Today I begin to discuss classic science fiction short stories as I move to those from the year 1940, as selected in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 (1940). Editors Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg had been touting how important writer Robert Heinlein had been this year and had planned to include three of his stories...apparently he didn't agree to the arrangements and they didn't appear. Maybe at some future time I'll discuss these stories and others of his. Instead, the book's first four stories are as follows...
THE DWINDLING SPHERE by Willard Hawkins
Presented as a diary of sorts spanning many years, this story describes the success of a new "clean" energy process that converts ordinary matter to energy through fission. Two consequences: the process is so perfect that it stymies further scientific endeavor and leads to a stagnant theocratic society run by dogma. But even more significant is that it eventually changes the very nature of the planet. Written five years before the atom bomb was exploded, The Dwindling Sphere is a treatise on how humanity needs to consider the broader consequences of their innovations, which may at first provide many benefits but in the long run can be harmful...
THE AUTOMATIC PISTOL by Fritz Leiber
This could more properly be labeled as a spooky crime story, with some hoods smuggling booze during the Prohibition era and engaging in their typically "hoodsy" banter. One of them has a special gun that he has put a hair trigger on...and he seems strangely obsessed with it, talking to it constantly in what seems to be a different language. One of his partners gets interested in the pistol, and the two criminals almost come to blows. Then, the gun owner gets rubbed out and the other ends up with the gun. But the gun seems to have ideas of its own...not exactly one of my favorite stories...
HINDSIGHT by Jack Williamson
It is well into the future and our solar system has been explored and settled to the outer planets. Holding it all together is trade, and a dictatorial pirate organization called the Astrarchy controls everything...and wants to control the different worlds, including Earth. Bill Wells leaves his friends on Mars to join this group as their leading scientist...he develops a special process that he believes will give them the needed edge to destroy the spaceships defending Earth. What happens in the subsequent battle leads him to implement a process he had developed to go back in time and change one pivotal event. Instead, he discovers that the future is as set as is the past...
POSTPAID TO PARADISE by Robert Arthur
A man discovers in his possession a set of large, exotically pictured postage stamps with El Dorado as the country on them. He soon discovers that simply by addressing something and sticking one of the stamps on it, it will be quickly transported away to that mystic land. After his old and sickly cat gets sent there...and back due to insufficient address, but now appearing much younger and healthier, the man's friend, seeing a beautiful young woman on one of the stamps, decides to mail himself there. What will happen?...guess you'll have to read it to find out. I thought this would be a good Twilight Zone episode, but it's more fantasy than science fiction. In my daydreaming, I have a special door that I can walk through to other places...the author's use of the postal system was original and innovative...
More stories from 1940 next week. Oh by the way, I didn't check but if you cut and paste the titles of these stories onto a search engine, you just might get them on the Internet to read...I imagine that the copyrights on many of them have expired and they are now public domain...
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