Thursday, November 18, 2010

Richard Olin's "All Day Wednesday" (short story, hallucinations, free): What if the world stopped changing?

Illustration by George Schelling accompanying the original publication in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, March 1963 issue, of short story All Day Wednesday by Richard Olin
One of the minor stories from Campbell's Analog. More interesting variants of the idea appear in Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" (download) & Hal Clement's "Answer".

Story summary.

"All his life there had been too many bright guys with too many bright ideas. And the bright ideas got put into practice and then things changed. They could never leave a guy alone and just let him do his job. They always had to throw in the unexpected."

Here the fantasy of a static world comes literally true - an entire world of hallucinating people, stuck mentally in the daily routine they did on a certain Wednesday!

Fact sheet.

First published: Analog, March 1963.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Rating: B.
Among the stories edited by John Campbell for Astounding/Analog.

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