SOLVED. SciFi Short Story / Old man secretly switches bodies with someone young. [s]

[M—]

Hello, everyone. I'm trying to track down a scifi short story I read years ago. Do this plot sound familiar to anyone here?

The protagonist is male and old. He was undergoing some sort of medical procedure that disconnected his consciousness from his body in a medical office that specialized in that thing. The office had some sort of massive technical glitch, and the records were lost for which consciousness matched to which body. The office starts plugging consciousnesses into random bodies, announcing to each pairing that this glitch had occurred and to please raise your left hand if this was not your body or raise your right hand if this was your body. The protagonist is popped in several different sorts of bodies, young, female, etc., before landing back in his own body. Once he's back in his own tired, aged body, he rethinks this and raises his left hand. The next body he is matched with is healthy and young, and he claims that body for his own. I think the story ended with the protagonist trying desperate to play it cool and relaxed as he walked out the main office doors and absconds with his new body.

I might have read this story in high school (mid- to late-90s), but it was probably published much earlier than that. I suspect I might have read it in an anthology, but I don't remember anything about the book I might have read it in.

Previous suggestions I've ruled out are:
Overdrawn at the memory bank
I will fear no evil
Anthonology

I've already posted this query in LibraryThing's Name That Book! group and in LiveJournal's What Was That Book? community, but I haven't found them yet. I'm hoping that I will be more lucky here!

Thanks much for your help.

(This query was formerly posted in another thread (link) grouped with another query, and has been moved to its own thread upon request.)

[Cheryl]

bump!

Come back in March and bump again, plz. :)

[M—]

:P I have a spreadsheet of the dozen or so books I haven't yet matched with titles. You're aiming for reminders ever couple of months? I'll try to remember that.

Maybe I should write that in the spreadsheet; there's an idea.

[Empress]

I would very much like to read that story, so please post here when/if you find it.

I checked the list after this article but didn't find anything, but you can double-check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_upl...

In another forum about a similar topic it was suggested the following story: Through Other Eyes by R.A. Lafferty which is part of this book: Nine Hundred Grandmothers

This is the link to the request, doesn't sound very much like yours

[Justanotherbiblophile]

Btw, you also need to hit your library thing post, since it's marked as dormant.

So, yes M~, you do need to put a note in your spreadsheet (more helpful might be your calendar) that threads need to get bumped on a regular basis (90 days for LT)

[M—]

Ellie, I found a preview of "Through Other Eyes" up on Google Books, and I can confirm that story isn't a match for what I'm looking for. Thank you for the suggestion, though!

I try to be good about the cross-referencing solutions when a title is solved. The spreadsheet really helps with this.

Justanotherbiblophile, I'm personally content to bump my requests whenever I happen to think of them, which could be once a year or longer. The LT dormancy feature provides a visual distinction between posts with active comments and posts without. Dormant posts are not considered abandoned. They are also not deleted and remain as searchable as active posts. This GR group requests more active thread participation, and I am amiable towards this, but I don't feel obligated to promote my queries on other book-search sites to the same degree. Thank you, though.

[Justanotherbiblophile]

Oh, I think our admins don't dump you into abandoned w/o bumping you first - asking if you've abandoned the query. No response within a month (most likely - not sure of the details) may get you dumped to the abandoned folder (which you can remedy by bumping/changing the folder back again). We have pretty good admins here.

It's just that the more actively a query is bumped, the closer it is to the top, so it gets more views by casual solvers - who're the ones who're most likely to solve it once the thorough users have gotten a shot at it (those guys/gals hit it the first time you post it... eventually. The serious ones dig back to where they last left off reading).

I was just suggesting that if you're taking the time to bump anywhere, might as well bump everything, everywhere (that needs/requests/allows bumping).

I know if I were browsing LT, and I got to the dormant listings, I'd stop reading. Who knows if anyone still cares about those queries? The OP may have gotten their answer, and have moved on - they've expressed they don't care by their failure to bump.

[Ann aka Iftcan]

The criteria for moving a thread down to Abandoned is no activity from the OP for 2 years. And usually we'll send them a PM first, and if there is still no response, we'll move it down. But if the OP comes back, they can move it back up at any time.

[Justanotherbiblophile]

I've also been seeing a bunch of 'Are you still interested in finding this book' bumps, which I assume were preludes to moving to abandoned...

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

The reason I nudge the oldest threads with "are you still looking" is because I don't want me (or others) to go on a big hunt for a book if the OP doesn't care anymore, or has found it, or is not in the Group, etc. If such a nudge gets no response, I won't launch a big hunt. This is not to say that I do launch a big hunt for every book I nudge, though....

