I Sing the Body Electric [Paperback]

"Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's is a Friend of Mine" - One fine summer's day, a man arrived at the train station in Green Town, Illinois - giving the name Charles Dickens.

"Christus Apollo" - A poem, speculating on how many worlds in the wide universe have seen the birth of a Christ child.

"The Cold Wind and the Warm" - The Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin is having a dull winter, when six male ballet dancers descend out of the blue for a 24 hour stay, looking for an unlikely new place.

"Downwind from Gettysburg" - Phipps says that's where we must stand, the only hearing place. (He's always dreamed of making a movie with a farmer and his son standing at the edge of the crowd listening to Lincoln's address.). Instead, he built a tourist attraction in Illinois with a robot Lincoln - and someone has now 'assassinated' the robot.

"The Haunting of the New" - Another story near Dublin's Royal Hibernian Hotel, but not with the same characters. Nora's family has lived at Grynwood for the last 200 years, each generation wilder than the last. (On Charlie's first visit, two rival ballet mobs, separated by a language barrier (Manhattan vs. Hamburg) were visiting, along with a Duchess. Nora greeted Charlie stark-naked at the front door, only to have the Duchess strip down in response as she came in.) Sometimes Marion brings his Pekingnese dog troupe, which always gets drunker and sicker than he. Now (years later) Nora offers to sell Grynwood to Charlie - and for the first time, the house has no weekend guests. What happened?

"Heavy-Set" - That's one of his nicknames, as well as Sammy (for Samson). He spends all his free time bodybuilding, but there's something not quite right about him.

"Henry the Ninth" - He's the last man in Britain, this December, because everyone else has finally given up, left the island, and relocated south. (Obviously written, I must say, by somebody who never lived through a Florida summer, but I love it anyway.)

"The Inspired Chicken Motel" - The family stayed there while looking for work in the Depression. The motel chicken laid eggs "right out of Revelation".

"I Sing the Body Electric!" - This was turned into an episode on the original Twilight Zone, which was OK, but the source is better. It begins the week the world ended - the day Tim, Tom, Agatha, and Father returned from Mother's funeral. So Father picked up a Fantoccini brochure on buying an Electrical Grandmother...

"The Kilimanjaro Device" - The narrator is one of the loyal readers of an old man who died in the wrong place at the wrong time; they've all chipped in to try to change that. The writer isn't named. If you don't recognize him from the context, look up Ernest Hemingway and start reading.

"The Lost City of Mars" - This really ought to have been in The Martian Chronicles; it explains how the dry canals were reborn. A very rich man, looking for the fabled lost city of Dia-Sao, had the canals refilled so that he could search for it by water (air and land expeditions having failed). Wilder and Parkhill (from the 4th Expedition) are invited to join the canal yacht party. Nobody quite knows why the city was abandoned.

"The Man in the Rorschach Shirt" - The doctor's shirts were an easy talking point with total strangers - designed by Jackson Pollack.

"Night Call, Collect" - When Mars was evacuated at the beginning of the war, Emil Barton was left behind in one of the Martian cities, alone. He recorded messages and set up the computers to call him at random, so he could hear a human voice. But at eighty, messages left by twenty-year-olds can be hard to take.

"The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place" - A gang of Dublin men show up at Lord Kilgotten's place to burn it down (some of them also appear in 'The Cold Wind and the Warm'). But the old lord himself answers the door, invites them in, and offers them a drink (asking them to wipe their feet, which they do). And nothing is ever as easy at you think it will be.

"The Tombling Day" - As the bodies of the old cemetery are moved to the new, Grandma has come to see William Simmons one last time. And the real tragedies of the deaths of the young are explored.

"Tomorrow's Child" - The baby was born healthy, but in the wrong dimension - he looked like a blue pyramid. A terrible problem for his parents, who can't communicate with him, and for him - he doesn't know what the 'normal' world looks like, never having seen it that way.

"The Women" - One of the 'women' is the ocean, luring the husband of the other woman to his doom.

"Yes, We'll Gather at the River" - A line from a hymn, which springs to mind since "the Lord giveth, and the Highway Commissioner taketh away." The new highway is being built 300 yards from the tiny hamlet of Oak Lane. (If you like this, read the opening chapters of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, particularly the definition of a bypass).