago into a posting on FictionMags, namely:

********************************************************************

August 11, 2004 / Fictionmags posting

********
I found my old notes, which are in various sections. I've rearranged
a bit to eliminate some duplication.

Re the origin of the traditional "shortest" sf story:

***********

What is most frequently cited as the "shortest science fiction story"
is attributed to (who else) Fredric Brown: "The last man on earth sat
alone in a room. There was a knock on the door." This appears as a
quoted reference in Brown's story "Knock." So far as I know, the
actual wording here is Brown's, but the idea of the story can be
traced back to the notebooks of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who wrote up
a slightly longer version of the same idea; he never wrote the
story, but the note was published after his death in a collected
edition of his works and has been reprinted in a couple of anthologies
(ed. by Borges, in one case) under the title "A Woman Alone With Her
Soul."

Brown's version was the basis for a bottom-of-the-page filler that
I once saw in (I'm almost sure) F&SF but have not subsequently
traced, titled something like "The Horror Story Shorter By One
Letter Than the Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told." This
version read: "The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There
was a lock on the door."

**********
<updating note:
<the "filler" was by Ron Smith and was on page 101 of the
July 1957 issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION>
*****************

I think I promised to look up the text quoted by Dashiell Hammett (or
his ghost-editor) in CREEPS BY NIGHT in which he misremembers/misquotes
Thomas Bailey Aldrich's microstory that later turned into the Fred
Brown one. To recap, here's the Aldrich original:

*********
The Aldrich ur-text:

"Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth excepting
one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York of London.
Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a
house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!"

It appears as part of "Leaves from a Note Book," which is pretty
much what it is--musings and half-baked story ideas from Aldrich's
note books. The essay "Leaves from a Note Book" in turn appears
as the lead item in Aldrich's miscellaneous collection PONKAPOG
PAPERS. ("Ponkapog" was the name of an Indian reservation and
the Massachusetts village thereat in which Aldrich had his Redman
Farm, and which most of the essays in the collection were written.)

The introduction to PONKAPOG PAPERS is dated 1903, and according
to the version that's online at following URL, published 1904:

The Aldrich quote is on pp. 8-9 of PONKAPOG PAPERS as online at

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AldPonk.html

Ponkapog Papers.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich

************

and here's what I find in the "Introduction" to CREEPS BY NIGHT
(1931 edition):

"One of my own favorites is that attributed, I believe, to Thomas
Bailey Aldrich:

A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone
in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The
doorbell rings.

That has, particularly, the restraint that is almost invariably
the mark of the effective weird tale."

************

In any case, other authors have aspired to write shorter "stories."
RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I recall, once listed this as its choice:

Chapter One: Coughin'. Chapter Two: Coffin.

but this, while arguably horror (and arguably a story) is not sf...

David Gerrold's 1972 Dell pb anthology GENERATION included "The
Shortest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told" by one Roger Deeley.
As I recall, it goes approximately:

Sign found at the edge of the universe: This End Up

(where the last three words are printed upside down). I think
the first part of the "story" was formatted as a subtitle, so
that the conceit was the entire "story" was those three words.
When a reviewer in one of Ted White's magazines quoted it in a
review, Gerrold wrote a letter complaining of excess of fair
use in quotation, since the reviewer had "reprinted" the entire
text of the story; White sent him a check for nine cents or
whatever his reprint rate was at the time.

Forry Ackerman had a pretty bogus attempt at an even shorter story,
but I've got to run to a meeting right now; that and more later.

***********************

Here's followup on the last one:  "The Shortest S-F Story Ever
Told" by Forest J. Ackerman from the June 1973 issue of VERTEX .
It appeared on the last text page (page 95) of the issue,
and was also reprinted in PERRY RHODAN #29 (magazine/paperback series)
a couple of months later.

The page consisted mostly of a graphic of a report card (on earth
or on the human race or somesuch) with a number of categories in
the form; the "text" of the story proper consisted of a large
scrawled letter "F."

Ackerman claimed it to be the shortest sf story on the basis of
"being" only one letter long, but of course this is cheating since
it makes no sense without the report card graphics and text.

*******************************

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu

At 11:46 AM 12/6/2006, you wrote:
>Robert Sullivan wrote:
> >>>        Well, it's not about a composer but it is (kinda) sci-fi.  And 
> it IS
> >>> the shortest short story ever written--its by Hemingway:
> >> No, as far as I can tell, it's by our old pal Anonymous, certainly not 
> by Ernie.
> >>
> >>>                 The last man in the world was alone in a room.  There
> >>>                  was a knock at the door.
> >> In the classic version, it's "sat" not "was" and "on the door" not "at
> >> the door."
> >
> > Sounds like "Knock" by Fredric Brown.
> >
> > <http://www.answers.com/topic/knock-short-story>
> >
>It's incorporated into "Knock" -- but that part of the story isn't by Brown.
>
>--
>Dan Goodman
>All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
>John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
>Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
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>
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