A secondary reason I nudge is just to try to empty out some of the dead and dying wood...we currently have 100 pages of Unsolved queries and the rate of growth is increasing. This is a popular Group not just on Goodreads but around the internet, and the number of people posting queries vastly outnumbers the number of people actively trying to solve queries.

[Lostshadows]

Since you seem to be on LiveJournal you might want to try asking over in bookish too.

[M—]

Yeah, and I can see those actions as making sense for this GR group, particularly with your admirable diligence about sorting folders and shelving found books. Other book-search sites don't seem to have that same push, and I'm fine with that.

Lostshadows, thank your for the suggestion.

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

Probably not your book given that it was published in 2002, but I'll toss it out there anyway - it's a novella included in a book with some other short stories.

The Body

"...in this provocative story of an older man whose brain is surgically placed in a younger man's body by a network of underground doctors.

Adam is offered the chance to trade in his sagging flesh for a much younger and more pleasing model. He tells his wife and son that he is going on an extended vacation..."

[M—]

Definitely too recent and the plots also don't seem excellent matches. Thank you very much for the suggestion, though!

[Michele]

I know I've read this and now it's driving ME crazy as well. Really hope someone solves this one...

[Hari]

Maybe a Jack Vance novel...

[M—]

Were you thinking of Vance's short story, Chateau D'If, sometimes titled "New Bodies for Old?" Google tells me that's more about class matters (poor people selling healthy bodies to rich people) than the body-theft story I remember.

(Google also tells me it's based on the classic Wells' short, "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham.")

http://www.online-literature.com/well...

[Hari]

Reply to M
I think that is the one I was thinking of, where a company offers 'adventure' and a young man signs up and gets more than he bargained for. Thanks for the memory jog :)

[M—]

bump

[M—]

bump

[Emily]

Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House had one about people leaving their bodies--Unready to Wear. Some similarities but I don't remember the raising hand part of it. Not quite it.

[M—]

I found a full copy of the "Unready to Wear" at Achive.org -- It isn't a match, but thank you for the suggestion!

[Cheryl]

Well, I happened to see this, so here's a bonus bump. Thank you for not abandoning this search - we like solving mysteries for questors who care! I'll keep thinking on it, too.

[M—]

bump

[Justanotherbiblophile]

bump

[M—]

bump

[M—]

bump

[M—]

bump

[Guvnorium]

Ringing the Changes by Robert Silverberg seems to fit the description. There is a Kindle anthology on Amazon with the story in it for like three bucks if you want to check it out, since I can't find a description online

[Kris]

Ringing the Changes by Robert Silverberg - Guvnorium's suggestion

From www.worldcat.org - "A collection of short fiction by Robert Silverberg. Stories include "To See the Invisible Man", "The Pain Peddlars", "The Sixth Palace", "Flies", "Halfway House" and "To the Dark Star". Silverberg provides an introduction to each story."

[M—]

Thank you both! I'll try getting a copy from the library first, and see how lucky I get!

ETA -- Tentatively, I think Guvnorium's suggestion is spot-on. I'm seeing this description available online:

“Ringing the Changes” features a malfunctioning body switching service which complicates the lives of its customers but also offers new and permanent options for change.

https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2015/11...

Super promising! I'll check back after I've been able to read it.

[Guvnorium]

M— wrote: "Thank you both! I'll try getting a copy from the library first, and see how lucky I get!

ETA -- Tentatively, I think Guvnorium's suggestion is spot-on. I'm seeing this description available online..."

Hope it's the one you were looking for. I had a similar situation. I read this in a version of the collection "Needle in a Timestack" back when I was eleven or twelve (way too young for some of the stuff in there, but I loved it.) There are multiple Silverberg collections by that name, and I forgot the name of this particular story, and the fact the collection on Amazon with this name doesn't have it just confused things for me. A couple years ago, I realized I couldn't remember the name, found your thread, and bookmarked it. A couple weeks ago, I remembered part of the title, and found it after a bit of searching.

[M—]

Guvnorium, you were absolutely correct! Huge kudos to your memory!

I'm amused that my own memory was solid on the hand-raising detail:

"Can you hear me? If there has been a proper matching of body and mind, please raise your right hand."
The changer raises his left hand.

...but completely off on the climax of the story, where (view spoiler)[the young body 'stolen' was actually that of a terminally ill youth, because the old man had wanted to live out the rest of a lifetime in peace and quiet and, it implied, away from his nagging wife. (The narrator seemed to feel it fair enough to give the youth his aging but longer-to-live body plus the nagging wife, though.) (hide spoiler)]

I think I would have originally read this in the McCaffrey anthology, Alchemy & Academe, but the library lent me a copy of the Silverberg collection, To the Dark Star 1962-69 for my purposes this time.

Thanks ever so much again.