Weekly Short Stories: '39 Sci-Fi, Part 2

This week I continued reading through the science fiction short story anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 1 (1939), which DAW published in paperback in 1979, as I read two more stories: Cloak of Aesir by Don A. Stuart and The Day is Done by Lester del Rey.  The former is about humanity's fate in a distant future under the yoke of alien conquerors while the latter goes thousands of years into the past as modern humans witness the end of the Neanderthals, which they supplanted...

Cloak of Aesir is the longest story in the book and may also be the one most loaded down with technical details...it might help you if you're adept at the intricacies of subatomic physics...I'm not.  Don A. Stuart is the pen name for John W. Campbell, Jr., the noted long-time editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.  The story revolves around an uprising of humans against the planet-wide despotic-but-relatively benevolent rule by the Sarn, a humanoid-like race that conquered Earth in a very destructive war some four thousand years earlier in our late twentieth century.  One man has invented a cloak...hence the story's title...that not only shields him from any weapon the Sarn can throw at him, but can also produce its own effects on the occupying enemy through the concept of "negative energy" (referring back to my aforementioned suggestion about subatomic physics).  The Sarn leader, a virtually immortal woman (their society is strictly matriarchal), is wise both in tactics of rule both over the humans and her own power-hungry rivals, but four thousand years is a very long time in which her foes can develop their own brilliant secret strategies.  How the story develops and ends...well, I'm not going to spoil it for you.  I will say this: the ending is worth plowing through all the technical details, much of which was over my head...

Much shorter and more to my liking is Lester del Rey's The Day is Done.  This is the writer who, three years later in 1942, would write Nerves, a story about a nuclear reactor meltdown, thirteen years before there was ever such a thing as a nuclear reactor!  Del Rey goes back in time and speculates about Hwoogh, the last Neanderthal on Earth.  Marginalized and ridiculed but still cared for by the band of Cro-Magnons he lives with, this is what I call a tear-jerker of a tale.  Hwoogh has his own memories of life with his kind, and how his world drastically changed with the advent of the "Talkers", which he called the Cro-Magnons.  Although it deals with the distant past, there are applications to this story in today's world, in any setting in which people find themselves marginalized and often demeaned and abused by others due to their disability, disfigurement...or even just looking different.  I strongly recommend The Day is Done, but you might want to keep a box of Kleenex handy should the tears start flowing...

And onward I march through this book: five stories down, fifteen to go...