I continued on with my look back at excellent short science fiction from the past as I moved to the year 1948, using the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948). Here are my reactions to the first six tales from that book...
DON'T LOOK NOW by Henry Kuttner
"Don't look now" is the frequent comment made by what appears to be a very paranoid and delusional man to a reporter in a bar. He is convinced that Martians have invaded and infiltrated Earth and are all around us...third eye and all, just like that old Twilight Zone episode made a few years later. He uses the kind of fervent, detailed language paranoids use that often gets listeners hooked on their narrative, which can be pretty farfetched. How it all ends...this story is pretty brief...I leave it for you to possibly read...
HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES by H. Beam Piper
This is a story about an alternative history. In 1809 Prussia a British diplomat traveling to Vienna in the midst of conflict with France's Napoleon walks around the horses at a stable...and disappears. That causes enough consternation for the people around him, but from the perspective of the new, parallel world he has entered that has no Emperor Napoleon in it, the people there are just as confounded by his sudden unexplained appearance and historically absurd rantings. It's a good history lesson if you're unfamiliar with this era and even delves back into our own Revolutionary War...
THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN KINGMAN by Murray Leinster
One of those psychiatrists of the time who was into the trend of applying electroshock therapy to their patients has his eyes set on John Kingman, diagnosed as a delusional paranoid who has been a patient at a mental institution as far as anyone can remember. The doctor goes back into the records and discovers he was first admitted in the late 1700s! And what about those six fingers on each hand and his tendency to sketch highly technical drawings that illustrate science and engineering principles yet undiscovered? The story draws a line between true science and "pop" science and suggests that not knowing the difference can bring some regretful consequences...
THAT ONLY A MOTHER by Judith Merril
This is a somber apocalyptic tale about a young woman carrying and giving birth to her baby daughter in an post-nuclear war environment where a large percentage of the newborn have serious birth defects and infanticide runs rampant as a result. The most disturbing story by far in this group...
THE MONSTER by A.E. Van Vogt
Earth has been decimated by war, wiping out all life. Aliens bent on conquering the planet for their own can resurrect life from the ashes. Looking for the causes of the catastrophe they keep trying to bring back people from the past, but none of them can provide any answer. Finally they resurrect one of the most recent humans...and he instantly vanishes! And then the fun starts...this is the only story I know of that paints an optimistic picture of humanity after its complete self-annihilation...
DREAMS ARE SACRED by Peter Phillips
The third story of the six about an paranoiac, an institutionalized famed fantasy writer has slipped into his own fantasy dream...unwakeable...and the attending doctor enlists the aid of his pragmatic friend to enter that dream and bring the writer back to reality. Uh...does this possibly remind you of the movie Inception, which is based on people entering and messing with others' dreams? Seemed like a great original idea when I first saw it, but Peter Phillips had already laid it all out back in 1948...
That's it for this week. More sci-fi short stories from 1948 next week...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment