While I’m unwilling to guarantee it, I’d certainly be willing to at the very least give great odds that this was the only story ever published in the more than forty-year history of Space and Time magazine to be adapted for television. Of course, once TV gets done adapting a story, the result can sometimes be unrecognizable, as was the case in this instance, but still—”Floater,” from the Winter 1983 issue, was indeed made into an episode of Tales From the Darkside under the title “Fear of Floating.” It starred Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson, and first aired on May 25, 1986.
The short story as written tells the tale of a man for whom gravity does not work. It had what I felt was a bittersweet ending, sort of like the one in the “Time Enough at Last” episode of The Twilight Zone. (You know, the one with Burgess Meredith as the guy who breaks his glasses.) But by the time Laurel Entertainment got through with its rewriting, there were buckets of blood. Seeing my name on the screen was fun. Seeing what came after … wasn’t.