Began Reading Great SF Stories of 1945

For some reason, the initial article I had written here, which was quite extensive and involved a review of sorts of three short stories from the book Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 7 (1945) (they are The Waveries by Frederic Brown, The Piper's Son by Lewis Padgett, and Wanted--An Enemy by Fritz Leiber), was mysteriously deleted...with no trace of it remaining.  I don't remember ever doing such a thing, so I'm not very happy about this, as you might guess.  I'm backdating this entry to the original posting date (May 13) even though right now, as I am writing this, it is May 18.  I don't know what happened to that other article.  What follows is a replacement...

Anyway, this book is part of a series covering, year-by-year, the period from 1939 to 1963.  I selected the one for 1945 at random: I just reached into my box of books and pulled out this one! As for the first three stories in it...

Frederic Brown was a great science fiction short story writer and was my favorite when I was a kid, since my father had a couple of his collections that I was able to read several times over.  The Waveries involves what happens when aliens composed of radio waves invade Earth and feed off humankind's own radio waves and electricity, essentially permanently shutting down everything in technology dependent on them.  How humanity ingeniously adapts to its predicament is the positive message from this story...

The Piper's Son presents an interesting situation: a worldwide nuclear holocaust has already been envisioned in this 1945 tale, the very year that such a weapon was first produced and sadly used.  One byproduct of the mutations that the radiation from this disaster produces is a number of people who possess telepathic powers.  How these people balance the fears of others about their abilities with their obvious use to society is a theme of this story...and how one of their children's vivid daydreams may imperil everything.  The author Lewis Padgett is actually a pseudonym for the husband and wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  Under the name Padgett, they also wrote Mimsy Were the Borogroves, my all-time favorite sci-fi short story, in 1943...

Wanted--An Enemy, by Fritz Leiber, examines how close to being a warmonger a pacifist can be. Such a pacifist travels to Mars to try to coax the Martians he finds there to stage a mock invasion of Earth in order to end its own wars and unite the planet in the face of a common enemy.  Of course, his scheme backfires, but how do things go wrong and what does he do about it? Read it...the final line in this story is unforgettable.

Well, this replacement article doesn't do justice to my wiped-out original, but it covers the basics.  Maybe I'll just have to back up my future writing in another file as a precaution to avoid a repeat erasure...