When I was a kid, I read A LOT. I devoured everything I could get my hands on, from William Shakespeare to John Grisham. Fortunately for me, my elementary school had an extensive library of donated books, and every few days, I would check out my two-item limit.
Capt. O.G. Readmore: he was like the Smokey the Bear of childhood literacy. In retrospect, I think he was also a schizophrenic homeless cat.
My favorite books were always anthologies. Getting to read an entire story in one sitting was perfect for a kid with a short attention span. My library had great genre fiction collections: horror and sci-fi anthologies with titles like A Cavalcade of Monsters and Amazing Worlds.
Some time around 1990, I read a story with time travel, robots, and mind control. I have always remembered this story because it was told BACKWARDS. Long before Christopher Nolan’s Memento or that X-Files episode, this little story told end-to-beginning blew my mind. It completely changed the way I thought of narrative. It affected me as a reader and writer for years after.
I grew up in the 80s and am obsessed with time travel. Who could say why?
But between my short attention span and the impressive volume of volumes I consumed, I forgot the title of the story. And the author. And the name of the anthology. I remembered the plot pretty well, but forgot every bit of information I would need to track down a copy. It wasn’t even worth asking a librarian. I’d sound like my grandmother trying to recall a movie: “the one with the guy who meets the girl and fights the other guy”.
As computers became more commonplace (yes, kids, there was a time when not everyone had them), I thought I would finally have a new method to find this lost gem. The Internet is an extraordinary repository of knowledge, and is literally full of tools called “search engines”. But I still couldn’t find the story.
Cutting edge technology, once.
I didn’t have any keywords- no words from the title, no character names, no publication date. Every search led to thousands of results for the same few common short stories. When I would pore over lists of sci-fi short stories, nothing was familiar to me.
So for many years, any time I had a conversation about life-changing stories, I would describe this lost tale. My interest would be renewed, and my futile search would be invigorated. Always to no avail. It seemed like I would never find my precious needle in the information haystack that is the Internet.
The Internet (artist's interpretation)
Then I heard about a website that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. WhatsThatBook.com is a site that allows people with fond but fuzzy memories to locate lost titles. Bibliomnesiacs like me can sign up and write a post describing the book as accurately as possible, using everything from character attributes to cover images. Literary-minded peers peruse the entries hoping, like the firemen of Fahrenheit 451, to hunt down the fugitive tomes.
I didn’t expect this to function as planned, as, to quote Dark Helmet, “Even in the future nothing works.” But I reckoned I might as well give this a shot. So, I put in the best description I could, highlighting the unusual structure. I cannot tell you how surprised and delighted I was to receive a response with the name of the story and author within ONE DAY!
This is how I felt. If you can't remember the name of the classic children's book from which I took this image, I have a website I can recommend...
In this age of very vocal complaint, I think it’s important to take the time to celebrate things that work as they should. And the next time I get the urge to rant about the rancor resulting from the anonymity of the web, I’ll remember that it was a stranger on the Internet who helped me find something I had been seeking for over 20 years.
By the way, the writer whose name I couldn’t recall was “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” co-author Henry Kuttner. The short story’s title?
“Happy Ending”.