What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

SPOILER ALERT!
I read this around 1960-62 and it is adult level but okay for YA. It was a short story. It's about a lone survivor of a rocketship crash on an empty desert planet. He finds the ruins of an alien city and the city still has power. He selects a house to try to find shelter in and he figures out how to activate the shower, bed, furniture, food dispensers, but it's all alien and dangerous and injures him and makes him sick. Like the shower sprays toxic gas and the food makes him vomit and he nearly dies. But slowly he trains the house to respond to his needs. At last he is comfortable and getting his needs perfectly met, so he waits with excitement for rescue so he can share his discoveries with the crew. It ends with him watching the rocket land and the rescue team getting out and he raises his snout to the sky and hoots and waves his long green tail in greeting. The point is that the city changed him into an alien and he didn't know it. Please help me find this story..it (along with L.Sprague de Camp's "Wheels of If") was a turning point in my choosing the "scifi life."

"Enchanted Village" by Van Vogt (see description here http://jennre.wordpress.com/2012/05/1...)

Oh my gosh! Andy you are my hero. I have only been trying to find this for my whole life! I was only about 12 when I read it 55 years ago, but it cemented me as a permanently single-minded reader of scifi. At the same time I read "The Wheels Of If" by de Camp and though it was completely over my head at that tender age, I knew I had "come home" and I was hooked and stayed hooked. Thank you so much. I am heading over the Amazon now to try to find it. Sadly the Wheels of If seems to be out of print.

Glad to help. You can get used copies of "Wheels of If" on Abebooks http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Searc... by the way.

I currently live in Romania and shipping to here from home costs a fortune. I just found an old copy on Amazon and had it shipped to my home in AZ and will get it when I am next home. Thank you..it's been like Christmas for me today! I just got a Van Vogt anthology for my Kindle that has Enchanted Village with it. Again, thank you for helping me out.

Carolyn, did you check Guterberg Press? (Not sure how to spell it) they are working on getting every book that's out of copywrite loaded into their machine as an ebook. I don't know if they'll have it or not, but thought I'd throw it out there.

This and de Camp's book was "it" for you? For me it was being given a copy of Andre Norton's Witch World by the kid I sat next to on the school bus every day in 1969. After that, he and I took turns buying the rest of the series and swapping them back and forth. Started my life-long love of sci-fi and fantasy (which, for you young pups in the audience were not listed differently back in those caveman days.) I was living in Greece at the time, and getting our hands on those books was sometimes not easy. That's also where I read my first Anne McCaffrey and my first L. Sprague de Camp.

And now, to make you jealous--I got to meet de Camp and his wife and struck up a friendship with them the last few years of his life. I was shocked that no one had made him a purple pterodactyl, since the first book of his I ever read was The Purple Pterodactyls: The Adventures of W. Wilson Newbury, Ensorcelled Financier. I made him a stuffed one as a present the year before he passed, and gave it to him at a con we were both attending.

Wow Ann, you met de Camp!!! And knew him! If only I could have told him how his book impacted my young life and my entire outlook of perceiving reality as an endless mystery to be pursued. I was blessed to meet and have a conversation with Ray Bradbury and I did get to thank him, and tell him how his work impacted my young life, my personality, and was seminal in my approach to the life I went on to lead. It was a very satisfying moment, and even though I am sure he had heard it a million times, he was humble and expressed surprise, delight, gratitude, and thanks.

Thank you for your suggestion about Gutenberg. I hadn't thought about it.

Andy wrote: ""Enchanted Village" by Van Vogt (see description here http://jennre.wordpress.com/2012/05/1...)"
Andy, I got "Enchanted Village" in an anthology for my Kindle the day you answered. I saved it until the wee hours of this morning and I have had the EXTREME pleasure of reading it again. It was every bit as profound a moment as I expected it to be. Thank you so much for responding to my post.

You're very welcome.