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May 27

Sci-fi story to ID

I believe a teacher read it to me back in grade school, so the story is probably 35+ years old. There was a single (male) protagonist and he's in an arena, being forced to fight an alien. The arena is split in half with some kind of force field separating them. For some reason I think there was something particularly bizarre about the alien, such as it was an enormous sphere-shape, but I could be conflating that with something else. I don't recall the outcome of the story; it could be that the human and alien figure out a way to cooperate or it could be that the man fought it and won. IIRC, it was being presented to us as "classic" SF, so I'm guessing the story is relatively famous within the genre, or at least was a major writer like Asimov or Bradbury. Any help? Matt Deres (talk) 19:52, 27 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Arena (short story). Nanonic (talk) 19:55, 27 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Which begat Arena (Star Trek: The Original Series) (The fight against the Gorn). Nanonic (talk) 19:59, 27 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I found the short story to be much better than the Star Trek episode. For one, the alien was much more alien, rather than just a man in a reptile suit. And the short story didn't have components for a cannon just lying around handy. The Star Trek episode did have Kirk refusing to kill the alien at the end, though, which was an interesting twist. StuRat (talk) 13:33, 28 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That's it - thank you! I was worried that the sphere shape was from some other story, but obviously not. I will need to track this down. Thanks again! Matt Deres (talk) 17:52, 28 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]