What? Fredric Brown wrote "Arena?" I read that story in a magazine when I was just a child: my memory says it was in Readers Digest, though I don't know if that's true. I was really struck by it, particularly by the vulnerability of the protagonist. I mean, naked in an enclosed space, fighting for your life against some weird alien? (Maybe I read it in the bath.) A vivid sense of the story stayed with me, even though I forgot the details.
Another story I stumbled across back then was "The Sentinel." It made a big impact, too.
I also recall trying to read a strange sf book I found in my elementary school library, oddly enough. (Well, it was a very small town, and a very small school. The school was K-12 in two classrooms. So I guess the library was for all grades.) I was probably in grade 3 or 4.
Let's see if I can remember this correctly... The book was about a planet which had, due to some problems during colonization, developed a male-only society. They used biotechnology to produce new people. A female investigator comes from some off-planet authority, and along with the male narrator, discovers that girl children have been produced by this process, it's just that they were considered freakish and deformed and were killed. She upbraids the narrator for the intolerance and hypermasculinity of his unisexual/homosexual culture. There was a scene in which the narrator goes out for recreation and hurls himself with abandon into tangle of men that's like a cross between a bar brawl and an orgy.
I didn't really understand a lot of that at the time. It struck me as a weird book that was over my head. (I wonder what it was called or who wrote it... Delaney? Sturgeon?) And it was, considering that I was an 8 or 9 year-old JW kid, living in a tiny Prairie town. Still, when I look back, I realize I got a lot of early exposure to science fiction and fantasy, some of it pretty heavy stuff.
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"Arena" was indeed reprinted in Reader's Digest during the late 80's - early 90's. I remember it very clearly, because it surprised the heck out of me. Had a nice illustration, too, IIRC.
Yeah, I remember "Arena" in Reader's Digest too, but they cut out a lot of it to make it shorter
Good to see I wasn't just imagining things. I think the Clarke story, Sentinel, was in Reader's Digest too.
Was the mystery sf book this, by any chance?
http://mistful.livejournal.com/107372.html?thread=7845740#t7845740
Huh, that does sound awfully close! And the publishing date would be about right. I would need to flip through it to be sure... or see the original (and doubtlessly terrible) 80s cover art.
Athos! What a great reference. I hear that at Mount Athos they don't even allow female domestic animals.
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