Short Stories
You can read one of these well-crafted tales in a single sitting, and still come away with plenty to think and talk about.
Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery
Author: Miscellaneous
Ages: 9-12
Publisher: Out of print
Science Concepts: Mass, weight, volume
This fine collection features H.G. Wells' The Truth About Pyecraft, a wonderfully entertaining look at the difference between mass, weight and volume. This story also provides a glimpse into the life of an English gentleman in the Victorian era. You can find this book in your local library or buy it used online.
Excerpt: (from The Truth About Pyecraft)
It was really a most extraordinary spectacle, that great, fat, apoplectic-looking man upside down and trying to get from the ceiling to the floor. "That prescription," he said. "Too successful."
"How?"
"Loss of weight – almost complete."
A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories
Author: Ray Bradbury
Ages: Adults and young adults
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1998
Science Concepts: Astronomy, rotation, revolution, planets
This short story collection features All Summer in a Day, an account of children living on a planet where the sun shines for only a few minutes every nine years. In this world, science dictates the rules for survival.
Excerpt: (from All Summer in a Day)
A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Ages: Adults and young adults
Publisher: Scribner, 1999
Science Concepts: Temperature scales
This fine collection features A Day's Wait, a short, amusing story of a boy who confuses centigrade and Fahrenheit scales. Beautifully written, it is also a look at Hemingway's descriptive talents.
Excerpt: (from A Day's Wait)
"About how long will it be before I die?"
"You aren’t going to die. What’s the matter with you?"
"Oh, yes, I am. I heard him say a hundred and two."
"People don’t die with a fever of one hundred and two. That’s a silly way to talk."
"I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can’t live with forty-four degrees. I’ve got a hundred and two."
A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories
Author: Ray Bradbury
Ages: Adults and young adults
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005
Science Concepts: Dinosaurs, Theory of Relativity, the Heisenberg Principle
More wonderful science fiction by the acclaimed Bradbury, this time about going back to the time when dinosaurs were the dominant species. This story can spur discussion of how seemingly insignificant changes in the past can influence the future, leading to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the Heisenberg Principle and other ideas about how scientists view the universe.
Excerpt:
Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus rex... It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior.
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For more information contact Pat Dixon at pdixon@magnet.fsu.edu or (850) 644-4707.
