This early Ursula K. Le Guin story, her second published, depicts a far future Earth where humanity struggles to regain ground lost by natural disaster. A new repressive religion makes progress slow for those who value a fidelity to reality and those who would make the tools to measure truth are punished by those who only value their own position and obedience to authority.
First published in Fantastic Stories Of Imagination, February 1963
I figure I had spotted the cover art, looked at the title, probably in an ebay auction, and became slightly obsessed with finding it.
I even wrote the New Jersey Historical Society about it, they have all of William Hamillton Osborne’s papers, apparently – but to no avail.
In trying to find it I found out a bit about the author.
William Hamilton Osborne (1873-1942) wrote at least 274 stories (a couple of handfuls of which got reprints), but at the time of this writing only one of them is even listed on ISFDB.org (and that’s a reprint).
Then nothing happened.
Then, all at once, I got the whole issue – just after it was scanned late in 2022! And I got the scan and I made a PDF out of it.
About that experience I wrote this:
“i havent read the story all the way through, but in processing it for a PDF i read from every page and can tell you that the idea seems VERY NOVEL despite there being in it…
*a scientist, and his beautiful daughter*
the scientist has a ‘machine’ – a kind of time machine (?) – but it also seems like more of a ghost story
and, from what my eyes spotted hear [sic] and there THE HAUNTED CORRIDORS appears to deal with ‘the eerie’ as Mark Fisher described it – rather than ‘the weird’ [in his book The Weird And The Erie]
then they go to Egypt! and ‘CLEOPATRA’ makes an appearance, kinda
and the ending seems pretty cool, its [sic] very proto-Lovecraftian”
Then, very recently, it sprung to mind and I passed it on to my friend Tommy Patrick Ryan and he has been so kind as to narrate it for me, and for you and for everyone! And so here it is:
The Haunted Corridors by William Hamilton Osborne
read by Tommy Patrick Ryan
|MP3| – 1 hour and minutes 37 seconds [UNABRIDGED]
first published in Mystery Magazine, October 1, 1918 |PDF|
The great and powerful narrator WAYNE JUNE has recorded, I proudly say at my prompting, the most wondrous and definitive audiobook of Edgar Allan Poe’s Morella ever recorded.
William Hamilton Osborne (1873-1942) wrote 
