Still More Sci-Fi Short Stories from 1945

As I continue reading through Isaac Asimov Presents: The Great SF Stories 7 (1945), I am amazed at the insight and prophetic vision that some of these writers have shown.

In The Vanishing Venusians, by Leigh Brackett, settlers from Earth on Venus (well THAT wasn't exactly prophetic, was it) encounter dangerous life forms native to that planet that they must conquer in order to survive.  But leave it to human nature for people come up with the most ingenious ways to completely wipe out their biological competitors...while at the same time appearing to be heroic in the process. Decades later, a pang of guilt about what happened to native Americans and their culture, along the demise of the once millions-strong buffaloes in the American West would become an accepted part of our own national consciousness...but in 1945 Brackett laid it all out in this great allegorical tale.

Into Thy Hands, by Lester Del Rey, is a post-apocalyptic tale which involves a group of robots that a wise scientist/engineer had built and programmed to lay the foundation for the resurgence of humanity.  Yet there is doubt about the plan's success when one of the crucial robots, misinterpreting some Bible verses he is exposed to, mistakenly sees himself as Adam and begins to impose the Garden of Eden story on his environment.

The third story, Henry Kuttner's Camouflage, examines what it truly means to be human, when an engineer, after a terrible accident destroys the rest of his body, is reduced to essentially a brain with connections, within a life-supporting mechanical box.  In this story, this individual retains his identity...even maintaining his marriage, although many around him doubt his humanity.  An attempt to hijack an atomic plant he is guiding on a spaceship to the Jovian moon Callisto brings the debate to the foreground, as the criminals on board, trying to wrest control of the ship from him, simultaneously debate with him while trying to find where he is hidden in order to "turn him off"...like a machine.  That this story discusses a concept like an atomic plant twelve years before the first operational nuclear reactor in the world sounds impressive...until you realize that another science fiction tale from three years earlier discusses in detail a nuclear plant meltdown...36 years before Three Mile Island and even years before the atomic bomb was first detonated!   

I have five more stories to read in this book...and then I'll reach back into my big box of old sci-fi anthologies and randomly pull out another one...