With this article I finish my review of the science fiction short stories that appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, which featured what the editors thought to be the best from 1971. Musically, that year produced some great albums, notably Led Zeppelin IV, Who's Next, and Marvin Gaye's timeless What's Going On...I remember the summer that year being entranced by his track Mercy Mercy Me. I also spent a lot of my free time that year catching up on some of the later Beatles albums that my sister got around to buying. I wouldn't exactly say that '71 was a terrible year in my adolescent life, but it was definitely "blah"...especially regarding school. I will say that in any year new things are learned that help me down the road...this year was very instructive in that regard. But enough of myself: here are my reactions to those final six stories from the book...
AUNT JENNIE'S TONIC by Leonard Tushnet
Set ten years into the future from the recounted events, a young, ambitious scientist describes the home and folk remedies of a woman from Central Europe, settled in New York City, whom everyone called Aunt Jennie. Over the years her tonics seemed to perform miracles on the elderly, rejuvenating them and considerably prolonging their lives...her own death at age 108 was from murder, not natural causes. The narrator works with Aunt Jennie on her products and discovers much of the underlying science, which he presents as his own work in the company he works at. He also rejects all of the religious and spiritual components she puts into her tonics, thinking only about how wealthy and renowned he will become from them in the future. After her death he tries some of the tonic on himself, and it all starts to unravel as you might expect from a story of this nature...
TIMESTORM by Eddy C. Bertin
Off in the future life is pretty easy...a man wakes up on Friday morning, the beginning of his typical four-day weekend. It's a life of luxury for his times, with his job about as easy as it can get and lots of his services automated and provided by robots. But unknown to him, it will be a very different morning as something called a "timestorm", caused by the collision of a nova with another star, will send a time shard into his home and send him to another time and reality...and an enormous building with cylinders that can transport him into reliving past time experiences through others' eyes. There were a lot different angles to this story, and that's the problem: I think the author tried to accomplish too much here. But he did get an important point across: messing with the past isn't advisable, because even the bad stuff that happened plays an important role in defining our reality and could cause some really bad stuff if they were erased from time...
TRANSIT OF EARTH by Arthur C. Clarke
Marooned on Mars with his four other partners dead and no rescue possible, an astronaut has one final mission: to record the transit of Earth and the Moon across the Sun as he is running out of oxygen. This story pointed out the precarious position that exploratory missions into space, the Moon or other objects were in (and still are, for that matter), with everything having to go mechanically right with the loom of disaster hanging over everyone if it doesn't. He has three ways of dying and must choose one, after reliving earlier memories of near-death experiences. It's a sad, touching story that also elevates the scientific study of astronomy in a way that the author...responsible for the great Space Odyssey series of novels...clearly felt. Clarke had an optimistic tendency with his science fiction stories to assume humanity would naturally keeping venturing out further into space after the Moon landings: this story is set in 1984...
GEHENNA by Barry Malzberg
Sometimes the shortest stories are the hardest to understand, this one depicting four interwoven human lives: a man, his future wife whom he meets at a Greenwich Village party, her current boyfriend whom she dumps for man #1, and her eventual daughter. Each story changes as well, presenting slight but significant changes in the setting and progression of events...but they all culminate in tragedy, nonetheless. I'm not sure what Malzberg was trying to accomplish here other than expressing the notion that life is futile...or maybe he just wanted readers to keep going through the story over and over again while discussing its possible meanings: some writers (James Joyce was a notable example) have been known to deliberately write cryptically to that end...
ONE LIFE, FURNISHED IN EARLY POVERTY by Harlan Ellison
A man entering his middle years has made a resounding material success of his adult life after undergoing a traumatic childhood in relative poverty, clawing and scratching his way through the rat race to put himself far above his childhood peers. And now he goes back somehow as an adult visiting his young boy self and trying to help him cope with his adverse circumstances. I've never read a "go back in time and correct the wrongs" kind of story when it didn't fail miserably and make things much worse...Ellison's protagonist here definitely has some issues to work out. This story reminded me of a similarly-themed Twilight Zone episode titled Walking Distance...
OCCAM'S SCALPEL by Theodore Sturgeon
Roughly stated, occam's razor is the supposition that generally the most plausible explanation for outcomes is the most simple and direct one...conspiracists tend to go in the opposite direction for their convoluted theories (check out today's QAnon, antivaxxer and Stop-the-Steal bozos). This story brings that up at the very end, after two brothers come up with a strategy to save the world following the death...of advanced old age and natural causes...of a shamelessly polluting tycoon who was by far the most powerful businessman on Earth. And now the task is to keep his successor, a young man whose penchant for incredible and often effortless success has been the hallmark of his life, from following his former employer's destructive policies. The change in the title from "razor" to "scalpel" points to what the brothers...one of whom was the tycoon's physician...cook up to accomplish this...
Next week I begin looking at standout science fiction short stories from 1972...
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