best short stories to write a research paper on

This 1962 story from one of the most original authors of the twentieth century is a dystopian tale set in a vastly overpopulated future, in which the world’s population is around 20 billion. In this story, which formed the basis of the 1990 film Total Recall, a man named Douglas Quail learns of a special ‘holiday’ to Mars that can be implanted into the brain so one can experience a trip to another planet without having to go anywhere. Dick, ‘ We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’.ĭick (1928-82) has attracted a devoted cult following since his untimely death, and his work fuses Kafkan paranoia and fear over police states and totalitarianism with an interest in psychedelia, drugs, altered consciousness, and related paraphernalia of the 1960s.

We tease out some of the elements of this story in a separate post.Ĩ. Le Guin raises some deeply unsettling but important ethical questions in this classic story, which is told in the beautiful, eloquent prose for which Le Guin’s work is rightly famed.

But such happiness and prosperity has come at a terrible cost, for the success and contentment of everyone’s life is dependent on the suffering of a small child which is kept in miserable conditions in a room in the town. This story, like Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, is perhaps more correctly labelled ‘speculative fiction’: it’s set in the fictional town of Omelas, in which everyone is happy and prosperous. Le Guin, ‘ The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’.

What happens when all nine billion names are printed out? Well, that would be telling …ħ. Two men are hired to be the computer programmers for the monks’ task. They predict there are 9 billion different names in total, which new technology will allow them to itemise. This 1953 story is another which, like Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, is often given the title of ‘one of the best short stories written before the Nebula Awards were created in the mid-1960s’.Ī group of Buddhist monks think that, once every single name by which ‘God’ is known has been listed, the world – indeed, the whole universe – will end. Clarke, ‘ The Nine Billion Names for God’.

Best short stories to write a research paper on