What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
This topic is about
Microcosmic Tales
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. Future man brought to present, doesn't have any useful knowledge [s]
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Maybe "Flirgelflip" by William Tenn, written in 1950 and collected in a few places http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
Here's a brief description of the storyhttps://books.google.com/books?id=8O4...
"In his hilarious comedy The Remarkable Flirgleflip, William Tenn pictured an expert on Martian art, with a well- paid job at a future university and a splendid academic reputation, who on being accidentally shipped back to the twentieth century could find no other job but washing dishes."
Looking up info on the Flirgleflip story, I foundhttp://www.storypilot.com/tt.php
which gives it as
"It’s difficult living in the intermediate era—the first to have an official Temporal Embassy from the future—because the embassy is always bossing people around and canceling promising research, but Thomas Alva Banderling won’ be stopped from sending his Martian archaeologist flirglefliper friend Terton to the past so that Banderling himself can get credit for inventing the time machine."
...and doesn't really sound right.
Looking through that page, there's also
"Renaissance Man" by T.E.D. Klein:
"When the new time machine randomly grabs a random man from the future, all the waiting bigwigs and reporters are delighted that they managed to catch a scientist for the six-hour interview."
...which has quite a good chance of being the one I'm thinking of.
It does sound like the T.E.D. Klein story is a better fit. Here's a list of places it's been collected http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
Mod
Lobstergirl wrote: "Forscha, did you figure out whether "Renaissance Man" by T.E.D. Klein was your story?"I read it and the story definitely matches the OP's description. I read it in Microcosmic Tales: 100 Wondrous Science Fiction Short-Short Stories.
Mod
Read in the eighties. Probably written in the fifties or so. Scientists bring a man from the future to the present, and he turns out to be a professor or something, but this means he knows a lot about something very narrow that doesn't even have any meaning to the present, and when they ask about future technologies, he's like, "I don't know. Well, the repairman came one time to fix the such-and-such, and I watched, and it had wires of different colors." and that sort of thing.