Weekly Short Stories: '39 Sci-Fi, Part 4

This past week I continued going through the science fiction short story anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 1 (1939), reading some more intriguing tales.  All the authors were familiar to me, from the wife/husband writing team of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner to L. Sprague de Camp and the series editor, Isaac Asimov himself.  Here's my reaction to each of them...

GREATER THAN GODS by C.L. Moore
This story, set about three hundred years into the future from its writing, examines alternate futures and how a simple decision a person makes can have a reverberating effect down through history.  A young scientist has a difficult decision to make: which woman he will ask to marry him.  As he looks at each of their three-dimensional pictures on his desktop, their descendants from centuries into the future call out to him through them, each one presenting how the world had turned out as well as how his original marriage went.  The two scenarios he observes point to diametrically different outcomes, with humanity in one dying out in lethargy and complacency and in the other having turned into a totalitarian, militarist nightmare of conquest, brutality and leader worship.  Forced into a decision in the end, he does something I first thought I had smartly figured out earlier...but no, then I suddenly realized that I had read this story before!

TRENDS by Isaac Asimov
One of Asimov's first published stories, Trends paints a picture of how in history the pendulum in society periodically swings back and forth between science and religious fervor.  His protagonist, John Harmon, has designed a spaceship in 1973 to take him to the Moon and back, but the people, led by religious extremists, see it as evil and protest the upcoming launch.  One of Harmon's own people betrays him and sabotages the launch...all looks lost.  But then again, will that pendulum begin to swing back in the other direction?  It's a good little story that, however, exposes the author's own hostility to religion as he depicts it being intolerant and anti-liberty.  Then again, I can't remember ever reading him ever discussing the brutality of state-sponsored atheism as enforced in the Soviet Union, China, and other totalitarian regimes during his lifetime...intriguing because Asimov himself was born in the USSR...

THE BLUE GIRAFFE by L. Sprague de Camp
Athelstan Cuff is a middle-age Englishman living in America with his wife and adopted son Peter.  Peter is sensitive about being adopted, and so his father sits him down and tells the story behind it, one that goes many years earlier in British colonial South Africa...more specifically the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now the nation of Botswana).  In one of the wildlife reserves there has been discovered something remarkable: a blue giraffe.  Cuff, a biologist working in Cape Town, is sent to investigate: a blue giraffe isn't the only anomaly among the animals there.  His investigation points to an earlier missing scientist, Hickey, and what he was trying to accomplish in this area.  In the process Cuff has one hilarious adventure after the other, culminating in the explanation as to why Peter was adopted.  This story was very funny, as most assuredly it was intended to be...

THE MISGUIDED HALO by Henry Kuttner
Not exactly a science fiction story, this story involves an extraterrestrial angel sent on a mission to bestow a halo of sainthood on a Kai Yung, living in Tibet.  On arriving there, he finds Kai Yung living in a drunken state of dissolution and concludes that this one has fallen into sin and no longer merits the halo.  Could it have been a mistake? The angel goes to America and finds a place called Tibbett in the Midwest...and a man named K. (Kenneth) Young.  He concludes that this may have been the intended recipient and places on him the halo, with it always hovering a few inches over his head and quite visible.  When Mr. Young, an advertising executive, awakens the next morning and gets ready for work, his wife points out the strange circle above him.  His subsequent antics while trying to hide it from others and the sequence of mishaps he experiences form the rest of the story, which I think would have played quite well as one of those humorous-type Twilight Zone episodes. I mean, what would you do if suddenly there were a permanent, visible halo over your head?

And the reading continues...