The Lost Short Story

[Lanen]

OK, folks, whoever is still around - I think we've had one of these before, but I'm too lazy to go void diving to look it up!

I read a brilliant short story once - basic premise was a time machine, but the inventor used it to go back and, e.g., tell Mozart, right before he died, that his music would live forever. It was very moving, very hopeful.

Can't remember the author or the name of the short story. Can anybody out there help? I've been trying to remember this for years!

Cheers,

Lanen, with memory like sieve...

[Elwen]

hmmm.... no idea. But surely, if the story is anywhere out there on the web (or just a discussion about it) there should be a chance of finding it through google - if you know just a few more details about it?

[Lanen]

That's the problem, really, I don't remember more of it than that. I know it was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late 1980s/early 90s, but have no idea who the author might have been. It was brilliant, darn it. :(

[lithorose]

You might check with a librarian- libraries sometimes keep books that list articles of all these magazines. And does the magazine have a website?

I once trolled through IMDB's ENTIRE anime list from the 80s to find a cartoon I watched as a small child, with "a small girl with an upside-down bow and a kat, and some hills that looked pretty wild". And darn if I didn't eventually find the name of it!:D

[Haldomere Banks]

I think that somebody else already found it for her.
See here (http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:_YBAzgXHj5cJ:www.coolscifi.com/forums/showthread.php%3Ft%3D198266+%22Magazine+of+Fantasy +and+Science+Fiction%22+%22time+machine%22+mozart&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us).


The whole story is posted at http://www.htg.tartu.ee/~c4trinx/bookish/Ray%20Bradbury/Ray%20Bradbury%20-%20Quicker%20Than%20the%20Eye.txt

In the Afterword, Bradbury said, "Last Rites" wrote itself because I am the greatest lover of other writers, old or new, who ever lived. I have never been jealous of any writer, I only wanted to write and dream like them. That makes for an enormous list, some of them first-class ladies as well as writers first class: Willa Cather, Jessamyn West, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Weelty, and, long before her current fame, Edith Wharton. "Last Rites" shuttles in Time to pay my respects to three of my heroes, Poe, Melville, and a third writer, nameless until the finale. It crazed me to perceive that these giants died thinking they were to be buried unknown and unread. I had to invent a Time Machine to celebrate them on their deathbeds.Of course, he's only talking about writers, not composers. Maybe there was a series of related stories.

Hjal

[Lanen]

Dear Hjal,

No, that was the story, for sure. I guess I just added Mozart out of my own sense of 'unappreciated genius in his own time'. Thanks, though!