More on 1945 Science Fiction Short Story Anthology

As I reported a few days ago in an earlier article, I've begun to explore some of my old short story collections (of other authors, not me), which tend to focus on the science fiction genre.  One series is a year-by-year review of the best in science fiction stories, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  The one I'm reading right now, titled The Great SF Stories 7 (1945), contains the best of the best from that year.  Here are some of my reactions to more stories from it...

Isaac Asimov, besides editing this anthology, also contributes one of the stories, titled Blind Alley.  It is actually a tale embedded within a much larger one: Asimov's own created futuristic universe within which he wrote many memorable stories, both short and in novel form, about the development of robotics, the initial human explorer/settlers, called "spacers", the ensuing Galactic Empire, and then the famous Foundation series of novels.  Blind Alley deals with the bureaucracy and red tape that permeates life throughout the entrenched Galactic Empire...and how one bureaucrat is able to play the system in order to outmaneuver his opponents and surreptitiously accomplish the fulfillment of his own hidden agenda.  Fortunately, his aims are benevolent...but are so well concealed in the red tape and authorization requests that the ending to this story is truly surprising.  This isn't the last time that Asimov pulled this feat of literary misdirection: the novel Foundation is loaded with it...

In Correspondence Course, by Raymond F. Jones, a wounded war veteran, while convalescing and grieving his recently killed girlfriend, reluctantly responds to a mysterious letter advertising a correspondence course touting how to become a "power coordinator" and thereby attaining the ability to harness energy and use it in a manner unimagined.  After the first few lessons, he realizes that, contrary to his initial suspicions, the course is legitimate and highly technical, using advanced mathematics.  He decides to visit the return address of the course, only to discover that it is in an isolated, run-down Iowa town where no one knows anything about the school sending him the material.  Well, not one to give away the ending, let's just say that it accomplishes two things for him and one important thing for the party that sent him the course. And it's out of this world!

Murray Leinster's First Contact is a story that I first read in a different anthology years before, so I was quite familiar with it when I reread it.  The premise of the story is that space explorers from Earth, while researching stars deep within the Crab Nebula, unexpectedly encounter an exploration ship from a completely alien society.  Both sides feel that the only workable solution to the encounter is to destroy the other ship and trace its origins...and destroy the base of the other's civilization...all in the interests of self-defense since neither side knows whether the other side has malicious intent or is possibly vastly superior with its technological capacity to destroy.  Thus a stalemate ensues in which the leaders of each ship try to think of a workable solution that allows all to survive the experience. How does First Contact, which shares the same title as a Star Trek movie but is a completely different story, end?  You should know better than ask me at this point!

That covers six of the fourteen stories in this volume, and more are forthcoming here.  One thing I appreciate about this book is the prefacing to each story that contains introductory comments by editors Greenberg and Asimov about the story's author and its nature and context. For example, in the intro to Correspondence Course, Asimov refers to the literary device of the "double-double-cross", in which the author subtly hints at a surprise ending, which the reader begins to suspect...only to have that ending abruptly turned on its head. That sort of thing happens a lot in many of these sci-fi short story classics, and is one of the reasons I love reading them...