I’m not resuming my James Gunn series yet, but I happen to come across this story in a recent issue of Analog.
Review: “The Little Sailboat”, James Gunn, 2019.
This is a “Probability Zero” story. That’s an Analog feature of short-short stories. Many are humorous. Some, like this one, are fabalistic or outside of Analog‘ usual scope of hard science fiction.
Gunn, in Crisis!, was operating in science fiction guru mode. This is Gunn operating in, unfortunately, in sort of an Elijah mode.
A man builds a sailboat in his driveway. However, the driveway is “hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean”.
Since this story is sort of a combination of “The Little Engine That Could” and the building of Noah’s Ark, the sailboat is personified as “the Little Sailboat”, and neighborhood boys mock the Little Sailboat as they pass.
As men, these boys do all sorts of reprehensible things. They “cooked large slabs of meat on charcoal grills, drank cold beer, and ran their air conditioners”. Continue reading ““The Little Sailboat””