Orbit 2

In the late 1960s, while a high school student, I read a strange SF novella called "Fiddler's Green."

Around 2001, having for a couple of years tapped into the collective consciousness of current and former Tulsans on TulsaTVMemories.com, the story resurfaced in my mind.

I could not remember the author's name or where I read it. I thought it might have been from one of my dad's Reader's Digest condensed books.

"Fiddler's Green" stuck in my mind particularly because I knew I had not fully understood it (and it is a great story.)

With Google, I found out that the author was Richard McKenna, and that I probably had read the story in the Orbit 2 anthology.

Here are a couple of online mentions of this unique story. If you are reading this, you may have found them, too:

Writer Robert Silverberg (whose juvenile novel, Lost Race of Mars, was probably the first SF I read) is said on AbeBooks.com to have called "Fiddler's Green" "...surely the most moving and profound desert-island fantasy ever written."

The July 2001 issue of Cloud Chamber (an online fanzine by David Langford) described it as a "disturbingly odd tale of escape from death at sea into a flawed consensus reality."

More at: http://tulsatvmemories.com/fiddlersgreen.html ( )