Reading all the hugo award shorts chronologically part 3— Avram Davidson's "Or All the Seas with Oysters"

 ★ ★ ★ ★½

This one especially reads like a classic. The reader is brought to a bicycle shop that one can only imagine is a charmingly crowded place with old-timey bicycles. The dialogue feels like that, too. One of the owners is a womanizer, while the other always has his nose in a book. Having imagined a bike shop in the 1960s, I almost forgot that this could go any other way... why would the nerd be talking about insect metamorphoses? What could metal needles "evolve" into, if they had the capability? And would they be intelligent? And then, curiosity kills the cat. I liked this one because I could imagine an easy adaptation of it. The existence of the creature is never explicitly confirmed, and we are left with the aftermath of a struggle between human and technology, or what technology could become. You'd never have to see it to know it was terrifying. A bicycle is so mechanical, so the way that Davidson writes about it almost mimics modern fears of AI—speculation that it has the power to overtake us but merely chooses to lay dormant... Anyways...

Link to it and the list~!