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jormis29
Since: Mar, 2012
25th Jan, 2021 12:39:50 PM
"The Wall of Darkness" by Arthur C. Clarke?
"The Last Magician" by Bruce Elliott?
Andariel
(Long Runner)
25th Jan, 2021 03:18:12 PM
Holy crap, that's exactly it!
Andariel
(Long Runner)
5th Sep, 2021 10:44:14 AM
Still looking for the first one
As a kid with no internet in the 2000s, I was a frequent library visitor. I especially liked sci-fi anthologies, some of them probably relatively old. Some stories I remember to this day and they bug me to no end.
1 story: The protagonist lands on another planet. There are human-like aliens there who implant some kind of gemstones into their foreheads which gives them telepathy/mind control powers. They do the same to the protagonist. They use those stones to control animals (I remember somebody controlling a bird and looking through its eyes) but turns out there is another species of aliens that can do the same to humans. I think this was actually their planet originally, and the human-like ones are descendants of those who crash-landed there like the protagonist. The other aliens are giants with very long lifespan, but as they grow older, they start turning to stone. Almost all of them are dead now, only one is still alive, but he's mostly stone, so he can't even move. In the end, the protagonist escapes the planet. While he's on a spaceship that's about to destroy the alien, the protagonist telepathically contacts him, half-expecting the alien to try to mind-control him to stop the countdown. But the alien is almost glad because he's been so lonely, he'd rather die than remain the last of his species.
2 story (SOLVED): There is a city that's surrounded by a huge wall and no one knows what's behind it. Eventually, people manage to climb to the top. The wall continues to the horizon and an expedition sets out to see where it ends. They walk for a very long time. As they walk, the sun doesn't set, but it looks like it's dimming and everything is getting darker. Then the sun starts to brighten again and they see the end of the wall. But when they reach it, they see their own city. It's stated that the wall is like a Mobius strip: it doesn't have other side. (But for some reason I thought that the expedition didn't end up in their city, but in some parallel reality version of it.)
3 story (SOLVED): The protagonist gets a job as an assistant for a Houdini-type escape artist stage magician. He falls in love with a woman who is another assistant and in relationship with the magician. Except the magician is a jerkass who treats her badly, and the protagonist wants to get rid of him. There is a big show being planned where the magician is going to get inside a Klein bottle
, but getting out of it is supposed to be impossible. The magician knows he can't do it for real, so he is planning to surreptitiously replace the Klein bottle with a replica while on the stage, but when the show starts, the protagonist doesn't switch bottles. The magician realizes this only when he's already half-way inside the bottle. He can't get out and breaking the bottle would kill him, so he is stuck there forever.
Edited by Andariel