I continued reading back through the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941) and covered five more tales from that pivotal year in our history. As is the case with many of these stories, three of them delved deep into speculation about the nature of time...some of this speculation can get to be a little tedious when you see the same paradoxes exposed. So, here are the stories I read...
TIME WANTS A SKELETON by Ross Rocklynne
A space cop crash lands on an asteroid as he catches up with the two crooks he plans to take back to Earth on their ship...but that vehicle gets ruined as well. Fortunately, a scientific research ship studying the origin of the asteroids happens to land just then and they offer a ride back. In the meantime, the police lieutenant discover an ages-old skeleton in a cave...wearing the ring of one of the criminals! Their ship slips back in time to when the asteroids were still one single planet...an amazing accomplishment. But other than the eccentric old genius professor running the research effort, the rest of the party seems obsessed with the skeleton...no one wants to be "it". Time travel paradoxes are all over the place in this story...the ending brilliantly solves the riddle of the skeleton...
WORDS OF GURU by Cyril Kornbluth
A precocious young boy with no internal moral compass is able to see beyond the physical realm and encounters a demonic entity he names "Guru", who gives him "words" to speak that cause terrible things to happen, including the deaths of others. This is a very short story, told from the boy's viewpoint, with an extremely jolting and disturbing final sentence...
THE SEE-SAW by A.E. von Vogt
Von Vogt had created his own science fiction "universe" that involved a galactic empire and a freedom-loving resistance movement. Within this movement were "weapon shops" that the author expanded upon in other stories. In The See-Saw, one such shop suddenly materializes in the present on Earth, and a reporter is allowed in. When the operators discover their mistake...that his presence threatens the course of history...they get him to volunteer on a most dangerous venture, hence the story's title. A.E. von Vogt, probably more than any writer of his time, loved to write about time travel and its various ramifications...so get ready for more of this should you decide to read it...
ARMAGEDDON by Frederic Brown
I've already reviewed this story...here's a link to it: [link]. Brown, like Ray Bradbury, was known more as a writer of "soft" science fiction...that is, he did not display much technical scientific detail in his stories to bolster their feasibility. So a little boy goes to a magic show in Cincinnati and saves the world with his water pistol...not much science going on here. But Brown's fiction placed ordinary people into extraordinary situations...in this sense he was a forerunner of Stephen King...
ADAM AND NO EVE by Alfred Bester
By far the best of the five stories I am discussing today, this is an example of "hard" science fiction as Bester goes into some detail discussing how a rocket inventor wanting to fuel his spaceship managed to cause nuclear fission...and subsequently destroy life on Earth from the subsequent chain reaction...using Iron. But as he instinctively crawls onward to what's left of Earth's seas, has life really been eliminated from this this charred and blackened world? The story's title points to the answer, one that is paradigm-shifting...
Next week I'll probably finish with the 1941 book and then head on to '42...
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