As the new year begins, I decided to start one of my old favorites from my early years of reading-"The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World" by Philip Jose Farmer. I remember reading it in Terry Carr's "The Best Science Fiction of the Year #1" in 1976. Some of my best reading experiences were the various "Best of..." and "World's Best SF" series. I plan on revisiting some of those this year.
"TSCOOTW" is one of Farmer's classic stories. The world is suffering from overpopulation. A scientist discovers a way to put people into suspended animation. So the government lets the populace be awake for one day a week. Our protagonist is a Tuesday person. At the end of the day, he goes into suspended animation until the next Tuesday. Life is good until the day he sees one of the Wednesday people who lives in his apartment building. He falls in love at first sight. As he learns more about he, he continues to become obsessed with meeting her. This story follows his quest to switch to Wednesday.
After all of these years, I still enjoyed this story. Highly recommended as a Farmer classic.
3 comments:
Philip Jose Farmer is one of those authors that I've always meant to read. So many of his books/stories seem intriguing, like the Tuesday one you just wrote about. So I'm going to see if I can pick something by him up for this years sci-fi experience.
I believe I've only read one short story by Farmer, and it was in one of the 'best of' collections. Not certain now what story it was.
I have only a handful of these older short story collections but I want to get my hands on more. There is a great used bookstore in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital, and I hope a work meeting takes me there again soon as I always find great SFF there.
When I was in the 2nd grade I discovered a collection of scifi literary almanacs from the communist era.The stories ignited my imagination.Keep writing
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