I conclude my look back at 1941's short science fiction with the final five entries in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941).
SOLAR PLEXUS by James Blish
Blish, who wrote several of the Star Trek books that came out after the TV series, was already an established science fiction writer for decades...this is one of his first stories. Brant Kittinger, a lone scientist stationed at the edge of our solar system, is abducted by a ship run by robots...robots imprinted with the memories and neural circuitry of humans, most notably their leader, the late Murray Bennett. Only one problem: they've lost their reason for what they're doing and Bennett's robot wants to place Kittinger into a robot to help guide them. Horrified, the scientist has to think fast about getting out of his predicament. Not one of my favorite stories...
NIGHTFALL by Isaac Asimov
Arguably Asimov's best short story of all time, Nightfall is set in a different star system with six suns...the planet in question, populated by humans with a comparable technology and civilization to ours, never sees nighttime or even darkness because there are always suns to keep everything in light. But now only one, faint sun is above the horizon...and an astronomer has learned from a cultist group that a heretofore unknown planet is about to eclipse it, causing planetwide darkness for several hours and bringing out the multitude of mysterious stars to vision. In the past...every two thousand years or so...advanced societies on the planet had suddenly and inexplicably disintegrated into chaos and civilization had to rebuild: was this periodic phenomenon the cause? Asimov examines not only the phobia of being in darkness that such a situation would create for people unaccustomed to it, but also how complex such a solar system would be and how this would make learning about forces such as gravity much more difficult. An excellent tale on many levels...
A GNOME THERE WAS by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
Kuttner and Moore were a husband-wife writing team that often wrote under the pseudonym "Lewis Padgett". This story is about a clueless labor agitator from California who goes uninvited into a Pennsylvania mine to organizer workers there, only to get himself lost and then turned into a gnome. The gnomes, you see, live in those mountains and have their own society and culture...they fight a lot, eats rocks, bathe in mud...and work, work, work. Our hero desperately looks for a way to become human again and escape the gnomes. This story tries very hard to be funny, but I just thought it was awfully annoying. Not one of the talented Kuttner and Moore's best works...
SNULBUG by Anthony Boucher
Another speculative sci-fi story about the nature of time. A medical researcher, needing funding for a new lab, has conjured up a demon to help him get his stingy ex-boss to provide the money. But the diminutive demon, named Snulbug, doesn't look or act as if he's capable of doing much of anything. The scientist, looking to the future, sends him out to get a copy of the next day's newspaper in hopes of finding something he can use today. He then discovers that any attempts to change the flow of time will be rebuffed...a different tactic will be needed. I thought it was strange that someone who was trained in the scientific method would be summoning a demon through magic, and it's here that I have a big problem with this story...
HEREAFTER, INC. by Lester del Rey
An overly pious and self-righteous man deliberately denies himself the pleasures of living, believing that in the afterlife he will be rewarded for his virtuous lifestyle. He looks down on everyone else, especially his free-living boss. One day he wakes up to discover that although he still lives in his miserable, scant apartment, his workplace and the city outside have suddenly changed. This is a call to those who think that they will be rewarded in heaven for their good works and who wish ill on others who don't meet up to their own extremely self-righteous standards...
Next week I begin looking at short science fiction stories from the year 1942...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment