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Best plot twists in short stories you have read (spoilers, duh)

all fictions

all fictions

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Exactly as said on the title. What extremely good plot twists (you know, the ones that can make you re read the story again with a whole new perspective) have you encountered in reading short stories? You can hide the twist in spoiler tag if you want to.

I begin.


The House of Asterion by Jorge Luis Borges, a fairly known one I think (but I will still put spoiler tag to be safe). A simple enough story, in first person, in which the eponymous narrator (and apparently child of a queen) describes his isolated life and limited social interactions from being pretty much forced to stay in his lonely, infinite house (he is apparently monstrous in appearance, as he once tried to go out and people screamed in fear). As is the case with most short stories in 1st person, his cryptic allusions become increasingly bizarre as the story advance, and the details he leaves out or sparsely describe make one doubt of his sanity (which he claims to possess in the first lines). You finally more or less guess what's going on once he makes mention of nine men who come every nine years and whom Asterion kills. He finally expresses the desire for a saviour to one day come to free him, and wonders ''Will he be a bull or a man? will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? or will he be like me?''

If you still don't get it, here are the last lines,
"Would you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus "The Minotaur scarcely defended himself."



Another one I quite like of is Despoilers of the Golden Empire by Randall Garrett (you can read it here), though it is more of a novella. A fairly typical space opera sci fi, all right: you have this advanced civilization, an Empire (risen from the ashes of a previous Empire) with a great need for this particular ressource, gold, which is apparently more important in these times than mining for coal or uranium, or drilling for petroleum. To remedy to this problem, it sends ships led by Commander Frank, our protagonist, on an expedition to an alien world, far away from the Empire, in search of the gold it needs in order to keep operating. Follow the exploration, then the victory of Frank's army over the alien natives thanks to their technological superiority, and the latter settlement in the new colony. Simple, right?
Except this is not really what the story is about at all.

You see, the author made clever use of terminology , very fancy and scientifically advanced language, as well as excact translation to make you believe that this is what it is about. The important fact is, this short story is not sci fi at all:

And thus died Francisco Pizarro, the Conqueror of Peru.

It's historical fiction.



My third choice: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (you can read here). As opposed to the two examples mentionned before, it's not a plot twist that completely changes how you look at the story. It's just a clever one. It was also one of the first scifi works I ever read (I think I was 13), so I do look back on it fondly (apparently, so did Asimov, calling it his own favorite).

Anyway, it is more or less the same story spread across time, throughout the entire history of the human race and the universe itself, with each time someone asking a computer (everytime a version of the same basic one, the Multivac) the eponymous last question: can entropy be reversed? And each time the same answer is given: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. Eventually, just before the heat death of the universe, the remaining humans (by now bodiless entities) merge one by one with humanity's hypercomputer, the now Cosmic AC. Still the same answer as the last question is asked once again.

It takes longer than the lifetime of the universe to come up with an answer (the now bodiless and omniscent computer is thinking it through in hyperspace).

Answer,
Yes, it can. How?

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And there was light.
I admit I genuinely laughed at that, going all ''hahaha, oh no, he didn't!''. It is a sharp contrast to how I disliked The Last Answer.
 
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In the HP Lovecraft story The Outsider, the amnesiac protagonist escapes from a decaying castle, climbing a tower and crawling up though a trapdoor only to bizarrely find himself in a graveyard rather than atop the tower. He then goes searching for clues about what is happening, and comes upon a party.

When he enters everyone runs screaming; he looks to see the reason, and views a hideous decaying monster nearby. He's so horrified and stunned that he staggers, reaches out and accidentally touches the outstretched hand of the abomination, then runs away in terror himself...
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
A.E. Van Vogt's "The Monster". If you read the story, you will see that the aliens (called Ganae) will bring along the last remnant of a psychic humanity with them, so he won't discover their technological secrets to resurrect his long-gone race. It seems that they will become successful in their sacrifice. Then...

When the human encountered them for the first time, he already got what he wanted. He was just trolling the aliens mercilessly and their sacrifice was for nothing. Psychic humanity is back.
 
The Haunted Space Suit by Arthur C Clarke.

An astronaut in a sci-fi future takes a space suit out to do some maintenance outside his space station. While out there, he gets to thinking about another astronaut who died not long before when he had a suit malfunction while working on the same space station. He then wonders what they would do with the space suit the man died in. He figures they would simply repair it and put it back into use.

His mind starts preying on him, as it occurs to him he is quite possibly in the same space suit as the other guy died in. He starts wondering if it could be haunted. And it's about then that he starts hearing these little scratching noises from somewhere down near the legs of the suit. He tries ignoring them, but they get slowly louder, closer to the head end. All his hairs are standing on end by this point, and he's in a state of barely restrained panic.

