(Found) Short story collection taught in UK schools in 1980s

lanepe

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Hi

I'm searching for a short story collection that I think was on the curriculum in secondary schools in the UK in the 1980s.

I remember a few plot lines:

A human captive on an alien craft finds a pet and is eventually freed as the aliens feel him subjugating another creature is a sign of intelligent life

A man (a lawyer?) breaks a spaceship by telling it a paradox - something about all lawyers are liars - and the ship starts using more power to solve the paradox and shuts off the air supply

Any ideas?

Thanks
 
I have read these within the last few years. But can I access the relevant section of my memory bank? Currently the hippocampus does not seem to be cooperating.
 
I remember Ray Bradbury's Golden Apples Of The Sun being taught in our school in the seventies but can't remember the plots of any of the stories.
 
Hello (and welcome to SFF Chronicles)

I think your first story is a somewhat garbled (memory!) version of The Cage by A Bertram Chandler.

From Wikipedia:-

In his ironic short story "The Cage", a band of shipwrecked humans wandering naked in the jungles of a faraway planet are captured by aliens and placed in a zoo, where, failing in all their efforts to convince their captors that they are intelligent, some are dissected.
Eventually they become resigned to captivity and adopt a small local rodent as a pet, placing him in a wicker cage.
Seeing this, their captors apologise for the mistake and repatriate them to Earth, remarking that "only intelligent creatures put other creatures in cages"
 
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Your second short story is The Monkey Wrench by Gordon Dickson

Again from Wikipedia:-

In this story, Lowland society lawyer Cary Harmon drops in unannounced on the weather station of meteorologist Burke McIntyre, high in the Lonesome Mountains, a jagged chain of the deserted shorelands of Venus's Northern Sea.

Curious about Burke's hermit's existence, Cary queries to gain knowledge of how Burke works. The Brain, a newly installed computer, does all observations, and Burke, by himself, just sits at the desk and prepares weather data for transmission to the Weather Center down at the Capital City.

Cary tries to find fault in the machine, but Burke proudly argues that the Brain, "A big tin god", is invulnerable, that it can never break down.
Along the debate, Burke claims that any bank out of the twenty could handle any situation, and if a situation too big for one to handle arose, it just hooked in with one or more of the idle banks until it was capable of dealing with the situation.
"Theoretically, it's possible for the machine to bump into a problem that would require all or more than all of its banks to handle. For example, if this station suddenly popped into the air and started to fly away for no discernible reason, the bank that first felt the situation would keep reaching out for help until all the banks were engaged in considering it, until it crowded out all the other functions the machine performs. But even then, it wouldn't overload and burn out. The banks would just go on to considering the problem until they had evolved a theory that explained why we were flying through the air and what to do about returning us to our proper place and functions"
Despite that, Cary happily makes a bet that he could gimmick the machine in one minute. He successfully does so by throwing at the machine a metaphoric monkey wrench - a paradox;
You must reject the statement I am now making to you, because all the statements I make are incorrect.
With the Brain dedicating all of its banks to working on the paradox, the consequence of Cary's action finally bears down upon the pair, as the harsh negative temperatures of Venus rapidly sets in.
 
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Now you need to search for an anthology containing both those stories, I've done the spade work for you :giggle: (y)

@Vince W how much time do you need? :LOL: :ROFLMAO:
 
dannymcg - thanks so much, that's fantastic!

A simple Google quoting those two stories revealed my school book was The Penguim Science Fiction Omnibus (1973) and I immediately recalled the cracking book cover!

Oh, I was going to post a link to show but I don't have enough posts.

But thanks again.
 
Well done @dannymcg. I see I read this as recently as 2015, but had got nowhere near accessing it from the memory bank. Great anthology incidentally: 36 stories, combining "Penguin Science Fiction", "More Penguin Science Fiction" and "Yet more Penguin Science Fiction".

And many thanks @lanepe for the question.
 

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