You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO request is from Jerrica, who is hoping to help out a library patron:
I work in a library and someone is looking for a short story, but cannot remember the title. The person thinks it is Ursula Le Guin, but the anthologies we had on hand didn’t contain it.
In brief, the story is about this land where people are given some kind of an aptitude test (by the government) and careers suggested for them based on their performance. The main character had always wanted to be an artist, but the test says that he has to be a miner. He rails and rants and appeals, but to no avail. So he ends up in this mining place and just hates it. He keeps appealing, but all this requests are turned down. So he slowly adjusts to the place, its roughness and brutality – and makes a life.
One day he discovers some strange minerals in the mines, and takes it home to play with. Over time he creates a whole array of artistic creations that others come to like. And so his life goes on. And then one day there is an urgent missive from the ministry/government that they had screwed up – and that his tests had indeed showed that he needed to be an artist. This never happens they said, but we will make it right.
So he is shipped off to this artists paradise. And once there he realizes he hates these people – they are too airy-fairy and just live in their own heads, and that he wants to go back to his life as a miner and that over time he had come to like its roughness and the space he had built within it.
Anyone recognize this?
Monkey Sonatas
by Orson Scott Card
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No, but I’d love to read it. Back before the Internet we used to say “All knowledge is contained in fandom.” I’ll check with some of my more elderly, yet well read, SF fan friends and see if they recognize it.
This rings the very faintest of bells but I can’t pin it down… I want to say I read it in a science fiction anthology in the 80s?
One of my friends said this question was asked on Reddit some months back but no one had an answer. Don’t give up though, we’re still searching the hive mind memories.
I have no suggestion. I’m just gleeful at the idea of someone naming their daughter JERRICA!
<– 80s Jem and the Holograms fan
Ugh, I hate it when that happens! I’ve had the same issue with another story for years and I would also swear I read it in a sci-fi anthology as a teen in the late 90s.
The plot was that heterosexuality was criminalized and socially abnormal, while homosexuality was the norm. A hetero couple had to sneak around and they were busted by the cops.
I saw a short video on YouTube that had the same plot in the last few years, but this was a story that predates YouTube.
Did my brain make this up or was this an actual story?
I think if maybe by Sheri Tepper… But I can’t remember which one… would love to know as this sounds like just the sort of thing I would love. I do hope the answer is posted here.
This isn’t going to be super helpful, but I wonder if the story in question is a retelling of Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills. In that novella, the protag works in an iron mill (obvs), but he makes statutes out of the waste material from producing iron (korl), and middle class visitors to the mill appreciate his artistry. The ending is totally different (LitIM is way tragic and depressing!), but the plots are so similar, it feels like there might be a connection.
Thanks, @Emma Barry. I was intrigued by your description and so went to the Big A, there are several versions, one was free so naturally that’s the one I went for. I note there is also a study guide for the book.
https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=Life+in+the+Iron-Mills&ref=nb_sb_noss
You might try checking Zena Henderson’s work.
@EC Spurlock I love Zena Henderson, especially the Nothing Box but her work is so hard to find.
@HeatherS–I KNOW THAT ONE! I remember it has a scene in a bar and a lesbian couple is ejected for being in the wrong place, and the het couple (she’s trying to pass as a man) are afraid the police, called “Mothers” will find them out. It’s not in the Playboy Book of SF or either of the Dangerous Visions collections (I just looked) but I’ll keep checking.
WE MAY HAVE A WINNER! Orson Scott Card’s THE MONKEY SONATAS. A search of Google Books found the story of Cyril who wants to be a carpenter but is told he has to be a miner because he’d be unhappy as a carpenter. Here’s a link: https://bit.ly/2PoGSvK. Please let me know if this is correct, so I can share it with my older-than-dirt science fiction pals who kept searching.
I was thinking Orson Scott Card as well, but I was stuck on “Unaccompanied Sonata” and I knew that wasn’t it.
Can I just say that the fact that this HABO is apparently an Orson Scott Card work is a bit of a bummer? It was a fun scavenger hunt (as I’m sure others did, I enlisted the help of a couple of friends who are much more knowledgeable of SF than I am to see if they knew what the HABO might be), especially with @DarleneMarshall popping back in to keep us updated. However, since Card revealed himself to be homophobic and opposed to marriage equality, I’ve put him in the same category as Marion Zimmer Bradley and the Eddings: yes, these people wrote some books I once enjoyed, but knowing what I know now, I can’t separate the dancer from the dance.
Heather S’s story is “The Crooked Man” by Charles Beaumont, which first appeared in Playboy in 1955.
@DiscoDollyDeb, I agree with you 100%. I loved so many books by those authors and then I found out stuff, I can’t read them again.
@passingthru–Yep, you’re correct about “The Crooked Man”. It must have stuck in my mind, and that’s why I looked first in THE PLAYBOY BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION. I’m surprised it wasn’t in there.
Thanks, it was itching in my brain because I knew that story!
Incidentally, according to one of the friends I had asked for help with the HABO, “The Monkey Sonatas” can be found in a massive Orson Scott Card collection, MAPS IN A MIRROR, which collects his stories published between 1977 to 1989.