Fish Tank
I found it! Oscar lives again! Hooray!
And not only did I find it! I also found the HTML version, as it appeared on tale.com so many years ago! I've reworked quite a bit of the HTML, but having a starting point saved me hours of work to get this story on line.
Click on the banner to go to the story.
This is not a Sims story and it has no illustrations. This is a science fiction novella, originally published in the June 1995 issue of
Analog magazine. It got bumped off the cover by the Black Horse rocket, but nevertheless
Fish Tank went on to win the Anlab award for best science fiction novella published in 1995.
Careful now; this is a 20,000-word
novella. Unless you read very fast, don't plan to read the whole thing in one sitting.
Amusement: The artist who did the interior illustrations for the magazine (whose name just won't come to mind at the moment darn it) spent a week painting a really magnificent cover painting for this story. Even though it wasn't published, the painting fetched at auction about twice as much money as I was paid for the story.
If you spot any typos or formatting errors, please let me know, preferably in this thread. This version was made from my original manuscript, but I do know that the editor at tale.com fooled with it some. (Much to my annoyance at the time.) As far as I know, the changes were all in the punctuation, but you never know, y'know.
I hope you enjoy
Fish Tank!
Fish Tank, Copyright ©2007 by Gregory Bennett. All rights reserved.
This story may not be published or distributed in any form whatsoever.
I'm deadly serious about this one, so don't even think about it.
Of course, if you'd prefer to read paper, you're welcome to print out one copy for your personal use only. It should print quite nicely.