Then something touches the back of his neck. He screams so loud he breaks the mic, and jerks so hard he smacks his head against a hard part of the inside of the suit and knocks himself out.

He comes to in the infirmary aboard the space station, being treated for a slight concussion. Across the room he sees one of the other astronauts playing with...

the litter of kittens that the station's resident cat had just given birth to... inside the locker where the space suit he was out in had been stored. He had unwittingly taken to space with a live kitten inside his space suit.
 
One story I forgot:

A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman (which you can read here for free, in 19th century newspaper format and with litterary references as advertisements). The premise is extremely simple: a crossover between Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos, with the plot of the first Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet taking place in said universe. In this new setting, the Old Ones have awaken somewhen during the Early Middle Ages, and conquered and subjugated humanity (crushing a certain religion in passing), and have since them reigned over it. By 1881, Britain New Albion is ruled by the Queen Victoria (named as such because she was ''victorious'' in conquering Europe) and her quite human consort Prince Albert (I leave you to imagine the disturbing implications...) and the moon has been red for centuries.

Anyway, as I said, it roughly follows the plot of the first Holmes novel, with the narrator left unnamed (as is common in professionally published pastiches to write around trademarks by leaving characters unnamed) being a doctor returning to London from Afghanistan, where he fought ''gods and men'', and from which he returns wounded and extremely traumatized. Seeking accomodation, he finds a flat on Baker Street, which he will cohabit with a brilliant consulting detective. The two soon becomes embroiled in investigating a gruesome murder, similar to in canon...except the victim is a member of the royal family, recognizable to his number of limbs and green blood. This murder might be more than it seems, and possibly linked to the Restorationists, anarchists seeking to put down the Old Ones...

From what I have been told, the twist would have been realized by readers particularly knowledgable about Sherlock Holmes due to certain clues, but anyway:
The story is not simply a retelling in a Lovecraftian universe, both the narrator and the detective are not Watson and Sherlock Holmes, the two murderers- referred to as "The Tall Man" and "Limping Doctor"- are Holmes and Watson. So who were our protagonists all along? Moriarty and his right hand man Major Sebastian Moran. The heroes and villains have essentially switched places in this alternate universe.

In the end, Holmes and Watson manage to escape, leaving no clues as to their whereabouts. Moriarty asks Moran to burn his notes on the affair to keep secret the involvement of Restorationists, but he decides to keep them in a safe in his bank account to be put out once all the actors, including him, in this affair are dead. And the short story ends on the implication that something worrying happened in Russia (ruled by the Czar Unanswerable).



I also thought about mentionning The Lottery, but I have learned that it is actually taught in American middle school literature classes, so most posters here probably already read it or heatd about it.
 
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The Star by Arthur C. Clarke.

The chief scientifical officer of a human expedition to a nebula located several thousand light years away from the solar system experiences a crisis of faith, because amidst the debris left behind by the supernova that made the nebula, they encounter a Pluto like planet with a giant monolyth in which a humanoid civilization unable to escape its solar system before the detonation of the star, created a vault in which they stored their science, history and culture to the best of their ability.

With the final revelation in the story, said crisis of faith gets worse.

This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I have reached that point at last.
We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached the Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.
There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?
 
The (second) shortest horror story ever written:

The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock on the door.
 
The Painted Door by Sinclair Ross

Ann is the wife of a farmer in midwest Canada in the early 1900's. On a particularly cold winter, her husband decides to walk five miles in the cold and snow to visit his dad and help with the house. Feeling lonely and trying to keep herself occupied, she decides to paint the front door to kill time. As the hours pass and a snowstorm starts to brew outside, she feels lonely and incontent with her life and it builds up until her neighbor comes over to visit and to get out of the snow for a bit. Feeling so lonely at this point, she decides to have one night of passion with the neighbor so that she can be satisfied and go back to being a loving and dutiful wife. The next morning, she's told to come out to identify the dead body of her husband who had died in the cold and snow on the way to his father. As she cries, she kneels down beside him for a closer look.

His hands have paint stains that match the ones on the door. The husband had come home early and saw her cheating on him and decided to leave, meaning her one moment of weakness killed her husband.
 
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We could interprate it in any number of ways. The most happiest one I can think of is the guy being some kind of caretaker/curator of the Museum planet of Earth, and the knock is his replacement coming to relieve him.
 
Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's.

Well, not quite sure if it ends on a twist, exactly. More like an unexpected note of hope and wonder.

Rescue Party, by Arthur C. Clarke. Especially the last sentence or two.

The Nine Billion Names of God, by same, which may have one of the best endings period.

All The Way Back, by Michael Shaara.

The Road Not Taken, by Harry Turtledove.
 
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